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This is a study of the social character of managers and staff at the U.S. ACTION Agency. The context of the study was a joint union-management work improvement program that took place in the U.S. ACTION Agency from 1977-80. The author, with others from the Harvard Project on Technology, Work and Character, was contracted by ACTION, to be a third-party researcher-consultant for the program. The methods of this study include in-depth interviews with 30 people, both managers and staff. The instrument for these interviews was an >interpretive questionnaire< originally developed by Erich FROMM to elicit both ethnographic and characterological information. Additional data were gathered through dialogues with individuals and office groups, and through participant observation. The findings of this study include a typology of five social character types at ACTION headquarters: sociable idealists, craftsman-idealists, political idealists, technical administrators and diplomat-administrators. The study discusses their adaptations to the organization of work, and how people of different social character types interact with each other around the work tasks, both productively and unproductively. This research demonstrates the importance of understanding local meanings, values, and motivations when planning organizational change. It is an example of using social character theory and participant research as significant methods for achieving such understanding.The theoretical framework for interpretation is Erich FROMM's theory of social character as adapted by Michael Maccoby for use in organizational change projects. FROMM's theory develops a typology of shared character syndromes functionally related to the socioeconomic and cultural environment; Maccoby develops empirical typologies of adaptations to work in each work setting, conceptualized and named through >participant research< with the people studied. Participant research creates new knowledge that can stimulate and support change in the workplace.
In Martin Stanton's 1990 monograph Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention , one of six exegetical chapters was titled >Teratoma<, using Ferenczi's own word for malformations of (psychic) development. Since then, there has been a tendency in the larger Ferenczi literature to use >teratoma< as a metaphor, leading to the creation of many odd readings and contexts for this very specific, medical, anatomic term. When Stanton becomes expansive in viewing the teratoma as a >transitional object< which >negotiates a relationship between the growth of ideal-ego ideas in oneself and the outside 'influence' of inner systems of thought< (p. 176), he is entering the play-space that opened between Ferenczi and Groddeck during the 20s as Ferenczi's relationship with Freud became increasingly constricted. What this misses is that Ferenczi was a physician, as was Groddeck. For all their fanciful explorations of mind and body relatedness, for both Ferenczi and Groddeck there would be a shared background of certain basic terminology. In that medical terminology, >teratoma< refers to variable numbers of primordial germ cells in the embryo, which in the course of development become displaced, sequestered and grotesquely overgrown; they can never become the tissues they were meant to be. Their potential is forever squandered. >Monsters< they may be; >doubles< they may seem; but they are utterly non-viable. In his metaphorical application of the term >teratoma< to the natural history of (psychic) trauma, Ferenczi proposes a biological and psychological isomorphism that is both clinically illuminating and intuitively prophetic of the course of treatment of trauma, which he was discovering. Clinical and literary material are used to explore the gap between the anatomic teratoma and the psychic teratoma.
This paper describes a case in which analyst and analysand became interlocked in battles that drew out the 'mad' parts of each other. It explores how the extreme conflict may have actually been an integral part of what has become a truly therapeutic process for both. Theoretically, the dialectical movement of becoming through contradiction is used to help explicate how mutually destructive enactments were necessary building blocks of genuine intimacy.
For mothers, the act of giving birth also brings them close to death as well as other human experiences. The mother represents the dual structure of life and death in the mind. It was this unconscious convergence that stirred the interest in reconsidering the subject of the loss of children and its effect on individual devel-opment. This article demonstrates what happens when death triumphs over life chronologically close to birth. The author presents a clinical report on a six-year-old girl, Dinah, who suffered the effects of the mother's mourning. She illustrates the therapeutic approach to mourning over time, at moments in which the shadow of pain is more clearly present. These are moments when the loss must be brought to consciousness, because of the unconscious effects it has on the survivors. Dinah's problems were not caused by the loss itself, but rather the fact that the loss oc-curred in a phase of her emotional development when she was only a baby an un-able to react in a mature manner.
