What We Take for Granted
(1997)
Introduction
(1997)
Using the Rorschach to Define Differences in Schizophrenics and the Implications for Treatment
(1997)
Investigation of Self-Representational Fantasies and Its Impact on the Psychoanalytic Process
(1997)
Analysis Uptown
(1997)
This paper is an experimental effort to invite the reader into an interplay between two modes of comprehension: the one predominantly narrative and emotive, and the other predominantly rational and analytic. The interplay of these modes of writing may (or may not, depending on the reader) amplify the thesis of the paper: that Freud's clinical technique of evenly-suspended attention involves a tension between attentional modes – a paradoxical willing-not-to-will – and this willing unwilling (a kind of free will) undercuts both rational and emotive modes of comprehension, thereby permitting novel prehension of self and other.
Despite its centrality in the lives of many people, psychoanalysis, with its traditional emphasis on psychosexuality and rationalism, has generally undervalued the importance of love and romance. This essay explores this devaluation within psychoanalytic theorizing and the parallel widespread degradation of love in everyday life. Whereas common wisdom claims that familiarity extinguishes love, I argue that the illusory security that familiarity often masks is endangered by genuine love, with all its accompanying risks.
Identifying with the Other – A Conflictual, Vital Necessity: Commentary on Paper by Jay Frankel
(1997)
This article explores the possibilities for the relationship between various taboo heterosexual relationships and an underlying homosexual preference. The analytic literature has not explored the tendency for many suppressed or repressed homosexuals to marry in order to escape shame over their sexual feelings and to avoid the social rejection experienced by those who are openly gay. The hypothesis stated here is that persons who are unconsciously gay are more likely to incorporate an element of taboo in their heterosexual relationships. The taboo heterosexual relationship substitutes for the more verboten homosexual one and provides an element of >being different< that may provide greater sexual arousal than a conventional relationship.
Primitive anxiety and delusions of demonic influence in borderline and schizophrenic disturbance.
(1997)
The work of Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger implicates psychoanalysis as a political, clinical, and aesthetic project and draws theoretically from each of these domains. As part of her challenge to psychoanalysis, Lichtenberg-Ettinger questions the Lacanian and Freudian preoccupation with the phallus. She queries the degree to which the psychical amplification of the phallus remains blindly tied to the penis and a masculine incarnation. She supplements this phallogocentric positioning with the concept of a matrixial subjectivity grounded in the intrauterine coexistence of mother and child. The womb and its possibilities indicate another relationship between the I and the non-I based on forms of relating that do not revolve around the dichotomy of exclusion and merger. As part of her critique of phallogocentrism, the author repudiates the absoluteness of a phallic presence versus castrated absence and the binaries in conceptualization to which this configuration leads. The following commentary is deeply in sympathy with this project and appreciates the great reach of Lichtenberg-Ettinger project. Her project requires great care, however, as it tries to redefine formations of subjectivity through the Real of bodily difference. Further, it is not fully clear how matrixial subjectivity is situated with respect to certain questions raised by the phallus. More specifically, if the phallus represents a moment that structures one's relationship to speaking and to repression, a clearer articulation of the place of these moments in a matrixial subjectivity might create a more productive dialogue with the most innovative aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Descriptions of clinical work tend toward the linear thus omitting the shifting intricacies of the known and the unknown inherent in the work. This essay, both in its form and its content, attempts to capture more closely the often kaleidoscopic complexity of the lived experience of the analytic process. The paper describes the emergence of multilayered transference – countertransference contributions to a single moment in clinical time.
This paper presents a series of training vignettes which suggest that a subtext of defensiveness regarding exposure to our patients, fear of feelings, adherence to an unwritten set of rules, and a profound need to control our way of thinking and working pervades the way psychoanalysis is taught and practiced in many settings. The paper explores the way in which the basic culture of psychoanalysis, and the manner in which psychoanalysts are socialized, may make these kinds of episodes commonplace. The paper suggests that a paradigm shift that has been taking place in psychoanalytic clinical thinking has not yet affected the training process because of the danger that the new paradigm might undermine the safety, clarity, and ways of knowing that our traditional theories and clinical practices have provided.
