During the first twenty years that Freud spent creating his theory, he assumed that most of the functions responsible for creating mental-thought structures were organized according to two different forms or principles of thought. He called these forms >primary process< and >secondary process<. The >secondary process< is identified with rational thinking and the ego, and it is easy to follow the changes that this concept underwent in the works of Freud that followed. The concept of >primary process<, on the other hand, disappeared from his later works with no explanation. This article traces the changes that the >primary process< underwent in Freud's thinking and examines the connection between his analytical technique and his research method. A close study of the changes that the >primary process< underwent reveals that Freud's developmental thought process included concepts whose directional changes may be termed >regressive<.
The existence of man is distinguished by its split state: man stands in the middle of life yet still has an awareness of his own death. He has to compensate whatever is missing in him naturally at the societal level, created as culture, and at the individual level through creativity. Rank investigated the human 'creative drive', the anthropological aspiration to express oneself in creative works, and to overcome the fear of death with its help. Freud admired poets and artists, whose achievements he could not psychoanalytically access, but he considered science superior to the harmless and na ve arts. There are two anthropological radicals: premature birth and the consciousness of death. Freud's massive fear of death made it difficult for him to acknowledge the problem of death appropriately. In Rank's concept, the development of human creativity contributes towards the fear of death being alleviated so that the knowledge of death can be integrated into life; creativity belongs to the fundamental opportunities of man that may enable him to find a way through neurosis. Failure is as much a part of life as is creativity: those who do not experience and accept life in its tragic dimension are denied creativity. Only a creative person who accepts his partial failure finds the strength to continue to be creative without his imperfect work leading to the ritual repetition of the same thing again and again, that is, getting stuck in recidivism.
This author posits that, perhaps because of its religious implications, psychoanalysis has historically avoided speaking of forgiveness, although playwrights have often depicted forgiveness as a psychological mechanism that can help resolve cycles of anger and revenge. The Laramie Project (Kaufman et al., 2001), a play about how a U.S. town deals with a murder and its aftermath, provides an example of the way in which forgiveness offers an exit from vengeance. The play points to both the positive and the negative roles that religious ideas play in human actions. At the same time, however, the play itself avoids some of the painful processes that enable human beings to locate forgiveness. This paper draws on psychoanalytic literature, social commentary, and plays by Aeschylus and Shakespeare to demonstrate how the mechanisms of forgiveness operate. In conclusion, it suggests that although enabling the psychological processes of forgiveness can be extremely difficult, ignoring these processes may be life-threatening.
In their commentaries, Sandage and Frommer each describe ways in which forgiveness may be intrinsic to the therapeutic process. But their papers also point to one of the great difficulties of promoting forgiveness as the goal in either theater or therapy, which is that the need to control the healing process can actually impede that process. This reply examines how that need may have undermined the writing of The Laramie Project, and it suggests that, in order to help audiences and clients find true forgiveness, playwrights and analysts may need to relinquish their own righteousness.
Psychoanalytic Bias Against the Elderly Patient: Hiding Our Fears Under Developmental Millstone's.
(2005)
The aim of this article was presentation the Fromm’s concept of person, person, who is involved to dichotomy of human subsistence. Person live, sometime it lived according to nature, there was part, however, in course of evolution, mental authorities have spread out at it. Person gaining consciousness, it has broken attachment of junction it with nature same. Fear has appeared and sense of alienation. Person has become free, but same very solitary. In purpose of killing existential solitude, person resorts to rate interpersonal. Correct, according to Fromm’s conception, rate is love, however the most often chosen rate is authoritarism, destruction and mechanical conformism. Dichotomies of person incline for choice among life or death, existence or property. Correct orientation, inherent restless being, is existence and life, other postures are secondary in accordance with they and if they are in balance, it lives according to nature person.
Fragmenten Fromm
(2005)
This paper suggests that the interplay between transference and countertransference is considered to be a valuable channel of communication. The author puts an emphasis on the containing function of the analyst. The patient strives for an experience of an object (analyst) that tolerates and copes with the patient's projections. There are some moments when analysts feel themselves to be invaded, controlled or abused by their patient's products. As Bion has postulated, this situation takes the form of a sojourn in the analyst's psyche. Clinical vignettes are given to provide support for the ways in which the analyst contains and elaborates the projections of the patients in his or her own mind and the therapeutic role that these processes have.
