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In this response to commentaries by Bernstein and Frankel, I suggest that there has been a shift in the psychoanalytic Zeitgeist with regard to ethical transgressions. At the time my case transpired, analysts' authenticity was prohibited, and >misdemeanors< were met with overzealous judgment. Contemporary theory and practice has come to appreciate the analyst's subjectivity, and the mutual press of the >impossible profession.< But in doing so, it has begun to occupy another polarized position. Instead of imposing moralistic judgment, we are tending to overcontextualize the analyst's acts and displace the analyst's agency onto the patient. Another position is suggested here.
Discussing an intensive case study of female sexual dysfunction, this paper studies mutual deregulation and disintegration as it unfolds in the transference–countertransference dyad. I propose that ethical transgressions are potentiated in analytic dyads in which the analyst's hope for either solitude or mutuality is foreclosed. This hope can be foreclosed by the particulars of the therapeutic interaction as well as by the theoretical and clinical aspects of analytic training. The deregulation that both precipitates and follows such transgression can be healed (in the analyst, in the analysis) only by the restitution of the therapist's agency, the reduction of paranoid-schizoid guilt and shame, and the location (in the analyst) of depressive, >I-Thou< remorse.
The author refers to a roundtable discussion (Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10/1, 2000) of dreams to which a Jungian colleague was invited to contribute, along with non-Jungian analysts. The author outlines how in some aspects of Jung's theory the fulfillment of individuality is achieved throughout the relationship in other aspects, fulfilment seems to be achieved because it is prewired in the individual himself. The author points out that, although Jung himself subscribed to various theoretical concepts, some one-person and others two-person, Jung's clinical stance was almost always relational. If we accept the paradigmatic switch that relational authors refer to, some nonrelational aspects of Jung's theory of dreams are superseded.
In Donna Orange's interesting paper, psychoanalysis is put into dialogue with philosophy as a royal road for questioning certain essentialist habits of thought as Orange asks us to consider the continued viability of certain overly freighted theoretical descriptors given recent shifts in theoretical assumptions. Instead of being viewed as neutral, timeless, culturally disembodied descriptors, our psychoanalytic lexicon is itself sociohistorically grounded in a particular tradition or assumptive context. Thus, given recent shifts in the assumptions on which psychoanalysis is grounded, the continued use of terms from a previous world view or context, without explicit reflection, is, according to Orange, at the least, problematic. The present commentary seeks to raise questions about the reasonableness of Orange's claims – including the use of reason itself as a way into this problem-space. In short, it is argued that the semantic structure of many words in a natural language lexicon derives from the fact of our embodiment – such that the controversial terms are claimed to rest on a background of prereflective, bodily based experiences that exist as echoes saturating the use of such terms. To strip our theoretical discourse of the use of the terms in question would seriously jeopardize losing the layers of sedimented meanings based on unconscious associations that echo through their continued use.
This is the third in a series of papers comparing the work of three contemporary theorists, each of whom is associated with the intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis: Jessica Benjamin (Gerhardt, Sweetnam, and Borton, 2000), Christopher Bollas (Gerhardt and Sweetnam 2001), and Darlene Ehrenberg. This paper describes aspects of the work of Ehrenberg and attempts to show how her trailblazing ideas of the therapeutic relationship and its nuanced particularities bear on issues in intersubjectivity theory. Ehrenberg's distinctive twist lies in her painstaking exploration of the processes of mutual influence in the ongoing therapeutic interaction and their bearing on the analytic process. The manner in which Ehrenberg attempts to integrate both interpersonal and intrapsychic perspectives and uses the interpersonal as a way of locating the intrapsychic is another focus of this inquiry. Moreover, the sense conveyed through Ehrenberg's voice – a voice both sensuous and strident, tender and provocative – in her attempt to make living, breathing contact in the moment with patients otherwise deadened to their own desire is also examined as bearing on issues associated with the intersubjective turn. While our own authorial positioning is never quite declared, our object relational biases exert their influence throughout our reading of her work, not surprising for a paper on intersubjectivity.
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.
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.
On Focusing Self-Definition.
(2003)
Reply to Discussants.
(2003)
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.
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.
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.
The Sculpture and the Dust.
(2003)
Psychoanalytic Peregrination VI: >The Effect on Countertransference of the Collapse of Civilization<
(2003)
Self-organizing systems (Stechler and Kaplan, 1980) biased by dissociative experience provide a robust perspective for the modern understanding of the development of hysteria. Definition of self, framed as a function of self as agent, object, and locus (Schafer, 1968), illuminates the bias of depersonalization and the clinical presentation of persons subject to developmental influences (Main and Morgan, 1996) in early childhood, as well as to overwhelming trauma (Terr, 1991). Characteristics of self, such as coherence, continuity/consistency, congruence/incongruence, and cohesion are explored in this context. Affect is the primary organizing bias in the discernment of self and in the development of relatedness. Clinically observed isolation of subjectivity may result from the bias of intense affect, that is, shame, on self-organizing systems in a multiple self-state model.
