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Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Persistence of Authoritarian
Populism in the United States
(2018)
Treatment for drug-induced depression usually consists of cessation or reduction of the causative agent and psychopharmacologic management. In addition, psychotherapy can be useful as an adjunctive treatment. The author presents case material related to a young woman with an inborn physical illness, who became depressed during the course of interferon treatment for a medical complication, hepatitis virus infection. In addition to the cessation of interferon and pharmacologic management, supportive psychotherapy of a psychodynamic orientation was started in order to address the patient’s low self-esteem and anxiety about her future. During the course of psychotherapy, it was understood that the premature cessation of interferon was, to her, a narcissistic injury. It was also important to explore the meanings of her inborn illness and her guilty feelings. After reviewing various formulations of depression, the author discusses the case material from an integrative perspective, which describes vicious cycles of depression.
In recent years, identity-based movements have increasingly been criticized by outsiders for espousing a >culture of outrage< both in terms of their academic expressions and activist mobilizations. In the present study, I examine this charge from within the struggle by advancing a self-reflexive socio-psychological investigation into certain emotional responses, attitudes, and practices that have, in significant ways, come to define this type of political agitation. Specifically, I focus my analysis on anti-racist feminism given my personal ties and investment in this movement. Following Wendy Brown, I investigate whether anti-racist feminism suffers from the Nietzschean affliction of ressentiment, and if so, what can be done to reorient the movement towards a more affirmative and humanist future. I address this latter objective through the work of Erich Fromm who I argue provides us with insights that are especially pertinent to our current problem, and which, when developed further with the aid of anti-racist interventions, can offer a fruitful means to moving forward.
The paper attempts to explore the patient–analyst contribution to the analytic process – focusing mainly on the contribution of the analysand – and how their mutual influence might affect the outcome, sometimes beyond the analyst’s capabilities. This is approached through exploration of the co-creation of an intersubjective analytic field by the analytic dyad, in which the analytic phenomena occur, somehow in both participants, but in an asymmetrical way. Their co-creation of the analytic third in this space includes conflictual as well as healthy elements of themselves. The analyst’s professional self and the analysand’s healthy ego parts form an unconscious alliance directed towards a common cause, the progress of analysis, which unavoidably affects both. Clinical material and vignettes from three cases are presented. In these, becomes apparent that the patient can temporarily take over the analytic situation, permitting continuation of the analytic progress. It is argued that, through the above process, a patient can often help and support the analytic process, surpassing the weaknesses and defects that their analyst might have. Influences on patients’ developing mentalization.
Some have attempted to address the popular acceptance of irrational ideas like fascism or capitalism through various combinations of the work of Marx and different forms of psychoanalysis. Some of the better - known attempts in this regard are Erich Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich’s discussion of the role of repressed sexuality as a control mechanism, and today, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s explanation via Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and Lacan’s psychoanalysis.
The psychoanalytic movement is experiencing a serious crisis: its scientific consensus, social standing, and impact on practice in mental health have all been steadily declining over the last decades. This unfortunate process has been variously explained in terms of prevailing hedonistic social values, the political influence of drug companies, and cuts in health-related expenditures. Following a suggestion by Garza Guerrero, we rather believe that the sources of the contemporary crisis in psychoanalysis are to be searched for within its own development and current social and cultural life. Specifically, we think psychoanalysis has failed to bring the revolutionary contribution of interpersonal and intersubjective paradigms to its fuller consequences. Here, we review five core dimensions in which such failure is particularly apparent: (1) an unwitting reliance on the medical model of mental illness; (2) an ontological, concrete understanding of unconscious processes; (3) a manifest failure to fully appreciate the role of extratransference relationships in the patient’s life; (4) a naive and idealized view of the psychoanalyst’s person and role; and (5) a marginal awareness of the impact of group-level unconscious phenomena on the social life of psychoanalytic institutions.