Some Thoughts on Empathy
(2001)
In the 100-year-old history of the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, there are several fields whose practitioners have not received the prize. Among the unlucky candidates for the Nobel Prize, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is probably the most prominent and best known. He is also the one proposed for the prize during the longest period of time, almost a quarter of a century, or more precisely, between 1915 and 1938. In this article I will examine the nominations of Freud and the evaluations of his work by what is perhaps the most science centered of medical institutions, the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. I will place these in the context of the reception of Freud's work by Swedish psychiatrists. Here the influence of the most prominent psychiatrist at the time, Bror Gadelius, deserves special attention.
On Writing Psychoanalysis
(2001)
The authors discuss several surveys that cover the practices of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in the Stockholm region. They compare these practices with other psychiatrists in both the private and the public sector. In addition, they discuss the results from an attempt towards continuous evaluation of psychoanalytical practices and their treatment standards including an evaluation of the development of individual psychoanalytical processes.
The author presents a clinical case to illustrate the consequences of a history of loss, beginning with the early death of the mother. The creation of a complex defen-sive system based on internal division and manifested through the existence of an alternate world is analyzed. The author stresses the importance for the patient of re-experiencing the sense of emptiness within an analytical setting and learning to tolerate it thanks to dependence on the auxiliary self of the analyst. D. W. Winni-cott’s suggestion of a relationship between the experience of emptiness and the fear of breakdown are also discussed.
The critical theory of subject, society, culture and history of the Frankfurt School originated in the experience of the horror of World War I. Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Sohn-Rethel and other, later critical theorists tried to make sense out of the senseless war experience in Frankfurt a. M., Berlin, Stuttgart, or elsewhere, by exploring the writings of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, Georg W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
The article discusses the application of the ideas of evidence-based medicine or empirically supported treatment to the field of psychoanalysis. The author argues that empirical support is gradual rather than categorical, and that the randomized clinical trial (RCT), which is commonly heralded as the appropriate method of support, confounds patient suitability factors with treatment 'as such'. As a consequence of the exclusive reliance on the RCT, empirical validation of psychological treatments has generally favoured cognitive-behavioural treatments, although there is ample evidence – albeit non-RCT – for the beneficial effects of short-term and long-term psychoanalytic treatment. The author argues for a suitability matching approach to empirical validation, where each treatment is tested, as powerfully as feasible, on samples based on selfselection (patient's choice, clinical assignment, suitability judgments etc.). The paper concludes by referring to two recent studies, indicating that there is reason to evaluate alleged empirical support with caution.
During these times, when society wants >evidence< that treatments are effective, ethical and cost effective, quality assurance and evidence-based medicine have become catchwords. The powers that be place their hopes on them when they find that they have to prioritize forms of treatment. There are different attempts to define these concepts and there are different approaches, most of them based on quantitative studies. This article describes a different approach. It also discusses how you can use the model for peer review among psychoanalytical colleagues as a qualitative study and a base for both quality assurance and a learning process. It also has its place in any formulation of 'evidence' for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
I attempt to rehabilitate Edward Glover's historical reputation, based on unpublished interviews as well as recently found documentary material. This should make one of the defining moments in the history of British psychoanalysis more plausible. Glover was an eloquent heresy-hunter – against Jung, Rank, Klein, Alexander, and others – yet the polemical side of him represents only one aspect of his career. During the Controversial Discussions Glover was taking some of the burden for the way his leader Jones had run the British Society. In moving against Klein, Glover felt he was fulfilling Freud's own wishes, and that he was allied with the recently arrived Viennese contingent. After Glover's resignation in 1944, Jones split the opposition by appointing Anna Freud as Glover's successor as IPA Secretary. Subsequently Adrian Stephen and Donald Winnicott opposed Glover's even being allowed to speak at a psychoanalytic conference in Amsterdam; Anna Freud defended Glover's presence then. Glover's long struggle to be accepted as a member of the Swiss Society only went through in 1949, when Jones ceased being President of the IPA. Glover and Anna Freud regularly corresponded about setting up of the distinction between the >B< and >A< groups within the British Society. Meanwhile Glover, who had since the early 1930s been the de facto founder of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, used his administrative talents there. He successfully founded The British Journal of Delinquency with Miller and Mannheim. Unlike what happened at the British Society, Glover cooperated without problem at the ISTD and the Portman Clinic. Glover was not only an important and successful clinical analyst but also a pioneer in forensic psychiatry. In 1947 he was unofficially approached and asked to take over the Directorship of the New York Psychoanalytic Training Institute. When the proceedings of the Controversial Discussions were published in 1991, various myths had been established about what had happened. That Glover found himself caught in the middle was not only a personal tragedy but also a part of a much larger story.
