Is There a Future in Disillusion? Constructionist and Deconstructionist Approaches in Psychoanalysis
(1999)
Kreativität und Schule
(1999)
Laudatio auf die Preisträger
(1999)
Le Coq-Héron
(1999)
Since its formulation by Bleuler in 1911, the generalisation of the term >autism<, mainly due to its use by Kanner in 1943 and its remake by authors of Kleinian inspiration, implies problems which mislead us, blurring our perception and understanding of clinical realities. Our psychoanalytical possibilities can be enlarged by a clear knowledge of the history of psychoanalysis, a dynamic approach to psychiatric classification and to problems related to our conception of the setting. On the basis of a case history the author shows how a child and its family worked through major autistic symptoms and proposes new approaches to some psychoanalytical concepts.
This article, which analyses a crime that took place in the city of Brasilia in 1997, is based on two separate and correlated hypotheses. Firstly, this crime reveals a fact about psychic structure: the >real< dimension irrupts through acts. Therefore, psychoanalytical practice must contemplate the >real< dimension. Secondly, we would like to pose two questions. Is it necessary for today's psychoanalysts to be aware of and involved with contemporary events? If the analyst ignores modern dialectics, what kind of symbolic involvement can he establish with the lives of the people he analyzes? Being committed to contemporary symbolic culture signifies that we must relinquish the comfortable division between good and evil. Acts of violence, performed by human beings, necessarily indicate both >enjoyment< and >truth<. In the symbolic dimension, we understand and comprehend; in the symbolic dimension, we are reasonable. But, not all acts fall within this pacifying register. If we consider these two aspects: on one hand, the analyst's responsibility to the patient, in regard to symbolic commitment and, on the other hand, the irruption of violent and senseless acts, this would mean that as analysts, we find ourselves lacking a certain neutrality, contrary to the position defended by some analysts.
There are many reasons why psychotherapy supervisees are prone to narcissistic vulnerability, in which feelings of self-esteem are challenged. In the supervisory process, the supervisee reveals his clinical ability, basic intuition and personal feelings, creating a powerful experience of self-exposure. Ego ideals towards which he aspires, compound this basic vulnerability. These ideals are challenged by the dual nature of mastery involved in the task of becoming a psychoanalyst. As a therapist, the supervisee is required to perform as something of an authority – if he is not yet an expert, he must appear to know a good deal more than the patient who is seeking his help, displaying some degree of mastery. As a student, he is clearly less knowledgeable than his supervisor, and, in the supervisory relationship, he displays his mastery in a very different way. There he is, at once, the >knowing< therapist and the >unknowing< supervisee. This paper examines the role of ego ideals and self-exposure in the experience of the supervisee, and explores special problems that occur with supervisees who present with narcissistic character defenses. Case vignettes are used to illustrate these ideas and implications for supervisory interventions are explored.
A essência psíquica do homem resulta de dicotomias existenciais que nascem da debilidade biológica da espécie e que naturalmente impulsionam os indivíduos a desenvolverem suas potencialidades éticas intrínsecas. Porém, uma vez na sociedade capitalista alienadora, o homem perde o espontâneo amor à vida e transforma-se alternativamente em terrível amor à morte.
On intimacy between men
(1999)
In this essay, I argue that it is in the very process of establishing a personal relationship to psychoanalytic theory and to the profession that one becomes a psychoanalyst. If our identities as psychoanalysts are established through our relationships to the psychoanalytic community, and to the values and ideals established by this society and embodied in its theories and practices, then psychoanalysis itself functions as the Third to analysts’ dyadic relationships with their patients. Although contemporary psychoanalysis emphasizes the subjective, the intersubjective, and the unique relational matrix, the view presented here of the psychoanalytic relationship as always existing within the context of the psychoanalytic community and its history provides a context that allows us to place some (relatively objective) constraints on what we mean by psychoanalysis, and these restrictions are imposed not only by the individuals directly involved (subjectively) but by a wider set of forces, including not only contemporary influences, but the voices of history and tradition as well. Idiosyncratic, personal, and subjective factors (the romantic vision of psychoanalysis) must be continually counterbalanced by more general, objective, and impersonal considerations (a classicist vision), and, among the analyst's many professional responsibilities, one is to manage the polar tension between these forces. The analyst's only hope in managing this tension comes from the very fact that he or she can rely on the sustaining background of professional allegiances to theory and community, psychoanalytic values and beliefs. The exploration of a clinical vignette from the perspective of three different supervisors illustrates how the theoretical and the technical form a complex system of mutual influence with the personal, the subjective, and the intersubjective and how, in the teaching and practice of psychoanalysis, these factors need to be considered together as functioning in complex and often elusive ways.
On making rules: Toward a reformation of the dynamics of transference in psychoanalytic treatment
(1999)
In the last decade Bowlby's ideas on attachment have been taken up with tremendous flourish within psychoanalysis in general and by feminists, journalists, and politicians. This paper explores this new turn and suggests some historic reasons for the convergence between feminist ideas, politics, and attachment theory. While welcoming the wider dissemination of an attachment paradigm, it cautions against the too easy uptake of ideas that may be less than congruent with the fundamental challenge that attachment theory poses for conventional psychoanalytic models of the mind.
I take this occasion to reflect on the relation between the flourishing attachment tradition established by Bowlby's work and the psychoanalytic tradition. I want to show how Bowlby's virtual expulsion from mainstream psychoanalysis in the early 1960s makes some sense in terms of the history of psychoanalytic ideas, as he was several steps ahead of his own time. I then consider the ways in which other major psychoanalytic authors, W.R.D. Fairbairn and Hans Loewald, as well as the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, struggled with the same problems Bowlby did. There is now a marked receptivity among psychoanalysts to the same ideas that earned Bowlby his place, along with Fairbairn and Sullivan, in the psychoanalytic Gulag. Finally, I consider the way in which an integration of these different angles on the same phenomena can be helpful both conceptually and clinically.
Free association allows the emergence of novel formulations about self and, along with them, new insights, but it needs to modulate the risks of chaos and the compromising of mental integrity on the one hand and the arrest of growth on the other. Interpretation acts to contain and hold associative pressures and so helps maintain the patient's mental integrity, but it limits associative freedom by being necessarily inferential. In addition, in current interpretative strategies, analytic progress depends on the patient's ability to associate. This ability may be poor for longer or shorter periods during analysis. To help resolve these difficulties, a strategy of associative dialogue is proposed and clinically illustrated. The proposed strategy draws on the associative abilities of the analyst. This paper elaborates the way in which two basic forms of associative dialogue – bold and focused analysis – may facilitate the negotiation between freedom and continuity in analytic discourse.