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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)
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.
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.