Showing papers in "The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2012"
TL;DR: The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind by Philip M. Bromberg as mentioned in this paper is a book about the growth of the relational mind in the 1990s.
Abstract: The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind by Philip M. BrombergRoutledge, New York and London, 2011 ; 215 pp; $39.95 Philip Bromberg’s work has been celebrated within certain ...
136 citations
TL;DR: This paper describes, discusses and presents illustrations of this transformational process (figurability) that moves intersubjectively from unrepresented or weakly represented mental states to representedmental states, from force to meaning, from the inchoate to mental order.
Abstract: Freud's initial formulations viewed psychoanalysis as working towards the rediscovery of psychic elements - thoughts, feelings, memories, wishes, etc. - that were once known - represented in the mind, articulatable, thinkable - but then disguised and/or barred from consciousness. His subsequent revisions implicated a second, more extensive category of inchoate forces that either lost or never attained psychic representation and, although motivationally active, were not fixed in meaning, symbolically embodied, attached to associational chains, etc. Following Freud's theory of representation, the author conceptualizes these latter forces as "unrepresented" or "weakly represented" mental states that make a demand upon the mind for work and require transformation into something that is represented in the psyche, if they are to be thought about or used to think with. This paper describes, discusses and presents illustrations of this transformational process (figurability),that moves intersubjectively from unrepresented or weakly represented mental states to represented mental states, from force to meaning, from the inchoate to mental order.
103 citations
TL;DR: The author reviews the psychoanalytic literature and shows the development of analytic thinking about this technology‐assisted practice of psychoanalysis, and gives vignettes from the analysis of a man with trauma‐related depression to support her argument that analysis using the telephone and the Internet is a viable, clinically effective alternative to traditional analysis where necessary.
Abstract: There is professional consensus that teleanalysis, the practice of psychoanalysis conducted remotely using the telephone and the Internet, is increasing in response to more mobility in the population. But there is controversy as to whether the use of technology leads to a dilution of analysis or to adaptive innovation that is clinically effective and true to the tenets of psychoanalysis. The author reviews the psychoanalytic literature and shows the development of analytic thinking about this technology-assisted practice of psychoanalysis. She summarizes analysts' perceptions and experiences of the advantages and disadvantages, and considers the indications and contra-indications. She focuses on the clinical concerns that arise in terms of the frame, resistance, and the development of analytic process through the unconscious communication of internal objects, unconscious fantasy, transference and countertransference. She gives vignettes from the analysis of a man with trauma-related depression to address the concerns raised and to support her argument that analysis using the telephone and the Internet is a viable, clinically effective alternative to traditional analysis where necessary.
63 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that in order to be psychoanalysis, the ‘here and now’ technical approach needs to be firmly grounded theoretically and technically in a practice that includes the notion of reverie or its equivalent.
Abstract: In this article the author argues that in order to be psychoanalysis, the ‘here and now’ technical approach needs to be firmly grounded theoretically and technically in a practice that includes the...
43 citations
TL;DR: Clinical facts and theoretical hypotheses that address configurations involving chronic and acute enactments and analysts’ inhibitions and feelings of guilt have been confirmed and broadened not only in relation to the vicissitudes of dream work in traumatic areas, but also in connection to defenses such as thin or thick skin, and in comparison to listening in countertransferential detours.
Abstract: This paper seeks to validate clinical facts and theoretical hypotheses that have been discussed before and that address configurations involving chronic and acute enactments Its validation process compares clinical material from psychoanalytic work in different psychoanalytic cultures – work from South America–Uruguay (Yardino), Europe–Spain (Sapisochin), South Africa (Ivey), Europe–UK (Bateman) It documents clinical facts described in four articles and confirms that during chronic enactments the analytic dyad gets caught up in a dual relationship that veils and congeals the triangular situation because acknowledging it would be traumatic The lack of triangular space impedes the formation of symbols as well as dreaming and creates non‐dreams‐for‐two During chronic enactments analysts use their implicit alpha‐function to assemble traumatic areas These areas emerge as a mix of discharges and non‐dreams that are dreamed through acute enactments Acute enactments occur when chronic enactments dissolve an
39 citations
TL;DR: This paper has traced Bion’s discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration, including the container/contained relationship, the PS↔D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors which he has termed the ‘Constellation for Thinking’.
