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105 Per Square Mile
(1971)
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.
1966 Anniversaries
(1966)
The Swiss member societies of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, namely the two existential analytic societies and the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Kreuzlingen, have always stressed the philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis as psychoanalytic approaches with severely disturbed and psychotic patients. The colleagues working in these institutes have often cooperated very closely with analysts from the International Psychoanalytical Association. This paper stresses the important contributions for inpatient psychoanalytic approaches.
The paper first discusses two documentaries by Donna Read, >Signs Out of Time< (2004) and >Goddess Remembered< (1989), that focus on the pacific tradition of the female centered settlements on the territories of modern Eastern Europe in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Read depicts significant findings of a world-renowned archeologist Marija Gimbutas who claims that a peaceful image of Old Europe embodied in the omnipotent Great Mother changed radically towards the end of the third millennium when violent Indo-European nomads came from Russia and shattered the matriarchal utopia of equality and natural harmony. These tribes introduced the principles of hierarchy and violent male-rule. Read’s and Gimbutas’ findings are further developed and examined in the studies by Riana Eisler and Erich Fromm who also claim that conspicuous material aggrandizement of patriarchal culture severely damaged a blissful matriarchal bond between man and nature. These theoretical insights are applied to Williamson’s compre hension of nature vs. nurture issue in >Mary and the Seal< (1997). In portraying a tender relationship between Mary and the seal, as well as its tragic and totally unnecessary shooting, contemporary patriarchal culture is brought to a trial. The mere existence of the bond between Mary and the seal, an embodiment of an idyllic matriarchal unity between man and nature, testifies to the prevalent need for the return to its substantial but long-forgotten values. The theoretical insights of Graves, Althusser, Freire, Fiske and Miller will also be used in the interpretation of the story.
In Ferenczi's view, dreams have a traumatolytic function that is anterior to and more primary than the wish-fulfilment function considered by Freud. This view is influenced by a number of metapsychological conceptions that occasionally are quite different from Freud's approach, especially as regards the economical and topical points of view, which Ferenczi clearly set apart in posthumous works. In these conceptions, he >dismisses< pondering a so-called death instinct and advancing towards the notion of an unconscious other than repressed. Otherwise, as Ferenczi considers that in dreams there is an >optimistic counterfeit,< the present article reflects on how to overcome this hypomanic solution in order to turn the traumatolytic potential of dream into a fully therapeutic function. A dream taken from a film is used to illustrate Ferenczi's point of view.
The distinction between the having mode and the being mode seems to be the basis of E. FROMM's clinical approach, which finds its main application in the center-to-center relatedness between analyst and patient. Analysts can understand a patient because they experience what the patient experiences. The dialog is based on reciprocally communicated emotional and conceptual responses and reactions; both identities come into play. The psychoanalytic session can save itself from the having mode by addressing the patient's living memory, which represents the past relived in the present, according to the being mode. Case material from a psychoanalytic session with a 31-yarr-old woman is included. (German and Spanish abstracts.)
The distinction between the having mode and the being mode seems to be the basis of E. FROMM's clinical approach, which finds its main application in the center-to-center relatedness between analyst and patient. Analysts can understand a patient because they experience what the patient experiences. The dialog is based on reciprocally communicated emotional and conceptual responses and reactions; both identities come into play. The psychoanalytic session can save itself from the having mode by addressing the patient's living memory, which represents the past relived in the present, according to the being mode. Case material from a psychoanalytic session with a 31-yarr-old woman is included. (German and Spanish abstracts.)
>Forum der Psychoanalyse<, which holds a firm place in the German-speaking world today, was founded in 1984 in a rugged landscape of psychoanalysis in Germany that was the consequence of the malignant group processes that had occurred between psychoanalytic societies after World War II. The Forum's foundation was guided by the idea of creating a constructive climate between the rivalrous groups and moderating the gap between them, given the increasing recognition of the shared history of psychoanalysis in Germany that had started to take root in the 1980s. Emphasizing the common ground in psychoanalytic theory and practice, the >Forum< is open to all psychoanalysts, to discussions of the various psychoanalytic trends, and to contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue. It promotes exchanges between psychoanalytic societies, and is also meant as a bridge to the development of psychoanalysis abroad.
Erich Fromm points to a tendency whereby the numerous freedoms gained by the citizens of modern democracies have been accompanied by widespread feelings of loneliness and disconnection. The loosening of traditional social structures leads some individuals to seek out restrictions, for example in order to counteract the feelings of being alone. This essay uses Fromm’s thesis as a lens through which to examine two of Franz Kafka’s novels in which the protagonists exemplify the >fear of freedom< proposed by Fromm. Society in these novels is perceived as a prison cell in which one must comply with social regulations, but also a fortress to which one can retreat from the chaos of the outside world, albeit at the cost of one’s psychological health.
