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Editorial
(1992)
In his closing address to the IFPS Conference on the theme >Psychoanalysis between conformity and opposition<, held in Munich in 1992, the author emphasizes the importance of the psychoanalytical training system in promoting a sense of responsibility on the part of the psychoanalyst. He bases his discussion on Winnicott's concept of the capacity for concern, and concludes that the current training system runs counter to the goal of encouraging a sense of responsibility in psychoanalysts. In this, the author confirms criticism currently being expressed in Germany whereby this situation is a consequence of the incorporation of personal development processes, including the training analysis, within the educational programme used by the training institutions. He sees the reason for the failure to implement changes in the training system as an unconscious need on the part of analysts in training for intimacy, a need which coincides with the need of the institutions involved to maintain their power.
Since Freud's Dream Interpretation and his additional writings on the analysis of dreams, the technique of handling a dream report within the analytic session has remained nearly unchanged. It is characterised by dream-centred associations and their interpretation in regard to dream content and to transference. This approach constitutes an alien element within contemporary interactional psychoanalytic technique and tends to provoke resistances in the analytic dialogue. This article stresses the function of dream reporting during the session with respect to the interactional process. It is concluded that sufficient attention should be given to interactional analysis of dream reporting in accordance with the questions: Why does the patient at this point of the process tell a dream, and why does he tell this very dream instead of another?
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.