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The ineffable articulated.
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Assisting the analysand in making the past a living present held within a bearable yet unpredictable future is what psychoanalysis is so much about. Events of the past can never be redone, or fully repossessed, but they must be reconstructed in the context of the transference–countertransference experience of the analytic relationship. In order to make the past a useful present and presence, we need metaphors to give it shape – metaphors that capture the memorial activity linking the past with the present and future in a meaningful manner. In this paper, I explore the ways in which the work of the American photographer Shimon Attie creates a memorial place in which the past is not simply remembered but instead is actively mourned. In The Writing on the Wall, Attie collects broken fragments from prewar German-Jewish life in Berlin, and, by projecting these found shards of former lives onto the buildings in the Berlin Scheunenviertel, which once housed these people, he creates a potential space in which a present can suddenly come alive by the superimposition of a past that was supposed to have been obliterated. In this transitional realm, the spectator is given a wide realm of to-and-fro movements between past and present that permits the creation of an object world that did not exist before. I suggest that Attie's intricate weavings of past, present, and future serve as instructive models for the psychoanalytic process in which the analyst can find himself in a similar position of opening up a playground where the past can be brought into the present and where the presentness of the past can come alive. The ability to move back and forth between the present and the past suggests a link to the Freudian concept of deferred action, later taken up by Lacan under the notion of après-coup, where the impression (Prägung) of an earlier event, having lain dormant for a long time, breaks through into the present through a retroactive action that then completely reshapes the present impression. I draw comparisons to psychoanalytic practice, in which the superimposition (the stacking on top of one another) of recollections, dreams, and associations pries open in the analysand's mind a psychic space in which memories of a seemingly insignificant past absorb a sudden sense of urgency when revisited through this retroactive process.
Examines the relationship between the humanistic psychological ethics of Erich Fromm & his commitment to socialist politics. The concept of >social character<, first formulated in >The Fear of Freedom< (1997, 1941), which provided the analytical framework for much of his subsequent work, is considered. Also discussed is his attempt to formulate a humanistic ethics grounded in a theory of human essence in >Man for Himself< (1997, 1947). Fromm's attempts to develop an ethical socialist politics at three levels – everyday life, democratic institutions, & the emerging >One World< – are introduced. It is argued that Fromm endorses a variety of strategies from old & new social movements that challenge the value structures of modern capitalist society. In conclusion, the claim is pressed that Fromm's social thought, developed on the foundations of his humanistic ethics, constitutes a significant contribution to emancipatory theory. Adapted from the source document.
Shifting Dialogues
(2000)
The article focuses on landscape impressions as a catalyst to start inner progress and creative innovation. The author uses the presumption that a work of art can act as an intermediary and testimony of specific states of mind. Two painters are presented, one contemporary and one from the turn of the last century. The difficulties in describing the origin of a painting and its coming into existence is considered and discussed. The object in view of the article is to point to the practicability of some aspects of psychoanalytical theories in the descriptions of the artistic creative process, of the relation viewer and work of art, of the studio dialogues between artist and viewer in front of the works. Objects relations theory, WR Bion's concepts of reverie, binocular viewing and negative capability, A Ehrenzweig's description of the different stages of the creative process, his positive accentuation of the role of the unconscious, the alternation between dedifferentiation and differentiation and need for the artist to go beyond the known, to be able to loose control of the work and let the painting 'live its life' is central. Art gives its own poetic imprints, not always accessible in words.
Oedipus as Normative? Freud's Complex, Hook's Query, Malinowski's Trobrianders, Stoller's Anomalies
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
The insufficiencies that Joan Copjec finds in the work of Judith Butler are the same kind Dyess and Dean want to alert us to in relational psychoanalysis. Two dangers of this nature are reification (that is, the relational position's becoming >the Book<) and a flirtation with superficiality (a potential outcome of believing that all experience can be understood in the terms of social relatedness). Theorizing >the impossibility of meaning< may be a first step in addressing these problems without having to limit the terms of the discussion to nature and nurture, or essence and social construction. But the idea of the Real is inextricably interrelated with, and mutually defined by, other parts of Lacan's theory. And so, if we simply import into relational psychoanalysis Lacan's conception of the Real, we are mixing apples and oranges and thereby risking conceptual confusion. We should instead use Lacan's idea as inspiration for the construction of a conception of >the impossibility of meaning< that can be used in theorizing the particular kind of problems relational psychoanalysis sets itself.