It seems it would be helpful for all impasses to be >recollected in tranquility.< In the thick of impasses, however, when we are experiencing pressure, defensiveness, vulnerability, and the responsibility to come up with a quick solution, it can be nearly impossible to think clearly. Time may take us to a place of greater calm and fresh awareness. But it may also provide an illusory calm, leaving us stuck circling in old familiar grooves, grooves rimmed by our own unconscious vulnerabilities and limitations. At such times, we may operate in a perceived state of calm, but with a set of powerful, yet ineffective, unseen or outgrown, concretized beliefs and perceptions, creating a perception of calmness. Some of these may even silence or damage the cooperative or struggling patient, who remains or dares to return (out of a longing to connect or make things >right<). I wondered whether what Dr. Pizer's patient said at the end of Rebecca's second therapy with him was true (that she no longer needed a hug from him, finding it more mature to proceed without one), or if this was merely what she felt she should say in order to leave a key relationship she valued – also in peace and tranquillity.
The central thesis of this paper is that grand theories of development are alive and well and should be paramount to those interested in behavioral intervention. Why? Because how we think about development affects how we approach treatment. Here I discuss the central concepts of a new theory of development – dynamic systems theory – to highlight the way in which a theory can dramatically alter views of what intervention is all about. Rather than focusing on one root of maladaptive behavior such as biological predispositions, environmental causes, or motivational states, dynamic systems theory presents a flexible, time-dependent, and emergent view of behavioral change. I illustrate this new view with a case study on how infants develop the motivation to reach for objects. This example highlights the complex day-by-day and week-by-week emergence of new skills. Although such complexity presents daunting challenges for intervention, it also offers hope by emphasizing that there are multiple pathways toward change.
Frommovo pojmovanje religije
(2005)
The author considers a relational perspective of mourning and suggests an elaboration and extension of Freud's theory of mourning with a sharper focus on the dialectic of holding on and letting go of the formative lost object relationship. Sussillo argues that Freud's early (1917) theoretical tilt toward the relinquishment of affective ties with the dead, later expanded and culminated in a deeper relational sensibility, was shaped by his developing theories and personal losses. Her position is that the analyst can help facilitate the adult patient's affective experience of felt continuity with the absent object, lost in adolescence, that ultimately allows the separation and the transformation of the primitive bond. Sussillo's perspective represents a synthesis of relational theories in a broad sense – also informed by attachment theory, contemporary bereavement research, infant research, and developmental theory. This thesis is illustrated by a clinical example that highlights the therapeutic action.
In. Replying to the discussions of Gilbert Cole and Stefanie Solow Glennon, I focus on several issues raised, including the continuing intrapsychic relationship with a dead parent who may have been destructive to the patient the analyst's facilitating role in enabling the patient to connect with, and construct the future of, the lost relationship the potential meaning of an enactment with a bereaved patient and some thoughts on the dyad's needs to work creatively postloss in multiple affective time zones.
The Use of Metaphors in the Service of the Therapeutic Alliance and Therapeutic Communication
(2005)
Arthur H. Feiner, 1922-2005.
(2005)
Theory and change. Commentary on Morris Eagle's >enactments, transference, and symptomatic cure<
(2005)
The author posits that Pizer's use of both narrative and lyrical style is not typical in psychoanalysis, whose scholarly tradition tends to favor a denser, more academic style of writing. The ways in which psychoanalysts read these two forms of writing are mirrors of one another. Both kinds of reading are forms of discipline both forms of writing are necessary in psychoanalysis. The author also writes that Pizer's >nonanalytic third< does not have to be a >good< thing like a poem it can be almost anything important to the analyst. The nonanalytic third is a soulful metaphor that can be used to create alternatives to rigid experience. Because rigidity in psychoanalytic relatedness is usually the result of problematic unconscious involvements between analyst and patient, the nonanalytic third can be significant in the negotiation of enactments.
