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- 1998 (340) (remove)
Listening three frost poems
(1998)
This article discusses binary, or dichotomous, thinking as it develops in normal classification, in pathological splitting, and in shifts of cultural awareness such as that from Classicism to Romanticism. It relates these to states of subjective and objective self-awareness as induced and regulated by the early parental environment. A number of clinical examples demonstrate how pathological splitting may arise and how the therapeutic process works to alter dichotomous thinking and raise it to higher levels of integration. It also suggests that a similar process of integration can take place over time in our historical understanding of cultural paradigm shifts. We do not know the Hells and Heavens of people we pass in the street. There are two possible perspectives. According to the first, on a miniscule ball of earth, in a smudge of mold called a city, some microorganisms move around, less durable than mayflies. And the internal states of [such] beings, deprived of any reason for their existence, perfectly interchangeable, what importance can they have? According to the second perspective, that of a reversed telescope, every one of these beings grows up to the size of a cathedral and surpasses in its complexity any nature, living or inert. Only in the second case can we see that no two persons are identical and that we may at best try to guess what is going on inside our fellow men [Milosz, 1986, p. 120].
Social-constructivist and other postmodern currents within contemporary psychoanalysis put a great premium on an epistemological critique of positivism and the authority of the analyst. This focus on the essential ambiguity and constructed nature of experience implicitly tilts the analyst's interest away from a disciplined attempt to develop systems of validation that rely on observable patient responses as confirmatory data with which to judge the analyst's interventions and understandings. As a result, even while defending themselves against charges of relativism and solipsism, many postmodern writers still tend to idealize uncertainty and implicitly discourage the clinician from seeking greater accuracy and clarity about the patient. Epistemic doubt and an ethic that celebrates surprise, although useful as a corrective to tendencies toward rigidity and arrogance in technique, unnecessarily clouds the ubiquitous existence and possibility of accurate intersubjective understanding. This bias can be seen as historically linked to similar processes in academia in which progressive intellectuals abandoned a social change agenda in response to a growing political conservatism and cultural cynicism and, instead, became increasingly involved in >theory for its own sake.< Similarly, the epistemological position of the postmodernists sponsors a bias against therapeutic activism and inadvertently rationalizes a growing pessimism in our own clinical practice.
J. D. Sutherland in memoriam
(1998)
In a Glass Darkly
(1998)
For a surprising number of analysands, many with above-average intelligence and facility with language, words do not adequately capture or convey emotion or symbolize experience. This often subtle difficulty can have a powerful impact on the ability to verbally communicate emotions, process affect, and utilize traditional psychoanalytic interventions. Analysands with these problems therefore often have difficulty using analysis to explore and understand their own experience, yet the reasons for such difficulties are often not recognized by either analyst or analysand. In this article, I suggest that the concept of alexithymia can provide a valuable tool for understanding this gap between affects and language and, in its broadest interpretation, can aid therapists in their pursuit of meaningful approaches to the analytic process. Using the concept as a starting point, I describe and illustrate an approach in which paying attention to apparently insignificant aspects of an analysand's experience gradually helps analysands identify and explore personal symbols and meanings in their lives.
Mannie and Music
(1998)
The Ego Structure and the Self-Identity of the Schizophrenic Human and the Task of Psychoanalysis
(1998)
Therapeutic transformation of the otherwise splitting symbiosis, transformation of the self-object into the transitional subject and progressive psychopathology as a preliminary stage to dualisation, communication and rehabilitation are described against the background of the author's 50 years of experience of working with schizophrenic patients. In addition to good social and existential healing, the author stresses the value of the individual sessions for both therapist and patient. The author clarifies the difference between >projective identification< and >partial identification with the suffering of the patient<, the latter demonstrating the strong side of the therapist, who exerts a positive influence, converting schizophrenic symbiosis into therapeutic symbiosis.
Shadow of the Other. Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York (Routledge) 1998.
