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Until recently, most psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the analyst as a new object have tended to equate newness with good experience and safety. Recent papers in the relational literature have explored not only the therapeutic value, but also the inevitability of the patient's experience of the analyst as bad, as well as the analyst's participation in this experience. This author examines the multifarious nature of hope, goodness, and badness in the clinical situation. The patient gets to know not only elements of his or her own self that are held by the analyst, but also ways in which the patient holds elements related to the particulars of the analyst's person in the analytic situation. Shifts in American psychoanalysis regarding conceptualizations of the analyst as a new object are examined. Limitations of a bifurcated approach to goodness and badness in clinical conceptualizations are also explored.
This author argues that therapeutic action in child psychoanalytic psychotherapy rests with the creation and transformation of fantasy through play, which in turn shifts psychic structure. The paper details the treatment of an eight-year-old girl whose mother's inability to playfully participate in the inner world of her child interfered with the child's development of a fantasy life. The author suggests that the introduction of objective reality (i.e., interpretations that link the child's play with the real world) potentially impinges on and interferes with the transformational processes of fantasy. Developing the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy does not take place through a forced accommodation to reality, but rather through the expansion of fantasy and a widening of the realm of the imagination. The elaboration of fantasy in concert with a parent or analyst is what builds the child's capacity to differentiate reality from fantasy.
Psychoanalysts participate in the internal constructs and the external exigencies of the people with whom they work, sitting where society and individuality cross paths. Yet, much of psychoanalytic writing mutes culture's bass line from the self's composition, even though every gesture – not to mention every word – evinces the cultural world in the analyst's room. Psychic disconnection takes place as the analyst decontextualizes an individual's personality from cultural reality in a dissociative process that compromises the analytic work. Cultural truths are very much a part of that work's mutuality. Social history underscores the motivations of the seekers and the providers of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Interpretations, enactments, and the relationship's construction unconsciously replicate unexamined tenets of analysts' cultural belief system. If analysts don't connect the dynamic process in which they work to social influence, they and the people who consult with them will inevitably wall off access to transformative meaning. Increased consciousness about how culture affects the therapeutic relationship inspires change. This paper presents three clinical examples in which culture was openly acknowledged as another actor in the psychoanalytic relationship. Two persons working together from and within cultural history create a common language: the dream of a better life.
In light of the contemporary shift away from the universalizing of the Eurocentric perspective, brought into focus with the advent of globalization, it may be useful to consider reorienting traditional psychoanalytic assumptions about human nature to those that are more appropriate to the recognition of a culturally pluralistic world. The author argues that ego psychology originated in the Western Enlightenment's emphasis on liberal individualism, which has limited its applicability across races, classes, and cultures. Relational theories, in their capacity to include the examination of the socially constructed dimensions of the analytic dyad (including race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation), offer crucial theoretical and clinical possibilities, lacking in traditional psychoanalysis, that may help analysts to address some of the important cultural sources of psychological suffering. In the relational view expressed here, the unconscious – as made manifest in everyday life and in the transference and countertransference of the analytic situation – is reformulated to include social and cultural influences.
Given the foundational premises of relational psychoanalysis, the lack of attention to the social and political world on the part of analytic writers who identify with this orientation is curious. Perhaps relational psychoanalysis itself, particularly in its democratizing impulses (e.g., emphasis on mutuality, concern with questions of authority and self-disclosure), has become a replacement for politics, an effort to provide for patients (and analysts) in the consulting room an experience of a world that no longer seems attainable outside it. The analytic situation thus created would represent a recasting of the world as analysts wish it could be, projected into therapeutic space. This development in the analytic field is part of a more general cultural shift away from a belief in the possibility of social transformation and a redirection of energies into ameliorative projects. This discouragement dispirits the work of those relational writers who do engage a political aspect in their thinking. The author argues that the recovery of a sense of political efficacy would vitalize analysts' endeavors inside and outside the therapy office and could help to balance the overinvestment of the clinical dimension of psychoanalysis that has accompanied the ascendance of the relational perspective.
The undeniable realities of globalization at the dawn of the 21st century have brought the United States and its citizens to the startling realization that we must grapple politically, economically, and culturally with the wide range of diversity existing within and without our borders. As greater numbers of culturally diverse persons are now represented in their caseloads, psychoanalysts are also forced to examine the relevance of psychoanalytic theories and practice in meeting their needs. The author discusses three papers that propose overlapping and differing opinions as to the function of psychoanalysis in the lives of culturally diverse patients, and its capacity to influence more public, social and political change. This paper questions the meaning of the term >culture.< It attempts to tease apart the nature of memory and dissociation among those who suffer intergenerational trauma because of their membership in particular cultural or ethnic groups. Also addressed is the extent to which, as described by social constructivist theory, self is entirely a socially constructed phenomenon. The author questions the extent to which, alternatively, >self,< possessed of will, agency and authority, exists in a mutually influencing relationship with the social world.