우리는 외부 권력으로부터의 자유, 즉 소극적 자유의 신장에 매혹되어, 자유와 그것의 전통적인 적들에게 대항해 얻은 승리의 의미를 훼손할 수 있는 내적인 억압, 강제, 두려움이 있다는 사실을 알지 못하고 있다. 그 결과 우리는 자유의 문제란 오로지 근대사의 과정에서 얻은 소극적 자유를 훨씬 더 많이 얻는 문제라고 생각하기 쉽다. 그리고 그런 자유를 부정하는 힘들에 대항해서 자유를 지키는 것이 필요한 전부라고 믿는 경향이 있다. 우리는 이제까지 쟁취한 자유 모두가 최대의 힘으로 지켜져야 하지만, 자유의 문제는 양적인 문제일 뿐만 아니라 질적인 문제이기도 하다는 것을 잊고 있다. 그리고 우리는 전통적인 자유를 지키고 늘려가야 할 뿐만 아니라 새로운 종류의 자유, 즉 우리 자신의 개인적인 자아를 실현하고 이 자아와 삶을 믿을 수 있게 해주는 자유도 획득해야만 한다는 것을 잊고 있다. 따라서 나는 소극적 자유의 실현뿐만 아니라 적극적 자유(개인적 자아실현)의 실현을 위해, 프롬(Fromm, E.)이 분석한 자유로부터의 도피심리와 사회현상을 살펴보고, 프롬이 말한 >적극적 자유<의 의미는 무엇이며, 또한 적극적 자유의 개념은 문제점이 없는지 살펴보고자 한다. 이를 위해 벌린(I. Berlin)의 >자유의 두 개념<에 대해서도 살펴보고자 한다. 또한 현대인들이 왜 그렇게 신흥종교에 매료(자유로부터의 도피 수단)되는지를 분석한 앨빈 토플러(Albin Toffler)의 생각도 살펴보고자 한다. 나는 이러한 일련의 작업이 보다 나은 자유 민주주의 시민을 형성하는데 많은 도움을 주리라 생각한다.
Psychoanalysis is questioned in the public debate and in the managed care system. The Swedish experience of negotiating with representatives of the public welfare system clarifies how important it is to have a wide network. The author argues that there is great risk that psychoanalysis will sink back into the private sphere if psychoanalysts cannot accept a third party to support the treatment situation. Were this to be our future, the choice of becoming a psychoanalyst would be more a choice of vocation than a choice of a profession. This line of thought related to the first medical revolution is the introduction of scientific medicine within a socio-economic context in which the main part of medical care is organized in a private setting. Sigmund Freud's consulting room was firmly situated within the private sphere. Although through his entire life he struggled to get psychoanalysis officially recognized, and thereby strived to place it within the public sphere, the original concept of psychoanalytical treatment was related to the family as a unit of production. Within this unit, Freud invented the analytical setting. The second medical revolution is the introduction of a general social security system of welfare including the main part of medical-health care. In Sweden, as in many Western welfare societies, psychoanalysis was included in public insurance systems. The third medical revolution is the introduction of methods for assessment and accountability, with the consequence that the main part of the medical health sector is organized by managed care methods. These methods question whether or not psychoanalysis should be included in public welfare systems.
This discussion of the paper by Stuart Pizer focuses on the unconscious forces operating within the analyst that can contribute to a therapeutic impasse. The author discusses a period when she unknowingly skirted interpersonal and transferential interpretations as a result of particular stresses in her personal life. It was not until she was taken to task by one of her patients that she realized the extent to which these stresses had led her to back away from the intensity of the therapeutic relationship. This discussion is offered as a cautionary tale, to remind every analyst of the importance of remaining as aware as possible of one's own circumstances, history, dynamics, and limitations and to be forever watchful of oneself.
Nonlinear dynamic systems theories offer useful approaches for understanding psychoanalyses: One of the most distinctive and appealing features of psychoanalytic thinking is its focus on mental processes that defy categorization and linear explanation. Analytic therapists tolerate uncertainty, find meaning in apparently disordered communication, and embrace the unexpected twists and turns that emerge from intimate attention to the ordinary complexities of everyday life. These are hallmarks of a psychoanalytic sensibility that spans various theoretical persuasions. Non-linear dynamic systems theory embodies the same sensibilities: It emphasizes such descriptors as pattern, complexity, flux and flow, the interplay of ambiguity and order, stability and instability, and the natural value of uncertainty and generative chaos. Although systems theory may appear esoteric and overly intricate, it can be approached in an intuitive, experience-near way so as to offer a language and an imagery that underlie everyday clinical thinking. Its metaphors and aesthetics can help analysts become more precise, spacious, and immediate about basic assumptions that tend to be taken for granted. In addition to tracing this conceptual path, this paper provides a brief account of the history of nonlinear thinking in psychoanalytic theorizing and offers clinical examples.