Reply to Commentary
(2000)
Psychoanalysts have likened psychoanalytic institutes to religious denominations and have viewed any possible similarities as stubborn but temporary liabilities that should eventually be overcome. Theoretical and empirical studies in the sociology of religious denominations suggest otherwise and offer a different way to think about institute structures. If a sociology for other kinds of groups applies to psychoanalytic ones, there are important implications for how we think to structure psychoanalytic education.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Instruments designed to measure Fromm's marketing character (SCOI; Saunders & Munro, 2000) & the vertical & horizontal dimensions of Individualism & Collectivism (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk & Gelfand, 1995) were administered to 167 Ss. The hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Vertical Individualism was supported. However, there was only partial support for the hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Indi-vidualism, as the SCOIscores had the same relationship with collectivism – which was unexpected.
Reply to Adam Phillips
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Images-Looking Back
(2000)
This article is written by an art historian, a person whose job it is to analyse and interpret images. In this case however, the article deals with three cases, where the interpreter confronts images with which she identifies in various ways. She conveys the experience of being strongly involved by the images and their represented worlds and also the feeling of experiencing the borderlines between reality, imaginary being and picture medium. The three cases are connected through the theme of >mirroring< and subjectivity.
Erich Fromm’s Courage
(2000)
Freud’s Power
(2000)
Erik H. Erikson as a Teacher
(2000)
Conclusions
(2000)
Political Theory and the Psychology of the Unconscious, London (Open Gate Press) 2000, 185 p.
(2000)
The Hands of Egon Schiele
(2000)
Through an exploration of Egon Schiele's life and enigmatic ?mannerisms?, which recall those of autistic children and schizophrenic patients, the author explores the impact his outstanding and disturbing paintings can have. The approach is biographical, revealing Schiele the artist as an already gifted though disturbed child. Some material refers to Schiele's way of expressing painful yet creative fantasies, in which different parts of his body (in particular his hands), projected into his paintings, form part of an intimate, creative, disturbed language. From childhood to his early death, Schiele used a coherent figurative language which was both realistic and oneiric; the author develops some ideas on art and psychoanalysis, particularly as to the creative process within a complex and disturbed personality. Working as he did between the psychotic and non-psychotic elements of his personality (Bion), Schiele is an appropriate artist for our time. His drama, his feelings of disintegration and ?dismemberment? are nourished by the creative, sane parts of his personality. The true psychotic artist is not entirely psychotic, for creation requires aesthetic taste and harmony.
Art-A Feasible Illusion
(2000)
Benjamin Wolstein.
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
Ceccoli (1999a) argues that, because of their capacity for maternity, women analysts are capable of certain interventions that men are not. Taking issue with such assertions, this commentary argues that although the gendered metaphors of psychoanalytic intervention have changed usefully since Freud's paternalistic imagery, in favor of the maternal language of Klein and Winnicott, these metaphors are regressive if their value as symbolism is undermined. Ceccoli's case study is revisited and reevaluated to posit an alternative view: that theory is sometimes employed to fill gaps that might be more productively tolerated in the service of the analysis. It is argued that Ceccoli's use of Kristevan theory to support an essentialist position that translocates the paternal phallus into the female analysts' >gendered, bodily specificity … on the basis of our capacity for maternity< (p. 695) is an example of such a use of theory.
Reply to Bromberg
(2000)
Among the many remarkable peculiarities of the electoral process in Ukraine during the eighteen-month electoral cycle (from the parliamentary elections in March 1998 to the presidential elections in October-November 1999), the features of most interest to political scientists are those that, if properly explained, will enable us, first, to outline the basic parameters of citizens' behavior under the political regime that has evolved during the last ten years and, second, to determine the value orientations and the potential of the principal social and political actors. Above all, I have in mind the sociopolitical and sociocultural components of the elections or, to use a term of Erich Fromm's, the >social character< [1] of what is called the mean statistical (average) Ukrainian.