This paper examines psychic trauma as experience so shockingly strange that it exceeds the threshold for cognitive processing and begins to flood the mind with unintegratable affect that threatens to disorganize the internal template on which one's experience of self-coherence, self-cohesiveness, and self-continuity depends. A detailed clinical vignette illustrates how the unprocessed >not-me< experience held by a dissociated self-state as an affective memory without an autobiographical memory of its traumatic origin >haunts< the self. It remains a ghostly horror even in an otherwise successful psychoanalysis unless a new perceptual reality is created between patient and analyst that alters the narrative structure maintaining the dissociation as though the past were still a present danger. The analyst's making optimal use of dissociative processes in an intersubjective and interpersonal context enables the patient more readily to self-regulate affect in those areas of implicit memory where trauma has left its mark the dissociated ghosts of >not-me< are thus persuaded, little-by-little, to cease their haunting and participate more and more actively and openly as self-reflective, self-expressive parts of >me.<
My. Reply addresses some of the questions raised by Gerhardt, Sweetnam, and Borton in their discussion of my work as representing >a radical shift in thinking about the process of change.< I also attempt to clarify areas of misunderstanding. Wherever possible, I focus on specific clinical moments to clarify my points.
I thank John Kerr for his long and detailed review of my Freud biography and note our major points of agreement and disagreement. Kerr and I both see the wisdom of placing Freud in the context of the major relationships of his life as opposed to viewing him as a self-created hero. We also note the value of using contemporary ideas and research, much of them based on the foundation that Freud erected, to loop back and understand him in new ways. I believe, more strongly than Kerr, that Freud's early traumatic losses, and the way he came to terms with them – or did not – in his self-analysis, had long-lasting effects on his character, relationships, and psychoanalytic theory and therapy. Several minor points of agreement and disagreement are also discussed.
Embodied Imagination.
(2003)
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.
I maintain that every therapist operates out of a >philosophy of treatment< that is not always conscious. Every interpretation made or not made is rooted in such a philosophy. I then consider my own approach in 14 points. In the second part, two cases are discussed. The case of Frank's perversion is understood as a defensive identification with two parents, themselves perverts, and particularly a mother who stimulated his incestuous wishes by jointly looking at pornography. In Laura's case, the father's assuming maternal functions encouraged a permanent fixation at the oral level. In both cases, I argue in favor of a more encompassing interpretation than those made by the original authors.
We consider the relevance of forms of intersubjectivity in infancy to the nonverbal and implicit dimension of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. The term forms of intersubjectivity, within the adult explicit and implicit modes and the infant presymbolic implicit mode, is offered to clarify the multiple meanings of intersubjectivity. The ideas of infant intersubjectivity of Meltzoff, Trevarthen, and Stern that have particular relevance for psychoanalysis are highlighted: the dialogic origin of mind, the role of correspondences, and the idea that symbolic forms of intersubjectivity are built on presymbolic forms. We build on their work to define a fourth position: that the full range of patterns of interactive regulation provides the broadest definition of the presymbolic origins of intersubjectivity, with correspondence being only one of many critical patterns. We additionally address the place of interactive regulation, problems with the concept of matching, the role of self-regulation, the role of difference, and the >balance model< of self- and interactive regulation. We take the position that all forms of interactive regulation are relevant to the possibility of perceiving and aligning oneself with the moment-by-moment process of the other. A broadened understanding of intersubjectivity in infancy sets the stage for a more fruitful exchange between infant researchers and psychoanalysts.
The Manic Society
(2003)
Whereas the first paper of this series compared the work of five theorists of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis, this paper compares three theorists of intersubjectivity in infant research, Andrew Meltzoff, Colwyn Trevarthen, and Daniel Stern. By evaluating the points at which the theorists concur and differ, we hope to clarify the meanings or >forms< of intersubjectivity in infancy. All three have addressed the question of how infants can sense the state of the other, and all have used the concept of cross-modal correspondences as a central aspect of the answer. Nevertheless each has a distinctly different theory of intersubjectivity in infancy.
Our goal in this series of four papers is a further refinement of a theory of interaction for psychoanalysis, with a specific focus on the concept of intersubjectivity. Psychoanalysis has addressed the concept of intersubjectivity primarily in the verbal/explicit mode. In contrast, infant research has addressed the concept of intersubjectivity in the nonverbal/implicit mode of action sequences, or procedural knowledge. We propose that an integration of explicit/linguistic with implicit/nonverbal theories of intersubjectivity is essential to a deeper understanding of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis today. To shed light on an implicit/nonverbal dimension of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis, we include concepts from adult psychoanalysis, infant research, developmental systems theories, and nonverbal communication, particularly the distinction between implicit processing out of awareness and explicit processing at the declarative/verbal level. We conclude with an adult psychoanalytic case illustrating the integration of implicit/nonverbal forms of intersubjectivity into adult treatment.
