Refine
Language
- English (187) (remove)
Document Type
- Articles (187) (remove)
Year of publication
- 2003 (187) (remove)
Reply to Discussants.
(2003)
Using a case example, the author explores the complex and shifting boundary between aspects of oedipal regression and postoedipal phenomena. Particularly, during termination phases, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish among the hostility, frustration, and anger related to oedipal longings and scorn that is connected to realistic appraisals of the limits of erotic longings in the analytic situation. Scorn sometimes involves a kind of righteous indignation that results from the patient's awareness that analytic immersion in erotic longings toward unavailable others has aspects of erotic masochism. To some extent, the analytic situation itself contains aspects of erotic masochism that are important to try to reorganize during ending phases of analysis. The author argues that distinctions between oedipal and postoedipal are ever-shifting and difficult to make because the Oedipus complex is a lifelong process that is never resolved. Instead, we are always seeking new adaptations and new ways to organize our relationships against the background of a fluid boundary between oedipal and postoedipal phenomena.
The author examines several types of therapeutic action intrinsic to Davies's clinical work. Among these actions was Davies's eventual and careful willingness to ask her patient to hold affective states that the patient had previously been unable to hold to discover a way to speak to her patient about her own struggles with the patient while risking, and actually knowing, that, inevitably, some of the patient's discovery of what the analyst feels will resonate with painful past experience to create another countertransference space in which Davies found a way to become a different kind of bad or disappointing object to the patient than the patient's earlier disappointment with parental figures, though one that proved much more helpful and bearable than her previous experience and eventually, though implicitly, to accept the aggressive and harsh ways in which the patient was already experiencing newness in the context of repetitive disappointment. In each of these types of action, the opportunity for mourning figures prominently.
This case analysis describes a young woman's jouney to integrate the experiences of having an unresponsive and nonnurturant mother and an invasive, seductive, and chronically anxious father, who functioned as the loving and responsive parent. From the outset of the analysis, mother's difficulties in attachment and empathy with her daughter's needs or fears, and father's overstimulating and intrusive relationship to his daughter, were present in the patient's dreams and in the transference. The early stage of treatment reported here describes the patient's efforts to find a self-regulatory balance between states of extreme overstimulation and excitement and of withdrawal and a fear of invasion.
The Sculpture and the Dust.
(2003)
Psychoanalytic Peregrination VI: >The Effect on Countertransference of the Collapse of Civilization<
(2003)
Self-organizing systems (Stechler and Kaplan, 1980) biased by dissociative experience provide a robust perspective for the modern understanding of the development of hysteria. Definition of self, framed as a function of self as agent, object, and locus (Schafer, 1968), illuminates the bias of depersonalization and the clinical presentation of persons subject to developmental influences (Main and Morgan, 1996) in early childhood, as well as to overwhelming trauma (Terr, 1991). Characteristics of self, such as coherence, continuity/consistency, congruence/incongruence, and cohesion are explored in this context. Affect is the primary organizing bias in the discernment of self and in the development of relatedness. Clinically observed isolation of subjectivity may result from the bias of intense affect, that is, shame, on self-organizing systems in a multiple self-state model.
This paper examines psychic trauma as experience so shockingly strange that it exceeds the threshold for cognitive processing and begins to flood the mind with unintegratable affect that threatens to disorganize the internal template on which one's experience of self-coherence, self-cohesiveness, and self-continuity depends. A detailed clinical vignette illustrates how the unprocessed >not-me< experience held by a dissociated self-state as an affective memory without an autobiographical memory of its traumatic origin >haunts< the self. It remains a ghostly horror even in an otherwise successful psychoanalysis unless a new perceptual reality is created between patient and analyst that alters the narrative structure maintaining the dissociation as though the past were still a present danger. The analyst's making optimal use of dissociative processes in an intersubjective and interpersonal context enables the patient more readily to self-regulate affect in those areas of implicit memory where trauma has left its mark the dissociated ghosts of >not-me< are thus persuaded, little-by-little, to cease their haunting and participate more and more actively and openly as self-reflective, self-expressive parts of >me.<
My. Reply addresses some of the questions raised by Gerhardt, Sweetnam, and Borton in their discussion of my work as representing >a radical shift in thinking about the process of change.< I also attempt to clarify areas of misunderstanding. Wherever possible, I focus on specific clinical moments to clarify my points.
I thank John Kerr for his long and detailed review of my Freud biography and note our major points of agreement and disagreement. Kerr and I both see the wisdom of placing Freud in the context of the major relationships of his life as opposed to viewing him as a self-created hero. We also note the value of using contemporary ideas and research, much of them based on the foundation that Freud erected, to loop back and understand him in new ways. I believe, more strongly than Kerr, that Freud's early traumatic losses, and the way he came to terms with them – or did not – in his self-analysis, had long-lasting effects on his character, relationships, and psychoanalytic theory and therapy. Several minor points of agreement and disagreement are also discussed.
Embodied Imagination.
