Discussion of >A Socioeconomic Dimension of the Therapeutic Relationship< by Sonia Gojman de Millán
(1997)
This... book will introduce you to the basic historical, philosophical, gender, and cultural assumptions of the theory and practice of psychotherapy. You will see the connections and contradictions between competing ideas and ideals that have shaped the professional identities of most contemporary psychotherapists. In 'Talking Cures,' you will also find: coverage of Western and Eastern approaches to psychotherapy, including radical feminism, existentialism, and Zen; coverage of ancient and modern practices of psychotherapy, the impact of the Enlightenment on psychotherapy, the work of 18th- and 19th-century French psychiatrists, and current data from clinical psychology (and) case studies, stories, anecdotes, and personal reminiscences to bridge the gap between what is written about psychotherapy in academic psychology and what is true in real life. – FROMM is discussed shortly in Chapter II as a member och the Ego-Psychology: Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, and Erich FROMM. (from the cover)
La terapia
(1997)
Menschheitspolitik als Golabe Frage? Die Soziale Dreigliederung der Globalisierung – 12 Thesen
(1997)
Interminable Analysis?
(1997)
A bug-free universe.
(1997)
In this commentary, Jacobson's exploration of Bollas's notions of >true self and >idiom< is discussed. I underline Bollas's focus on unconscious processes in general and in the psychoanalytic relation in particular and – referring to Bion and Bollas – discuss the importance of the analyst's intuitive capacity in sensing these processes. Winnicott's and Bollas's formulations on the notion of true self/idiom are briefly reviewed and its unknowable quality is emphasized. While being in many respects appreciative of Jacobson's essay, I argue against his position of not considering idiom as something inherent and unique to each person, claiming that Jacobson's understanding of Bollas's notion sometimes is too concrete. I argue as well against Jacobson's view of Bollas as a >one-person theorist< and as holding a position leading to >a distancing of the social world.<
The paper begins with the claim that psychoanalysis faces a dilemma in locating itself in a contemporary world that devalues experiences of interiority, depth, and embeddedness in personal history. Psychoanalysis's coming to terms with this modern world – reflected in contemporary relational paradigms and emphases on interaction, authority, and epistemology – is essential yet tends to replace an outdated conformity with an updated one, in which what is offered to analysands may become limited and the soul of psychoanalysis lost. Bollas's work attempts to reinspire psychoanalysis. This paper explores his contributions and the tensions within them and develops several points about how psychoanalysis can maintain a worthwhile self – for itself and for its analysands – in the modern world. Among the issues discussed are the sense in which an endogenous motivational core associated with an emphasis on interiority may be compatible with a relational paradigm and how the notion of personal idiom is a rich and fruitful one, but that the cultural field deserves a more fundamental place than it is given by Bollas. The problem of authority and exploitation, within and outside the consulting room, is also taken up, and it is argued that psychoanalysis should be conceived as a moral discourse in which the analyst's self-subverting (but not diminished) authority is essential.
This paper distinguishes between the grammar of wishes in neurotic patients and the grammar of imperative needs in borderline patients. The treatment of a borderline psychotic boy 30 years ago was uninformed by subsequent developments in technique arising from the theory of projective identification as a communication rather than as an attack or a defense. Issues that need addressing in borderline patients, especially those who are children, include (a) developmental delay, (b) the distinction between defenses and overcomings in the paranoid position, (c) rectification fantasies of vengeance, and (d) rectification fantasies of justice and other moral imperatives.
The doctrine of defects in the self leads to a clinical focus on what is missing rather than on what is present in pathological organizatons of self-experience. Felt deficiencies in the sense of self may be understood not as manifestations of an irreducible internal defect within the person, but rather as the consequence of various organizing principles established in early transactions with caregivers. An illustration of this idea is provided by a brief description of the life and treatment of a young woman who felt that she had no self and that she did not exist.
Linguistic philosophy provides conceptual tools by which psychoanalysis can redefine its conditions of productive discourse. In particular, the idea of performative contradictions permits ready noting of obstructions to that discourse. The present paper means to develop an adequate vocabulary defining the conditions of what is essentially analytic and the positive events accompanying them. These conditions can be seen as systematic substitutions for such recommendations as anonymity and neutrality.
In this paper I comment on several aspects of the way language is used in psychoanalysis. Language is viewed not simply as a >package< for carrying ideas and feelings, but as a medium in which thoughts and feelings are created. In the analytic setting, analyst and analysand are viewed as engaged in an effort to use language in a way that is adequate to the task of creating/conveying a sense of what it feels like for the patient to be human, to the extent that he is capable at a given moment (with particular emphasis on describing the leading anxiety that the analysand is experiencing). The analyst strives to use language in a way that embodies the tension of forever struggling to generate meaning while at every step casting doubt on the meanings >arrived at< or >clarified.< Forms of lifelessness of analytic language are discussed with emphasis on those forms of linguistic deadness that derive from (1) the analyst's ideological attachment to a particular school of analytic thought and (2) the analyst's unconscious participation in an intersubjective construction jointly, but asymmetrically, generated by analyst and analysand (Ogden, 1994a, b, in press a, b). Finally, I discuss the idea of effects being created in language and suggest that this phenomenon constitutes a principal medium through which unconscious meaning is communicated in the analytic setting. Such unconscious effects in language are generated at least as much through the way the patient (or analyst) is speaking as through what the patient (or analyst) is saying. This paper does not represent an effort to apply analytic thinking to the field of literary studies. Instead, I hope to make a small contribution to an awareness of the life of words (and the life in words) that occurs in the analytic situation. Rather than attempting to look behind language, the effort here is to look into it.
