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- 2004 (348) (remove)
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.
Der Beitrag erörtert die Anwendbarkeit von E. Fromms Theorie des Gesellschaftscharakters in der praktischen Sozialpädagogik. Dabei orientieren sich die Ausführungen über den Wert der Frommschen Charakterlehre an der Annahme, dass die Einbahnstraßen und das Einzelkämpfertum aus den Köpfen der Pädagogen heraus müssen, um Produktivität zu entwickeln. In das Thema einführend, wird zunächst der Frage nachgegangen, ob der Gesellschaftscharakter überhaupt zu beeinflussen ist. Der zweite Schritt widmet sich sodann dem Begriff des Gesellschaftscharakters hinsichtlich seiner Entstehungsgeschichte bei Fromm. Hier wird der Zusammenhang zwischen Psyche und Gesellschaft in Fromms Sozialpsychologie im Kontext seiner Biographie dargestellt. Der dritte Schritt setzt die Begriffsbestimmung fort und beleuchtet die Funktion des Gesellschaftscharakters bei Fromm. Hierbei ist die Funktion des Gesellschaftscharakters für die Gesellschaft von der Funktion für das Individuum zu unterscheiden. Grundsätzlich ist der Mensch weniger determiniert durch Instinkt als das Tier. Der Charakter kann nach Fromm den Instinkt ersetzen. Reaktionen laufen ab, ohne dass darüber nachgedacht werden muss, da das Charaktersystem das Grundmuster für die Verhaltensweise vorgibt. Eine weitere Funktion des Charakters im Allgemeinen ist die Vereinheitlichung der Handlungsweise. Der Mensch handelt innerhalb eines geschlossenen Systems, das einer bestimmten Logik folgt, vorgegeben durch die Charakterstruktur. Darüber hinaus lassen sich noch die speziellen Funktionen des Gesellschaftscharakters beschreiben. Da er das Ergebnis der Lebenserfahrungen einer ganzen Gruppe ist, ist er als verbindender Faktor der Individuen mit der Gruppe zu verstehen. Aus einer solchen Basis können sich Ideen beispielsweise zu 'mächtigen Triebkräften' entwickeln. Nur mit einer bestimmten Charakterstruktur ausgestattet können diese Ideen oder Werte von den Individuen nachvollzogen werden. Auf dieser Grundlage erläutert der vierte Schritt abschließend den Sinn der Erkenntnis des Gesellschaftscharakters nach Fromm für die praktische Pädagogik.
Not until after the Second World War did German sociology get back on par with the general Western mainstream that remains the standard to this day. Prior to the Third Reich, various philosophical and sociological schools of thought and traditions had emerged. They were quite unique to Germany and very different from those in other Western countries. It was first and foremost the brutal destruction by the Nazis and then the US modernization policies in post-War Germany that eradicated a specifically German scholarly culture. One of these specific German schools of philosophy was the so-called Frankfurt School around the philosophers Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse (and later Jürgen Habermas).
The mind and the body
(2004)
The co-construction of the intersubjective field is of interest to psychoanalysis, yet detailed clinical material illustrating the nonverbal dimension of this process remains rare. This case presentation of Dolores illustrates two themes of the 10-year, thrice-weekly treatment conducted sitting up: (1) the integration of the >faces< of Dolores herself, her multiple early attachment figures, and my own and (2) traumatic loss and mourning. Dolores was preoccupied with the faces of her childhood, and she wanted to be able to find her own face in mine. But she could not look at me, her own face was dampened, and she was often silent. Extremely fearful, withdrawn, and dissociated, she nevertheless longed for attachment. The paper describes both the process of co-constructing our attachment, as well as her difficulty in using our attachment, in large part because of her difficulty in mourning the traumatic loss of her first mother. Although Dolores was a brilliant and accomplished professional woman, and capable at times of highly articulate self-reflection, much of the progress of creating the attachment occurred through the implicit >action-dialogue< of face, voice, and orientation. I made an unusual intervention, derived from my background with videotape microanalysis of mother – infant interactions. I took a series of videotapes of Dolores and me together, and of my face only while I interacted with her. Because she did not look at me at this time, seeing my face seeing her while she watched the videotape and hearing my sounds responding to her, heightened her experience of my response and her own visceral experience: she came to recognize herself in my face recognizing her. Dolores urgently wished not >to go dead,< and Dolores had remarkable abilities to reflect on our process, to put her experiences into words, to convey how important I was to her, and eventually to analyze her difficulties with mourning. Our respective contributions illustrate the co-construction of the therapeutic action of the treatment.