To introduce an archival protocol of a >Debate about methods in the social sciences, especially the conception of social science method represented by the Institute<, held on 17 January 1941 at the Institute of Social Research in New York, the article focuses on certain conflicts in substance and terms of discourse among members of the Institute, with special emphasis on Franz Neumann’s distinctive approaches, notwithstanding his professed loyalty to Max Horkheimer’s theory. These are seen to arise not only from Neumann’s assignment as bargaining agent for the Institute and his distinctive relations with American colleagues, but also from their different orientations to the conflicted legacies of Weimar.
One of the perennial questions in Shakespeare studies concerns what Coleridge called the >motiveless malignity< of Iago. Instead of looking at Iago as an individual, however, I will argue that he is best understood as a representation of the >social character< of early modern bourgeois man. Iago’s denial of spiritual values and his mercenary nature can be understood in this light. Fromm’s theses concerning the interconnections among anal libido, the death instinct, malignant aggression, and necrophilia all find support in Shake-speare’s supreme villain.
James Joyce represents one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century and an adherent of the great tradition of humanistic ethics. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine, primarily in the light of humanistic ethics, the process of the artistic coming of age of the main character of Portrait, Stephen Dedalus. The basic principles of Humanism tend to view man in his physical and spiritual totality, believing that man’s fundamental aim is to >be man< and that the major prerequisite for achieving that aim is to be >man for himself<. Stephen Dedalus epitomizes Fromm’s type of man of productive character, in the sense that he gradually frees himself from the >nets< of Irish society represented in the form of constraints of nationality, family, and religion which he sees as threatening forces bent upon annihilating his own individuality. Stephen Dedalus manages to accomplish true affirmation of his individuality only through artistic vocation. Moreover, it could be argued that Stephen D. (Joyce himself) stands for the epitome of a genuine intellectual living in self-imposed exile and who is, according to the words of philosopher Julien Benda, a guardian and a bearer of independent thought who is loyal solely to truth.
Bridging psychoanalysis and literature, the present paper links literary depiction of traumatic terror with our own learning from psychoanalytic experience. It identifies psychodynamic understanding at two levels: (1) at the descriptive level of traumatic experience; and (2) at the specific level of working-through. Beginning with traumatic descriptions in ancient Western accounts, represented in the Biblical book of Lamentations and by Sophocles, the paper focuses on the dynamic work of affective and cognitive emergence, highlighting a sequence of repetitive traumatic reminiscences drawn from Samuel Beckett's literary productions across a 33-year period from >The end< to >Company.< In so doing, it illustrates both the literary and therapeutic efficacy in emotional conveyance of personal narrative in achieving the necessary cohesion after traumatic experience to more effectively go on.
>Now, Look here...<
(2009)
This paper proposes that psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be a helpful form of treatment for certain autistic children. Some of the misconceptions surrounding this kind of treatment are discussed. The literature identifying a particular sub-group of autistic children is then reviewed and the characteristics of this group, and the relationship of their difficulties to early trauma, are described. Using clinical material from work with a child who probably fell within this sub-group, and who had very marked autistic features, the paper illustrates the importance of the therapist taking an active role in the therapy and how this helped the child to emerge from his withdrawn state. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of introducing themes of aggression, and of this being done in a playful way. The impact of trauma on children's development, with particular reference to the acquisition of language, is considered. The role of sibling rivalry as a factor is emphasised.
>Switch Him On!<
(2002)
In this article, the author describes somber scenes that have been extracted from Brazilian reality. Some of the elements that compose these scenes have been analyzed as to their relation with contemporaneity and psychoanalytic topics of interest: perversion, helplessness, pain, life instinct, death instinct, humor and indifference.
>The greater the satisfaction, the greater the disillusionment<. Interview with Luciano Aleotti
(1975)
>The Metaphors We Live by<
(2003)
During the first twenty years that Freud spent creating his theory, he assumed that most of the functions responsible for creating mental-thought structures were organized according to two different forms or principles of thought. He called these forms >primary process< and >secondary process<. The >secondary process< is identified with rational thinking and the ego, and it is easy to follow the changes that this concept underwent in the works of Freud that followed. The concept of >primary process<, on the other hand, disappeared from his later works with no explanation. This article traces the changes that the >primary process< underwent in Freud's thinking and examines the connection between his analytical technique and his research method. A close study of the changes that the >primary process< underwent reveals that Freud's developmental thought process included concepts whose directional changes may be termed >regressive<.