White contrasts the primacy of individual personality process with a more dialectical position. Nonetheless, Bodnar reaffirms that understanding dialectical process in self-experience does not detract from the unique self-state of individuality. The philosophical roots of dialecticism indicate that the >I-ness< of me is only enhanced by recognizing dialogic processes, especially in the psychotherapeutic relationship.
The author notes that, overall, he and White seem to agree on many important issues that she writes about in her commentary, such as the necessity of recognizing both our shared humanity and the agency of separate, subjective selves. He argues, however, that White mischaracterizes what it means to think of the self as socially constructed, and he clarifies his views of how the concept of a socially constructed self may be related to individual differences in the same culture, and to personal agency. He responds to White's imputation that his paper implicitly prescribes a type of intervention or mandates some particular view of the Truth as a new theology, substituting a concrete environmental or social determinism for the abstract (intrapsychic) determinism that he criticizes. Finally, he responds to some interesting and insightful questions White raises about the case vignette of Mr. J that was presented in his essay.
What allows us to explain the repetitive cycles of self-destructive, self-defeating behavior that we all struggle to help patients overcome? What explains the malignancy that can infuse certain transference – countertransference relationships, often suddenly and without warning? Why do some patients come to hate us despite our best efforts? Why do we come to hate some of them? Perhaps more to the point of this paper, why do we come to hate that version of ourselves that emerges when we are with them? This paper explores these questions, examining the issues of repetition and repair with regard to our most toxic introjects – the patients' and our own. Whereas Melanie Klein helped us to understand why we come to hate that which is good in others, this author explores the complementary question of how loving that which is bad in others keeps the self innocent, good, and sane. A fundamental dissociative split in two necessary but incompatible self–other organizations is posed. With reference to a detailed clinical example, the author investigates how the evocation of intensely shame-riddled bad self representations in both the patient and the analyst can perpetuate a need to provoke, find, and sustain that badness clearly in the psychic domain of the other, blocking entry into certain necessary therapeutic enactments that may therefore fail to occur. Both self – other organizations must occur, first in oscillating moments and ultimately in simultaneous awareness, in order for the analytic work to proceed.
The authors conceptualize Davies's account of the difficult session with her patient Karen as a mentalization mismatch: an expectable failure on the analyst's part to understand the mental state of the patient. In response, the patient used projective identification to re-create the link to the analyst that was temporarily severed. They argue that the therapeutic impasse produced by Karen's successful externalization of a persecuting part of her self is more than repetition of a past relationship. It is the current experience of a disorganized self: a pervasive state for the borderline patient, and a temporary but no less disorganized state in the analyst.
The author suggests some ways in which this important paper contributes to the relational perspective on clinical work. In particular, the analyst's role in owning participation in the struggle for the position of the doer, the >bad one< is seen as crucial to shifting out of the negative symmetry in which each person feels done-to by the other. Davies's crucial identification of the dynamic whereby the child must own all of the badness for the parent helps to clarify how repetition works in the analytic dyad. Whereas the repetition may be understood in terms of the complementary relation of doer and done-to, the owning of responsibility for participation is associated with the space of thirdness, the alternative. This author sees the Davies paper as a seminal contribution to the effort to unpack the mystification that projective processes foster, that are concretized in relationship rather than merely in the individual psyche by forcing the other to bear the toxic identity while denying it in the self. Davies's work illustrates how the intersubjective third can be reestablished by the analyst's careful ownership of hatred and also makes clear that the issue is recognition of what cannot really be hidden, except by reproducing mystification in the analytic process. This author also notes that Davies has provided an important redefinition of what has often been misunderstood as disclosure.
The following response to discussions by Benjamin and by Fonagy and Target focuses on several issues raised, including linearity versus multiplicity in the assessment of developmental capacities, the complex interplay of shame and subjectivity in an intersubjective field, the notion of surrender in resolving therapeutic impasse, and some thoughts on the concept of the third, as they are exemplified in this case material.
The Tiger's Stripe: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis, Gnosis, and the Experience of Wonderment.
(2004)
Psychoanalysis has a well-documented history of antipathy toward religion. As a consequence of the postmodern shift in philosophy, however, there are those who, albeit cautiously, are attempting to approach religion with a renewed spirit of dialogue and inquiry as a narrative among many narratives that has informed and even enriched the development of psychoanalysis. In this spirit of dialogue, the author traces the influence of early religious affiliations on two object relations theorists, W. R. D. Fairbairn and D. W. Winnicott. Fairbairn's early imbibing of Calvinist theology in Scotland and Winnicott's involvement in the Wesleyan church are detailed. The theological differences between these Protestant perspectives (which form counterpoints to one another) are clarified and the perspectives are positioned within the framework of British culture. These religious themes are then identified within the works of Fairbairn and Winnicott. As a final consideration, the relational nature of the Judeo-Christian God, and the subsequent view of human life that flows from that theology, are posited as influential in the development of the relational shift in psychoanalysis. The author details the association between this shift and the seminal work of Fairbairn and Winnicott.