Abstract: This paper has traced Bion's discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration. His traumatic experiences as a young tank commander in World War I (overlaid on, and intertwined with, childhood conflicts) gave him firsthand exposure to very painful emotions that tested his capacity to manage. Later, in the 1950s, after his analysis with Melanie Klein and marriage to Francesca Bion, he undertook the analysis of psychotic patients and learned how they disassembled their ability to know reality as a defense against unbearable emotional truths in their lives. This led Bion to identify an aspect of dreaming that was necessary in order for reality experience to be given personal meaning so that one may learn from experience. Simultaneous with working out this new theory of dreaming, Bion also revisited his World War I experiences that had remained undigested and all these elements coalesced into a selected fact - his discovery of alpha function. In subsequent writings, Bion explored the constituent factors of alpha function, including the container/contained relationship, the PS↔D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors which I have termed the 'Constellation for Thinking'.
35 citations
TL;DR: Ferro as discussed by the authors made a useful distinction between the torrent of pre-packaged images by which we are inundated, in particular through the medium of television (and often by a politician who ‘for many years has been controlling our souls’) and true images.
Abstract: to clinical material. This is perhaps how all analysts can present their own views: by offering images that often then become focal points of anchoring or recapitulation. As examples we could point to Elisa, Cristina and her drawings, Antonio, Clara and Anna. But that is not all, for there are moments when images (or the memory of them) gain the upper hand. The beautiful ‘images’ of Alida Epremian, which express more than any lengthy discussion could, also deserve at least a mention. In the chapter ‘An Overwhelming Psychoanalytic Session’, the consistency of the setting is represented visually through the steady images of analyst and patient, as well as the overwhelming wave that drags up and passes through them both, even if they survive the emotional tsunami that develops in the session. The authors make a useful distinction between the torrent of pre-packaged images by which we are inundated, in particular through the medium of television (and often by a politician who ‘for many years has been controlling our souls’) and true images. Whereas the former ultimately relate to that ‘sensoriality’, to those beta elements that need to be digested, true images are those that are articulated by our minds, those – as Grotstein would say (Ferro, 2008) – that lead to the subjectivization of O. This seems to me the most basic sense of every ‘image’, understood as a solution to the conflict between the ‘thing in itself’, the ‘unknowable’, the ‘O’ and ourselves. The boy’s pick-up truck has worked: it has taken on board and transported many ‘important characters’, it has managed to give us a flavour of a long and enriching journey that takes us closer to O, but not yet close enough. The journey continues. Antonino Ferro Via Cardano 77, Pavia I-27100, Italy E-mail: ninoferro3@aol.com
32 citations
TL;DR: Alfred I. Tauber as discussed by the authors, the Reluctant Philosopher, discusses Freud's interest in philosophy, and the relationship between philosophy and Freud's reluctance to be a philosopher.
Abstract: Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher by Alfred I. Tauber Princeton University Press , Princeton, NJ , 2010 ; 318 pp; $24.95 Many commentators offer a passing nod to Freud’s interest in philosophy, duti...
32 citations
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TL;DR: The inner witness is a mechanism that develops in response to a reasonable experience of infantile helplessness, the resulting maternal impingement and the presence of a sufficient experience of a third, being crucial to the subject’s capacity to shift between the first person and the third person of experience.
Abstract: The inner witness is a mechanism that develops in response to a reasonable experience of infantile helplessness, the resulting maternal impingement and the presence of a sufficient experience of a third. Being crucial to the subject's capacity to shift between the first person and the third person of experience, it also has an essential role in coping with trauma. Three types of testimonial narrative are differentiated in terms of the presence of the inner witness in their syntax. The first mode is one in which the inner witness is accessible, enabling the imaginary shift between the voice of the victim and the voice of the witness. The second mode, which remains a 'first-person' mode of report, preserves and enacts the traumatic memories and the traumatic features. The third, psychotic mode attacks both the first and the third person, separating the subject from both his memories and his sense of selfhood. This mode can evolve as a reaction to an adult massive trauma, but is more likely to emerge as a result of early traumatization. The above ideas and their implications for recovery are illustrated by a case study and through a reading of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
30 citations
TL;DR: There has been a psychoanalytic civil war being waged in the USA over the last 30 years between what has represented the mainstream tradition of American psychoanalysis, ego psychology, and an upstart that goes by a variety of names but which I will label here intersubjectivity.
