In his comment on Teurnell's paper >The Piggle—a sexually abused girl?< the author points to the risk of organizing a complicated clinical material around one single idea and briefly describes other ways of understanding the material in Winnicott's book. To the author's mind, the richness and depth of the material and the subtleness and aesthetics of the interplay between Winnicott and the Piggle, in Teurnell's way of reading, collapse into one single question: the possibility of a sexual trauma. At the end of the comment the role of the Piggle's father is shortly discussed.
A Room for One's Own
(1993)
>Psychoanalytic Considerations on the Defences from Confrontation with the Stranger<: The conscious and unconscious are qualities of the contents of the psyche attributed, for the most part, to social processes, that are themselves unconscious. In this way the conscious area is largely an illusion. The total man, from the most distant past to the potential future, remains unconscious. One is a member of society, but also member of the human race and, as such, citizen of the world. Humanism is the antithesis of all xenophobic nationalism, all racism and all prejudiced thought. The repression of emotions, sentiments and thoughts which strike the family harmony are part of a strategy of survival adopted by the individual from the start of infancy. The operation of estrangement begins from oneself in order to conform with the family and social environment. Ostracism is avoided by directing it towards repressed and split parts of oneself and towards all aspects on the outside to which those parts allude, according to the defence mechanisms of identifiaation with the aggressor and the projection. Not only is >primordial man< estranged, but also and above all man in his potentiality of development, the >new man< who has overcome narcissism and the symbioticincestuous attachment. The revolutionary character is the strangest of all in today's Western society. The Author supports these positions by the analysis of two dreams and by a brief history of witch hunt.
Aggression – worauf und wohin? Antworten der Psychoanalyse. Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Wiblingen.
(1993)
Algunos comentarios del grupo mexicano de sociopsicoanalisis sobre el seminario de octubre de 1992
(1993)
After having read: The Piggle. An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl by D W Winnicott the author presents the hypothesis that the Piggle is a sexually abused girl, who during the treatment is trying to tell what has actually happened to her. – The facts upon which the hypothesis is built are presented and discussed. The author suggests that Winnicott because of his countertransference is not capable to understand what his patient is telling him. His resistance is supposed to be acted out in an unfortunate way because of the weakness of the method of the treatment, psychoanalysis on demand, which means that Winnicott meets his little patient when she herself demands it.
Some salient features of a Sullivanian perspective are given as a background for a discussion of the case of Anna. Lived experience is mentioned as of equal importance as fantasy. Technically, analytic inquiry in the form of questions is stressed. In his review of the case presentation, the author observes that too much emphasis is given to content, compared to form. He notes that the therapist does not report key transference and non-transference interactions with the patient and further suggests that the patient still has significant narcissistic problems. He suggests that it is time to confront the patient with her characterological ways of relating to the analyst.
The hermeneutic turn in psychoanalysis may be less a move toward soft science than an attempt to address certain failures in the classical tradition. The latter has failed to convert Freud's many metaphors into anything like responsible science it has been unable to give up its fascination with Freud and move on to other thinkers and other points of view it has been unable to find an answer to the problem of secrecy and privileged access to clinical data under the heavy hand of theory, it has all but eliminated research from the psychoanalytic enterprise and finally, it has been unable to find a home for the Roshomon effect and the fact that almost everything worth looking at has at least two sides. Above all, psychoanalysis needs to recognize that our theory is often the projection of either our Zeitgeist or our personal history. Until we can make room for the problem of subjectivity in our theory-building, we will never be able to separate the singer from the song.
This paper considers, from a psychoanalytic point of view, work with urban poor patients. A previous attempt, from an ego psychological perspective, to adapt psychoanalytic theory and technique for work with such patients is reviewed. An attempt is then made to elaborate an object relations perspective, based largely on the work of Fairbairn. The two approaches are compared and contrasted, especially with respect to common problems that arise in work with this group of people, such as missed appointments, crises, and requests for >concrete< help. Finally, there is a review of how the structure and policies of the public clinics in which most poor patients are seen impact on analytically oriented work.
I present a case study in which the dramatic disappearance of the patient's chronic symptom of dyspareunia followed a critical episode in the treatment in which a core dynamic theme of defiance-punishment was enacted in the patient-therapist interaction. Symptomatic cure was not accompanied by the patient's explicit insight, but rather seemed to be a function of a complex process of test-passing and transference-countertransference enactments leading to the discorifirmation of a core unconscious pathogenic belief. Concepts of transference, transference cure, misalliance cure, and analysis of transference are discussed in the context of this case study.
Angst vor der Angst
(1993)
A challenge is offered to the characterization of psychoanalysis as suffering from potentially fatal epistemic flaws and needing to ground itself in the language of hermeneutics, neuropsychology, or infant observation in order to survive. Psychoanalytic truth is neither made up nor discovered. Psychoanalytic propositions are true in the important sense of being the most useful statements we can make right now about the nature and functioning of the human unconscious. Psychoanalytic theories evolve through rational critical discourse just as theories evolve in all fields of science and scholarship.
This presentation examines psychoanalysis from the standpoint of fictionalism. Fictionalism maintains that all aspects of human experience are creations of imagination, that mind-made realities constitute for human beings their sole realms of existence, and that it is only about these realms that anything at all can be known. No other knowable realities exist. Fictionalism is an aesthetic orientation that considers these imaginative constructs artistic renderings that are aesthetically formed and experienced, and that must be comprehended and evaluated aesthetically. Furthermore, it regards these artistic constructs as works of fictions – invented textual realities woven by the perpetual interplay of multitudinous signifiers into ever-changing psychical configurations. From a fictionalist's perspective, >truth< becomes, paradoxically, a manifestation of fiction. The term fiction intends not only to underscore the radical divergence of fictionalism's philosophical perspective from realism's but to emphasize its reinterpretation of the materialities realism posits as also inventions of imagination. Fictionalism does not, however, simply reverse the hierarchy and valuation of the real/fiction dichotomy but modifies the very understanding of this dichotomy's conceptualization and, by reinscribing realism as itself a form of fiction, even diminishes some of the antagonism inherent in this age-old rivalry. Rooted deep in psychoanalytic tradition, realism's role has been complex, inconsistent, contradictory, and often embarrassingly naive. Fictionalism contests the many postulates of realism that psychoanalysis has incorporated so fundamentally into its theory and technique. Focusing primarily on transference, I argue not only that this phenomenon has been misconstrued within a realist framework but that most of the other features of psychoanalysis have been as well because psychoanalysis is basically a fictional enterprise.
Art, War, and Fascism
(1993)
This paper argues that some forms of sadomasochistic fantasy and enactments can represent a developmental and therapeutic advance for some patients. Playful fantasies of dominance and submission, when enacted, function to reassure the patient that the other can survive the full expression and power of his or her sexual desire. Sadomasochistic scenarios can mitigate guilt and worry and free the patient for an experience of sexual ruthlessness. The apparent differences in the manifest roles of the man and woman in this situation are belied in a paradoxical way by underlying commonalities. A woman can use her consensually scripted domination as a reassurance that the man can withstand the full force of her excitement, and the man can experience his partner's excitement in submission as a condition of safety for the consolidation of his phallic strength. Two clinical examples illustrate these paradoxes and the affirmative dimension of certain kinds of sadomasochistic play. The suggestion is made that blanket critiques of sadomasochism as either perversion or misogyny are misguided and potentially repressive.