Psychoanalysis and academia: Psychoanalysis at the crossroads between exact and human sciences
(2018)
It is proposed that the mental health crisis in >developed< societies is largely due to the fact that psychology is heavily based upon an exact science model academically, and upon a medical model clinically. Indeed, these models favor an apperception of mental pathologies as essential entities with a biological etiology, and this reification facilitates a process of nonimplication of the sufferer as concerns his condition. The progress in brain sciences holds the promise of acknowledging psychology as an autonomous discipline, properly describing mental logics, which are constrained, but not determined, by brain characteristics; moreover, mental logical operations mandatorily need content from the contingent history of the subject's life to become instantiated. Psychology, then, is at the interface between an exact science and a human science epistemology. Consequently, we need psychologists and clinicians in the field of mental health who can apply a particularized approach to mental distress, who can deal with the personal feeling of nonmastery, who can base their clinical thinking on the patient's story, and who thereby systematically stay away from any essentializing temptation, while simultaneously being aware that the theoretical framework they operate from is embedded in a continuous scientific dialogue. Psychoanalysis is at that crossroads.
Building on bell hooks’ conceptualization of love as a mode of political resistance, this article explores how prisoners’ radio employs love to combat injustice. Through an examination of two prisoners’ radio projects – The Prison Show in Texas and Restorative Radio in Kentucky – I argue that incarcerated people and their loved ones appropriate the radio to perform public and revolutionary acts of love, countering the oppressive forces of mass incarceration in the United States. By unapologetically positioning their love for prisoners front and center, ordinary Americans subvert systems of oppression which mark incarcerated folks as incapable and unworthy of love. Love is an intrinsic marker of humanity, so prisoners’ radio allows the incarcerated and their advocates on the outside to actively challenge the dehumanization that people face behind bars.
This paper follows up Bion’s development, focusing its attention on Cogitations in particular and suggesting that it can be read as a sort of new >Clinical Diary< à la Ferenczi. The authors, showing us both the link between the writings of the London Bion and those of the American one, stress the dramatic change that took place in his theoretical and technical position around about 1967, when he crossed the Atlantic for working and teaching in North and Latin America, and gradually arrived to formulate a kind of listening more authentically centered on his own thoughts and emotions and those of the patient during the analytic encounter.
Here we introduce the dissertation program PSAID (Postgraduate Studies for the Advancement of Individual Dissertations), conducted at the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin, Germany. We tell stories about our experience: about a wish to sum up in a dissertation after long years of clinical practice what has been learnt in diving deeply into human experience; about the fear of losing one’s identity when something new is to be learned, either planning a research study or conducting an interview that has not clinical but research-driven orientations; about the >biography of theory< – what motivates therapists to make a choice between psychoanalysis or cognitive-behavioral therapy; about how the experience of listening changes when you do not hear a voice but read a transcript and understand how many details allude to a relationship and influence your perception and thinking; about the experience of seeing a voice visualized on an audiogram; about summing up certain characteristics of >situations< in the consulting room. We propose not only to distinguish >online/offline< research, but to include >situationism< as a third concept.
This paper explores how Sullivan's interpersonal theory can be applied clinically and illustrates this with a clinical case. It considers the emotional impact, on the clinician, of a Sullivanian point of view. Each theoretical orientation equips the analyst differently. Sullivanian technique impacts the analyst's focus, feelings of competence, and hopefulness. Although each theory emphasizes different aspects of the clinical material, this paper suggests that there is a set of clinical values that inspire the work of all analysts, regardless of orientation.
The postmodern university is experiencing a legitimation crisis because of a deepening and corrosive mistrust of all forms of authority; even those that are intended to benefit students by enabling them to >think critically<, or to deepen and improve their knowledge and skills. Some of the problem is rooted in prevailing cultural and economic trends, but others inhere in the nature of postmodernism itself; especially the postmodern claim that truth itself is non-existent or simply unattainable or unavailable, even at the best of times. Unlike earlier generations of critical theorists, who believed that >the truth shall make you free<, postmodern theorists, following Nietzsche, claim that the very idea of truth is moot, if not entirely obsolete. But absent a commitment to a search for truth, the entire structure of the university itself begins to crumble.