Abstract: There has been a psychoanalytic civil war being waged in the USA over the last 30 years between what has represented the mainstream tradition of American psychoanalysis, ego psychology, and an upstart that goes by a variety of names but which I will label here intersubjectivity. It may appear at this point that we should declare intersubjectivity the winner. Certainly the range of theorists writing with this outlook have attracted a wide following, and much that is written in contemporary ego psychology can be understood as a response to the various challenges posed by these revisionists. Yet, as Andr Green (2000) observed, intersubjectivity must be seen as more of a corrective movement than an outright revision of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is and has always been intersubjective. ‘Intersubjectivity’, as a group of contemporary theories, addresses issues that have been present in our theory since Freud, but were inadequately theorized. The division between drive and object, internal and external, has been problematic throughout our history. Green believes that Freud emphasized drive and internality to the detriment of the object in order to focus attention on what was new in his theory. Beginning with Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott, many theorists have sought to rectify that situation. Over the last 30 years we have seen that process intensify as intersubjective theories have come onto the stage and, at times, pushed drive and the intrapsychic to the wings. Any theory that eliminates one side of the intrapsychic–intersubjective, drive–object axes creates particular difficulties if it still wishes to be considered psychoanalytic. In their effort to provide the corrective psychoanalysis has long needed, these theorists call attention to the object side, but some also call for a dialectic between the two sides. Critics tend to omit this dialecticism from their remarks and present intersubjectivity as destructive of the concept of drive. Ultimately, it is not in terms of metapsychology that these writers are most innovative or have had the greatest impact, but rather in terms of clinical technique. There is no singular theory of intersubjectivity; there are a variety of schools of thought that are intersubjective in nature. Leaving aside contemporary Int J Psychoanal (2012) 93:401–425 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00543.x
25 citations
TL;DR: The present authors consider that Freudian metapsychology, as now complexified by Andrè Green, allows for a metapsYchological approach to alexithymia insofar as it relates to Marty's operative thinking.
Abstract: The object of this paper is to provide a metapsychological definition of alexithymia as described in 1967 in terms of operational thinking and negative hallucination. This is a familiar and established concept in the fields of psychopathology, psychology, and of clinical and psychosomatic medicine. From a psychoanalytic and psychosomatic point of view, the term is conceptually close to P. Marty's "operative thinking", as described in 1963, even though we know they do not belong to the same epistemological field: on one hand Neuroscience, Psychiatry and the objectalization of the symptom at different levels, and on the other, as regards mechanical functioning, a psychoanalytic clinical approach within the dynamics of the relationship between transference and counter-transference. The present authors consider that Freudian metapsychology, as now complexified by Andre Green, allows for a metapsychological approach to alexithymia insofar as it relates to Marty's operative thinking. Thus does Green's conceptualization of the mother's negative hallucination, of negative introjection, of a psychically 'dead (and insecure) mother', now provide us with the opportunity to describe, in metapsychological terms, the genesis of this particular mode of psychical functioning. Given the mother's negative hallucination produces a host structure as a background to negativity that will fit future object representations, we will assume that in the case of … future operational or alexithymic …?, this negative hallucination will pathologically and defensively involve the endo-psychic perception of affect.
TL;DR: The author suggests that, instead of internalizing shared experiences leading to growth, children with autism can feel that they add to themselves by taking over the qualities of others through the ‘annexation’ of physical properties that leads to a damaged object and can trigger a particular sort of negative therapeutic reaction.
Abstract: Recent work in neuroscience has highlighted the contrast between ‘procedural’ memory for bodily experiences and skills, which is unconscious though unrepressed, and verbalizable, ‘declarative’ memory, which includes autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is weak in people with autistic spectrum disorder, who frequently turn to self‐generated sensations for reassurance that they continue to exist. The author suggests that, instead of internalizing shared experiences leading to growth, children with autism can feel that they add to themselves by taking over the qualities of others through the ‘annexation’ of physical properties that leads to a damaged object and can trigger a particular sort of negative therapeutic reaction. Clinical illustrations drawn from the treatment of two children on the autistic spectrum illustrate some ramifications of these processes in relation to the sense of a separate identity and the capacity to access memories.