We psychoanalysts – as split subjects – are not immune to charismatic leaders who preach violence against selected targets depicted as the cause of all evils. Freud, in Group psychology and the analysis of the ego, alerted us against such leaders, who can manipulate by transforming us into an uncritical mass. This would be the social equivalent of the perverse pact in repressive desublimation between the superego and the id at the expense of the ego: the latter is put to sleep, and the superego exhorts the id to do violence and regress. Socially, these perverse pacts often take place with the superego represented by charismatic leaders who foster identification with themselves, put the egos of their audiences to sleep through manipulation and thus address an amorphous mass that they can direct towards violence and destruction. An event in which such a phenomenon apparently occurred will be discussed to show how urgent it is to revisit psychoanalytic writings on these matters in order to withstand the temptation to be herded by manipulative leaders. This will certainly protect psychoanalysis and allow for its transmission. It is up to us to exercise the critical analysis that psychoanalytic tools equip us for so that we can detect such summons to perverse pacts and denounce them.
Neil Altman and Rachael Peltz have written forceful and important papers on manic defenses and the loss of >social security< in American society. My own experience underscores the value of their project, which I view as a response to changes and differences that have grown over decades and accelerated in recent years. The emergence of the theory of manic defenses leads back to the crises of the 1930s, and psychoanalytically informed cultural critics have recognized similar patterns since the 1970s. I suggest evidence for their views, while also expressing skepticism about their more prescriptive ideas. The crisis they begin to analyze has even deeper roots in the ultimate fears generated in the mid-20th century.
A Psychodynamic (NonOedipal) and Brain Function Hypothesis Regarding a Type of Male Sexual Masochism
(2005)
In October 2004 it was my pleasure to present at a cutting-edge conference entitled The Interplay of Implicit and Explicit Processes in Psychoanalysis. In addition to offering an address (>The Essential Role of the Right Brain in the Implicit Self: Development, Psychopathogenesis, and Psychotherapy<), I also provided a commentary to Steven Knoblauch's excellent paper, >Body Rhythms and the Unconscious: Toward an Expanding of Clinical Attention.< In the following, I briefly summarize these presentations, with the purpose of showing how current advances in developmental and neuropsychoanalysis are being incorporated into the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. This work is part of an ongoing effort to expand regulation theory, an overarching theoretical model of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the implicit self.
In response to Franco Borgogno's article, the author talks about the dread of falling, a theme that appears in some of the dreams presented in Borgogno's case study and that conceals very primitive anxieties, each resulting from specific object relations constellations. The discussion elaborates the understanding of this dread through various theoretical perspectives as well as through Samuel Beckett's (1946) short story, >The Expelled.<.
In providing the background to a pivotal session, Stuart Pizer reveals his clinical work as an unsupervised neophyte, prior to his own analysis and analytic training. These early therapeutic efforts were flawed, leaving Pizer at times >grimacing with mortification 26 years after the fact.< But they were also extraordinarily helpful to the patient. Schaffer discusses the challenge of supervising similarly talented beginners: how does one teach psychoanalysis without desiccating a treatmen? How does one teach a relational approach, with no >basic model< and few rules, to a beginning analyst infused with an unformulated, yet often passionate, sense of what is >curative<? Pizer recognizes that were he to meet the same patient today, he would not conduct the same treatment. Now trained and analyzed, not to mention more cautious and >worldweary,< Pizer would not do what he did then. But what if he were the supervisor then? Schaffer concludes her discussion by asking Pizer how he, now a seasoned analyst, would supervise his early therapist self.
