Showing papers in "Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa in 1993"

The Good Society and the Inner World : Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture, Michael Rustin : book review

Abstract: The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe is an event that has had profound psychological consequences for left-wing psychologists and social scientists committed to the ideal of democratic socialism. So far these events and their psychological expression have not yet emerged explicitly in the psycho-analytic literature. On the other hand, work by left-wing psycho-analytic thinkers, committed to forging personal and intellectual links between marxism and psycho-analysis, are still being regularly published. The most creative and productive of these authors are British, which is not surprising given the co-existence of both an established psycho-analytic community and muscular socialist opposition under a Conservative British government.

Reparation - political and psychological considerations

Abstract: What justifies my being here tonight is not my political biography, but an episode in my life that began after a long spell in solitary confinement. It was 1963-64, and I came out of detention with puzzles that I had not taken in with me. Why was it so difficult to be courageous? Why did I want to co-operate so much with the guards? Why was it so hard to resist? It was a great problem for me because I had always thought that if you were clear about what you stood for and if you knew what you wanted, then you just behaved accordingly and that was that. But as it happened, that was just not that. There was another thing baffling me. It was behaving in a contradictory way and was fighting with the familiar self-directed part of me.

Two forms of 'mindlessness' in the borderline child

Abstract: Psycho-analytic theory has always viewed trauma or traumatic phenomena as an integral part of normal psychological development, hence the psycho-analytical therapist is well positioned to comment upon the apparently immutable effects of severe trauma upon the personality. Freud addressed this issue at several points in his writings, with many of his ideas, old and new, culminating in the now famous metapsychological essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).