TL;DR: Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas by Nancy Caro Hollander Routledge, New York, NY 2010 ; 403 pp; $36.95 The complicity of psychoanalysis with authoritarian politica...
Abstract: Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas by Nancy Caro Hollander Routledge , New York, NY 2010 ; 403 pp; $36.95 The complicity of psychoanalysis with authoritarian politica...
TL;DR: The author points out that praxis is always replete with contradictions and that by taking them into account, scientific development could be managed in a more planned way, less blindly; that is to say, less abandoned to spontaneity.
Abstract: The author systematises and examines the relation between theory and practice in psychoanalysis in three directions: one, eminently epistemological, which is only mentioned because it pertains not only to psychoanalysis but to all the sciences; another, the relation between theory and technique; and the third, the relation between theory and the institutional organisation of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts. All the problems described, especially the second and third points, together define psychoanalytic praxis. With regard to contradictions between theory and technique, the author points out that psychoanalytic theory is constructed fundamentally on the basis of an approach that is historico-genetic, dynamic and consistent with formal logic, whereas psychoanalytic practice occurs within a transference–countertransference relation, in a situation configured as an analytic field, a ‘here and now’, within a dramatic explanation and in a dialectic process. This triple diagnosis involves naturalistic and phenomenological approaches, the problem of objectivity and the role given to sexuality as a privileged parameter in psychoanalytic theory. In relation to the third direction mentioned above,the author refers briefly to the problem of psychoanalytic organisations, in the sense that they come into conflict with the development of psychoanalytic theory and the deepening of investigation. In reference to the latter, the author emphasises the need to widen the perspective of what constitutes psychoanalytic praxis. He points out that praxis is always replete with contradictions and that it is not a question of ignoring,denying or impeding these contradictions themselves (which would in any case be totally ineffective), but that by taking them into account, scientific development could be managed in a more planned way, less blindly; that is to say, less abandoned to spontaneity.
TL;DR: In psychoanalytic practice, the transference relationship induced by the method within a specific setting has been activated by the Transference Relationship as mentioned in this paper, which is activated by a transference relation between the analyst and the patient.
Abstract: Psychoanalysis does not seek to get rid of symptoms but to question them as witnesses of psychic functioning and as formations of the unconscious. Whatever their nature may be, it is a question of analysing their causes and their functions as they appear and develop during the course of the analytic process. The latter is activated by the transference relationship induced by the method within a specific setting. The aim is to bring about liberating psychic transformations. The extension of the indications and modifications in the expression of psychic suffering have led to the development of psychotherapies. Their relations with psychoanalysis proper have been evolving constantly since the first advances by Ferenczi. This long historical evolution has resulted in their redefinition. Psychoanalytic practices are currently considered to require, depending on the case, different settings and different modes of psychic involvement from the analyst. Contemporary psychoanalysis places emphasis on the internal setting of the analyst (thus his training), analysis of the countertransference, and the risk of anti-analytic aberrations.
TL;DR: It is argued that infantile sexuality plays an important role in many mother-infant disturbances and needs to be delineated from attachment and be understood in the context of mother–infant interaction to function as a clinical concept.
Abstract: Classical psychoanalytic theory draws many concepts from mental processes that are assumed to arise in the infant and influence the adult mind Still, psychoanalytic practice with mothers and infants has been integrated but little within general psychoanalytic theory One reason is that only few analysts have utilized such practice to further theory Another reason is that infant therapists tend to abandon classical psychoanalytic concepts in favour of attachment concepts As a result the concept of infantile sexuality, so central to classical theory, plays an unobtrusive role in clinical discussions on infant therapy The author argues that infantile sexuality plays an important role in many mother–infant disturbances To function as a clinical concept, it needs to be delineated from attachment and be understood in the context of mother–infant interaction Two examples are provided; one where the analyst’s infantile sexuality emerged in a comment to the infant Another is a case of breast-feeding problems with a little boy fretting at the breast This is interpreted as reflecting the mother’s infantile sexual conflicts as well as the boy’s emerging internalization of them Thus, to conceptualize such disorders we need to take into account the infantile sexuality in both mother and baby
TL;DR: In his sweeping, visionary overview of the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and practice, Jos Bleger (2012) finds ‘‘contradictions’’ that have impeded the development of both.