The Nature of the Transference Between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein: Learning from the Controversies
(2001)
As we work through our theories, we rejoice in discovering the logic of concepts and their articulation in clinical experience. Such joy hides other movements, in which the only stakes are demands for love, sexual curiosity and the satisfaction of hate, transferred from infancy to others worlds, idealised or despised. When we participate in our psychoanalytical institutions, we feel pride or even vanity to be participating in the great historical movement of psychoanalysis. This conceals the working of transference in our institutional life; transference which is crudely sexual at its origins, and implies maternal, paternal or fraternal objects. This is its constraining power. We should be fully aware of this, as Strachey or Balint have already shown, in order to attenuate the violence of transference and stimulate our creativity. Anna Freud and Melanie Klein's controversies had a reality of their own. This reality was quickly forgotten and trapped in various conflicts, as those existing between Jones and Freud or between Glover and the rest of the British Psychoanalytical Society of his times. These reelaborations gave rise to ideological elements, which have ever since pervaded the history of psychoanalytical theory, influencing psychoanalytical methods and clinics. It is important for us today to elucidate these ideologies in order to improve our achievements.
Presenting our case in conference space, we find ourselves in the middle of two developmental trajectories: the historical development of psychoanalysis, and the personal development of the analyst. While in clinical space psychoanalysis had some success in developing a working method, and the clinic became a 'psychoanalyticspace', in 'conference-space' there is a mixture of mainly medical-philosophicalreligious practices; 'conference-space' is not a 'psychoanalytic-space'. In very general terms, the developmental trajectory of the analyst tells the story of dialogical difficulties within the external world, which are taken into the clinic for further development, and then a reconstituted dialogue is brought back to the external world, in hope of 'using' it in a kind of intermediate-transitional-psychoanalytic space. Many times, however, the analyst finds himself in a 'disaster area', the result of a collision between the two unsynchronized/ untuned developmental trajectories: the developmental-historical phase of psychoanalysis, does not match the personal development of the analyst . In the past 10-15 years, there are signs of a possible future mutual-tuning , between the two trajectories; a time of importance for psychoanalysis. While the developmental history of inter-subjective-relational school in psychoanalysis is in the very heart of the general line of development of psychoanalysis, it is in the last two decades that the analyst was moved into a central-position, pronouncing a new reading of the development of the analyst and his 'voice', his identity; the analyst becomes less of a one-authoritative figure, and more of a partial expression of multiple-alternative mutual figure. This is a meeting point for the two developmental trajectories. The rephrased Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, speaking post-modern relational language of love and life, meets the Ferenczian line of personal development of the analyst, and for the first time in the history of psychoanalysis, they can really have some mutual development.
A reading of David Riesman's classic The Lonely Crowd is presented that emphasizes its links with the critical theory of German psychoanalyst & social critic Erich Fromm. The intellectual & personal relationship between Riesman & Fromm brings into focus Riesman's adaptation of the insights of European critical theory as well as the strengths of American social science & social criticism. Riesman's rela-tively neglected theoretical approach has much to offer a sociology concerned with retaining its links to public debate & empirical evidence.
