心理學普通不設宗教信仰這一問題,因為兩者的研究對象各有不同之故。但由於心理學所討論的人,是「整體性」的,生理與心理固然不能分離,肉體與精神現象也很難完全分開處理;因此自五十年代以來,某些研究「人之所以為人」之特徵的心理學家,已開始對宗教信仰這一問題發生了興趣。心理學家討論信仰問題,不管他們的背境是什麼,藉通不強調、更不執著某種特定的宗教系統,如佛教、基督教、或天主教,雖然這些心理學家也有他們自己的特定信仰。本文收集了五位較有代表性的心理學家,並計劃從他們不同的立場來討論人與宗教之問題:(一)從成熟的人格觀點來看人之宗教信仰對人之人格成熟有何關連。這裡介紹了兩位心理學家,即亞爾伯之人格理論及梵岡之信仰健康觀。(二)從人生意義之探索看信仰問題。並以意義治療學之創始人以弗蘭克為代言人。(三)從追求道德及靈魂之實有看宗教,以新精神分析學權威佛洛姆為主。(四)從人之自我實現論談宗教信仰,並以此理論之創始人馬斯洛為主要依據。輔大以全人教育為宗旨,並以真善美聖為師生共同追求的目標,但全人教育不設宗教這一問題又如何能成為「全人」。真善美聖的實際內涵又脫不了終極關懷的問題。我們不願以自己的信仰談宗教,雖然我們也有此權利及責任,但畢竟易引起誤會及反感。本各完全以人自己的立場來說信仰,似乎應該易於接受。
Analytic authority in historical and critical perspective: Beyond objectivism and relativism.
(1999)
Paradox and process
(1999)
In this paper I am tracing the history of countertransference and how it has informed the current debate about self-disclosure as a pivotal instrument of analytic work. Now that the analyst's >subjective factor< has been understood as a central influence on the analysand and as a vital source of information about the analysand's intrapsychic life, I argue that certain currents in the relational school of psychoanalysis confuse the analyst's subjectivity with his personality. While becoming more >real< with a patient may enliven a stale analytic dialogue, it ought not be confused with, or take the place of, an analysis of unconscious desires and phantasies. I claim that a two-person psychology can exist only within a tripartite structure in which the analyst does not lose sight of his complex function of being the carrier, observer, and conveyor of the unconscious currents holding both participants in check.
A gendered person lives in and creates a gendered body. Through the sexual life of the couple, two gendered bodies come together. In this paper, I draw on case material to illustrate how a multitude of sensations associated with what it feels like to be a man or a woman is aroused, affirmed, and created as one dimension of sexual experience. I suggest that these gender sensations may be organized through the three psychological positions – autistic-contiguous, paranoid-schizoid, and depressive. The movement among all three positions gives different shapes to sensory-based gender experience – each position making its own unique contributions to the qualities of what it feels like to be a man or a woman. In one case, I consider the possibility that gender transformation occurred through an unconscious intersubjective erotic third – the body of the couple – created between the patient and her husband.
They Shall Wear Fringes
(1999)
Psychoanalytic Expertise
(1999)
Psychoanalysis, dissociation, and personality organization reflections on Peter Goldberg's essay
(1999)
In this paper, I consider the feeling of interiority as it evolves within the treatment relationship. A capacity to access and sustain one's interiority reflects a sense of personal solidity within which the validity of subjective process and privacy is taken for granted. When this capacity is relatively undeveloped, individuals rely on the >other< (including the analyst) to help them contact, elaborate, or manage their affective experience. Quite paradoxically, the analyst's active investigation of dynamic or intersubjective process may obfuscate rather than clarify this core difficulty. I suggest two alternative approaches to the treatment situation that stand in some tension and yet also complement each other. One emphasizes the >active< investigation of dynamic and dyadic process, wherein the analyst works interpretively and/or around relational issues. The other is organized around the >interior< dimension of the treatment experience, emphasizing the patient's need to develop or manage her affective process in the relative absence of input from the analyst. Two clinical situations are described, the first illustrating the use of silence with a patient whose difficulties involved affect articulation, and the second involving a patient whose need for affect regulation made her highly dependent on the analyst for soothing.
