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Complex dynamics of forgiveness: Psychological, interpersonal, and psychotherapeutic implications
(2013)
The distinctive correlates of forgiveness are studied and analyzed in this paper. It is concluded that superficial and hasty forms of forgiveness might have a harmful impact on self-respect, self-concepts, self-complexity, and authenticity. Even deep forgiveness might not completely free the individual from negative side-effects, and there is some doubt whether complete forgiveness is possible. The paper also examines what place forgiveness should have in therapeutic settings and how it could be practiced in an accurate and safe manner.
I present and analyse here the phenomenon of a specific language that was spoken within the walls of a maximum security prison in the south-east of England between 2006 and 2007. In doing so, I look at the adolescent who becomes an offender, and how his language is thereby altered, here exploring language in groups and drawing on Freud and Bion, as well as the sociological contributions of Emery, Goffman and Messerschmidt, and the linguistic contribution of Teresa Labov. Examining the social structures that the language enforced, I examine my own role within and outside the prisoners' language, and explore what the prisoners learned from me and my language, and vice versa. I explore the nature of learning a language inside a prison, and examine the need for a homogeneity of language and the social adhesive in the language used. I look at my experience of one-to-one teaching versus group teaching: specifically, the differences in language used by the prisoners in these different scenarios, and try to determine to what extent language comes from outside influences and what to extent it forms and permutates inside. Using actual examples, I argue that despite the exuberance and inventiveness of the language, its usage follows Freud's >“Beyond the pleasure principle,< in that there is an attempt to reduce excitation. Finally, I regard prison language as a psychic retreat, drawing on the work of Steiner, Meltzer, Emanuel, and Leader (among others); and I ask questions not only about the prisoners, but also about the function of learning inside a prison itself, while regarding the language used as a depressive defence. No identifying reference to any single prisoner, or any specific crime, has been included in these pages. The people and the place that are alluded to throughout have been rendered anonymous.
The author discusses countertransference in relation to the impact of training institutions on the therapist as a person. The author claims that therapist's feelings and experiences determine the diagnosis of the personality. It is neither the behavior nor the psychopathological phenomena, which have a diagnostic value, but how the relationship is experienced in terms of the therapist's feelings. The author speaks about the problems connected to of “as if” personalities as a starting point. This concept originated with the psychopathological studies of Helene Deutsch, who associated it with schizophrenia. Later, Paul Roazen transported the concept to the social dimension of politics and to the personality of politicians. In this article, the author treats the “as if” personalities as a concept of unification, in contrast to current attempts to fragment diagnostic personality disorders, as in many psychoanalytic concepts in relation to the medicalization of psychoanalysis. Some clinical vignettes are briefly presented in order to sharpen this focus.
The intention of the author is to further the knowledge on pain, based on a review of the concept of psychic pain as found in Freud, Klein, Bion, and French authors, with the objective of clarifying as far as possible the nature and vicissitudes of pain. After this review, the author describes a case in which she proposes that psychic pain is made up of three essential elements: the first is the overflowing of great quantities that cannot be contained; the second is an intense and immediate defense to protect the psychic apparatus from destruction; and the third is the >return of the foreclosed.< At the end of the paper, the author makes her final, subjective considerations.
Review Friedman, L. J.: The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet: The Art of Being Erich Fromm
(2013)
Freud's attitude toward philosophers and philosophy in published works was consistently hostile. This paper aims to show that Freud's persistently hostile attitude toward philosophers and philosophy was the result of ambivalence. On the one hand, it is explicable by his reaction to the resistance on the part of philosophers toward his innovative notion of “unconscious” and by his embrace of Comtean progressivism. On the other hand, it is explicable by his proclivities toward speculative thought, without the net of empirical data, and by his often unacknowledged borrowings from philosophers, old and new.
Prefacio
(2013)
Como interpretar os sonhos
(2013)
Since the concept of imaginative elaboration of body functioning, which is essential to Winnicott's idea of psyche-soma, has rarely been investigated up to now, this article sets out to do this and tries to pursue the meaning and articulation of that concept in the corpus of Winnicott's theory. In this way, it contributes to bringing the body to the core of psychoanalytical theory.
