The progress of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy depends on our capacity to study, in a scientific manner, the process of therapy. Since a study of this kind involves charting the waxing and waning of something as elusive as the sense of personal existence, the task has, in the past, been seen as virtually impossible. However, words, or more particularly, the way words are used, manifest such shifting states. Sophisticated linguistic analyses are available, providing the means to conduct these necessary studies. This article suggests that an ongoing sense of personal existence, which William James called >self,< is multilayered, in the manner of the poetic, and that indices of such layering will reflect beneficial change. The description of this zone of experience, which might be called the synchronic, depends on contributions from Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henri Bergson, and Ferdinand de Saussure. An illustration of the value of a consideration of the minute particulars of the therapeutic conversation is given by means of extracts from therapy sessions seven months apart.
Summum jus, summa injuria
(2005)
Marginality is an important concept in the history of science, though it is often used in a manner that presumes marginality to be a static designation. We contend that the dynamics of marginality are crucial to the history of psychoanalysis, a discipline that has moved between dominant and marginal positions. We address psychoanalytic marginality via three specific >cases<: the marginalization among Freud and his followers when psychoanalysis was an emergent discipline; the marginality trope in Erich Fromm's popular psychoanalytic writing when psychoanalysis was orthodoxy in American academic psychiatry; and the rhetorical marginality of psychoanalysis in Sweden as psychoanalysis entered a decline within psychiatry. Our aim is to show that marginalization and self-marginalization serve interpersonal, social, and professional strategies. (© 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)