This article seeks to identify the theoretical foundations and practical features of spiritual management development (SMD) through social movements which have enabled the diffusion of religious practices into secular life and led to the development of a more spiritualized psychology. Although similarities can be seen with outdoor management development, SMD is distinctive because it encourages subjects to search for meaning in their everyday working life through engagement with an inner self. It thus encourages an internalized, implicit form of religiosity where the search for self-understanding and the search for meaning are closely aligned. Through a re-contextualized, critical reading of the idealistic, Utopian visions portrayed by Maslow and Fromm and the spiritual, transpersonal psychologies of Jung and Assagioli, the intellectual foundations from which SMD practice has developed are traced. Analysis of the texts associated with SMD practice illustrates how these discourses are made meaningful to managers through the concepts of self-realization, holism and personal and embodied experience which define events as implicitly religious. However, by defining managerial identity in terms of the inner self and placing responsibility for change on the individual, SMD is isolated from possible critique and transformed from a potentially enlightening into a potentially repressive project.
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.
Erich Fromm als Soziologe. Anregungen aus dem Werk von Alfred Weber und Zuordnungen zur Soziologie
(2004)
Erich Fromm
(2004)
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.
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.
The relationship between trauma and the symbolic function of the mind is discussed in three parts. First, a short outline is given of the long-lasting split within the field of trauma: it consists in a dichotomy between the symbolic and anti-symbolic reading of the traumatic experience – as I have called it in a previous paper. In the second part, it is maintained that the work of Ferenczi represents an attempt at overcoming this split. In the third and last part, the notion of symbolic adaptation is introduced. The process of adaptation has to ensure the survival of the individual along lines capable to foster the hope that the lost equilibrium between the individual and his environment will one day be restored. This function is performed by symbols: by linking together the lost satisfaction and the hoped-for wish-fulfillment, by creating bridges between past and future, symbols enable us to adjust to the new environment without renouncing hope. Symbols are mediators between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. When a person is struck by trauma it is precisely this unifying function which is broken. A typical consequence of this situation is described by Ferenczi as a rupture between feeling and intelligence.
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.
Editorial
(2004)
A society undergoing rapid change, which doubts its own possibilities of survival, calls into question the worth of psychoanalytical theory and practice. The author emphasizes that the Ferenczian clinical evolution could be a source of inspiration for reinvigorating our trust in the prodromes of the Freudian paradigm, and thus for relaunching the authoritativeness of our thought and our psychotherapeutic method. In this light the author examines the affective and cognitive qualities that render Ferenczi a mentor of our possible future development, taking into consideration the following aspects: the communicative and intersubjective perspective that denotes Ferenczi's thought since his first writings; the receptive, reflective, and self-reflective capacities which have progressively accompanied his own commitment and clinical attitude; and his elective work on trauma and >the traumatic<, including the algogenic messages transmitted during the healing process by analysts in fear (and perhaps terror) of their own regression and countertransferential catastrophe. In particular, these last events (central in the Ferenczian vision) are today specifically stimulated by new forms of pathology which search for, with our help, a resolution of the apathetic pain and the tearing apart of the identity that characterize the suffering of patients.
What patients mainly want – which Ferenczi noted as early as 1932 in his clinical diary and which Bion later expressed in his Cogitations (1992) – and what some patients need, is to experience how the analyst lives and processes the interpersonal events that lie at the origin of their affective and mental suffering. This is especially true with schizoid patients who were profoundly emotionally deprived in childhood. In this paper, the author investigates this crucial aspect of the intersubjective analytic relationship in his treatment of just such a patient, an extremely silent and inert young woman. Through a detailed examination of clinical material from various stages of her analysis, he explores how the analyst's unconscious emotional response serves as both a tool for comprehension and a key element of environmental facilitation – a >new beginning,< to use Balint's phrase – that may help the patient attain a level of development and emancipation that he or she has never experienced before.
Mechanisms of dreaming in the processing of early traumatic situations and their clinical utilization. The difference is established between dreams of >repetition<, which lack dream imagery and contain a great amount of anguish, consisting of bodily sensations which may last on awakening, and the >secondary dream< with imagery, into which the first type can be transformed when the capacity of the psychic apparatus to process the traumatic situation is increased through therapeutic work. This >secondarization< of the repetitive dream has a traumatolytic effect, allowing the patient to reach psychoanalytically the mechanisms and mental states prevailing in the traumatic situation, through the mechanism of dream autorepresentation described by Silberer. In some cases, as illustrated in the clinical material, it is possible to anticipate the event of episodes of somatic disease before they become clinically evident. The detailed analysis of dreams in patients with these characteristics is presented and discussed.
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.
