TY - JOUR A1 - Ghent, Emmanuel T1 - A reconsideration of homosexual themes. Commentary on Trop and Stolorow's >defense analysis in self psychology< JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 02 (1992), pp. 135-159. N2 - A paradox must be accepted on its own terms, without resolution, and, at the same time, valued as a pointer to a new level of comprehension. Many of the phenomena we encounter in our psychoanalytic work have simultaneously a quality of remarkable similarity and radical, even contradictory, dissimilarity. The apparent paradox is ultimately resolvable by an understanding of the process that underlies and therefore relates the phenomena. The twin dangers that inhere in dealing with paradox and process are, first, the inability to accept the paradox, that is, a premature resolution of it, and, second, a clinging to the paradox so as to avoid articulating the process that would allow one to climb into a new grasp of reality. Among the questions touched on in this paper are: How can there both be and not be a baby inside? How can there be both need and no need at the same time? How can there be both destruction and transcendence in the same moment? Y1 - 1992 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ghent, Emmanuel T1 - Bigger than both of us – double binds, conflicting interests, and the inherent paradoxes in human relating: Commentary on paper by Ringstrom JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 03 (1993), pp. 495-507. Y1 - 1993 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ghent, Emmanuel T1 - Commentary on paper by Paul Williams JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 04 (1994), pp. 473-486. Y1 - 1994 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ghent, Emmanuel T1 - Dreams of America/American Dreams JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 05 (1995), pp. 479-491. N2 - In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we are primarily interested in psychic change and how to facilitate it for the better. Change is a universal property of matter, living or inanimate: everything in nature is influenced by everything else interaction is ubiquitous. In the early years of psychoanalysis, the prevailing view was that therapeusis was essentially informational – insight and awareness would bring about changes in the ways one would experience events and respond to them. Over time, there has been a subtle shift from the informational perspective to the transformational, where insight is often retrospective rather than the active agent. The growing awareness of the need to be deeply recognized and responded to by another human being is reflective of this shift and has loomed ever larger in the interactive arena known as psychoanalysis. This paper focuses on a single facet of the need for recognition by another – the role of enacted response in effecting psychic change. It also addresses another level of the meaning of interaction: Whereas the internal interaction between perception and response has tended to be looked upon, in psychoanalysis, as unidirectional, the present discussion draws attention to the complexity of the bidirectional interaction between perception and response. Y1 - 1995 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ghent, Emmanuel T1 - Reply to Greenberg JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 023-041. Y1 - 2001 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ghent, Emmanuel T1 - The analyst's professional self as a >third< influence on the dyad when the analyst writes about the treatment JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 12 (2002), pp. 763-808. N2 - Almost all psychoanalytic theorizing posits some basic and presumably built-in motivational thrusts. The goal of this paper is to present an alternative way of thinking about the beginnings of motivation. I go into some detail about recent contributions from two areas of research: dynamic systems theory as applied by Esther Thelen to infantile motor development and Gerald Edelman's (1992) theory of >Neural Darwinism.< What emerges are two interlocking hypotheses: The first is that what we infer as drives or other versions of >basic< motivations are already a late development of motivational organizations that started out from a collection of rather primitive biases. The second hypothesis, based on dynamic systems thinking or complexity theory, is that a great many developmental features that appear to be driven by a built-in genetic program or design, are, in fact, the spontaneously emergent, and therefore the never completely predictable, resultant of the interplay of embedded, embodied, and environmental elements. It is also hypothesized that, just as motivational systems lead to the emergence of new capacities and functions, so too do new capacities beget new motivational derivatives in an ever-more complex developmental spiral. Early experience plays an enormously important and highly individual role in the creation of conative patterns that eventually crystalize into what we, as observers and theoreticians, begin to categorize into systems of motivation. Depending on the observer and his or her frame of reference, certain motivational systems are held to be superordinate to others these then are held up as basic motives. As psychoanalysts we currently find ourselves in a situation of competing organizational systems vying for prominence. The multiplicity of such systems speaks to our uncertainty and the need for further study to clarify the many questions that this line of thinking evokes. The second section of this paper explores the relations among need, wish, impulse, and defense as varieties of motivational systems that have already crystalized out of the early beginnings of motivation. Y1 - 2002 ER -