This article probes psychoanalytic theory regarding the repercussions of traumatic experiences in memory function. Both memory and trauma are fundamental to psychoanalysis and lead to the psyche's constitution as well as to its limits. The relationship between trauma and memory, based mainly on an aspect beyond the pleasure principle, points toward a function at the limits of the psychic, something between the body and the psyche, between perception and representation – all of which is responsible for psychic differentiation. Trauma has been associated with death drive dynamics and automatic anxiety, which constantly require a prior link to the establishment of the pleasure principle. When there is no possibility of linking and transcribing an event, its effects are negative, that is, it causes narcissistic damage. Ferenczi considers the object's role to be the determinant as far as an event's traumatic fate is concerned. When the object cannot accommodate the subject's needs or assign some meaning to the traumatic experience, introjection and psychic inscription are interrupted. We suggest that the lack of intersubjective recognition occasions the nonrepresentation and the meaninglessness that emerge as corporeal acts during psychoanalytic treatment.
(Foreword, Arabic)
(2013)
Particularmente devido às inovações técnicas, estamos testemunhando uma realidade sem limites crescente que se reflete cada vez mais em um esforço interno para nos livrarmos das limitações e fronteiras de nossa própria personalidade, reconstruindo-a novamente. Essa busca des-limitação, dissolução e indefinição dos imites é vista como um traço de caráter central do caráter social Ego-orientado. Tal fabricação de uma personalidade ilimitada sem dúvida resulta em um enfraquecimento de tais habilidades psíquicas como experimentar a si mesmo como uma entidade consistente e ambígua, estar emocionalmente ligado a si mesmo e aos outros, sentir seus próprios esforços, afetos e emoções, e ser guiado por alguém normas e valores internalizados. Por fim, discute-se o impacto dessa formação de caráter no que diz respeito às questões clínicas e terapêuticas.
Erich Fromm analyzed how man is divided in his sense of true self. This division within forces him to cling to abstract and concrete entities outside of himself and Fromm calls this >transference< which he, after all, borrowed from Freud. This transferring of man’s individuality to outside forces brings temporary relief to his experience of powerlessness and loneliness. The transference makes man acquire a masochistic character wherein he submits himself to outside irrational forces that perpetually dehumanize him. This is the reason why his ethics is a struggle to bring back the power of man within, nursing his potentialities to change himself and transform his world. Ethics, for Fromm, is a form of normativity which leads man into freedom to fully actualize his own sense of self.
Converging Self - Other Awareness: Erich Fromm and Paulo Freire on Transcending the Fear of Freedom
(2013)
Different theoretical perspectives have been developed within the psychology framework for the analysis of the authoritarian phenomenon. They constituted some of the background lines of what would afterwards be considered as the field of Political psychology. The first approach takes place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, along with group psychology, where authoritarianism is studied as an emergent behavior of crowds. Subsequently, developments in authoritarian personality suggest a change in the analysis axes by studying the phenomenon in an intra-individual way. A third perspective arises with the cognitive approach, represented by the concept of dogmatism, which emphasized the study of beliefs and the way in which individuals defend them. Parallel to this approach, advances in the field of Experimental Psychology on obedience, account for the situation in the authoritarian phenomenon. Later on, the study of authoritarian personality is taken up once more with the concept of right-wing authoritarianism, which is defined as the individual differences in the covariation of three attitudinal clusters (authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism). Finally, the most recent perspective for the study of the phenomenon suggests rethinking rightwing authoritarianism as an intergroup phenomenon, since its three attitudinal clusters account for a group phenomenon, plus a personality trait. The main objective of this paper is to critically review each of the six perspectives which have approached the study of authoritarianism as psycho-political phenomena, showing its peculiarities as well as its differences so as to finally consider which of those are still acceptable alternatives for the interpretation of this phenomenon.
Laudatio auf Georg Schramm
(2013)
Einführung in die Tagung
(2013)
Begrüßung
(2013)
Is psychoanalysis scientific? Which Oedipus is the >correct< Oedipus? Questions like these have divided psychoanalysis and fueled debates about it since its inception. In this paper, I explore these issues by outlining and adopting an >intertextual< perspective, not to answer such questions but to establish a metatheoretical position that might enable us to step outside of them to consider the broader relationship between theory, myth, literature, and the clinical session. I discuss how concepts such as narcissism and the Oedipal arrangement signify a deeper need for affiliation beyond the content of the myth itself but from within the psychoanalytic field; that they provide a flexible resource but also accrete a historical residue presenting as inertia against a unified psychoanalytic approach. In doing so, the term theory drift is developed to argue that psychoanalytic theory might in part develop through idiosyncratic >etymological< processes that reflect an obligation to retain concepts such as Oedipus and a reluctance to break with existing forms and practices. Finally, I discuss emergence and how it signifies the imponderability of the literary and clinical material with which psychoanalysis works, and look to actor network theory to conceptualize the fluid, intertextual networks within which we exist.