Joseph Brodsky (1995a) has referred to poetry as >a great disciplinarian< (p. 100) to prose. I would add that poetry is a great disciplinarian to analytic listening. In this paper I look at the way language is used in the making of poetry in three Frost poems. My interest is not so much in what a poem is >about,< but rather in what a poem is. I discuss the ways effects are created in language and how these effects, taken together, create the unique experience the reader generates (with the poet) in listening to the poem. I leave it entirely to the reader to make what connection he or she will between the experience of listening to poetry and the experience of listening to the language created in an analytic relationship.
The pragmatical apprentice
(1997)
This paper develops the idea that the human experience of time is not a creation of an isolated mind, but emerges within the earliest intersubjective experiences. Following Winnicott's main theoretical assumptions about the role of the environment and the processes of ego integration, the paper focuses on the sense and the concept of time as stemming from within a self-with-other context and constituting an emergent property of self – other differentiations. These processes are viewed also from the perspective of the dialogical character of early mother-infant interactions as evidenced by recent infant developmental research. The dialogical structure of these interactions includes important aspects of synchrony and accommodation, as well as asynchrony and transformations, which play a basic role in the emergence of self-differentiation. Moreover, the temporal characteristics of mother – infant exchanges constitute a basic vehicle through which interpersonal meanings unfold. The evolution of the sense of time is seen as a continuous process of construction of meaning in an intersubjective framework. Four basic aspects/phases of this evolution are proposed. These underscore basic features of the experience of time and self-object differentiation, including timelessness or a time of togetherness, the containment of absence or time of separation, narrative time related to the configuration and refiguration of a self in time, and the renunciation of immortality and the >use< of time.
This paper uses concepts from infant research to describe the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Louis Sander's model of bidirectional mutual influence implies that agency is a property of all living things. Studying sleep – wake cycles, Sander concludes that these are mutually regulated the infant uses his state to guide his pole of the bidirectionality. It is in the >moment of meeting,< when the caregiving surround acknowledges the infant state in a way that >fits,< lies the beginnings of the infant's sense of agency. I suggest that one can make links between how a sense of agency develops in infancy and how this concept can be used in psychoanalytic treatment. Specifically, a bidirectional stance, a continuous attention to affect and state, and a systematic inquiry into how the patient is experiencing the analytic activity foster a sense of agency. Clinical examples illustrate the thesis.
Introduction
(1997)
Introduction
(1997)
The concept of projective identification continues to be viewed as alien, even dangerous, by self psychologists. Six aspects of self-psychology/intersubjectivity theory are explored in an attempt to understand the presumed incompatibility of self psychology and projective identification: 1) the empathic vantage point 2) the focus on subjective reality 3) the emphasis on the analyst's personal contribution 4) the focus on selfobject experience 5) the disruption – restoration process and 6) the defining of transference and countertransference as >organizing activity.< The self-psychological/intersubjective concepts that come closest to describing the phenomenon of projective identification – that is, empathic immersion, affect resonance, and reciprocal mutual influence – fail to capture at least three of its essential elements 1) the patient's persistent, unconscious intent to communicate certain unformulated aspects of self through the other 2) the analyst's sense of being >taken over< by the patient's experience and 3) the intensely visceral quality of the analyst's experience. It is argued that self psychology ignores this important form of patient communication to its own detriment and that the concept of projective identification needs to be reformulated in terms that are more experience near to self psychologists. It is suggested that there exists a normal, developmental need, a selfobject need, to communicate intolerable, unsymbolized affective experience through the other's experience – a need that remains more pervasive and intense in some of us than in others – and that the longed-for selfobject response is to have one's communication received, contained, and given back in such a way that one knows the other has >gotten< it from the inside out.
Eulogy for Rose Spiegel.
(1997)
Although the technique of countertransference-disclosure has received increasing attention, interest in the role of the analyst's inadvertent self-revelations has remained quite limited. Yet the analyst's inadvertent self-revelations are at the heart of the distinction between monadic and two-person views of the psychoanalytic situation. This paper extends the logical implications of a two-person perspective on the psychoanalytic situation. Because the analyst's inadvertent self-revelations are inevitable and continuous, they significantly shape the patient's experience of the relationship. The analytic process at times can be enhanced, therefore, by collaborative efforts to make explicit the inadvertent expressions of the analyst. Aspects of the analyst's individuality thereby become clarified, rather than obscured as in classical views. Dealing with the analyst's inadvertent self-revelations in an active, collaborative manner that is tempered by asymmetry elucidates the integration of interpersonal with intrapsychic aspects of transference and heightens the immediacy and directness of the analytic interaction. This approach also embraces the significance of the analyst's personal participation, authenticity, and interaction, which though crucial in two-person models, have been obscured by concerns with maintaining neutrality, anonymity, and abstinence, which epitomize the analyst's stance from the one-person perspective.
Illusion, faith, and knowledge. Commentary on Sorenson's >ongoing change in psychoanalytic theory<
(1997)
Introduction: A Systems View
(1997)
Reminiscences.
(1997)