This paper briefly reviews major theoretical and clinical changes in American psychoanalysis since its beginning in the early twentieth century. The immigration of European analysts in the 1930s and 40s was of major significance. Infant development research promoted a shift towards the importance of object relations, reducing the importance of the Oedipus complex. The increasing focus on narcissism and borderline personalities is discussed, as well as the applications to dynamic psychotherapy. Dogma dissipated with increasing latitude in theory and clinical work within >classical< psychoanalysis.
Trauma is the subject of increasing attention in contemporary psychoanalysis. Its complexities will be explored in a clinical case, emphasizing traumatic experience and unconscious conflict across developmental phases. The patient, a young adult white man began analysis complaining of anxiety and depression. Born to adolescent parents, he had experienced infantile stress and childhood traumatic illness. Needy, greedy, and dependent, he was gratified by the frequency and intimacy of psychoanalysis. Genetic interpretation and reconstruction were particularly important in the analytic process. Analytic progress with attenuation of unconscious conflict and developmental transformation proved enduring after termination.
The initiator of the conference and (together with Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor) conference co-chair, Harold Blum, introduces the objectives of the interdisciplinary and psychoanalytic conference on >Parent–Infant Disturbance: Theory and Therapy.< In the epilogue, the author brings up the coincident Paris terrorist attack of November 13, 2015 – the first day of this two-day conference.
The mother’s intrapsychic mental representation of her infant begins before pregnancy and is modified during pregnancy and thereafter. Parents have conscious expectations and unconscious fantasies about their infant, which are all too often not consistent with reality. Early intervention in infant–parent disturbances is important for repair of the relationship and prevention of later pathogenic development. A clinical example of a mother’s unconscious ambivalent mental representations of her infant is presented.
Sociopolitical democratization, the rebirth of Sigmund Freud's legacy, and the revitalization of psychoanalysis in today's Czech Republic created the conditions for the symposium >Psychological Birth and Infant Development< to take place. The sponsors, faculty, and organizers are gratefully acknowledged, together with the citizens of the town of Příbor.
Although at age 75, Freud asserted >deep within me there continues to be the happy child of Freiberg< (Příbor), his statement may now be regarded as an idealized version of his infancy and early childhood, devoid of trauma and stress. His reconstructions of his first three years of life, reported in his letters of October 1897 to Wilhelm Fliess, are subject to their own reconstruction. He had just repudiated seduction trauma as an exclusive etiology of psychopathology. Freud was then in the throes of an intense transference–countertransference relationship with Fliess, with reactivated unconscious conflict and developmental challenge. The reconstructions of his nursemaid, of his reactions to the birth and death of his first sibling, and of seeing his mother >nudam< require re-evaluation and revision in the context of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and new knowledge. While the specific reconstructions are of continuing interest, the methodology of analytic inquiry into early childhood and parenting transcends the inevitable limitations of the infancy of psychoanalysis. The concept of reconstruction potentiated the development of psychoanalytic thought, although with recurrent controversy, especially concerning retrospective meaning, psychic reality, and historical reality.