This paper explores sources of therapeutic action located in inchoate experience, in the often-preconscious resonance that is generated in that dimension of experience which we have come to regard as enacted in the transference/countertransference field. The living and working through of a wide range of problematic and reparative elements distilled in the analytic relationship are described as a crucial source of therapeutic action. A brief historical treatment of the place of enactment in different psychoanalytic traditions is followed by the explication of two different kinds of enactments: ordinary, quotidian enactments that form the daily ebb and flow or ordinary analytic process and (capital E) Enactments. The latter are highly condensed precipitates of unconscious psychic elements in patient and in analyst that mobilize our full, heightened attention and define, and take hold of, analytic activity for periods of time. Clinical vignettes by Theodore Jacobs and Margaret Black are discussed in explicating the latter distinction and considering its implications for technique.
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.
Review Bonvecchio, C. e Boris Luban Plozza: Il corragio di essere. L’esperienza di Erich Fromm
(2003)
Chapter 5 outlines the stance of sociologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. It discusses Fromm’s alternative, humanist version of religion and psychoanalysis, as well as the parallels he draws between psychoanalysis and Buddhism as a means of achieving spiritual enlightenment. [Taken from Publishers Website: http://www.oxfordclinicalpsych.com/]
Umetnost življenja Ericha Fromma: Erich Fromm, Umetnost življenja, prevedel Milan Štrukelj ...
(2003)
在当代西方思想家当中,埃里希•弗洛姆(Erich Fromm, 1900—1980)是以人本主义而著称的,被称为>人本主义社会哲学家<。弗洛姆人本主义理论的一个鲜明特色,就是他力图把弗洛伊德主义和马克思主义这两种截然不同的学说>结合<起来,并把精神分析学的心理分析和人道主义的社会批判揉和在一起,创立了一个完整的人本主义理论体系。弗洛姆正是用这种人本主义理论,去揭露现代资本主义社会的矛盾和危机,批判现代资本主义社会的弊病,即把人道主义作为解决现代资本主义社会问题的有效手段。弗洛姆的人本主义理论不仅在西方,而且在整个世界都有广泛而深刻的影响。近年来,我国学术界开始对弗洛姆的人本主义理论展开了研究,并取得了一些成果。但是,在对弗洛姆人本主义思想的研究方面,还存在着一些不足之处,这主要表现在对他的人本主义所涉及的主要问题,特别是它们之间的内在联系,还缺乏系统的研究。有鉴于此,本文在阅读弗洛姆的原著的基础上,着重考察和探讨弗洛姆人本主义理论的三个主要问题,即人性论、异化理论和>爱<的理论。本文认为,人性论是弗洛姆人本主义思想的基础和出发点;异化理论是他的人性论的进一步深化和展开,是他的人本主义思想的主要内容;而>爱<的理论则是他的人本主义思想的顶峰和归宿,也是他的人本主义伦理学的核心。本文分为三个部分:第一部分,着重考察弗洛姆的人性论。本文认为,弗洛姆探讨人的本性的角度是独特的,即从人的>生存两岐<的境遇出发去考察人的本性,把人的本质看作是存在于人的生存所固有的矛盾之中。接着,本文详细地考察和分析了弗洛姆关于人的>生存两岐<,关于人的需要的产生和种类,关于人的>社会性格<及其作用等观点;并对他的这些观点作了恰当的评价,既指出了其中所包含的合理因素,也说明了它与马克思主义的区别。第二部分,着重考察弗洛姆的异化理论。本文首先考察和说明了弗洛姆是如何>解释<和歪曲马克思的异化理论的。接着,针对学术界在弗洛姆的异化问题上的一些偏颇观点,本文指出,弗洛姆尽管对马克思的异化理论作了歪曲的解释,但与其他弗洛伊德式的马克思主义者相比,弗洛姆的观点具有更多值得借鉴的地方。这主要表现在,他从人性论出发,深刻地揭露和批判了资本主义社会的异化现象。同时,本文也指出了弗洛姆对资本主义社会中异化现象的分析和批判的根本缺陷。第三部分,主要考察和论述弗洛姆的>爱<的理论。针对学术界忽视弗洛姆>爱<的理论的倾向,本文认为,>爱<的理论是弗洛姆人本主义的重要内容和归宿。他把>爱<看成是消除和克服人的异化,医治资本主义社会病态的>灵丹妙药<。因此,要把握弗洛姆的人道主义伦理学,就必须研究他的>爱<的理论。基于这种认识,在这个基础上,本文分别详细考察和分析了弗洛姆关于爱的根源、爱的本质和要素,自爱和爱他、自爱和自私的关系等问题。与此同时,本文一方面肯定了弗洛姆>爱<的理论中所包含的合理的成分,分析了其中可以借鉴的价值;另一方面,又指出了这一理论的消极意义和抽象性。