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A reflective appraisal.
(1996)
Olympia: a study in perversion – a psychoanalytic pictorial analysis of Edouard Manet's painting
(1996)
Gender as contradiction
(1996)
Patients’ dreams and analysts’ dreams about patients are assumed to reflect each analytic participant's attitude and psychic conduct toward the other, and an unconscious overlapping of psychic issues and struggles between them as well. This makes it possible to deal with dreams from one-person and two-person models of psychological functioning, as well as from an additional psychic dimension that is assumed to be a creation of the analysis itself. As a source of freely moving experience within both participants, one that is assumed to have a life and direction of its own, this latter dimension of analysis permits patient and analyst to undergo more freely the actual experience of the treatment as a modality that is separate from and prior to positivistically grounded determinations that can be made about either the patient or analyst individually, or about the two of them jointly. This dimension of analysis is said also to reflect a holism that characterizes conscious and unconscious psychoanalytic experience. Dreams and unconsciously generated dreamlike clinical phenomena are presented to try to illustrate this holistic character of analytic work, and to show how either participant's psychic productions maybe used to evoke significant experiences and further clinical knowledge.
The importance of nocturnal dreams is discussed along the lines of Lorentzen's arguments. The risk that they are under-evaluated is stressed. Some contradictory aspects of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams are discussed and a tentative attempt is made to integrate them with the thinking of Bion and Meltzer in the sense of creation of meaning. Montague Ullman's technique of working with dreams in groups is also very briefly sketched and discussed in this context. Finally the capacity to dream and dream-space is commented on with the help of Khan and Kant.
This paper offers an overview of the complex and rich history of Argentinean psychoanalysis, highlighting the significance of its contribution to the psychoanalytic world at large. The sociopolitical context in Argentina that threatened the neutrality of the analyst is explored. The development of psychology as a discipline seems to have served as a bridge between psychoanalysis and social sciences, fostering incursions into the study of group psychodynamics and its clinical applications. The centrality of the Oedipus complex's yielding to the main thesis of Totem and Taboo is understood in the context of the prevailing psychoanalytic discourse. The impact of ideology on established psychoanalytic institutions is both a promoter of internal splitting, and an energizing force. The question of why Argentinean psychoanalysis maintains a high degree of creativity and originality is also addressed.
Hiding Behind Motherhood
(1996)
Is there such a thing as midwifery ethics? Yes, there is. As human beings (moral agents), midwives are to be ethical, moral, responsible persons and professionals. Midwives work in moral relationships with other persons. They serve by the moral standards of their profession as now embodied in written codes of ethics, a profession that is part of the larger health care profession. As part of the professional world, midwives participate in the general standard that to be professional is to be ethical and to be unethical is to be unprofessional. The professions, in turn, are part of what Erich Fromm calls >human ethics<. If midwives are to be ethical, we suggest they need to understand ethics and to reason morally. Better health care for all is the result.
Review Charles C. Hogan: Psychosomatics, Psychoanalysis, and Inflammatory Disease of the Colon
(1996)
What is psychosis?
(1996)
Each of us holds unconscious representations of man and woman. Traditional psychoanalytic theories have viewed gender as formed primarily through unconscious representations of either man or woman. These theories have linked gender identifications to the resolution of either oedipal or preoedipal developmental issues. With this resolution, gender identifications have been conceptualized as acquiring a cohesiveness and a fixed nature over the rest of the life span. Contemporary feminist theories have challenged these ideas of fixed, unitary identifications and have offered instead the notion of a fluid gender that moves between multiple identifications. What is problematic is that either the understanding of gender has been restricted to the idea of singular, fixed identifications because of the linear frame of traditional theories or, in the feminist psychoanalytic quest for multiplicity and fluidity, no place has been left for the more fixed quality of gender experience. The tension between gender rigidity and fluidity has been collapsed. The author argues that the complex and dialectical nature of gender as an aspect of experience that at times feels sure and fixed and at other times feels more open to fluidity and change must be accounted for in gender theory. She traces the major developments in the psychoanalytic gender literature and, through case vignettes, uses Klein's and Ogden's formulations of the psychological positions to illustrate how the dialectical movement between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions continuously recontextualizes gender such that the tension between fixed and fluid experience is maintained.
Faith and Denial
(1996)
Editorial
(1996)
Tribute on Erich Fromm
(1996)
With the breakdown of the hegemonic hold of ego psychology on American psychoanalysis, we have been groping for ways to describe, explain, and label a new paradigm. A variety of terms have been offered, including participant observation, social constructivism, and intersubjectivity. In this paper, I use the phrase two-person psychology to embrace all these dimensions of the new paradigm. I suggest that both the ongoing struggle to define this paradigm and the proliferation of names for it are due to the fact that any viable psychoanalytic paradigm must address issues at least at three levels of discourse: the developmental (the origin of self and object representations), the ontological (the essentials of human nature), and the epistemological (on what basis and in what ways can we claim to know anything about anyone's unconscious psychology, including our own?). Perhaps the most widely recognized part of the one-person versus two-person dichotomy is the developmental component. At the developmental level, the question at stake has been whether we interpret as if children make themselves up or as if they are largely created by their parents. Ontologically, what is ultimately at stake in the one-person versus two-person debate is the fate of the concept of resistance. Any two person psychoanalytic theory of therapy will be forced to abandon the notions that resistance is intrapsychic and that resistance is the ego's primary agenda in the psychoanalytic situation. Finally, any psychology that is >two-person< at the epistemological level will assume that conscious insight, intellectual or emotional, is an event in a dialogue, not an achievement of a lone and private mind contemplating itself.
The constructivist/relational perspective has challenged the analyst's emotional superiority, her omniscience, and her relative removal from the psychoanalytic dialogue. It at first appears to be antithetical to treatment approaches that emphasize the analyst's holding functions. In this essay I examine the holding model and its resolution from a relational perspective. I propose that the current discomfort with the holding function is related to its apparent, but not necessarily real, implications. I discuss the analyst's and patient's subjectivity during periods of holding. I believe that the holding process is essential when the patient has intensely toxic reactions to >knowing< the analyst and is therefore not yet able to stand a mutual analytic experience. During holding, the patient experiences an illusion of analytictic attunement. This requires that the analyst's dysjunctive subjectivity be contained within the analyst, but not that it be abandoned. Ultimately, it is the transition from the holding position toward collaborative interchange that will allow analyst and patient explicitly to address and ultimately to integrate dependence and mutuality within the psychoanalytic setting and thereby engage in an intersubjective dialogue. The movement toward mutuality will require that the analyst of the holding situation begin to fail in ways that increasingly expose her externality and thus her subjectivity to the patient.