Psychoanalytic Techniques: A Handbook for the Practicing Psychoanalyst,edited by Benjamin B. Wolman, 596 pp, $15, New York and London: Basic Books, Inc., 1967. Psychotherapeutic techniques depend on the way the therapist understands the personality of each patient and what changes both patient and therapist strive for. The personality makeup of man may be simple in its broad essentials but is certainly complex in its details, and full of surprises. Freud opened up our understanding of it—he did not close it. Certainly no single school has all the answers, although this is the tone of much orthodox psychoanalytic writing as distinct from contributions that are free inquiries using all available knowledge. Dr. Greenson's book is based primarily on the theory of dammed-up libido, correct in itself but not expanded and enriched by the last 40 years of study which have seen such revolutionary progress in every other clinical and scientific

The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis

Why do people vote against their interests? Previous explanations miss something fundamental because they do not consider the work of group consciousness. Based on participant observation of conversations from May 2007 to May 2011 among 37 regularly occurring groups in 27 communities sampled across Wisconsin, this study shows that in some places, people have a class- and place-based identity that is intertwined with a perception of deprivation. The rural consciousness revealed here shows people attributing rural deprivation to the decision making of (urban) political elites, who disregard and disrespect rural residents and rural lifestyles. Thus these rural residents favor limited government, even though such a stance might seem contradictory to their economic self-interests. The results encourage us to consider the role of group consciousness-based perspectives rather than pitting interests against values as explanations for preferences. Also, the study suggests that public opinion research more seriously include listening to the public.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055412000305

Putting Inequality in Its Place: Rural Consciousness and the Power of Perspective

Purpose: To investigate the problems of practice experienced by novice school principals as they transition into their new occupation, focusing in particular on the first 3 months on the job—a crit...

Novice School Principals’ Sense of Ultimate Responsibility Problems of Practice in Transitioning to the Principal’s Office

The common operational picture is used to overcome coordination and information management problems during emergency response. Increasingly, this approach is incor- porated in more advanced information systems.This is rooted in an ‘information ware- house’ perspective, which implies information can be collected, sorted and exchanged in an accessible and univocal form. In practice, however, professionals interpret similar information differently.Therefore, we focus on how emergency responders develop col- lective sensemaking from information.We employ a ‘trading zone’ perspective, in which information is negotiated, to study information management in an ethnographic study of disaster exercises in the Netherlands. Our analysis shows how professionals attribute different meanings to information that distorts the coordination process. We end by stressing the importance of actionable knowledge and reflexivity.

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The Common Operational Picture as Collective Sensemaking

Concerns about the end of International Relations theory pivot around at least three different issues: the fading of the ‘paradigm wars’ associated with the 1990s and early 2000s; the general lack of any sort of ‘great debate’ sufficient to occupy the attention of large portions of the field; and claims about the vibrancy of middle-range theorizing. None of these are terribly helpful when it comes to assessing the health of International Relations theory. We argue that international theory involves scientific ontologies of world politics: topographies of entities, processes, mechanisms, and how they relate to one another. Understood this way, the state of International Relations theory looks strong: there is arguably more out there than ever before. Ironically, this cornucopia helps explain concerns regarding the end of International Relations theory. In the absence of a ‘great debate,’ let alone ways of organizing contemporary International Relations theory, this diversity descends into cacophony. We sub...

International theory in a post-paradigmatic era: From substantive wagers to scientific ontologies

Interpretation started as the central tool of psychoanalytic theory, but it has undergone changes, just as the theory it was based on has evolved. Not only have these significant changes been determined by cultural trends, but different authors have also contributed to their evolution through their approaches to various other pathologies besides neurosis. Today, the cure process is divided between those who believe that therapeutic efficiency should be based on the different interpretation models, and those who maintain that it can be only sustained by the modifying capacity of the therapeutic relationship. Both positions are supposedly upheld by the results of tests that both models believe are sufficient proof but that, in the current author's opinion, lead back to the type of pathology they arose from, although they may at times attempt to cover the entire theoretical spectrum. The position upheld by Gedo—who considers that the psychoanalyst's intervention will depend on the degree of evolutio...

