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This paper focuses on how sometimes it is possible to encounter nodal concepts that seem to lead to a perceptible consistency of the intertwining of some >fil rouge< in the theories and sensibilities of psychoanalysts who are otherwise very different from each other. Ninety years after the last conferences held by Ferenczi in America, it emerges that Ferenczi remains a point of reference for numerous authors and continues to influence many of the theories proposed. In particular, the concept of agency, as theorized by Jonathan Slavin, would seem capable of organizing a series of observations in analytic practice within a coherent theoretical framework, while remaining unsaturated enough to allow further reflections and connections with the theories of other scholars, among which that of Edgar Levenson appears significant. Levenson and Slavin, in the wake of Ferenczi, highlight how the analyst must avoid both the risk of an aseptic neutrality and the risk of collusion with their own narcissistic desire at the expense of the desire of others, since the realization of these risks would hinder the patient from becoming an agent of themself.
>To hear with eyes< is a Shakespearean expression used by Masud Khan as the title of his article written in 1971. In this text, Khan recounts the clinical case of a young model who told him certain things, but in whose body, lying on the couch, he saw other things. Khan’s article is almost 50 years old, and since then the clinical management of bodily issues and subjective dissociations has become more pressing. We have more and more patients who do not use the couch and who seek our gaze. If Khan privileged the analyst’s gaze on the patient’s body, we can now broaden this horizon, adding layers to the relationship between body expressions, gestures, and rhythms in the clinical encounter. Non-neurotic patients are very sensitive to this; in the analyst’s interventions, what patients perceive is the gesture, rather than the content of what is said. In the same way, we must be attentive to the rhythm of each subject during the sessions of analysis. The more traumatic the subjective process is, the more important are the perception of and respect for the patient’s rhythm, as well as the possibility of being able to get in synch with their rhythm.
This article aims to be an intervention into the recent discussions on the importance anxiety and ontological security in the study of International Relations (IR) (Kinvall and Mitzen, 2020; Hom and Steele, 2020; Rumelili, 2020). The paper poses an alternative critical starting point based on the Marxist concept of alienation. Marx’s work on alienation continued in historical materialist traditions such as in Lukács’ (1971) analysis reification has a lot to offer to the discussions on emotions and anxiety and the development of a politically relevant critical theory of IR. My purpose is to draw attention to the potential of Marxist social theory and particularly the concept of alienation in contributing to the development of an emancipatory critical IR theory. Most of the recent discussions on anxiety remain at an abstract level. The recent existential accounts of anxiety and ontological insecurity have subjectivist and idealist conceptions failing to account for the structures of power and domination in capitalist society. However, Marx’s concept of alienation deals with the consequences of power and domination in a more historically specific way (Sayers 2011, 1) providing the basis for a more meaningful social critique oriented to human emancipation.
This article raises the question why is it that, despite Jewish tradition devoting much thought to the status and treatment of animals and showing strict adherence to the notion of preventing their pain and suffering, ethical attitudes to animals are not dealt with systematically in the writings of Jewish philosophers and have not received sufficient attention in the context of moral monotheism. What has prevented the expansion of the golden rule: »Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD« (Lev 19,18) and »That which is hateful to you do not do to another« (BT Shabbat 31a:6; JT Nedarim 30b:1) to animals? Why is it that the moral responsibility for the fellow-man, the neighbor, or the other, has been understood as referring only to a human companion? Does the demand for absolute moral responsibility spoken from the face of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas emphasized in his ethics, not radiate from the face of the non-human other as well? Levinas’s ethics explicitly negates the principle of reciprocity and moral symmetry: The ›I‹ is committed to the other, regardless of the other’s attitude towards him. Does the affinity to the eternal Thou which Martin Buber also discovers in plants and animals not require a paradigmatic change in the attitude towards animals?
It is argued that Brouwer’s philosophy of mathematics makes perfect sense if viewed from an Eastern philosophical perspective, as a mathematics in what Erich Fromm called “the being mode of existence.” The difficulty Western philosophers have accepting its validity under Brouwer’s own justifications is that mathematics is one of the highest prized treasures of Western philosophy (those footnotes to Plato’s dialogues).
In this essay, the author will explore the use of countertransference in the therapeutic process, with particular emphasis on Oedipal love. We begin with countertransference as conceptualized by interpersonal psychoanalytic theorists, who immediately pointed out the technical relevance of the therapist as a person, and the importance of the use of the therapist’s feelings, thoughts, life experiences, and states of mind in the therapeutic relationship. Just as dreams, slips of the tongue, peripheral thoughts, and physical gestures are useful in reading the patient’s unconscious experience, accepting, examining, and exploring countertransference become useful in reading the analyst’s unconscious experience. The author will then identify a more radical and contemporary conception of countertransference as representative of the analyst’s unconscious receptivity to the patient within the enactments in which transference and countertransference reciprocally affect each other. Finally, the author will concentrate on the Oedipal feelings experienced by the therapist and their importance in treatment. A clinical case will illustrate the clinical ramifications of these hypotheses.