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- 2010 (124) (remove)
Following both Bion's and Aulagnier's thought, this paper seeks to examine two functions of psychotic syntax within the nonpsychotic personality. The first function is the creation of a split between voice and meaning in the mother–infant relationship, a split whose aim is to disengage contact with contents that cannot be metabolized and that are associated with the mother's denied death wish toward her infant. The second function pertains to the use of psychotic syntax as a way of denying separateness and annihilating the >speaking I.< Both functions will be exemplified by clinical case studies. In conclusion, psychotic language will be discussed as a >hybrid language< generated by an incestuous relationship between the mother's and the infant's language.
From the moment man first learned how to say >no<, human history and the relational celebration between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective was set in motion. Liberation does not permit any type of regression. When an adult individual goes in search of symbiosis with nature, he reveals his pathology. Intrapsychicity, and with it, intersubjectivity, is broken.
Most people who recognize his name are aware that Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was considered to be one of Freud's most brilliant students and an important contributor to psychoanalytic theory. But it is also widely known that this innovative thinker, who is still read with interest over 50 years after his death, died in a federal penitentiary in the USA. The case against Wilhelm Reich, brought by the Food and Drug Administration, has been admirably detailed in Wilhelm Reich vs. the U.S.A. by Jerome Greenfield. Less well known are two other intertwined investigations of Reich, the first by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which led to his imprisonment for nearly a month after the USA declared war on Germany in 1941; and the second by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in an attempt to remove his naturalized citizenship and deport him. This paper examines in detail these two assaults on Reich, placing them within the historical context of a lifetime of marginalization and denunciation by authorities, from the Communist Party in Germany to the International Psychoanalytic Association to academic biologists in Norway to right-wing Christian moralists in the USA and finally to agencies of the US government.
The paper presents a clinical model of different subtypes of pathological mourning and the intrapsychic and intersubjective conditions that initiate and maintain them. Specific psychotherapeutic interventions for each subtype are proposed, taking into account that an intervention that would produce change for a certain subtype will reinforce pathology for another one.
The gaze is originally experienced as a disembodied force. This experience is discussed here from a psychopathological prospective and from a developmental perspective. In certain states of regression, when the boundaries between the self and the others are fading away, the gaze is again experienced as a disembodied force that radiates from the eyes and can dangerously penetrate into the mind. The body and its extensions are usually used as a shelter. The body performs this sheltering function in a natural and silent way, and only when this function is lacking do we become aware of it. Shame then signals the failure of the ordinary sheltering function performed by the body. If the external body is not sufficiently cathected, its sheltering function is also decreased, to the point that the body is experienced as transparent, and the most intimate feelings and thoughts become dangerously available to others. In primitive societies, this situation is reflected in the universal belief in the >evil eye,< the most common defense against the evil eye having been a representation of an erect penis. In ancient Rome, the phallus-shaped amulet used to ward off the evil eye was called the >fascinum<: this magic phallus was supposed to neutralize the attack by fascinating the disembodied gaze, that is, by binding it (from the latin verb fascio, fasciare, to bind). The construction of mastered visibility is an organizer of the ego structure. The fascination of the mythical Narcissus for his own mirror image illustrates a central moment of the dialectical construction of the self: the effort to bind the disembodied gaze that is threatening the self, by giving a body to it and by fixing it to an image. Narcissism is thus the effort to bind an almighty free-floating gaze.
Editorial
(2010)
>Who?, where?, what?, in which way?, to whom?< – besides being the questions Paula Heimann suggested that any analyst should ask him- or herself while exploring the patient's communications, these are also the main issues the authors addressed through the results of their survey on the present state of the relationship between psychoanalysis and universities in Europe. This is a pilot study that tries to chart a map of European psychoanalysts (for the moment including only members of the International Psychoanalytic Society) working at various levels in universities. The aim is to set up a network between them for starting a debate on shared problems, hopes, and anxieties relating to the future of psychoanalysis in academia.