Interpretation and method

Over time, two opposing views on the role of affect in psychoanalysis have emerged: on the one hand, the view of affect as only existing as long as it can be named, and thus enter the field of speech; and on the other hand, the approach that considers that affect has its own specific and independent role in psychoanalysis, which makes it harder to conceptualise this psychic phenomenon and, of course, to define its purpose in clinical practice. Regardless of the theoretical model that underlies it, however, the goal of psychoanalytic practice is to incorporate emotions into the field of representation. This paper aims to show the problem of affect's specificity and, at the same time, the need for a theory that explains how free affect (or emotion) turns into affect linked to representation – in other words, affect in its restricted sense. At the same time, the author stresses the need for practitioners to regard affect, in its status of truth, as a guide for the cure.

Affects in psychoanalytic theory and practice

More than a hundred years after the birth of psychoanalysis, we find that, rather than creating a welldefined object of study and an unequivocal practice, subsequentdevelopments in the field have increasingly moved away from this goal. Manifold schools have emerged that may be grouped according to two basic positions, namely, the one that places something like the scientific method at the core of its endeavor, and the one that does the same with something like the hermeneutic model. I say something like because neither position fully corresponds to these two methods. The object of psychoanalysis transcends empirical observation and mere interpretation. Attempts to define its identity from either perspective have failed. Thework ofGrünbaum inquiredprecisely into these different approaches. He strived to characterize the Freudian method as strictly scientific in comparison with other orientations, such as Paul Ricoeur’s, which belongs on the side of hermeneutics. Grünbaum never aspired to harmonize both positions; he always advocated a scientific psychoanalysis, whose epistemological failings were easier to identify. Nevertheless, the challenge of constructing an epistemologically specific psychoanalysis, and hence a new object transcending both fields (that of the natural sciences and that of the social sciences), remains unresolved. This difficulty, however, does not prevent some of us from trying. While psychoanalysis is neither a positive nor a hermeneutic science, it feeds from both methods in order to devise methodologies and theoretical models that increase, at best, its specific knowledge. For example, there have been various efforts to incorporate empirical observation so as toproduceknowledgebeyond thepsychoanalytic setting. Among these efforts is the work carried out by Daniel Stern, Peter Fonagy, and others, in short, by the IPA’s Research Committee, created in 1990 under the direction of Robert Wallerstein. Verification demands are also starting to prevail, and Grünbaum’s work accurately illustrates this development. We find papers that present empirically validated results and attempts to verify psychoanalytic concepts. Whether these undertakings simplify or distort the psychoanalytic model should be a matter for reflection and debate. In any case, we believe that psychoanalysis is solid enough to allow us to see the current situation as another vicissitude of our time, when values such as effectiveness and profitability make it possible to downplay, if not neutralize, all the disciplines that lie outside this new episteme. Can we admit such fragmentation? Or is it a question of accepting a de facto situation in which the preservation of the idea of a common ground is but an unfounded wish, and reality clearly shows the existence not of one or many, but of two opposing psychoanalyses with different legitimacies? Rómulo Aguillaume reflects on this problem of two psychoanalyses. To this end, he uses as his starting point the models presented by Daniel Stern and Julia Kristeva at the IFPS Congress held in Athens in October 2010. Siegfried Zepf continues with this epistemological reflectionand,basedonHabermas, shows themisunderstandings that led Freud to confuse unconscious and natural processes. Such confusionmay have contributed tohispersisting in thehopeof viewingpsychoanalysis as a natural science. Anyhow, Freud never seemed to doubt the scientific nature of psychoanalysis and never addressed the split between the natural and the social sciences. Our discipline was forced to face this split when the social environment demanded effectiveness. Such demand, however, did not prevent the application of psychoanalysis in practice – even in hospitals, for instance, by way of group work, as José Guimón shows. Juan Rodado inquires into the nature of psychoanalysis from this perspective of therapeutic effectiveness. Social demand forced Freud to open a crack in the pure gold of psychoanalysis with the copper of suggestion. In other words, psychoanalytic practice changed and gave rise to endless theorization, which is the situation in which we find ourselves today. Alejandro Ávila and Miguel Ángel González optimistically describe a theory, intersubjectivity, and an author, Otto Kernberg, capable of choosing a path that makes it possible to combine strength and meaning. The temptation to bring together diverse theories and practices has always existed. The problem is how to distinguish relevant theoretical aspects from those aspects that simply show thinkers’ ability to combine theories. Yet psychoanalysis is more than a discipline and a science. It is an ideology, that is, the expression of a desire to change reality rather than merely reflecting it. The passion driving this debate seems to confirm such a premise.

Rómulo Aguillaume

Papers

Interpretation and method

Affects in psychoanalytic theory and practice

Epistemology and psychoanalysis: One psychoanalysis or two?

Explicit and Hidden Objectives of the Process of Training Psychoanalysts