Abstract: In his sweeping, visionary overview of the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and practice, Jose Bleger (2012) finds “contradictions” that have impeded the development of both. His paper, m...
TL;DR: This contribution aims to describe that structure from the metapsychological point of view – contained, by synthesizing the possible widening of what could be a Bionian negative grid.
Abstract: This article examines pathologies in the creation of symbols and those pathologies' ensuing consequences. It relies mainly on the vertices provided by Bion and Meltzer. It studies the different forms in which these lapses occur in symbolic processes, where they may create vacuums in symbolic networks or give rise to 'lies', and even destroy or de-symbolize established symbols. Based on Bion's concept of the minus-contained (-contained), I propose that when a symbol is attacked, a particular mental structure with its own peculiar characteristics comes about. This structure not only creates a vacuum in that mental zone, it ends up damaging the entire symbolization process. This contribution aims to describe that structure from the metapsychological point of view - contained. I end by synthesizing the possible widening of what could be a Bionian negative grid.
TL;DR: The tattoo is a visual symbolization of a taboo transgression that activates the same through an act of self‐injury that resembles the magical ritual acts of indigenous peoples’ use of tattoos.
Abstract: Tattooing projects a visual image in transference to form a backdrop for the most salient unconscious inner conflicts arising during an ongoing analytic process. Like a snapshot, the tattoo is a di...
TL;DR: The present communication focuses on three areas that teach me much about clinical work and living as I grow older, now the same age as Winnicott when he died.
Abstract: Winnicott is one of those men who changed my life. I would like to share with you some of the writings that helped me. I have written elsewhere of my meeting with him in 1968 before he spoke in New...
TL;DR: The scope of the set title and brief by the Controversies Section has enormous potential and requires substantial research to give full credit to Winnicott’s clinical innovations in the analysis of adults.
Abstract: The corpus of Winnicott’s writings amounts to well over 600 articles and a simple search on PEP shows that his work is cited in almost 12,000 articles and books The second edition of my book, The
TL;DR: This article outlines conceptions even closer to the ideal (idealized) goal of full‐time placement within the university, with strong links to medicine, to the behavioral sciences and to the humanities.
Abstract: Although Freud had aspirations of a university structure for psychoanalytic education the sociopolitical structure of the Austro-Hungarian empire precluded this, and psychoanalysis developed by default in the central European heartland within a part-time, private-practice educational structure. With its rapid spread in the post-World-War-II United States, and its ready penetration of American academic psychiatry, a counter educational structure arose in some quarters: the department-of-psychiatry-affiliated institute within the medical school. This article outlines beyond these other, more ambitious, academic vistas (the David Shakow model, the Anna Freud model, the Menninger Foundation, Emory University (USA), AP de BA (Argentina)); conceptions even closer to the ideal (idealized) goal of full-time placement within the university, with strong links to medicine, to the behavioral sciences and to the humanities. The putative advantages of such a structure are presented.
TL;DR: The present study examines the relationships between lung transplant recipients and their unknown, deceased donors using JAKOB, a qualitative research tool that analyses relational configurations and diagnoses psychodynamic conflicts to identify narratives in which the figure of the donor played a role.
Abstract: The present study examines the relationships between lung transplant recipients and their unknown, deceased donors. Out of 20 semi-structured interviews, eight narratives, by three female and three male recipients respectively, were identified in which the figure of the donor played a role. These narratives were examined using JAKOB, a qualitative research tool that analyses relational configurations and diagnoses psychodynamic conflicts. Analysis revealed a broad range of varying themes and relationships with equally varying wish and fear themes. All the narrators dealt either explicitly or implicitly with whether and how they are connected to their donors. In five narratives, specific personality traits were attributed to the figure of the donor; in four narratives, latent feelings of guilt concerning the donor's death were expressed. Indeed, the figure of the donor was not always perceived as an independent person, separate from the narrator's self: in two cases, the donor appears as part of the recipient's self, while in another case, the donor is presented as a transitional object for the recipient. The findings of the narrative analysis are discussed within a theoretical model of psychical organ integration.