The sociological study of intellectual innovation has long been polarized between romantic notions of the creative marginal intellectual & competing accounts stressing the benefits of national, organizational, & network centrality in the production of knowledge. I offer the concept of >optimal marginality< as an attempt to move beyond this longstanding but increasingly stale debate. The relationship between a certain type of marginality & intellectual creativity is discussed in the context of a case study on innovation within psychoanalysis. German psychoana-lyst Erich Fromm's contributions to the modern revision of Freudian theory is high-lighted to illustrate the conditions under which marginality is likely to lead to innova-tions within theoretical systems & intellectual organizations. What types of margin-ality lead to innovation? Under what conditions does marginality lead to insight, & when does it lead to marginal ideas? Four ideal types are outlined & a research agenda is called for that operationalizes & tests these theoretical ideas in the con-text of comparative sociological analysis of intellectual creativity.
In Memoriam: Chrzanowski
(2001)
Sincerity: a Study in the Atmosphere of Human Relations, a previously unpublished book, appearing in D. Meltzer's Collected Papers, explores The Dwarfs, The Birthday Party and The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, both the capacity to communicate genuine emotion and its limitation by the subject's inability to say-what-he-means, because of rigidity and coldness, and to mean-what-he-says, because of an integrated narcissistic structure. That the language of dreams is perhaps the lingua franca of emotionality and the key to aesthetics is the book's conclusion, with a clear indication of the books to come. This article surveys the relevance of the notion of sincerity in Meltzer's further work, in its clinical and metapsychological aspects.
Already in the first decade of the 19th century and of its existence psychoanalysis has been under attack. Freud the psychoanalyst, the moralist, and the healer, and his new message to mankind, were under fire both ad rem and ad hominem: people attacked both the message and the messenger. In the recent decades, one of the most powerful challengers of Freud's legacy is Pittsburgh philosophy professor Adolf Gr nbaum. This paper is the author's answer to Gr nbaum's challenges, as presented at the 1998 IFPS Congress in Madrid. The author offers a rebuttal of a number of Gr nbaum's critical contentions about the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a method, a theory of disorder, and a healing profession and analyzes the flaws in Gr nbaum's arguments.
Integration or Sealing Over. A Pilot Study of Coping Strategies of Severely Traumatised Patients
(2001)
To improve the initial decision about recommended treatment strategies for patients who have experienced political persecution and torture we needed an instrument that could help us observe patients? coping styles. In order to assess coping style the Integration/Sealing-over Global Scale was adapted for man-made traumatic experiences. A semi-structured interview-guide regarding crucial psycho-dynamic aspects relevant to these experiences was created. In order to try out the interview-guide, interviews were conducted with four former patients. Whether psychoanalytical psychotherapy can influence the patient?s coping style is also discussed.
The adopted child has experiences of loss, changes of goals for attachment, and of being biologically separate in the family, which are similar to the experiences of adoptive parents who are infertile. In this paper, the correspondence of experiences between the adopted child and the infertile adoptive parents will be examined with the motivational system theory constructed by Joseph Lichtenberg. This theory is based on psychoanalytical knowledge as well as on infant research. It comprises five motivational systems, all existing from the beginning of life, which promote the fulfilment and regulation of: 1. the need for psychic regulation of physiological requirements, 2. the need for attachment and later affiliation, 3. the need for exploration and assertion, 4. the need to react aversively through antagonism or withdrawal (or both) and 5. the need for sensual enjoyment and (later) sexual excitement. In regard to these basic needs, infertile parents have certain experiences that correspond to and correlate with those of the abandoned child. This implies a risk for the development of the adoptive family as well as a possibility for growth. The author suggests potential healing factors that may exist within an infertile couple regarding meeting and understanding an abandoned child.