Selbstliebe
(2003)
Assuming that psychic reality and social phenomena are two sides of the same social totality, this article attempts to discuss the building up of the concept of superego in the Freudian text emphasizing its social roots and the function it performs as the representative of the symbolic law. Critical turning points in the development of the concept are presented and possible theoretical consequences of Freud's argument in >Civilization and its Discontents< are questioned when considered against the background of our present society determined by globalization and consumption. The author concludes by suggesting that the contemporary superego may represent an erractic reaction against the conditions prevalent in the social realm. Thus it appears to
Auf die eigene Kraft bauen
(2003)
Winnicott et la créativité
(2003)
Current Review [本期导读]
(2003)
张一兵先生撰写的《人是马克思哲学中的核心概念 ?》一文 ,通过对弗洛姆的《马克思关于人的概念》一书的解读 ,指出了弗洛姆在重新阐发马克思早期思想时存在的对马克思的曲解和误读。他指出 :弗洛姆颠倒了马克思关于人的自然属性和社会属性关系的历史定位 ,从而将历史唯物主义重新诠释为人本主义。作者对这种乖离了马克思主义整体理论取向的重新诠释进行了批评。人们解读和诠释经典时 ,常常会带着自己的问题在经典中寻找理论武器。因此 ,对同一研究对象的不同解读后面 ,也许就隐藏着解读者遭遇的时代问题或个体状况。对解读者的解读 ,或许也是一个有趣的题目。赵林先生对中西文化的各种源流传统进行了考察 ,指出了不同的文化源
Human Needs [人的需要]
(2003)
弗洛姆认为,为了摆脱或者克服种种>尴尬<的境遇,人类产生了与动物不同的社会性的五大心理需要。关联的需要人类为了克服个体的孤独,需要与他人联系起来,然而通过屈从或统治某人(或物)的方式是无法保持与世界的正常联系的,只有积极的爱才能体现>人同他人、自然和自身的一种积极创新的相关性<。超越的需要人类不满足于生物状态的被动性和生存的偶然性,产生了超越的需要,即主动地去创造和爱。寻根的需要人类的成长意味着与大自然的脱离,失去>根基<的恐惧使人类产生了?寻根的需要,即人需要得到大自然的庇护。同一感的需要人是有自我意识的动物,需要回答>我是谁<这个问题,以保持自我意识的统一。而人在社会生活中又需要得到他人的
The author underscores the importance of Slochower's and Grand's papers on the misdemeanors and crimes committed by psychoanalysts during their clinical work. Both authors are described as being courageous in exploring the realm of analysts' secrets, small misdemeanors, and crimes as a valuable source of collecting and processing countertransference material. Instead of looking at every self-involved activity as a theft from the patient, the author suggests that an analyst may have to retreat to self-enclosed activities in order to be fully present for the patient. At the same time, the kind of activity in which an analyst is engaged while listening to a patient may encapsulate and foreshadow crucial aspects of the transference–countertransference dynamic.
The goals of contemporary psychoanalysis have been largely recast, deemphasizing symptom relief and character change and focusing on more fundamental yet elusive issues, like the quality of being itself. The interest shared by contemporary relational, progressive Freudian, and contemporary Kleinian authors in the concept of enactment holds promise for generating new models of therapeutic action to this end. Freud's description of the part played by day residue in the creation of dreams provides a basis for exploring formulations of energy and energy sharing between patient and analyst. This process, occurring by way of enactment, can facilitate the patient's breaking out of chronically crippling dynamics. A detailed clinical illustration emphasizes the analytic discipline that is essential to working with enactment as a largely nonverbal, mutually constructed clinical experience. The importance of the analyst's understanding the enactment is crucial the advantage of discussing the enactment with the patient is, in certain instances, open to question.
Reply to Discussants.
(2003)
In this paper the author discusses the multiple ways in which enactments emerge in the course of an analysis. She presents several clinical examples in which enactments were used to further the analytic process as well as an example in which the work of the analysis was temporarily stalled following an enactment.
Self-Disclosure of Serious Illness: The Impact of Boundary Disruptions for Patient and Analyst.
(2003)
Who Is the Psychoanalyst?
(2003)
Much psychoanalytic vocabulary is embedded in discourses, or languagegames, that involve philosophical assumptions that most post-Freudian, relational, and intersubjective systems analysts no longer accept. Terms like transference, projective identification, and representation, however carefully redefined for contemporary purposes, cannot escape their connotative history and loading. It is suggested that psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners remain open to questioning and being questioned about our use of words, their impact on our attitudes toward our patients, and about our responsibility for disavowed assumptions about human nature and reality.
The desire for self-creation
(2003)
Although Gerhardt's commentary points to substantial points of agreement between us – the claim that human being is embodied being, the critique of rationalisms, and the resistance to relativisms – we also have important differences. The chief of these, from my point of view, concern (1) the functions of theoretical language, (2) the level of commitment psychoanalysts owe to traditional language for the sake of community and continuity, and (3) the issue of reification. My. Reply suggests that Gerhardt has confused the functions of expressive and theoretical language that, for the sake of a >gossipy connection,< she seems to deprive the psychoanalytic community of the self-reflective criticism of its own shared assumptions and that there is a difference between metaphor and the misplaced concreteness that is sometimes called reification.
