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- 1998 (340) (remove)
Listening three frost poems
(1998)
This article discusses binary, or dichotomous, thinking as it develops in normal classification, in pathological splitting, and in shifts of cultural awareness such as that from Classicism to Romanticism. It relates these to states of subjective and objective self-awareness as induced and regulated by the early parental environment. A number of clinical examples demonstrate how pathological splitting may arise and how the therapeutic process works to alter dichotomous thinking and raise it to higher levels of integration. It also suggests that a similar process of integration can take place over time in our historical understanding of cultural paradigm shifts. We do not know the Hells and Heavens of people we pass in the street. There are two possible perspectives. According to the first, on a miniscule ball of earth, in a smudge of mold called a city, some microorganisms move around, less durable than mayflies. And the internal states of [such] beings, deprived of any reason for their existence, perfectly interchangeable, what importance can they have? According to the second perspective, that of a reversed telescope, every one of these beings grows up to the size of a cathedral and surpasses in its complexity any nature, living or inert. Only in the second case can we see that no two persons are identical and that we may at best try to guess what is going on inside our fellow men [Milosz, 1986, p. 120].
Social-constructivist and other postmodern currents within contemporary psychoanalysis put a great premium on an epistemological critique of positivism and the authority of the analyst. This focus on the essential ambiguity and constructed nature of experience implicitly tilts the analyst's interest away from a disciplined attempt to develop systems of validation that rely on observable patient responses as confirmatory data with which to judge the analyst's interventions and understandings. As a result, even while defending themselves against charges of relativism and solipsism, many postmodern writers still tend to idealize uncertainty and implicitly discourage the clinician from seeking greater accuracy and clarity about the patient. Epistemic doubt and an ethic that celebrates surprise, although useful as a corrective to tendencies toward rigidity and arrogance in technique, unnecessarily clouds the ubiquitous existence and possibility of accurate intersubjective understanding. This bias can be seen as historically linked to similar processes in academia in which progressive intellectuals abandoned a social change agenda in response to a growing political conservatism and cultural cynicism and, instead, became increasingly involved in >theory for its own sake.< Similarly, the epistemological position of the postmodernists sponsors a bias against therapeutic activism and inadvertently rationalizes a growing pessimism in our own clinical practice.
J. D. Sutherland in memoriam
(1998)
In a Glass Darkly
(1998)
For a surprising number of analysands, many with above-average intelligence and facility with language, words do not adequately capture or convey emotion or symbolize experience. This often subtle difficulty can have a powerful impact on the ability to verbally communicate emotions, process affect, and utilize traditional psychoanalytic interventions. Analysands with these problems therefore often have difficulty using analysis to explore and understand their own experience, yet the reasons for such difficulties are often not recognized by either analyst or analysand. In this article, I suggest that the concept of alexithymia can provide a valuable tool for understanding this gap between affects and language and, in its broadest interpretation, can aid therapists in their pursuit of meaningful approaches to the analytic process. Using the concept as a starting point, I describe and illustrate an approach in which paying attention to apparently insignificant aspects of an analysand's experience gradually helps analysands identify and explore personal symbols and meanings in their lives.
Mannie and Music
(1998)
The Ego Structure and the Self-Identity of the Schizophrenic Human and the Task of Psychoanalysis
(1998)
Therapeutic transformation of the otherwise splitting symbiosis, transformation of the self-object into the transitional subject and progressive psychopathology as a preliminary stage to dualisation, communication and rehabilitation are described against the background of the author's 50 years of experience of working with schizophrenic patients. In addition to good social and existential healing, the author stresses the value of the individual sessions for both therapist and patient. The author clarifies the difference between >projective identification< and >partial identification with the suffering of the patient<, the latter demonstrating the strong side of the therapist, who exerts a positive influence, converting schizophrenic symbiosis into therapeutic symbiosis.
Shadow of the Other. Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York (Routledge) 1998.