Introduction
(1997)
This paper attempts to develop a phenomenology of the perpetrator's conviction of innocence in a condition of actual guilt. This phenomenology is developed through the investigation of dissociative states in a certain type of incestuous perpetrator: one who is herself a survivor of sexual abuse, physical abuse, or both. Clinical material suggests that certain types of schizoid perpetrators can genuinely experience the incestuous act as not really real not really sex, not really mine. This clinical phenomenon is examined from the perspective of two contemporary theoretical trends: the new view of the self as multiple (Bromberg, 1993 Mitchell, 1993), and the neo-Kleinian formulation of >adhesive< (Mitrani, 1994) or >autistic-contiguous< (Ogden, 1989, 1990) modes of pseudo-object relatedness. Incestuous acts are conceived as occurring within a prelinguistic modality, and are therefore not encoded in discursive, autobiographical memory. The coexistence of dissociated, multiple self states and modalities accounts for the contradictory levels of object relatedness, memory, and concern frequently encountered in perpetrators of incest.
Integrating kleinian theory and intersubjective infant research observing projective identification
(1997)
The practice of psychoanalysis, traditionally, has privileged verbal communication. In relational theory the therapeutic significance of unconscious, semantically unformulated, but nonverbally encoded communications has been recognized. While patients are understood to generate significant nonverbal material for use in the treatment process, similar nonverbal productions from analysts rarely have been acknowledged as useful for treatment. In this paper, I demonstrate a way to recognize and use the nonverbal productions of analysts as well as of analysands within the analytic process. A brief review is offered of contemporary authors who have conceptualized the importance of the nonverbal realm for psychoanalytic treatment. An approach is then described that builds on process conceptualizations derived from the infant research literature. The model, illustrated with two clinical examples, provides a way of conceptualizing >process contours< on a nonverbal level of exchange between analyst and analysand that becomes the medium for catalyzing the transition from presymbolic interactions to symbolic language. Working on this level, analyst and analysand coconstruct scenes from both the dreaded past and the hoped-for present/future, which, when reflected on in a joint process of narrative construction, provide a new context for accessing previously dissociated affective experience.
Introduction
(1997)
Transcending the self: An object-relations model of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.
(1997)
In the Yellow Room
(1997)
Betrayal.
(1997)
Work in Progress
(1997)
This essay puts forward for discussion a >subject relations< theory of psychoanalysis. It is argued that the term subject captures a basic aspect of the human situation, that we are both subject >of and subject >to< various phenomena. It is argued that psychoanalytic subjectivity implies being in several different positions or viewpoints in relation to others. The subject moves between positions within the subjective organization. The paper tackles such basic issues as the way such subjective organizations both arise and are sustained, how unity is maintained but also undermined. The essential role of social structure in the subjective organization is discussed. The role of objects in a subject relations theory is considered. In addition, various transference states are described that could reflect particular subjective organizations. Lastly, there is a brief consideration of the role of the analyst's subjectivity in the analytic relationship.
Historical legacies and contemporary innovation. Introduction to symposium on child analysis part I
(1997)
Using research on the purely social face-to-face exchange, we examine patterns of mother – infant interaction and their relevance for the presymbolic origins of self and object representations, focusing on the representation of inter-relatedness between self and object. Based on a dyadic systems view in which the system is defined by both self- and interactive-regulation processes, we argue that characteristic patterns of self and interactive regulation form early interaction structures, which provide an important basis for emerging self and object representations. What will be represented, presymbolically, is the dynamic interactive process itself, the interplay, as each partner influences the other from moment to moment. This is a dynamic, process view of >interactive< or >dyadic< representations. The argument that early interaction structures organize experience is based on a transformational model in which there are continuous transformations and restructurings, where development is in a constant state of active reorganization. To define the capacities on which a presymbolic representational capacity is based, we review the last decade's research on infant perception and memory, which has radically changed our concepts of representation. The interaction structures we describe illustrate the salience of arousal, affect, space, and time in the early organization of experience: (1) state transforming, the expectation that an arousal state can be transformed through the contribution of the partner (2) facial mirroring, the expectation of matching and being matched in the direction of affective change (3) disruption and repair, the expectation of degree of ease and rapidity of interactive repair following facial-visual mismatches (4) >chase and dodge,< the expectation of the misregulation and derailment of spatial-orientation patterns, without repair and (5) interpersonal timing, the expectation of degree of vocal rhythm matching.