(2003)
The goals of contemporary psychoanalysis have been largely recast, deemphasizing symptom relief and character change and focusing on more fundamental yet elusive issues, like the quality of being itself. The interest shared by contemporary relational, progressive Freudian, and contemporary Kleinian authors in the concept of enactment holds promise for generating new models of therapeutic action to this end. Freud's description of the part played by day residue in the creation of dreams provides a basis for exploring formulations of energy and energy sharing between patient and analyst. This process, occurring by way of enactment, can facilitate the patient's breaking out of chronically crippling dynamics. A detailed clinical illustration emphasizes the analytic discipline that is essential to working with enactment as a largely nonverbal, mutually constructed clinical experience. The importance of the analyst's understanding the enactment is crucial the advantage of discussing the enactment with the patient is, in certain instances, open to question.
I maintain that every therapist operates out of a >philosophy of treatment< that is not always conscious. Every interpretation made or not made is rooted in such a philosophy. I then consider my own approach in 14 points. In the second part, two cases are discussed. The case of Frank's perversion is understood as a defensive identification with two parents, themselves perverts, and particularly a mother who stimulated his incestuous wishes by jointly looking at pornography. In Laura's case, the father's assuming maternal functions encouraged a permanent fixation at the oral level. In both cases, I argue in favor of a more encompassing interpretation than those made by the original authors.
We consider the relevance of forms of intersubjectivity in infancy to the nonverbal and implicit dimension of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. The term forms of intersubjectivity, within the adult explicit and implicit modes and the infant presymbolic implicit mode, is offered to clarify the multiple meanings of intersubjectivity. The ideas of infant intersubjectivity of Meltzoff, Trevarthen, and Stern that have particular relevance for psychoanalysis are highlighted: the dialogic origin of mind, the role of correspondences, and the idea that symbolic forms of intersubjectivity are built on presymbolic forms. We build on their work to define a fourth position: that the full range of patterns of interactive regulation provides the broadest definition of the presymbolic origins of intersubjectivity, with correspondence being only one of many critical patterns. We additionally address the place of interactive regulation, problems with the concept of matching, the role of self-regulation, the role of difference, and the >balance model< of self- and interactive regulation. We take the position that all forms of interactive regulation are relevant to the possibility of perceiving and aligning oneself with the moment-by-moment process of the other. A broadened understanding of intersubjectivity in infancy sets the stage for a more fruitful exchange between infant researchers and psychoanalysts.
The Manic Society
(2003)
Whereas the first paper of this series compared the work of five theorists of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis, this paper compares three theorists of intersubjectivity in infant research, Andrew Meltzoff, Colwyn Trevarthen, and Daniel Stern. By evaluating the points at which the theorists concur and differ, we hope to clarify the meanings or >forms< of intersubjectivity in infancy. All three have addressed the question of how infants can sense the state of the other, and all have used the concept of cross-modal correspondences as a central aspect of the answer. Nevertheless each has a distinctly different theory of intersubjectivity in infancy.
Our goal in this series of four papers is a further refinement of a theory of interaction for psychoanalysis, with a specific focus on the concept of intersubjectivity. Psychoanalysis has addressed the concept of intersubjectivity primarily in the verbal/explicit mode. In contrast, infant research has addressed the concept of intersubjectivity in the nonverbal/implicit mode of action sequences, or procedural knowledge. We propose that an integration of explicit/linguistic with implicit/nonverbal theories of intersubjectivity is essential to a deeper understanding of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis today. To shed light on an implicit/nonverbal dimension of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis, we include concepts from adult psychoanalysis, infant research, developmental systems theories, and nonverbal communication, particularly the distinction between implicit processing out of awareness and explicit processing at the declarative/verbal level. We conclude with an adult psychoanalytic case illustrating the integration of implicit/nonverbal forms of intersubjectivity into adult treatment.
This paper explores sources of therapeutic action located in inchoate experience, in the often-preconscious resonance that is generated in that dimension of experience which we have come to regard as enacted in the transference/countertransference field. The living and working through of a wide range of problematic and reparative elements distilled in the analytic relationship are described as a crucial source of therapeutic action. A brief historical treatment of the place of enactment in different psychoanalytic traditions is followed by the explication of two different kinds of enactments: ordinary, quotidian enactments that form the daily ebb and flow or ordinary analytic process and (capital E) Enactments. The latter are highly condensed precipitates of unconscious psychic elements in patient and in analyst that mobilize our full, heightened attention and define, and take hold of, analytic activity for periods of time. Clinical vignettes by Theodore Jacobs and Margaret Black are discussed in explicating the latter distinction and considering its implications for technique.
This article examines the clinical and theoretical contributions of Stephen A. Mitchell. Relating his work to aspects of his character, it demonstrates a unifying theme in his life and work. Mitchell employed his methodological strategy both in navigating clinical stalemates and in his momentous theoretical breakthroughs. In working out theoretical entanglements, Mitchell first laid out before his readers two contrasting approaches to a problem and then showed how, by examining the problem from a different level of abstraction, one can find a third alternative reconciling the tension between the first two. Similarly, when dealing with therapeutic impasses, Mitchell learned to tolerate, sustain, and identify the entrapped states in which he found himself until he could free his imagination and gradually discover some third avenue along which to proceed. These methodological approaches were central to Mitchell's development of relational psychoanalysis.
Chapter 5 outlines the stance of sociologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. It discusses Fromm’s alternative, humanist version of religion and psychoanalysis, as well as the parallels he draws between psychoanalysis and Buddhism as a means of achieving spiritual enlightenment. [Taken from Publishers Website: http://www.oxfordclinicalpsych.com/]