Introduction
(2004)
Éditorial
(2004)
Un cas de dyszapie
(2004)
La pensée hypertexte
(2004)
Martin Buber und Erich Fromm
(2004)
Introduction
(2004)
Painting the vortex: The existential structure of the experience of parenting a child with autism
(2004)
The experience of parenting a child with autism is one of change to the parent's self. The associated triad of impairment in autism of impaired communication, social skills and a repetitive way of being permeates into the self of the parent through the medium of the social parent child relationship. This is a progressive process likened to the parent being pulled into a vortex. The existential mechanisms through which this may plausibly occur are considered.
This essay elaborates the notion of chemistry between people and how we understand it psychoanalytically. The author puts forth the idea that certain experiences are lost or diluted when put into words, yet seem to come to life through aesthetic media that do not rely on words (art, music, poetry). Although psychoanalysts are often tied to interpretation in the belief that signifying experience helps to process it, patients not only seek understanding but also have a need to be known and appreciated experientially. Perhaps that is why they often privilege some experiences as magical or chemical and are reluctant to deconstruct them in treatment.
Psychoanalytic Supportive Psychotherapy of a Terrified Communist: Report of a 37-Year Treatment
(2004)
This paper has both theoretical and historico-cultural dimensions. Theoretically, it describes the origins of an >American Independent Tradition,< intersubjective ego psychology, in the work of Loewald and Erikson. Just as the British Independent or Middle Group thinkers incorporated elements of both the Anna Freudian and Kleinian approaches, so the work of Loewald and Erikson incorporated and synthesized elements from the two dominant and antagonistic schools – Hartmannian ego psychology and Sullivanian interpersonal psychoanalysis – that constituted classical American psychoanalysis. Intersubjective ego psychology, exemplified in the work of these two founding thinkers and others who follow them, remains firmly committed to ego psychological understandings and technique while also theorizing, without thereby coming to identify as either interpersonal or relational the centrality and pervasive impact of the object-relational, developmental, and analytic transference – countertransference fields. As a historicocultural study, the paper explores what makes American psychoanalysis American, though it also suggests that defining, other than descriptively, what is characteristically American is itself problematic and can be done only with self-conscious irony. It also provides a historical overview of psychoanalytic controversies in the United States, and it considers schematically the relations between >American< and >European< psychoanalysis.
Beebe's case presentation illuminates the complex architecture of nonverbal procedural forms of interaction and the painstaking development of capacities for self- and interactive regulation within the balance model of intersubjectivity developed by Beebe and her colleagues. This discussion focuses on the patient's persistent search for the self-initiating, agentic experience that exists within, or in dialectical relationship to, the development of self within the dyad. The patient's individual, private experience and her very active use of her analyst and her creation of the analytic space are drawn out for emphasis in a treatment characterized by exquisite attunement by the analyst and profound withdrawal on the part of the patient.
Review Eric L. Santner: On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig
(2004)
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.
The relational reach and psychotherapeutic action of comedy are examined in the opening phase of treatment with a man who had an early history of neglect and consequent neurotic isolation. Through the examination of a series of comedic enactments that cracked into the beginning phase of this treatment, comedy's animating force to defy neurotic gravity and aid in the reanimation of primal density is considered. The ways in which laughter opened into a maternal erotic transference – countertransference is further detailed, in conjunction with reflection aimed at the aggression of this comedic bond, including countertransference hate.
The paper reviews central concepts and research findings of attachment theory emphasizing its clinical relevance to psychoanalytically informed clinicians. We then turn to a historical analysis in order to understand why Bowlby's work was dismissed within psychoanalytic circles and the reasons why Bowlby's contributions and attachment theory have begun to have a significant impact among clinicians within the last ten years.
Half a century after Halbwachs laid the foundations of a sociology of memory, a new edition of his work >Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire< has allowed scholars both to understand it more fully and to appreciate its limitations. This article attempts to elucidate the problem of collective memory, distinguishing different forms of memory in the state and civil society. In this dialectic between state and society, collective memory is constructed. This is the main hypothesis of the article. The author uses Fromm’s classic work on Mexican peasants as well as Borges’s >Funes the Memorious<. Both texts – one socio-psychoanalytic, the other literary – illustrate forms of social memory, its achievements and its limitations.
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.
How to find Fromm
(2004)
This commentary on Beatrice Beebe's long-term intensive work with an adult patient using the video as an adjunct to the treatment offers a perspective on the work that reflects on the need for bridges to be built across the Atlantic and between disciplines. Using the classic psychoanalytic tools of transference, countertransference, and the paradigm of the Oedipus complex, the author considers the importance of mother – infant research in informing psychoanalytic work. She looks at ways in which this research can vitally inform a different but related territory, while not necessarily becoming incorporated into the consulting room.
