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- 2000 (293) (remove)
Reply to Bergman and Foster
(2000)
With permission of the Finnish artist Juhana Blomstedt, a selection of his thoughts on art collected in the book >Muodon Arvo< (The Value of Form) and from an interview with the psychoanalyst Veikko Talvitie, have been translated and reproduced in this issue. Aphoristic sentences, reflecting his views on the value of form, on time and memory, art as communication, abstract painting, or on the artist and his role in society, build up some of the chapters of his book, but the same sentences can also be found time and again in longer and more coherent texts. They seem to contain the essence of the artist's reflections on art and on >the enigma of being in the world<.
The way we plan and live our built environments reflect unconscious forms of thinking realised through architecture. Cities become holding environments that offer inhabitants differing forms of psychic engagement with the object world. The way they are planned and the types of objects they offer add up to degrees of >imageability<, an attribute of any city that could become part of a psychoanalysis of the built world, or what Bachelard termed a >topoanalysis<. Cities also play with life and death as those who inhabit built structures will be outlived by the places they inhabit, yet they enliven the inorganic spaces they construct. All buildings may, then, be forms of death brought into lived experience, and architects negotiate complex issues involving the matriculation of forms of death into human life. The >spirit< of human endeavour needs representation in the built environment and we may consider the ways in which a psychoanalysis of the built world could lead to a psycho-spiritual representation of human life.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Review Donnel B. Stern: Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis
(2000)
Reality
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
This. Reply clarifies the ideas originally presented in >Beyond Milk and the Good Breast: Reconfiguring Psychoanalytic Dyads< (PD 9/5, 1999) in response to Steven Reisner's commentary. It faults Dr. Reisner's reading of Lacan and Kristeva, as well as his use of male-gendered metaphors to transform my clinical material into a different analytic treatment. I conclude that, by arriving at such differing conclusions regarding theory and clinical treatment, he inadvertently proves, and enacts, the basis of my argument: that the gender of the analyst is an important variable that affects psychoanalytic formulations, treatment, and outcome.
What Is Psychoanalysis?
(2000)
The patient's containment of the analyst's affect occurs in a broad range of situations that extend far beyond the more visible instances when the analyst is directly expressive of his or her own affects. This paper begins to explore how patients help analysts contain various kinds of affects within the analytic process, particularly more routine and less heroic types of containment. Although this containment is generally a far less prominent feature of analytic work than is the containment provided by the analyst for the patient, it is omnipresent. Routine elements of containment that the patient provides for the analyst involve working with the knowledge of the limits of the other – including the possibility that in a long-term treatment the patient will often get to know quite well some of the quotidian aspects of the analyst's personality and its relation to the patient's conflicts. Mutual aspects of containment are extremely important in the expression and titration of anger and disappointment, desire, hope, humor, and the negotiation of psychic possibility within the analytic dyad.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
This symposium addresses a psychoanalytic lacuna: race. The papers it comprises, drawn from both clinical and academic precincts, pick up the thread of social commentary that runs through the psychoanalytic fabric. Here Psychoanalytic Dialogues joins other like-minded efforts to position the psychic and the social, the clinical and the cultural, in the same discourse, and to consider the painfulness of political inequity amid therapeutic intimacy. These essays demonstrate the clinical and intellectual benefits of the engagement with the disciplines characteristic of psychoanalysis in the previous generation. They also reveal how the evolution of psychoanalytic practice itself potentiates recognition of psychoanalytically marginalized dimensions of society and culture that constitute subjectivity and inform everyday clinical life.
This commentary addresses two themes: parallels between religious and psychoanalytic education and the question of group survival in a world of competitive groups, whether religious (>strict< vs. >weak<) or psychoanalytic (differing psychoanalytic approaches). >Strict< religious education involves teaching both critical thinking and identification with the particular religion. This blend of critical thinking and identification with psychoanalysis is crucial in psychoanalytic education. We want to graduate students who see themselves as psychoanalysts rather than as being >interested< in psychoanalysis. This goal is accomplished when students have close, positive experience with personal analysts, supervisors, and teachers who are strongly committed to psychoanalysis but in a manner that encourages students to think critically and find their own psychoanalytic perspective. With regard to the second theme, I discuss how our narcissistic commitment to one or another psychoanalytic model interferes with open integration of new insights. Individual analysts privately integrate competing ideas in their own idiosyncratic ways. When these individuals publicly represent competing psychoanalytic groups, however, they tend to emphasize differences among these groups. They then find ways to appropriate new ideas as extensions of their own evolving tradition. In this way, a theoretical school is able to integrate new developments while preserving its own identity.
After a brief exploration of Hegel's writing on the formation of self-consciousness, including the place of religiosity in this formation, the article examines Kojeve's response to a Hegelian homo religiosus, followed by a counter-response to Kojeve's atheism through a peculiar, Jaspersian reading of Erich Fromm's discussion of the >X< experience. Finally, it will be argued that the desire for mutual recognition, and humanity's yearning for transcendence, are essential experiences in the formation of self-consciousness.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
This. Reply to the commentaries by Corbett, Hansell, and Stern explores whether Lacan's concept of the real can – or should – be translated into more readily recognizable terms. It extends our previous discussion of impossibility by arguing that not all ideas and experiences can be brought within the realm of the known and familiar. We suggest that impossibilities of meaning should not be understood primarily in phenomenological terms, and we demur from the assessment that our concept of impossibility offers nothing for clinical work. Claiming that what resists meaning also impedes relationality, we encourage relational theorists to address the nonrelational processes that subtend relationality, including the relation between analyst and patient. We acknowledge that the theory of impossibility – or what we now call >negative mediation< – raises a fundamental challenge to relational theory, but we insist that disruptions of relationality need not be considered pathological. Taking into account the nonrelational may enhance rather than impoverish relational psychoanalysis.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
This paper offers an antiessentialist, psychoanalytic account of gender by arguing against Butler's deconstructive critique of gender essentialism. We develop an alternative to Butler's conception of gender as performative by focusing on those aspects of gender that resist meaning and representation. Using Lacan's concept of the real, we argue that any viable theory of gender must account for the limit conditions of cultural discourses that constitute subjectivity and sociality. Once gender is understood in terms not of proliferating possibilities for meaning, but of a certain impossibility of meaning, then gender's bearing on human relationality requires reconceptualizing. Claiming that various cultural narratives about gender (including traditional psychoanalytic narratives) should be recognized as symptomatic attempts to come to terms with a fundamental impossibility at the heart of sexual difference, we conclude by suggesting ways in which psychoanalysis may productively illuminate the failures of meaning that structure human relationality.