Stephen Wangh's insightful article, >Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming< invites a psychoanalytic contribution to interdisciplinary dialogue on violence, revenge, and forgiveness. This author suggests that one strength of Wangh's perspective is his attention to the interplay of systemic and intrapsychic dynamics, which offers a needed corrective to dominant individualistic perspective in psychological and clinical literatures on forgiveness. He notes that Wangh does not clarify a particular definition of forgiveness or an approach to interdisciplinary dialogue. This commentary outlines a linguistic approach to the definition of forgiveness by drawing on three semantic domains of meaning (forensic, therapeutic, and redemptive or sacred). The author suggests some areas of rapprochement between the construct of forgiveness and psychoanalytical theory across each of these semantic domains and briefly illustrates the role of hermeneutics in interdisciplinary dialogue.
Freud's theory of melancholia has lately experienced a renaissance among those interested in the creative potentialities of the psyche. In this essay, I consider the ways in which melancholia can contribute to the actualization of these potentialities by preparing the ground in which inspiration can later take root. I also outline the circumstances in which the melancholy subject's refusal to abandon its lost objects represents an entirely valid response to loss. At the same time, I propose that if the subject is to develop an affirmative and imaginatively supple relationship to its psychic history, it must in the end move from melancholia to meaning production. Insofar as melancholia signals the psyche's inability or stubborn unwillingness to move forward, its powers by necessity remain dormant until the subject is able to exchange its sadness for the versatile meaning-making capacities of the signifier. I moreover argue that it is only when the subject is able to transcend its melancholia enough to begin to desire new objects that it can develop loving and responsible relationships with others – that it can begin to welcome others in their own terms rather than reducing them to its own narcissistic image.
Transferred fictions
(2005)
Neil Altman and Rachael Peltz suggest the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas drawn from the object relations tradition to understanding contemporary American social life. They see the denial of suffering and the projection of hostility in an increasingly individualistic culture as a >manic defense.< While sympathetic to this critique, this commentary raises questions about it. It argues that the object relations perspective is only one of several versions of psychoanalytic thinking. Psychoanalysis is neither value free nor committed to one set of values, but is rather a plural discourse within which moral and social differences can be explored. The paper suggests three ways for advancing the critical program set out by the authors. It recommends that clinical work be used as a valuable source of evidence of the consequences of social organization for personal lives, that arguments based on case descriptions of individual experience can be effective forms of public communication, and that the value of the >containment model< presented by Altman and Peltz needs to be demonstrated in practice as well as in theory, through psychoanalytic work both in and beyond the consulting room.
This paper has two purposes. The first is to elaborate compromise formation theory from an intersubjective perspective. The second is to explore the implications of this vantage point for our understanding of the modes of therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. I pursue the goals of this paper by outlining the essentials of compromise formation theory and by elaborating what I mean by its intersubjective dimension. Then I present and discuss analytic data to demonstrate the value of the theory for understanding aspects of mode of therapeutic action. Finally, I contrast this perspective with competing theoretical points of view.
My response to the discussions is organized from an evolutionary perspective on the development of theory within psychoanalysis. After briefly stating the premises of the paper, I discuss each commentary. I experience Aron's discussion as more evolutionary than Benjamin's or Ellman's. It seems clear that we all have our own agendas. The reader is invited to try them on for size in the spirit of ongoing dialogue that characterizes this journal.
Envy, Shame, and Sadism
(2005)
This case provides a delicate approach to vital purpose, unconscious pattern, and >emotion recollected in tranquillity.< The author defines, the >paradoxical analytic triangle< to which Pizer refers, as a human quality, an unprecedented level of understanding and comprehension, that lets analyst and patient recognize their own dependence on the object. In so doing, they both gain a quality of presence through recovering the projections that they have attributed to the object. Four aspects are considered important steps leading to this human quality within the analytic process: dissociation leading to impasse sensibility opening to countertransference recollection in tranquillity leading to self-reflexivity and the patient's >vital purpose< – the most salient aspect (the lighthouse) of the whole project.
Replying to eight commentaries on my paper submitted by readers of this journal, I address such disparate issues as matters of training and supervision, theories of regression, the analyst's self-states, the patient's vital purpose, complexities of doing for the Other, and the question of what needs to be spoken (interpreted, formulated, declared) explicitly between patient and analyst. I further explore the meaning of my stating to my patient that I would not hug her in our analytic work ahead. And I respond to questions regarding my concept of the paradoxical analytic triangle.