This article examines the clinical and theoretical contributions of Stephen A. Mitchell. Relating his work to aspects of his character, it demonstrates a unifying theme in his life and work. Mitchell employed his methodological strategy both in navigating clinical stalemates and in his momentous theoretical breakthroughs. In working out theoretical entanglements, Mitchell first laid out before his readers two contrasting approaches to a problem and then showed how, by examining the problem from a different level of abstraction, one can find a third alternative reconciling the tension between the first two. Similarly, when dealing with therapeutic impasses, Mitchell learned to tolerate, sustain, and identify the entrapped states in which he found himself until he could free his imagination and gradually discover some third avenue along which to proceed. These methodological approaches were central to Mitchell's development of relational psychoanalysis.
Book Review. Rochelle G.K. Kainer, >The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration.
(2003)
The Schizophrenic Person and the Benefits of the Psychotherapies – Seeking a PORT in the Storm
(2003)
Foucault challenged the unified, the foundational, and the codified system of knowledge because he believed that the epistemological privilege attached to >scientific< theory lead to a dominating discourse. This occurs, Foucault believed, not only through social institutions, but also through the language, rituals, and practices of ordinary communicative experiences, which are vehicles for the subtle domination of knowledge and all knowledge serves power and the dominant hierarchy. Engaging with Foucault, I challenge some traditional psychoanalytic views and indicate how the psychoanalytic discourse contributed to the shaping of female sexuality. Using a >genealogical< approach such as Foucault considered, I trace some of the historical factors as well as the Zeitgeist for women that shaped early psychoanalytic views. I offer, as well, challenges to Foucault's position because I maintain the relevance of truth claims for the advancement of a psychoanalytic theory of mind and behavior. Such claims, however, need to be held lightly, subject, as they inevitably are, to revision through the acquisition of new knowledge. I present the attachment system as a contrast, as well as an addition to some traditional theorizing, thereby expanding our notions of early development and its interdependent base. I especially challenge the concept of early-stage symbiosis and its role in limiting and constraining women's lives. In this article I focus primarily on the power relations that have shaped female sexuality and have influenced our knowledge and understanding of female development. I challenge some normative views. Such a challenge to normativity is consistent with Foucault's entire intellectual journey, as his biographer comments (Eribon, 1991). My vision includes a conviction about the importance of theory construction and its development, and it proceeds from my focus on research data about the organization of mind and the nature of early bonding. I structure my presentation of female sexuality around the inclusion of such knowledge. I concede that as I upend an old >truth< about the developmental line of female sexuality, I am establishing a new one that will need future interrogation. My hope is that the new narrative will offer another perspective to our view of female sexuality.
The Sculpture and the Dust.
(2003)
Psychoanalytic Peregrination VI: >The Effect on Countertransference of the Collapse of Civilization<
(2003)
This paper discusses clinical cases presented by Comins and Eliot within a paradigm of psychoanalytic supervisory work based on relational theory. Here, in making the medium of supervision more symmetrical with the message of contemporary psychoanalytic ideas about structure of mind health, pathology, and treatment, the relationship between the supervisor and supervisee is considered to contain crucial supervisory data to be delineated and discussed by both members of the dyad. The supervisory relationship is described using three dimensions: power and authority, the data held to be relevant for supervisory conversations, and the mode of the supervisor's participation in the supervisory process.
It is important for every treatment that we analysts feel some room for our own subjectivity and some recognition of this from our patients. But we may feel that our analytic ideals – part of what may be called our >preexisting analytic third<: our analytic inheritance – require that we expunge our subjectivity from view. A submissive attitude toward the preexisting third may result in our committing misdemeanors in an attempt to salvage some feeling of psychic existence in a treatment where we feel negated. We can also think of a different kind of analytic third – an >emergent third< – that is mutually created by the analytic couple. This kind of third can be a platform from which to develop a necessary active, independent, and critical stance toward that which we inherit. The emergent third can find expression through the play structures that may come to shape the analytic relationship. Misdemeanors, therefore, may reflect analysts' inevitably taking on certain roles in the unconscious, restitutive, and often sadomasochistic, scenarios that patients may play out in their analyses. The possible therapeutic value of playing out these scenarios – a possibility suggested by Grand's case material – tends to undermine a clear distinction between freely surrendering to a creative analytic process, and submitting in a self-negating, though potentially helpful, way.
Current understanding of the process of therapy and development focuses on the interactions between the partners. The interaction is a negotiation of differences and of change. The equilibrium of the relationship is inevitably subject to frequent destabilizations, by virtue of normal developmental processes, life events such as losses, and the divergence of aims as each process unfolds. The destabilizations are pivotal to the creation of new states. If a newly emerging state is to be advantageous for the development of the infant or the health of the patient, the associated toxic affects have to be tolerated and dealt with openly. If the analyst defensively hides, opportunities for change will be lost and the old patterns will persist. The therapist and patient, like the parent and child, are engaged together in this mutually altering process.