(1998)
>Like Those Crystal Balls of Yore...< Fragility Within the Analytic Relation: Real or Fancied?
(1998)
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann became famous with her intensive psychotherapy of psychotic patients which she developed in Chestnut Lodge where she worked, after having left Nazi Germany, from 1935 until her death in 1957. The paper outlines her life and work in Germany. Studying medicine in Königsberg (East Prussia), she wrote her dissertation about pupillary changes in schizophrenia and worked during World War 1 under the famous neurologist Kurt Goldstein with brain injured soldiers. They both differentiated between somatic and psychic factors in neurologic patients and published articles about neurotraumatology including aphasia. Between 1920 and 1923, she worked in the psychotherapeutic sanatorium Weisser Hirsch in Dresden under J.H. Schultz where she treated neurotic and psychotic patients. In these years, she started her training analysis and her psychoanalytic teaching and publishing. From 1924 to 1933 she led a kosher psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg, co-founded the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Society and gave university lectures in psychoanalysis in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. She became a close friend of Georg Groddeck who treated also somatically ill patients with psychoanalysis. — Her great promoters furthered different important attitudes which got very important for Fromm-Reichmann later: Goldstein the natural scientific discipline, Fromm the political view, Groddeck the therapeutic optimism.
Organisation und Charakter. Sozialpsychologische Aspekte zur Analyse von Sekten und Psychogruppen
(1998)
In The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume III, Ernest Jones explained the third wave of dissension as an effect of the progressive mental deterioration of two members of the Committee, who had governed the psychoanalytic movement: Rank and Ferenczi. While in relation to Rank, Jones made a partial recant, in relation to Ferenczi, he did not modify his assertions. Erich Fromm collected various testimonies by witnesses of Ferenczi's last years, all contrasting Jones's assertions, and challenged Jones's manner of writing his-tory. However, since Fromm was himself a dissident, and his witnesses were pupils, relatives or friends of Ferenczi's, they were discarded as >partisans<. The present study aims at reconsidering the question on the basis of many docu-ments, among which the 1958 report of Lajos Levy (Ferenczi's physician) to Anna Freud. The consulted documents do not support Jones's allegation of Ferenczi's insanity. At the same time, they show that Jones's allegation was not a one-man fabrication, but reflected a shared belief. Finally, the author attempts a reading of the possible function of this belief within the psychoanalytic commu-nity. It is pointed out that Ferenczi's emphasis on the analyst as a real person was incompatible with the strict conception of psychoanalysis, based on the theoretical rejection of the affective factors which was becoming dominant around 1957, and it is argued that the narrative of Ferenczi's >falling into insanity< represented an expression of the fear of remaining embroiled in the patient's affective net.
This paper considers the fundamental change introduced by Ferenczi in1919 by proposing the use of countertransference as an instrument. Basically it reconsiders the concept of analytic neutrality; mastery of countertransference is reached through tolerating it, overcoming resistances against it, demanding a very intense involvement of the analyst, as opposed to the image of the surgeon or the mirror. The paper analyzes the implications of this position for psychoanalysis. It places these concepts in the scientific and personal context in which it was written, then follows the later developments of these ideas in Ferenczi’s own work, as well as in that of some other authors, and comments on the effects of these ideas on the psychoanalytic movement. Finally it poses some questions regarding our present use of countertransference in clinical work, with two brief vignettes highlighting these points.
Patients’ use of language in the analytic setting can undergo extreme and sometimes surprising fluctuations. Seemingly articulate and engaging patients retreat to the concrete in their use of words, disconnecting verbal expression from one's internal experience. Are these fluctuations indications of limitations in the patient's capacity to put experience into language, or are they indications of the emergence of otherwise unacknowledged aspects of self into the treatment arena? Shifts in the use of language (both patient's and therapist's) can be opportunities to question the work of the analysis. Whether one uses these moments to expand the boundaries of the analytic technique or to expand the boundaries of the analytic relationship – or both – is the question posed in this commentary.