This author describes how poetry infuses her way of thinking, feeling, and writing and her way of working analytically. She introduces the concept of a nonanalytic third – the analyst's personal, intimate, and substantially abiding relationship to some body of experience unrelated to materia psychoanalytica. She posits that this nonanalytic third, the nature of which is unique to each analyst, constitutes a source of enrichment, texture, and dimensionality as well as personally compelling metaphors that the analyst may offer to the patient as other-than-me substance and a placeholder for cultivating the potential in the discourse of analytic potential space, in addition to serving as a facilitator and comfort for transition when the analyst must recognize and promote the necessary ending of an intimate analytic relationship. Using Stephen Mitchell's notions of intersubjectivity and also using the analyst's and patient's separate role responsibilities in the creation of a context for the absence of conscious intentions, the author develops her concept of the nonanalytic third and the particular contribution of poetry to clinical process. These ideas are illustrated with a detailed case example of an unfolding analytic process that includes an e-mail exchange at the time when a shocking form of nonanalytic third appeared – September 11, 2001.
The article opens with a fairly detailed overview of the research on nonlinear dynamic systems, deterministic chaos, and complexity theory – referred to collectively as complexity theory. The second part of the article is aimed at applying this research to an interesting discussion that has developed in the psychoanalytic literature regarding the fundamental nature of the self as either singular or multiple. Chaotic systems (a class of nonlinear systems) exhibit staggering variability, sensitivity, and adaptation in response to perturbation (in the form of sensitive dependence on initial conditions), while also demonstrating an enduring and distinctive coherence and continuity in their overall organization (in the form of strange attractors). As such, chaotic systems are useful in conceptualizing how relatively healthy people remain recognizable (or in character) in the midst of their variability, multiplicity, and change. By contrast, pathology of the self from the perspective of nonlinear dynamic systems is characterized by the repetitive, periodic and self-same quality of mental states.
In this article I maintain that, as a society, we are lacking a basic commitment to the social equivalent of Winnicott's >environmental provisions.< Though we live in a democracy with certain inalienable rights, we have not instituted a system of governing authority to protect those rights. Instead, the needs of the market have taken precedence, overriding the needs of the populace. I believe that psychoanalysis can be used to inform political and social policies by underscoring the importance of the environment (familial and societal) and of the responsible agents (parents and governmental institutions) to provide an environment that fosters growth and creativity. I suggest that one internal, psychic response to the lack of a system of governance that guarantees the provision of basic environmental needs is the proliferation of manic defenses. Compulsive consumption, a behavior our market heavily relies upon, rates as one of the many socially sactioned manic attempts to ward off the pain and anxiety associated with both the absence of a containing governing authority and the loss of basic provisions including health care schools safe water, air, and food energy and other needed resources. A composite clinical picture will be presented to illustrate the manifestation of manic defenses. These defenses will also be discussed in relation to the changing role of work in this society.
Two ways of being
(2005)
The paper by Barbara Pizer is discussed in terms of the analyst's use of the self. An important element in the use of the self in the psychoanalytic situation is the analyst's deeply personal, unique guiding spirit or muse. Poetry acts as a muse for Pizer. In this context, the historical romance between poetry and psychoanalysis is discussed. A successful poem can strike an immediate resonance with the known but inchoate and unarticulated experiences of the reader or listener. Like a dream, a poem can stimulate inquiry without footnotes, citations, or metapsychology. But unlike what Freud believed, poets do not have easy access to psychological insights. Pizer uses poetry in the consulting room to >construct, deconstruct, and then construct again.< Her refusal to make such use a technique or method is supported with two illustrations from Orfano's own clinical work.
This article argues that we need to take seriously the centrality ofthe dead to fascist ideology. Organized around the fascist slogan ‘Long Live Death!’, the article examines a host of fascist claims and practices centered on the dead. These include Martin Heidegger’s suggestion that we can be with the dead, and a range of provocations, tropes and ceremonies which suggest that the dead are either still present or are about to be resurrected. Through a critique of other categories which have been used to grapple with this dimension of fascism— necrophilia (Fromm), suicide (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari), survival (Theweleit)—the article argues that fascism is animated by ideas about resurrection and assumptions about immortality.
Gewalt statt Beziehung - Überlegungen aus der Sicht des transaktionsanalytischen Menschenbildes
(2005)