All understanding is context dependent, and one of the most significant contexts for clinical purposes is the self-state. How we understand the other, and ourselves, depends on the state(s) we occupy. Dissociations between an analyst's self-states can, therefore, limit or impede understanding of the analysand by depriving the analyst of a fitting context within which to grasp what the analysand says and does. Clinical understanding may require the breach of such dissociations. I lay out some of the implications of thinking about transference and countertransference along these lines, with detailed examples illustrating the consequences of the analyst's dissociations and their eventual resolutions. Among the advantages of this way of thinking is that it amounts to a psychoanalytic account of the hermeneutic circle.
The author examines several types of therapeutic action intrinsic to Davies's clinical work. Among these actions was Davies's eventual and careful willingness to ask her patient to hold affective states that the patient had previously been unable to hold to discover a way to speak to her patient about her own struggles with the patient while risking, and actually knowing, that, inevitably, some of the patient's discovery of what the analyst feels will resonate with painful past experience to create another countertransference space in which Davies found a way to become a different kind of bad or disappointing object to the patient than the patient's earlier disappointment with parental figures, though one that proved much more helpful and bearable than her previous experience and eventually, though implicitly, to accept the aggressive and harsh ways in which the patient was already experiencing newness in the context of repetitive disappointment. In each of these types of action, the opportunity for mourning figures prominently.
Using a case example, the author explores the complex and shifting boundary between aspects of oedipal regression and postoedipal phenomena. Particularly, during termination phases, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish among the hostility, frustration, and anger related to oedipal longings and scorn that is connected to realistic appraisals of the limits of erotic longings in the analytic situation. Scorn sometimes involves a kind of righteous indignation that results from the patient's awareness that analytic immersion in erotic longings toward unavailable others has aspects of erotic masochism. To some extent, the analytic situation itself contains aspects of erotic masochism that are important to try to reorganize during ending phases of analysis. The author argues that distinctions between oedipal and postoedipal are ever-shifting and difficult to make because the Oedipus complex is a lifelong process that is never resolved. Instead, we are always seeking new adaptations and new ways to organize our relationships against the background of a fluid boundary between oedipal and postoedipal phenomena.
This case analysis describes a young woman's jouney to integrate the experiences of having an unresponsive and nonnurturant mother and an invasive, seductive, and chronically anxious father, who functioned as the loving and responsive parent. From the outset of the analysis, mother's difficulties in attachment and empathy with her daughter's needs or fears, and father's overstimulating and intrusive relationship to his daughter, were present in the patient's dreams and in the transference. The early stage of treatment reported here describes the patient's efforts to find a self-regulatory balance between states of extreme overstimulation and excitement and of withdrawal and a fear of invasion.
On Focusing Self-Definition.
(2003)
The Erotic Leader
(2003)
Close attention to the process of a treatment is proposed as an ideal vehicle for examining the analyst–patient interaction and teaching analytic listening, understanding, and intervening. A balance needs to be maintained between too dogged attention to details, which can lead the supervisee to feel outclassed, criticized, shamed, and constricted, on one hand, and abandoned and deprived of support because of insufficient input, on the other. In discussing the two treatments presented, I approach supervision with a focus on the dialectic between repetition and transformation in the therapist–patient interaction, the distinction between leading-edge and trailing-edge interpretations, and the coconstruction of model scenes and imagery to broaden the analytic context. In supervising, I would amplify these topics by recommending relevant readings: some papers by Peter Fonagy, Dan Stern and the Process of Change Study Group of Boston, and some of my own work.
The title of this paper employs a pun (>not< and >knot<) to emphasize that a relational (k)not negates truly intersubjective dialogue by shutting down the spaces, between and within persons, for mentalization, reflective functioning, genuine affect, and negotiation. In treatment, relational (k)nots appear as repetitions that – unlike Russell's >crunch,< with its intensities of crisis – coerce states of noninvolvement between patient and analyst. Persistent relational notting produces a crisis of mutual detachment. After offering in this paper a developmental perspective on the etiology of relational (k)nots based on parental failure to mentalize the child's separate subjectivity, I offer an extended clinical vignette to illustrate notting and subsequent disengagement between patient and analyst, and I suggest potential analytic approaches to untying the (k)not.
In. Reply, I raise a metaphorical glass to celebrate kinship with Philip Ringstrom, a fellow laborer in the relational vineyard. Drawing from his commentary, I note examples of how a colleague's intersubjective understanding carries meaning forward. Ringstrom takes what I have said into his unique experience and relays it back to me in a new way. I feel both deeply understood and challenged. I restate what I believe Russell means when he refers to >the crunch< in therapy and my >take< on Ringstrom's misunderstanding of Russell then leads me to an exploration of ways in which Philip and I may differ as we conceive the treatment frame. Finally, by implication, I hope to have highlighted, through our dialogue, that relational analysts do not define themselves by particular >agreements< but, rather, that they share a common attitude and context in which we continue to labor and explore.