On the basis of a historical survey of Ferenczi's contributions to the concept of countertransference, the author highlights the most important theoretical shifts present in each of his contributions, from Freud's initial formulation in 1910 to the ?Clinical Diary?. Besides pointing to some key concepts and characteristics in Ferenczi's thinking, such as ?the control of the countertransference?, ?The transference-countertransference interaction?, ?the analyst's narcissism?, and in particular the view of countertransference as a useful therapeutic tool in itself rather than as an obstacle for the cure. The author discusses Ferenczi's significant influence on some later analysts, especially on Heimann, Winnicott, Racker and Searles who stood out precisely for, among other reasons, their contributions to the question of countertransference.
Mamma, li turchi!
(1998)
Keeping it moving. Commentary on Judith Butler's >melancholy gender – refused identification<
(1998)
On the basis of the assumption that the understanding of Freud's work can gain much from illuminating his own psychological development, the author tries to reconstruct the evolution of his self-analysis. Against the common view of placing it in the context of his relationship with Fliess, the author shows how it actually evolved out of a whole series of experiences and relationships. Freud's self-analysis was initially nourished by his study of the Greek and Latin classics; it acquired the necessary interpersonal dimension through his relationship with Emil Fluss and Eduard Silberstein; it gained a cathartic and thus therapeutic quality through his relationship with Martha; and it eventually became a professional enterprise once his patients forced Freud, with the help of Wilhelm Fliess, to systematically look into himself.
In this paper we explore a few points emphasized by both Fairbairn and American Relational Theory related to conceptualizations of the new and old object and the implications for working in the analytic situation. Underlying much of our discussion is the belief that there are useful tensions between, on the one hand, Fairbairn's emphasis on our attachment to bad and old objects and refractory clinging to these bad objects in the face of receiving something new, and, on the other, a construal of a push or willingness toward integrating externality and newness of objects (e.g., Winnicott, 1969 Benjamin, 1988). American Relational models which explore complexities of interaction augment an understanding of Fairbairn's formulations of why we hold on to old objects. Fairbairn's theory also offers ways of understanding aspects of repetition, even, and sometimes especially, in trying to provide new experience.
Der zweite Band des Handbuchs zur >wachstumsorientierten Beratung< beschreibt die hauptsächlichen psychotherapeutischen Schulen und arbeitet jeweils Elemente heraus, die zur Verwirklichung persönlichen Wachstums genutzt werden können. – Aus dem Inhaltsverzeichnis: (1) Wachstumsorientierte Beratung und die fünf Strömungen der Psychotherapie. (2) Sigmund Freud und die Ich-Analytiker. (3) Alfred Adler und Otto Rank. (4) Erich FROMM, Karen Horney und Harry Stack Sullivan. (5) Carl Gustav Jung, die Existentialisten, Carl R. Rogers. (6) Verhaltenstherapien. (7) Transaktionsanalyse. (8) Gestalttherapie. (9) Ganzheitliche Gesundheit, Biofeedback und Körpertherapien. (10) Familien- und andere Systemtherapien. (11) Feministische Therapien. (12) Psychosynthesis
Love. Its Forms, Dimensions, and Paradoxes, Basingstoke et al. (Palgrave Macmillan) 1998, 239 pp.