The dynamics of the larger society inevitably are manifest in intrapsychic dynamics, as well as interpersonal interactions, in and out of the psychoanalytic consulting room. Traditional psychoanalytic inattention to the social world predisposes analysts to enact unreflectively some of the racist and classist patterns in the social world around us in our clinical work. This author argues first that U.S. psychoanalysis, as a field, has sought to define itself as white, thereby demonstrating the influence of racism in this country. Second, in a clinical example, the author demonstrates the subtle imprint of racism and classism in a dyad in which both participants are conventionally classified as white. He concludes that open discussion of U.S. history and of the past and current social location of psychoanalysis as a field goes hand in hand with increased awareness of the ways in which social forces organize psychoanalytic interactions.
The ideas and practices of psychotherapy, together with fresh thinking from many other sources, can help to revitalize Western politics which seem broken and moribund. The author describes various professional experiences of his own at the interface of politics and psychotherapy. These include consulting with mainstream and activist politicians and groupings. He discusses how politics in the West is changing in the general direction of what he calls >transformative politics.< He also asks if psychotherapists can make a difference in the political world today, explaining that, though enthusiastic about the prospect, he is also skeptical about it because the record of psychotherapists' involvement in politics is not very good. The paper includes an experiential and personally oriented section (>The Inner Politician<) that looks at how the political self is formed in culture, family, and the inner world. The notion of differing political styles as a source of conflict is explained and explored. The author concludes with some reflections on the relations between psychotherapy, politics, and spirituality.
This essay is intended to record and analyze some recent events in psychoanalytic history, in particular the omission of sexual and gender minorities from the planning of the inaugural conference of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists (2002) and its subsequent protest by several East Coast psychoanalysts. Those events are recounted and analyzed to emphasize the significance for psychoanalysis of the general exclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) voices from the sites of psychoanalytic authority, to hypothesize the intellectual roots of this historic exclusion, and to make recommendations for remedying this situation. The author suggests that philosophical idealism embedded in psychoanalysis in the form of reified notions of development, gender, and health may be responsible for the failure of contemporary psychoanalysis to fully include GLBT consciousness and perspectives. He further argues that the institutional recruitment and deployment of GLBT psychoanalysts is a likely remedial strategy.
Psychoanalysis and politics intersect variously. Some psychoanalytic writings have critiqued society, whereas others have applied socially critical insights about class and race to illuminate transference – countertransference enactments and other clinical matters. The hegemonic politics of psychoanalysis, less intentional but equally influential, define maturity and mental health by idealizing of some psychological and behavioral traits and some clinical stances (especially authoritarianism), and by demonizing of certain categories of persons (notably nonheterosexuals and people of color), certain types of practice (e.g., social work), and certain sorts of ideas (e.g., that clinical and theoretical practices are political practices, too). One way to redress these problems is to reclaim the marginal – homosexuality and queerness, affect's presence in politics, and the political in the psychical (in which instance, the concept of multiple self-states may be useful). Any such effort requires recognizing and articulating one's own subject-position, that is, one's own class, race, gender, or sexual location.
二十世纪急剧的社会文化变迁深深地影响了人们的精神生活,价值冲突、社会变动、文化移入、生活巨变无不加剧了人的心理困难。心理咨询和心理治疗顺应时代要求,迅速蓬勃发展。然而,由于对治疗对象缺乏全面的把握,心理治疗在疗效、范围和方法上均陷入困境。要走出困境,就必须揭示人的完整本性、建构人的完整形象,并以此作为心理治疗理论与实践的出发点。弗洛姆的人本主义精神分析治疗观正是这样一个典型。 弗洛姆人本主义精神分析治疗观的主要思路是:跳出单纯从解剖学和生物学意义上把握人的圈子,结合马克思主义对人的本质的认识,从人的处境出发,揭示出人存在的矛盾是心理疾病的根源;通过对当代资本主义社会现实的分析,指出现代人生存的困境——异化是心理疾病的直接原因;通过对心理疾病成因的分析,弗洛姆进而提出了其心理治疗的目标——从健全人格的追寻到健全社会的追求;最后,弗洛姆阐释了自己心理治疗的具体步骤和方法。 本论文通过对弗洛姆著作的整体把握,系统归纳了弗洛姆的人本主义精神分析治疗观,旨在阐明其对当今心理治疗的整合趋势与本土化研究潮流的启发及意义。
Un cas de dyszapie
(2004)
希特勒,一个影响了20世纪历史并为人们所熟知的历史人物。有人把他看作天才的政治领袖,有人把他看作政治舞台上的小丑,有人把他看作疯子。那么,希特勒究竟何许人也?如何理解这个人?如何看待他的性格?在一些心理分析学者看来,希特勒这个独特的人物作为一个极端的案例恰好为心理分析提供了一个典型样本。我们这里要介绍的是精神分析学者弗洛姆对希特勒所做的性格分析。埃里希·弗洛姆(1900—1980)出生于德国法兰克福一个犹太人家庭。1934年,离开德国到美国。作为一位杰出的精神分析学者,他批判地继承了弗洛伊德的思想,成为新弗洛伊德主义的代表人物之一。他一生著述很多,其代表作品有《逃避自由》、《爱的艺术》、《自为 ]
Éditorial
(2004)
Éditorial
(2004)