TL;DR: The aim of this introduction to the belated English publication of ‘Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis’ is to arouse interest in the thinking of Jos Bleger and, by bringing readers face to face with his writings, enable them to respond personally to what they say.
Abstract: Is it possible to be both a creative and a rigorous researcher in psychoanalysis? The aim of this introduction to the belated English publication of ‘Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis’ is to arouse interest in the thinking of Jos Bleger and, by bringing readers face to face with his writings, enable them to respond personally to what they say. My own answer to the question that opens this article is strongly affirmative. Bleger was the living example of an at once creative and rigorous researcher. For more than 40 years, the vagaries of translation prevented the Englishspeaking world (and many gifted thinkers) from discovering the thinking of Jos Bleger, contained mainly in his book Symbiosis and Ambiguity (Bleger, 1967b). This situation is now changing: the book, translated only into French in 1981, is shortly to be published in an English translation. This has created a significant time lag, both for the reader and for Bleger’s texts themselves. Aside from the article (published in Spanish in 1969) that is now presented in this issue, there is another essential text by this author that The International Journal of Psychoanalysis fortunately published at the same time as the original in Spanish. I am referring to ‘Psychoanalysis of the psychoanalytic frame’ (Bleger, 1967a). In that article, Jos Bleger was anticipating problems that had not yet been addressed in the international literature. The coupling of that article, which has become a seminal work, with a belated reading of the present text on research in psychoanalysis offers me an opportunity to help to make known a body of work that will long provide us with much new food for thought. Bleger died of a heart attack (in 1972 at the age of 49) in the full flow of his original thinking. The potential of this author’s works to spark new ideas in today’s reader (and hopefully in future readers) endows him with the status of a classical author. The best way that we who enjoyed the privilege of following his teachings could honour Jos Bleger is by helping to reveal the generative potential of his ideas and to contribute to their revival.
TL;DR: The author proposes to examine two of the main movements of psychic life brought into play in this process of intersubjectivation, to integrate theoretical pluralism while encouraging us to reflect on the diversification of the authors' practices.
Abstract: We are not born subject but become one, in a two-and-fro process between what is played out on the intrapsychic stage and the field of intersubjectivation. The author proposes to examine two of the main movements of psychic life brought into play in this process. In the domain of the 'subjectivating link', becoming a subject depends on the relationship with another, authentically taken into account as a desiring subject and not simply as an object for oneself. In the course of history, this intersubjectivation is only internalized as a lasting preconscious predisposition if sufficient trust is established in the possibility of mutual recognition. When this perspective recedes, the subject tends to fall back on narcissistic positions, in search of an end to lack. Such a narcissistic tendency drives the subject to constitute himself by subjugating his objects, striving to rob them of their otherness. A plurality of subject positions will be recognized in every analytic encounter. Psychoanalytic work can allow for a lasting change insofar as it modifies the equilibrium between diverse psychic trends. The multiplicity of the issues at stake in subjectivation allows us to integrate theoretical pluralism while encouraging us to reflect on the diversification of our practices.
TL;DR: Screen memories, seen by Freud, Greenacre and other analysts of a past generation as a key source of data for the reconstruction of psychic and historical reality, have been relatively neglected in contemporary analysis.
Abstract: Screen memories, seen by Freud, Greenacre and other analysts of a past generation as a key source of data for the reconstruction of psychic and historical reality, have been relatively neglected in contemporary analysis. A fresh look shows that these durable, constant memories have a dual relation to childhood experience: they memorialize both a specific organization of trauma, wish and defense, and a private childhood act of remembering. Close attention to the screen memory itself and the context in which it appears indicates that both aspects of screen memory have meaning for the individual and are represented in fantasy. Both currents of meaning can be seen in a literary screen memory and in the clinical situation, where both play out in transference and countertransference.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed Freud's correspondence with his closest collaborators and reviewed the works he published during this period, and it was clear that anxiety was a crucial element among the topics in dispute.