This paper discusses one family's struggle with domestic violence involving three generations. In this case, coercive negative maternal attributions interacted with parent-to-child projective identification, which resulted in the child's internalization of parental perceptions involving confusion around danger and protection from danger. Projective identification occurs as readily from a parent to a child as from a child to a parent. As is illustrated, when the parent's use of projective identification is excessive, it has severe implications for the whole of the child's psychic development (Lieberman, 1992, 1994, 1997, in press Seligman 1993, 1995, this issue Silverman, Lieberman, and Pekarsky, 1997).
Freud's characterization and dismissal of the >symbolic dream interpreting< of his time – his idiosyncratic distinction between that metaphoric form of interpretation and what he called the >scientific< mode, and his subsequent asymmetrical focusing on the latter – seriously skewed his presentation of the nature and history of the Western dream tradition. It obscured the facts that an old theory regarded the dream as the unmasker of the hidden psychic life and that a venerable hypothesis that it could bring to light licit and illicit unconscious desires had not been forgotten by Freud's fin de siècle contemporaries. For many years, his injunction against the use of symbolism, except in the case of the sexual, had an inhibiting effect on psychoanalysts’ free use of manifest dream interpretation.
Developmental Metaphors: The Dialectic of Perception and Creation in the Construction of a Novel
(1999)
Freud, Religion, and Science
(1999)
The author situates the development of Ogden's clinical theory over the past 20 years within a philosophic scheme. Ogden (1986, 1989), in using Hegel to deconstruct the Cartesian objectivist assumptions of classical psychoanalysis, goes beyond Hegel to create in Subjects of Analysis (1994) a new synthesis that is similar to aspects of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This regrounding allows for the introduction of the analyst's prereflective and sensuous experience through reverie in the cocreation of an intersubjective >third.< The author illustrates how Ogden's solution to the problem of alterity transcends the debate over one-person versus two-person psychologies by producing a truly dialectical, postclassical psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity that is neither a one- nor a two-person psychology.
This paper develops a Bakhtinian dialogical perspective on the psychoanalytic discourse in general and on the concepts of true and false selves (Winnicott, 1960b) in particular. Bakhtin's assumptions about the origins of dialogicality in children's development are compared to Winnicott's ideas about the origins of true- and false-self processes. This comparison leads to a characterization of the false and true selves as different genres of the narrated self – the epic and the novel – each with its specific configurations of experience and temporality. Moreover, psychoanalysis is conceived as a unique phenomenon that centers on the internal and most of the time simultaneous dialogues that take place in each of the two participants. This perspective underscores the impact of the analyst's subjectivity on the analytic process as well as the multiplicity of the patient's and the analyst's selves. In this context, therapeutic change can be seen most of the time as a transformation of genre and not necessarily as a modification of contents. Free association allows for the transgression of the basic rules of narrativity, thus facilitating a generic shift. A dialogical relation between the openness of free association and narrativity's coherence is suggested. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue [Bakhtin, 1963, p. 293]. A word like >self< naturally knows more than we do [Winnicott, 1960a, p. 158].
Promises, promises.
(1999)
In the last decade Bowlby's ideas on attachment have been taken up with tremendous flourish within psychoanalysis in general and by feminists, journalists, and politicians. This paper explores this new turn and suggests some historic reasons for the convergence between feminist ideas, politics, and attachment theory. While welcoming the wider dissemination of an attachment paradigm, it cautions against the too easy uptake of ideas that may be less than congruent with the fundamental challenge that attachment theory poses for conventional psychoanalytic models of the mind.
I take this occasion to reflect on the relation between the flourishing attachment tradition established by Bowlby's work and the psychoanalytic tradition. I want to show how Bowlby's virtual expulsion from mainstream psychoanalysis in the early 1960s makes some sense in terms of the history of psychoanalytic ideas, as he was several steps ahead of his own time. I then consider the ways in which other major psychoanalytic authors, W.R.D. Fairbairn and Hans Loewald, as well as the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, struggled with the same problems Bowlby did. There is now a marked receptivity among psychoanalysts to the same ideas that earned Bowlby his place, along with Fairbairn and Sullivan, in the psychoanalytic Gulag. Finally, I consider the way in which an integration of these different angles on the same phenomena can be helpful both conceptually and clinically.