This presentation focuses on one of the author's terminally ill patients. The patient is a Hispanic American physician who is aware of the implications of her illness. At one point, she learns of her analyst's previous illnesses, similar to hers, but in the author's case successfully treated. Of considerable importance to this case study is the author's return for sessions with her own former analyst, so that her feelings about the patient become a subject for analysis. The approach represents a relational perspective. It is intersubjective, co-constructed and mutually processed. Technique and decisions about self-disclosure are tailored specifically for this particular dyad. Dreams of both patient and analyst are presented, along with details of countertransference reactions and the role of the patient's former analytic psychotherapy group. For all its unique circumstances, this case may bring to the foreground other, more common, analytic dilemmas.
A basic rhythm of breakdown–recovery, with many offshoots and permutations, characterizes aspects of psychic life. This rhythm threads its way through Elkin's, Winnicott's, and Bion's work and plays an important role in the unconscious processing of affects. If this rhythm is damaged or jammed, affect processing goes awry. Dream work helps initiate affect processing, a kind of emotional digestion. If the dream work's rhythm of breakdown–recovery is damaged, one lives in a state of chronic emotional indigestion or starvation. Clinical work, including a child's dream of the World Trade Center disaster, illustrates the discussion.
On Medial Identity
(2004)
An important change is taking place in the identity forming processes in human development, caused by the increasing medialisation of communication, through television, video and Internet. In this regard, the medial mode of communication seems to be more important than the overwhelming variety of the transmitted contents. It represents the prototype of a narcissistic relation structure by arousing needs but not answering them. The identification with this mode of communication creates what the author calls medial identity in this paper. It is described as an adaptation to noncontingent experiences. An interaction consists between the medialisation of the adult world and an estrangement in the identity forming developmental conditions in childhood, which gets more influential from generation to generation. The increasing usualness of the described phenomena indicates that a new normality is heralded here.
I examine how Sándor Ferenczi has survived in the cultural memory of psychoanalysis, and why myths and legends have been created around his life and work. It seems that he could not escape the fate of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, most notably, that of Freud and Jung: their life and work have become an object of cultic respect for the followers, diabolic figures for the enemies. Quasi-religious cultivation of the >great man< is an often observable phenomenon in literature, politics, history and in science, and it has several political and ideological functions. These functions may help to increase the inner cohesion and the group identity of the cultic community, to defend the group against external threats. Psychoanalysis has always been vulnerable to myth formation; first, for obvious sociological reasons, and, secondly, for reasons originating in the nature of therapy. The cultic functions can be realized in several ways, such as, for example, the ritualization of the transmission of knowledge, and the >biography as passion< that is, attempts to create a biographical narrative in which all life history moments crystallize around the great man's central theme. Most of the biographies on the life of great psychoanalysts are of this kind – and Ferenczi is no exception. A historiography of psychoanalysis must follow the path of modern historiography in general, which attempts at deconstructing both myths and counter-myths about persons, events and processes, in political, as well as in cultural and intellectual history. By examining the structure of myth formation about psychoanalysts we can learn a lot about how ideas are operating in changing social contexts.
This paper tries to show that Ferenczi's contributions in >The Development of Psychoanalysis< (with Otto Rank) and in his >Clinical Diary< are pivotal for the development of modern psychotherapy with severely disturbed patients. In addition, the question of whether a psychotherapeutic technique should or could be communicated to others is discussed.
Through numerous clinical examples and from a point of view focused on field theory the author reflects upon what are the main characteristics of 'transformative interpretations' and upon the mental and affective conditions that support it. He especially centers his attention on difficult patients who have experienced cumulative affective traumas in their lives.
Responding to Davies's extension of the classical psychoanalytic description of the Oedipus complex, the authors argue that, in theoretical thinking about the Oedipus complex, attachment and sexual relating must be carefully distinguished, although they ceaselessly interact and – in the end – their separate contributions may be hard to disentangle. Making this distinction enables these authors to suggest that it is less likely to be a refusal of romantic response that triggers the patient's relentless pursuit of love from the analyst than an earlier disorganization of the infantile attachment. Taking the transference situation as a whole, the patient's persistent demand for an unattainable gratification can then be seen as the patient's determination to create in the consulting room another person who is in beleaguered, defensive withdrawal from a relationship. The discussion further elaborates the similarities and differences between the authors' own theoretical position and Davies's relational perspective through a consideration of the case of Roberta presented by Davies in her paper.
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.