Abstract: The publication of Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (1924) gave rise to an intense debate within the secret Committee and confronted Freud with one of his most beloved disciples. After analyzing the letters that the Professor exchanged with his closest collaborators and reviewing the works he published during this period, it is clear that anxiety was a crucial element among the topics in dispute. His reflections linked to the signal anxiety concept allowed Freud to refute Rank's thesis that defined birth trauma as the paradigmatic key to understanding neurosis, and, in turn, was a way of confirming the validity of the concepts of Oedipus complex, repression and castration in the conceptualization of anxiety. The reasons for the modifications of anxiety theory in the mid-1920s cannot be reduced, as Freud would affirm officially in his work of 1926, to the detection of internal contradictions in his theory or to the desire to establish a metapsychological version of the problem, for they gain their essential impulse from the debate with Rank.
TL;DR: The Processes of Defense: Trauma, Drives, and Reality by Joseph Fernando Aronson, New York, 2009 ; 370 pp Winner of the 2010 Gradiva Prize in the category of psychoanalytic theo...
Abstract: The Processes of Defense: Trauma, Drives, and Reality – A New Synthesis by Joseph Fernando Aronson , New York , 2009 ; 370 pp Winner of the 2010 Gradiva Prize in the category of psychoanalytic theo...
TL;DR: The goal of this article is to demonstrate how Nachträglichkeit represents the unique temporal movement of the analytic session and the characteristic positioning of the mind of the analyst at work.
Abstract: Of the various forms that the matter of time assumes in analysis, Nachtraglichkeit represents Freud's first intuition on the subject. The focus of this article is directed toward the specific temporal dimension that the concept of Nachtraglichkeit expresses, and how that dimension, which overturns linear time, is expressed in clinical work. The concept of Nachtraglichkeit is approached from a theoretical point of view, tracing back the role and development that this notion has had in psychoanalytic Freudian and post-Freudian thinking. The goal of this article is to demonstrate how Nachtraglichkeit represents the unique temporal movement of the analytic session and the characteristic positioning of the mind of the analyst at work. Three clinical examples are presented. The analytic scene is formulated as occurring in two times, and through the working through that takes place, patients can recover the enigmatic 'remainder', which is consequently traumatic and which has compulsively accompanied them through the various times of their existence. Nachtraglichkeit, as a non-linear temporality, introduces a unique dimension into the clinical work that influences listening to and interpretation of the material. The recognition of that (trauma, infantile sexuality, non-linear temporality) has consequences for the analyst's way of working in session and on the interpretation of clinical material, as I will try to show through my theoretical exposition and clinical examples.
TL;DR: It may be argued that this text represents Freud’s last word on unconscious memory, and, in a more general way, on the particularities of psychical organization according to psychoanalysis, which constitutes the essential elements of psychoanalytic thought.
Abstract: The fruit of the very last period of his thought, and written two years before he plunged into definitive silence, Constructions in analysis (1937a) is a precious jewel in Freud’s work. This text, inspired by remarkably vigorous thought, constitutes, moreover, an example of authentic psychoanalytic thinking, freed of the rationalizing prejudices which stand in the way of the development of a specific form of theory that Freud possessed to the highest degree. Constructions in analysis is a sort of postscript to Analysis terminable and interminable (Freud, 1937b). This latter text, written in 1937 and published in June 1937, was followed in December of the same year by Constructions. Despite the late date of publication, Freud had in fact been preoccupied by this subject for a very long time. Already in ‘Little Hans’ (Freud, 1909a), we find the germ of a concept that Freud would only develop much later on. But it was with the ‘Wolf Man’ (Freud, 1909b) that the idea took shape in connection with the primal scene, as well as in his study on the psychogenesis of a case of female homosexuality (Freud, 1920). As is often the case in Freud’s work, it took time before the idea finally gave birth to a concept in 1937. There is more than one way of defining this work. The most convincing seems to me to be to consider it as a late solution to the problems posed by the impasses of the theory of technique which confer a somewhat pessimistic tone on Analysis terminable and interminable. This, anyway, is how I understand this energetic leap of Freud’s thought leading him to return with surprising vitality to questions from which he had seemed to recoil. In fact, Constructions offers clinical reflection a depth never attained before. It may be argued that this text represents Freud’s last word on unconscious memory, and, in a more general way, on the particularities of psychical organization according to psychoanalysis. This is where its value lies and, furthermore it brings together in a few pages the essential elements of psychoanalytic thought.