Postmodern theory and critiques currently exert a considerable influence on psychoanalytic theory, particularly in regard to the revision of a theory of sexuality and gender. This article reviews some of the critiques and alternative views of sexuality proposed by various postmodern theorists such as Butler, Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault. After conducting a critical comparison of these critiques and alternatives with contemporary analytic revisionist theory, I contend that, despite the useful aspects of postmodernism's critical cultural perspective, some postmodern positions run directly counter to certain key psychoanalytic tenets about human agency and the existence of an inner psychic world or selfhood. Furthermore, I believe that, despite the laudable politics of many postmodern writers to promote a greater diversity of nonpathologized sexual experience, the atrophied views of agency and selfhood depicted in the postmodern writings reviewed in this essay cannot support an approach that is concerned with clinical treatment or with describing processes of psychological transformation. A case vignette is provided illustrating the main arguments of the paper.
Passion, Responsibility, and >Wild Geese< Creating a Context for the Absence of Conscious Intentions
(1999)
On making rules: Toward a reformation of the dynamics of transference in psychoanalytic treatment
(1999)
The experience of selfhood is that of struggle, between conflicting demands, inevitable dilemmas, and shifting allegiances toward deciding what is for us. The complex nature of this struggle often makes the boundaries between health and sickness ambiguous. Therapeutic work is significantly dependent on the capacity to engage with such struggles. This is illustrated by two striking examples of successful work, as well as my own two analyses, and other clinical material.
Free association allows the emergence of novel formulations about self and, along with them, new insights, but it needs to modulate the risks of chaos and the compromising of mental integrity on the one hand and the arrest of growth on the other. Interpretation acts to contain and hold associative pressures and so helps maintain the patient's mental integrity, but it limits associative freedom by being necessarily inferential. In addition, in current interpretative strategies, analytic progress depends on the patient's ability to associate. This ability may be poor for longer or shorter periods during analysis. To help resolve these difficulties, a strategy of associative dialogue is proposed and clinically illustrated. The proposed strategy draws on the associative abilities of the analyst. This paper elaborates the way in which two basic forms of associative dialogue – bold and focused analysis – may facilitate the negotiation between freedom and continuity in analytic discourse.
Psychoanalysis as a vocation
(1999)
In this centenary of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams it is important to revisit this classic, to discuss why it is a classic, to consider what has been learned since its publication, and to discuss what changes in our understanding of dreams and dreaming are called for. To this end, we briefly discuss some of the main themes of the book. Then we review both changes in psychoanalytic thinking and theory and the results of many studies made possible by the discovery of the electro-encephalographic changes that occur during sleep and their relevance for understanding dreams and their function. We suspect that Freud would have been delighted to know about this explosion of information about the physiology of dreaming. With this in mind, we consider the need for modification of some of Freud's theories while noting that his basic contribution, that dreams are meaningful and understandable, has been amply confirmed. We then discuss these observations in relation to how we approach working with dreams.
Stoller proposes two fundamentally contradictory conceptions of core gender identity. This paper urges that we accept the first, a relational conception: Core gender identity develops in the context of unambiguous sex ascription at birth and the virtually infinite number of daily infant-parent interactions permeated by all the conscious and unconscious meanings the child's gender has for its parents. The implications of this conception are explored in four contexts. The first shows that a recent case of sex reassignment, purporting to demonstrate a neurological base for gender experience, does not do so. The second argues that children's core gender identities as >girls< or >boys< are as diverse as the meanings that their genders have had for their interaction partners (usually the parents). The third emphasizes the priority of infant-parent interactions in core gender identity development and in the gendered meanings that children's genitals have for them. The fourth argues for the rejection of the >disidentification< hypothesis rooted in Stoller's second and unsupported conception of core gender identity and in Mahler's conception of separation?individuation, which might usefully be replaced by Lyons-Ruth's conception of attachment-individuation.