This paper explores the links between psychoanalysis and music in Vienna between the years 1908 and 1923, focusing in particular on two members of the highly influential Second Viennese School, the composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern. While there is little evidence of an actual interaction between Freud and his circle and contemporaneous musicians in Vienna, this paper discusses the direct personal and professional contact Webern and Berg had with Freud, and also with Freud's one-time colleague Alfred Adler; Berg's wife Helene also underwent psychoanalytic treatment. Both composers documented their experiences with and feelings about psychoanalysis, offering critical insights into the reception of psychoanalysis in musical circles in Vienna, and into the actual connections between psychoanalysis and Vienna's most important musical figures. This paper examines Berg and Webern in the context of Freud's Vienna, Adler's musical background and his treatment of Webern, and Berg's knowledge of psychoanalysis and strong ambivalence towards his wife's psychoanalytic treatment, and concludes by considering Berg's opera Wozzeck (1925) as an example of a musical work influenced by contemporary Viennese attitudes towards psychoanalysis.
>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 invites Primo Levi, the internationally esteemed citizen of Turin, Italy and survivor of the Auschwitz to instruct post 9/11 psychoanalysis in five lessons on living and dying in the aftermath of severe trauma. Relying on excerpts from Levi's writings, the author invites Levi to speak to the reader words of warning concerning contemporary psychoanalysis' benign omnipotence in embracing overly simplistic theories of cure, resiliency and psychic repatriation of the human spirit in the aftermath of severe trauma.
This paper is part of my research into psychotic transference and is also related to the psychotic aspect of any adult or infantile patient in analysis. In my research, I studied the origin of the concept of transference in Charcot's time before Freud, and the transformation of this concept in psychoanalysis. Freud thought that psychotic patients were not able to establish a transference relationship, but some of his early papers show the opposite. In fact, Freud himself and then several other analysts were able to develop a personal experience regarding the possibility of contact and transferring feelings and delusional experiences in a therapeutic context – individual, group, or institution. I provide some clinical examples in this paper, as well as some theoretical, personal views regarding intrapersonal and interpersonal transference. Like Freud and Melanie Klein, I believe that transference starts with life, but that in psychoanalysis it has a particular meaning.
The nature of the psychopathology of individuals with eating disorders always requires special understanding. In the case presented in this article, the psychodynamics of the patient's bulimia needed to be thought in relation to her mother's anorexia and the transgenerational transmission of her unmourned trauma. The article will focus on the pathological vampiric tie between mother and daughter, whose bulimia served to saturate the maternal void left by the traumatic losses, actualizing the illusion of their union through a common erotogenic zone, the belly. Special emphasis will be given to the powerful phenomena of bodily countertransference experienced by the analyst, who had to contain the patient's massive projections into her own body and to work through the raw inner tensions and sensations in order to create an intermediate space of thinking between them.
The knowledge culture of psychoanalysis relies heavily on the practical wisdom of competent psychoanalytic clinicians. In order to become competent analysts, analysts in training should not content themselves with trusting in their supervisors’ intuition and expertise. There is a need for supervisors and supervisees to explicate implicit theories of interpretive and supervisory techniques in psychoanalytic supervision by raising the question >Where does it come from?< with regard to three too often neglected issues. First, both the supervisor and the analyst in training should actively and constantly try to make transparent the process of contextualization, that is, the methodology of inferring latent meaning from manifest content through privileging certain pieces of information over others. Second, it should become an ongoing task in supervision that concrete (recommendations about) technical interventions are embedded in and reflect the application of a particular theory of technique. This facilitates an understanding that goes beyond the interpretation in a concrete situation and helps to generalize learning into a gradually expanding, integrated technical framework. Third, we should reflect and explicate the (predominant) supervisory approaches we are using in order to remain flexible with regard to both supervisory material and ways of reacting to it. Discussing these issues will enable analysts in training to develop their own psychoanalytic identity and integrated frame of reference for their practice that they critically and deliberately reflect upon and actively acquire rather than passively and seemingly intuitively absorb and adopt. Examples for illustrating the explication of theories of interpretive and supervisory techniques are provided.