Reflections on Flat Mountain
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
Jan Henriksson, Professor of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and member of the project-group of the issue >Psychoanalysis Meets Art and Architecture<, elaborates in this interview on different perspectives and ideas about architecture, which for him essentially is a contradictory and open concept with no a priori. Architecture belongs to the field of moral laws or ethics. The instrumental part deals with building and buildings. The working process includes research, penetration and interpretation of which the latter is the most interesting and powerful, not seldom connected with existential questions. The training of the students includes not only the instrumental part but still more important is the training of their critical thinking, to enable them to gain the insight that that which is the truth, looks like the truth no longer is the truth. To be given a lot of freedom during the training helps the students to find an inner compass, an inner bearing which will be decisive in their work. Conflicts are seen as vitalizing and the alternation between order and chaos as fertilizing for creative thinking and acting to take place. The need to express ourselves takes us all somewhere. For Jan Henriksson it is all about processes where different parts interrelate; that is the heart of the matter. The need for architects today to express themselves in words is increasing, to look behind things and to think and reflect about their own work and that of other architects.
Stairways of the Mind
(2000)
Psychotic developments in a sexually abused borderline patient. Commentary on paper by Paul Williams
(2000)
In this paper, I explore >the art of mourning< in the course of discussing two Borges prose poems, >Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote< (1941) and >Borges and I< (1957), both of which were written soon after Borges suffered enormous emotional losses. I suggest that successful mourning centrally involves a demand that we make on ourselves to create something – whether it be a memory, a dream, a story, a poem, a response to a poem – that begins to meet, to be equal to, the full complexity of our relationship to what has been lost and to the experience of loss itself. Paradoxically, in this process, we are enlivened by the experience of loss and death, even when what is given up or is taken from us is an aspect of ourselves.
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
An interpersonal psychoanalytic approach to testing adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
(2000)
Instruments designed to measure Fromm's marketing character (SCOI; Saunders & Munro, 2000) & the vertical & horizontal dimensions of Individualism & Collectivism (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk & Gelfand, 1995) were administered to 167 Ss. The hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Vertical Individualism was supported. However, there was only partial support for the hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Indi-vidualism, as the SCOIscores had the same relationship with collectivism – which was unexpected.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
The experience of self is partially a narrative of one's history without memory, there is no self. Central to personal histories are accounts of significant relationships and their successes and failures. Accounts of failed relationships tend to gravitate toward two narrative themes: selfpity and guilt. This essay explores some aspects of the nature of guilt and self-pity, the different forms in which they surface, and their relationship to each other.
Erich Fromms Einstellung gegenüber den abstrakten Wissenschaften wie der Ma-thematik erscheint uneinheitlich: einerseits hat er bekannt, abstraktes Denken falle ihm schwer, andererseits hat er Vertretern abstrakter naturwissenschaftlicher Theo-rien wie Einstein und Heisenberg eine revolutionäre Haltung attestiert. Tatsächlich lässt sich Fromms Kreativitätsbegriff auch für die Mathematik fruchtbar machen. Fromm fordert auf, die Dinge in ihrem >So-Sein< wahrzunehmen und darauf kritisch zu >antworten<, ein Verhalten, das die Bereitschaft zur Abstraktion mit einschließt. Der didaktisch bedeutsame >Siehe-Beweis< in der Mathematik ist damit ein Muster-fall dieses Frommschen Ansatzes. Zu Fromms ganzheitlichem Anspruch gehört seine von ihm auch gelebte Forderung an den Menschen, sich Konflikten zu stellen und so seinen Charakter zu entwickeln. Dies verweist auf einen speziellen Grund-zug mathematischen Denkens, nämlich das Bestreben in der Mathematik, sich über Normen hinwegzusetzen, wie es die Entdeckung der nichteuklidischen Geometrien im 19. Jahrhundert zeigt. Dieser prometheische Geist der Mathematik, der von Pädagogen oft übersehen wird, steht damit dem Frommschen Kreativitätsbegriff sehr nahe.
Instead of using a psychological grid when reading literature, Freud recommended that we let the actual writer instruct us. The same applies to artists. Here I will be asking two questions: can one make a formal comparison between the painter's visual approach, and the analyst's psychic approach which leads him to form a particular interpretation? Can one compare the spectator's feelings when a painting imposes itself on him, with the analyst's feelings when confronted with the silence of the analysand? Out of these two questions another, more general one arises: what can the psychoanalytical approach to artistic representation bring to the understanding of the analytical process?