(1998)
The book is concerned with questions about love: questions about its many forms, strands and aspects, and the relation in which they stand to each other. It is concerned with the way different aspects of sexual love conflict with each other, with the way self-regard and self-interest can corrupt love, and with spiritual love and its difficulties. It seeks the views of some writers who have suggested some distinctive solutions to the existential problems that love poses in the face of its obstacles: Plato, Proust, Sartre, Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Erich Fromm, C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Kahlil Gibran. [Taken from Publisher's Website: http://www.palgrave.com/]
The Concept of Trauma According to Ferenczi and Its Effects on Subsequent Psychoanalytical Research
(1998)
Freud abandoned his belief that all the traumas reported by his hysterical patients were true. He came to the conclusion that pathogenic fantasy was more frequent that real trauma. Ferenczi was the first one to return to the idea that most of the neuroses have a real trauma at their root. His pupil and follower, Michael Balint developed this idea and proposed new ways of describing the mechanism of trauma and and some of the therapeutic consequences. Since then much further research has been done about the problems of pathogenic trauma. The ideas of Maria Torok & Nicolas Abraham as well as some of Leonard Shengold's theories are described in this paper.
Reflections on Culture
(1998)
Loyal opposition and the clarity of dissent. Commentary on Donald P. Spence's >the hermeneutic turn<
(1998)
Selected aspects of case material in the treatment of a bisexual woman are used to illustrate the theme of penetrability versus impenetrability in the feminine and masculine psyches. I examine the dimensions not of activity and passivity, but of a fixed versus a permeable bodily and psychic boundary – the ability to penetrate as well as the ability to be penetrated. The patient showed shifting gender identifications, depending on the relational context – the geography of the lover's body and mind – that she described as >expanding her gender repertoire.< Bisexuality is discussed as a creative use of potential space that does not necessitate the collapse of core gender identity. An integration is offered of a clinical and theoretical focus on sexuality with an emphasis on earliest object relations. To the metaphors of the primal scene and the combined parent, I add the metaphor of the nursing couple as the site of bisexual identifications and as the earliest relation of the penetrating to the penetrated. I critique the gender split regarding the ability to penetrate – an ability not inherently male but that comes to be seen as such.
Kaiserschnitt-Geburt
(1998)
The interface of empirical work with child psychoanalysis at the Anna Freud Centre is part of the tradition of systematic study and research pioneered over many years by Anna Freud and her colleagues (A. Freud, 1962; Sandier, 1962; A. Freud 1965). George Moran initiated a program of work at the Anna Freud Centre, which, starting with the work on juvenile onset diabetes (Fonagy et al., 1991b), led us to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the child psychoanalysis, with important implications for technique. We acknowledged our debt by dedicating the lecture on which this paper is based to George Moran, whom we see as a worthy successor to Marianne Kris, both of them working within the tradition of Anna Freud. This article starts with observations that imply the need for a change in some aspects of our psychoanalytic model. Throughout child psychoanalysis is used to illustrate both the need for change and the character of the revision that is required. The authors, however, assert that, as is so often the case for explorations in child analysis, these ideas may be extrapolated to psychoanalytic approaches to adults, specifically individuals with borderline personality disorder.
Kohut's contribution
(1998)
Analytic child therapy techniques developed as modifications of techniques from adult psychoanalysis. Child therapy continues to be regarded as an adaptation of adult analysis and to give a central place to the methods and conditions of adult analysis, such as interpretation, in its understanding of how therapy heals. I propose that child therapy is not a modified form of therapy and that the essential processes of therapy are fully present in child therapy. In fact, they often may be seen more clearly there than in adult therapy. I suggest two interrelated processes as the essential ones in all analytic therapy. The first is play. I examine several interrelated aspects of play, specifically as they occur in child therapy. These include the emergence and integration of dissociated self-states, symbolization, and recognition. The second process I propose as essential in analytic therapy is the renegotiation of self – other relationships through action. This renegotiation is what can help patients become able to play in therapy when they have difficulty doing so. Since I suggest that action is at the heart of analytic therapy, I go on to consider the role of talking in an action therapy. Finally, I explore the dimensions of mutuality in the relationship between child and therapist, including mutual influence and regulation, mutual recognition, and mutual regression. The intersubjective nature of psychotherapy, which is increasingly appreciated in adult analytic therapy but not in child therapy, provides a fertile context for the evolution of play and for the productive renegotiation of self – other relationships.