Igor A. Caruso (1914–1981), one of the founders of the IFPS and the early Vienna Circle of Depth Psychology, began to discuss questions of the interplay between biological, social, and evolutional realities and intrapsychic development in the early 1950s. Caruso understood that Man's specific human ability to transcend his overdetermined biological constitution into a development of conciousness, care, and self-awareness is basic for his need for and lifelong activity related to intersubjective relationships. Sexual and survival drive as a biological basis contain their own transformation as cultural potency within the subject–object relationship. Each act of relationship – to things and living objects – creates a new reality that is a meaningful symbol for both parts of the relationship in their single reality. This new – third – reality gains full effectiveness for both actors as “symbolic realism” and initiates the ongoing development. On this understanding, psychic development is a process of changing interactive creation and effectiveness, following the biological drive dynamic as well as its inherent future transformations by attachment. Symbolisation is therefore the main intrapsychic and intersubjective activity of the development of object- and self-awareness. Caruso emphasises the meaning of symbol and symbolisation as an act of relationship to and within the world, and understood psychoanalytic theories as a changing symbolisation of relationship.
On psychic reality and neutrality: Empathy and the work of construction in countertransference
(2013)
The clinical challenges faced in encountering patients who do not fit the standard treatment of Oedipus conflicts clearly show the limitations of the interpretative method, thus making indispensable the study of clinical concepts and techniques as a way to broaden the psychoanalytic horizons. In order to analyse the different psychopathological problems resistant to traditional clinical approaches, it is necessary to reorganise the technique on the basis of a better understanding of the ways in which subjectivity is rooted in early psychic constitution. In this way, empathy becomes important as a clinical tool. The use of empathy must be understood as a decisive factor in handling clinical cases and situations in which the treatment encounters obstacles that restrict the power of the analyst's verbal interventions.In this case, can we say that the use of empathy interferes directly with and changes the position of the concept of psychic reality? Moreover, as we use empathy, can we also say that the concept of neutrality is transformed, without being abandoned? The intention of this paper is to discuss these questions using clinical material taken from the analysis of borderline clinical cases and situations.
Zur Einführung
(2013)
Homecoming
(2013)
Philosophical and literary perspectives are combined with psychoanalytic ones in an attempt to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the theme of homecoming. The concepts of home and homecoming are presented as symbolic representations of fundamental psychical functions, and their vicissitudes as subjective manifestations of basic psychic organizations. The hypothesis is put forward that the ability, or lack thereof, to work through the process of mourning of a lost object colors the evolution and outcome of any reckoning with such a notion and what it stands for. Literary sources are used to supplement and explicate psychoanalytic understandings regarding how the concept of homecoming is being made use of, within unconscious dynamics observed in a number of analytic cases.
This paper explores psychosocially young unemployed men’s resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine’. The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which their resistance is mediated by father–son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for un-derstanding youth male unemployment are considered.
This paper addresses the notion of irrationality and madness, as they are understood within the psychoanalytic framework. By highlighting their similarities and differences, as well as by emphasizing the crucial defensive position that manifest psychosis holds in the midst of all this, an attempt is being made to delineate the links between the conjectured earliest interaction that the infant has with its environment and the burgeoning conscious rational mind. Winnicott's conceptualizations around fear of breakdown, disintegration, the environment-mother, and therapeutic regression are utilized to form a bridge between the theoretical understanding of madness and the clinical applications of this understanding, as illustrated by a clinical vignette.
The theory of social character developed by Erich Fromm asserts that the significance of experience is intimately linked to the material conditions under which persons, located in a specific economic system, live. The shared character traits thus correspond to the social role that these persons play. In the case of women, existing literature does not focus on their function as reproducers of the work force within the family, although this is a generalized function and additional to out-of-home work. This function has a transcendent importance to the development and emotional health of children, as has been established in longitudinal research of attachment theory.