(1998)
>Like Those Crystal Balls of Yore...< Fragility Within the Analytic Relation: Real or Fancied?
(1998)
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann became famous with her intensive psychotherapy of psychotic patients which she developed in Chestnut Lodge where she worked, after having left Nazi Germany, from 1935 until her death in 1957. The paper outlines her life and work in Germany. Studying medicine in Königsberg (East Prussia), she wrote her dissertation about pupillary changes in schizophrenia and worked during World War 1 under the famous neurologist Kurt Goldstein with brain injured soldiers. They both differentiated between somatic and psychic factors in neurologic patients and published articles about neurotraumatology including aphasia. Between 1920 and 1923, she worked in the psychotherapeutic sanatorium Weisser Hirsch in Dresden under J.H. Schultz where she treated neurotic and psychotic patients. In these years, she started her training analysis and her psychoanalytic teaching and publishing. From 1924 to 1933 she led a kosher psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg, co-founded the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Society and gave university lectures in psychoanalysis in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. She became a close friend of Georg Groddeck who treated also somatically ill patients with psychoanalysis. — Her great promoters furthered different important attitudes which got very important for Fromm-Reichmann later: Goldstein the natural scientific discipline, Fromm the political view, Groddeck the therapeutic optimism.
Organisation und Charakter. Sozialpsychologische Aspekte zur Analyse von Sekten und Psychogruppen
(1998)
In The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume III, Ernest Jones explained the third wave of dissension as an effect of the progressive mental deterioration of two members of the Committee, who had governed the psychoanalytic movement: Rank and Ferenczi. While in relation to Rank, Jones made a partial recant, in relation to Ferenczi, he did not modify his assertions. Erich Fromm collected various testimonies by witnesses of Ferenczi's last years, all contrasting Jones's assertions, and challenged Jones's manner of writing his-tory. However, since Fromm was himself a dissident, and his witnesses were pupils, relatives or friends of Ferenczi's, they were discarded as >partisans<. The present study aims at reconsidering the question on the basis of many docu-ments, among which the 1958 report of Lajos Levy (Ferenczi's physician) to Anna Freud. The consulted documents do not support Jones's allegation of Ferenczi's insanity. At the same time, they show that Jones's allegation was not a one-man fabrication, but reflected a shared belief. Finally, the author attempts a reading of the possible function of this belief within the psychoanalytic commu-nity. It is pointed out that Ferenczi's emphasis on the analyst as a real person was incompatible with the strict conception of psychoanalysis, based on the theoretical rejection of the affective factors which was becoming dominant around 1957, and it is argued that the narrative of Ferenczi's >falling into insanity< represented an expression of the fear of remaining embroiled in the patient's affective net.
This paper considers the fundamental change introduced by Ferenczi in1919 by proposing the use of countertransference as an instrument. Basically it reconsiders the concept of analytic neutrality; mastery of countertransference is reached through tolerating it, overcoming resistances against it, demanding a very intense involvement of the analyst, as opposed to the image of the surgeon or the mirror. The paper analyzes the implications of this position for psychoanalysis. It places these concepts in the scientific and personal context in which it was written, then follows the later developments of these ideas in Ferenczi’s own work, as well as in that of some other authors, and comments on the effects of these ideas on the psychoanalytic movement. Finally it poses some questions regarding our present use of countertransference in clinical work, with two brief vignettes highlighting these points.
Patients’ use of language in the analytic setting can undergo extreme and sometimes surprising fluctuations. Seemingly articulate and engaging patients retreat to the concrete in their use of words, disconnecting verbal expression from one's internal experience. Are these fluctuations indications of limitations in the patient's capacity to put experience into language, or are they indications of the emergence of otherwise unacknowledged aspects of self into the treatment arena? Shifts in the use of language (both patient's and therapist's) can be opportunities to question the work of the analysis. Whether one uses these moments to expand the boundaries of the analytic technique or to expand the boundaries of the analytic relationship – or both – is the question posed in this commentary.