>Who?, where?, what?, in which way?, to whom?< – besides being the questions Paula Heimann suggested that any analyst should ask him- or herself while exploring the patient's communications, these are also the main issues the authors addressed through the results of their survey on the present state of the relationship between psychoanalysis and universities in Europe. This is a pilot study that tries to chart a map of European psychoanalysts (for the moment including only members of the International Psychoanalytic Society) working at various levels in universities. The aim is to set up a network between them for starting a debate on shared problems, hopes, and anxieties relating to the future of psychoanalysis in academia.
Through the use of Paulo Freire’s >Pedagogy of the Oppressed<, bell hooks >Teaching to Transgress<, and Erich Fromm’s >Marx’s Concept of Man<, amongst other works, this analysis will attempt to analyze the subject/object, public/private, and the masculine/feminine dichotomies that arise in nineteenth-century England. Using Charles Dickens’ >Hard Times< as a basis for this discourse analysis, I will explore the following: Patriarchy and capitalism as interconnected systems of domination that (re)produce and purposefully instill Marx’s concept of false consciousness and alienation in an attempt to train, as Victorian economist Andrew Ure explains in his >Philosophy of Manufactures<, >human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identity themselves with the unvarying regulatory of the complex automaton< (Ure 15). Works Cited Ure, Andrew. The Philosophy of Manufactures; or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain. London: C. Knight, 1835. Google Books. Google, 28 June 2007. Web. 2 Apr. 2015.
This paper was inspired by the documentary >The Act of Killing<, directed by an American-born, British filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer and released in 2012. Provoked and appalled by what is described as one of the worst mass murders in the 20th century, the movie director focuses not so much on the crime itself but the perpetrators of the crimes and the ensuing consequences. A part from the need to bring to open and discuss this part of Indonesian history, as well as the consequences of the communist and subsequent anti-communist political rules, this paper deals, on the one hand, with the question and the essence of human nature capable of such monstrosity and on the other, with the role that art must take in understanding and healing of the open wounds in any nation’s history as well as individual perpetrators of the crimes. For this purpose, the ideological framework of Erich Fromm as given in his study >Anatomy of Human Destructiveness< and also philosophical ideas of Hanna Arendt, specifically concerning the nature of evil itself were used as theoretical framework.
>Solidarity< conjures up positive images of the strength of togetherness and community, but in practice it is experienced by groups when confronted by a real or perceived threat from other groups. The ideal of a universal human solidarity appears tenuous and flimsy. However, Richard Rorty and Axel Honneth have attempted, in different ways, to bring this ideal under philosophical consideration. Their treatment of human solidarity is flawed by their a priori rejection of the normative idea of a common human nature. Such an idea, termed ‘radical humanism’, is reconstructed from the work of Erich Fromm, and one of its chief implications – the rejection of liberal nationalism – is proposed as part of a radical challenge to contemporary social and political theory.
A Case of Primary Vaginismus
(1999)
Sometimes human sexuality manifests itself in forms that must be interpreted as symptoms of a severely disturbed psychological situation. The author presents a case in which primary vaginismus – a long known symptom in the gynaecological field and difficult to approach both from a gynaecological and a psychological point of view – is the manifestation of a personality with psychotic elements.
A Clinical Illustration of >Langs'Communicative Interactional Model of the Mind< (A Symposium)
(1987)
In his comment on Teurnell's paper >The Piggle—a sexually abused girl?< the author points to the risk of organizing a complicated clinical material around one single idea and briefly describes other ways of understanding the material in Winnicott's book. To the author's mind, the richness and depth of the material and the subtleness and aesthetics of the interplay between Winnicott and the Piggle, in Teurnell's way of reading, collapse into one single question: the possibility of a sexual trauma. At the end of the comment the role of the Piggle's father is shortly discussed.
A Commentary
(1996)
A Commentary
(1996)
Sandra Buechler's commentary provides an interesting counterpoint to Mar-golies's chapter. She observes that Fromm believed work should be an expres-sion and a vehicle for self-development and that this urge transcends historical circumstance. She questions whether the categories we create hinder or en-hance our understanding. She believes the self-developer category may have blinded the therapist to other aspects of the treatment. Her own reading of the clinical material would have led her to focus on different aspects of the patient, such as his narcissism and his sadistic sexual fantasies. Margolies would argue that these pathological elements were declining as he worked through old com-promise solutions and developed life-affirming passions in work and love-particularly as he strengthened the positive strivings of his social character ori-entation.
A Concept of Psychopathology
(1960)
This paper presents vignettes of a case from the city of Rio de Janeiro in which temporality appears as a fundamental issue. Severe difficulties in validating the past and integrating past, present and future reveal pertinent questions on time and the ideal function in the contemporary world. The author underlines the relevance of such questioning for the practice of psychoanalysis today.