This study explores Mexican mothers’ shared character traits, a systematized appraisal of their attitudes towards their lives and their children, their states of mind, and the quality of care they provide as well as their relationship to attachment patterns of their infants; some come from urban Middle, Middle-upper and Upper-class families and others from Poor in-digenous peasant families.
The fundamental focus is on the woman’s participation inside the family, although it does not exclude the possibility that some of these mothers handle not only the care giving and housework but also work outside of the home (the "double shift”). It concludes that the daily material conditions of existence are closely related to shared character traits and that these are in turn related to patterns of attachment in their infants, their sensitivity in the treatment of their babies, and the results of their Adult Attachment Interviews. Women have been the sup-port and pillar of subsistence for urban populations as well as the most poor and disadvan-taged communities. This role played by women is as widespread as undocumented in litera-ture.
Neurosciences have experienced tremendous development in the last decades. Research on genetics, structural and functional neuroimaging advance at a frantic pace. At the same time, psychoanalysis as a whole has been in decline, reflected in a reduced influence on culture, academia and mental health. However, there are some optimistic signals pointing to a slow but steady recovery. Three factors among others have contributed to this changing situation: interest in personality disorders, attachment theory and links to neuroscience. The approach to neuroscience has been especially contested among us, and some colleagues distrust these advances and take refuge in more familiar approaches to clinical work and research. There are also colleagues who maintain a naive view of neuroscience, expecting confirmations it can never provide. Some interesting ideas in psychoanalysis today come from projects involving neuroscience – or at least taking advantage of a research methodology more usually applied to natural sciences, and overcoming the methodological problems often found in traditional psychoanalytical papers. This rediscovery of nature and science in psychoanalysis should be considered not as a deviation from our core field, but rather as a return to the attitude of discovery and risk-taking our discipline once showed, and lost.
This thesis attempts to advance the underappreciated thought of Erich Fromm as both a crucial contribution to twentieth century intellectual history and a potentially pivotal point from which to transcend current theoretical impasses. In particular, I argue that Fromm's radical humanism can participate in the rejuvenation of contemporary social theory, which is still largely constrained by the dual reductionism of positivism and poststructuralism, and that a return to it will encourage renewed theorising of, and empirical engagement with, the connections that obtain between the >psychological< and the >social<, the >essential< and the >constructed<, and the >is< and the >ought<. I try to show that Fromm's qualified essentialism and ethical normativism are sensible, viable, and desirable, and that they, coupled with his analytic social psychology, which is based on his underlying humanism and elaborated through a unique fusion of Marx and Freud, provide the basis for the development of practical strategies to realise humanism in the world. Perhaps above all, I try to show that there is a deceptive complexity and sophistication to Fromm's ideas, which are all too often taken as simple and naive.
Erich Fromm was not only one of the founders of IFPS in the 1960s, but also one of the forerunners of the intersubjective tradition in psychoanalysis. Trained at the Berlin Institute, he started in the 1930s, after emigrating to the USA, to reformulate psychoanalytic theory by focusing on man’s need to be related to reality, to others, and to him- or herself. Similarly to Sullivan, Fromm looked at man primarily as a social being. But in contrast to Sullivan, Fromm stressed much more man’s being molded by societal requirements and by an intersubjectivity that is determined by strivings originating in the structure of his social character. Because of Fromm’s ‘‘societal’’ orientation, his approach to psychoanalysis is still of relevance to understanding how the intersubjective and intrapsychic are interwoven in each individual. Beyond that, his approach enables insights into what is going on psychically in society and how these changes can influence the individual’s welfare or suffering.
Particularly due to technical innovations, we are witnessing an unbounding of reality that increasingly is reflected in an inner striving to get rid of the limitations and boundaries of our own personality by reconstructing it anew. This pursuit of de-limitation, dissolution and blurring of boundaries is seen as a central character trait of the Ego-oriented social character. Such a fabrication of a limitless per-sonality doubtless results in a weakening of such psychic abilities as experiencing one’s self as a consistent and ambiguous entity, being emotionally attached to oneself and to others, feeling one’s own strivings, affects and emotions, and being guided by one’s internalized norms and values. Lastly, the impact of this character formation is discussed in regard to clinical and therapeutic issues.
(Foreword, Arabic)
(2013)