Psychoanalysis may be seen as caught between two different trends of disenchanted modernity: rationalization, which leads to the framing of our work as a professional discipline subordinate to the dictates of instrumental rationality, and self-analysis, which frees us from the dictates of orthodoxy, inequality, and authority. But a further difficulty lies within the aspect of enlightenment, which has not only provided a greater role for our subjectivity but disguised relations of authority, conformity, and objectiflcation in our work. Psychoanalysis has objectified the other while idealizing its knowledge as objective, has paradoxically denied the very subjectivity that must serve as the source of the analyst's knowledge. However, the reaction against this condition, which may tend to produce counter-ideals of not-knowing and mutuality, must also be carefully deconstructed. Differences in the meaning given by different schools to the use of the analyst's subjectivity suggest that pluralism will make new knowledge demands on psychoanalysts. Analytic training should include the development of critical abilities that help to meet these demands within a context of education as a collaborative, democratic process. Knowledge itself can be used homeo-pathically as an antidote to the old ideal of the knowing authority.
Patients' Representations of Therapists, Parents, and Self in the Early Phase of Psychotherapy
(1997)
Interview Sue van Zyl
(1997)
The history of the stormy love affair between psychoanalysts and literature is explored, with an emphasis on their basic affinity and on the animosity created by analysts’ reductionistic tendencies. Past studies of the dynamics of Robert Frost's emotional world and poetry are reviewed in this context. Ogden's sensitive reading of Frost's poems is portrayed as an example of the potentially mutual egalitarian encounter allowed by newer trends in psychoanalytic theory.
The author describes the impact on her clinical practice of a 10-year struggle with recurrent breast cancer. Informed by tales of therapists who kept their disease secret and thus deprived patients of the experience of saying good-bye, she explores a process of clinical decision making involving self-disclosure and the clinical indications that patients were ready and wanted to learn about her illness. Nonverbal communications from patients, relevant history of disease in friends and relatives, and parallel experiences with others in their current lives were among the indications cited for self-disclosure about cancer. In clinical vignettes, the author explores her process of deciding who and when to tell, and the subsequent work of helping patients deal with the information and potential loss. She considers as well decisions about accepting new patients, countertransference challenges regarding her illness, and the authenticity that self-disclosure provides in allowing patients to determine for themselves whether or not to continue or terminate treatment.
Impasse Recollected in Tranquility: Love, Dissociation, and Discipline in the Analytic Process
(1997)
Groddeck is not a fully recognised part of the history of psychoanalysis. Several reasons induce us to rediscover his work. He is the analyst of man's compulsion to symbolise, even if in doing so he remains an expression of late Romanticism with some aspects of irrationalism. He opens a way of understanding the relationship between psyche and body through the original concept of the It. His psychotherapeutic practice offers themes of reflection to present-day psychoanalytic research. Many psychoanalysts refused Groddeck's unconventional and provocative activity and his declarations against science. Other psychoanalysts had friendly relations with him, particularly Ferenczi, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm. They learnt deeply from his example of creative and independent thought and love of truth.
La comunicación de¡ silencio
(1997)
The paper discusses what the author calls >The seduction by the father<. It would occur when, in the Oedipus complex, the father reverses his role: instead of being the one who castrates, he seduces. Seduction here is understood in the sense that he does not act as the one who imposes limits to the child. Consequently the child can not project his hostile impulses onto the father. – Based on clinical data, the Author says that, in the male child, the seduction by the father hampers the transformation of the two Oedipal attitudes towards the father into identifications. The consequences of this fact upon the construction of the >nostalgia of the father's protection< are discussed, so as the transformation of this father into the symbolic father.