A Psychotherapy for the People: Towards a Progressive Psychoanalysis
Abstract
Inspired by the progressive and humanistic origins of psychoanalysis, Lewis Aron and Karen Starr pursue Freud's call for psychoanalysis to be a “psychotherapy for the people.” They present a cultural history focusing on how psychoanalysis has always defined itself in relation to an “other.” at first, that other was hypnosis and suggestion; later it was psychotherapy. The authors trace a series of binary oppositions, each defined hierarchically, which have plagued the history of psychoanalysis. Tracing reverberations of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia, they show that psychoanalysis, associated with phallic masculinity, penetration, heterosexuality, autonomy, and culture, was defined in opposition to suggestion and psychotherapy, which were seen as promoting dependence, feminine passivity, and relationality. Aron and Starr deconstruct these dichotomies, leading the way for a return to Freud's progressive vision, in which psychoanalysis, defined broadly and flexibly, is revitalized for a new era.
... In the sphere of psychoanalysis, they contributed to a picture of change in which the importance of the relationship as a direct therapeutic influence in its own right was derided and the therapist was cautioned to abjure giving any kind of direct advice or assistance, instructed to leave it to the patient to make his own decisions and take his own initiatives, 1 and directed to refrain from too much encouragement, support, or sympathy ("gratification"), lest the patient's autonomy be undermined by well-meaning, but ultimately harmful, assistance. As Aron and Starr (2013) have put it, these ways of working and thinking "dovetailed with the American valuation of self-reliance and the heroic image of the lone cowboy riding off into the sunset. . . . If you improved because of interpersonal influence or reliance on your relationship with your therapist, you were not helped to be as autonomous as you might be" (pp. ...
... 2 One of the earliest important formulations of this impact was Alexander and French's (1946) articulation of the concept of the corrective emotional experience. Their innovations were met with great resistance in the psychoanalytic community, which at the time regarded an emphasis on the direct therapeutic influence of the relationship as detracting from the presumed special transformative power of the traditional psychoanalytic method and as problematically blurring the boundaries between "psychoanalysis proper" and "psychotherapy" (Aron & Starr, 2013). But the basic soundness of Alexander and French's conceptualization has been retrospectively demonstrated, if only indirectly and without acknowledgment, via the repeated adaptation of their idea by almost every psychoanalytic school in recent decades. ...
This chapter covers an integrative psychotherapy known as cyclical psychodynamics and features its origins, applicability, assessment, treatment, therapy relationship, case example, outcome research, and future directions. Cyclical psychodynamics is an approach to theory and therapy that centers on the repetitive interaction cycles that maintain adaptive and maladaptive patterns of living. Employing concepts and methods from psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, systemic, and humanistic-experiential perspectives, the aim is to interrupt these cycles to enable the person not only to be relieved of distressing symptoms but to live more fully and richly. A key focus is on how the person unwittingly recruits “accomplices” in the maintenance of the pattern through the behaviors his actions evoke in others. Also central is attention to the ways that early attachment experiences lead some of our thoughts, wishes, and feelings to be cast into the background, rendered difficult to access consciously or to draw upon adaptively in one’s life. The therapy proceeds integratively, attending both to the expansion of subjective experience and to more adaptive daily behavior, as well as to how each promotes the other.
... The field needs to prepare for this shift in focus, identity, and interest whether we like it or not. Here psychoanalysis is destined to become a psychotherapy for the people (Aron & Starr, 2013). ...
... Stepansky (2009) coins the word "fractionation" (p. xvii) and, along with Aron and Starr (2013), worries psychoanalysis' lack of coherence will bring its demise. In addition to the infighting evident in rivalries between professional associations, journals' editorial boards, and institutes, the field is increasingly attacked by better branded, mainstream treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychopharmacology. ...
The Singular Object of the Oedipal Stage and Earlier Component Objects
the actual ego…which we describe as the system Pcpt.-Cs…is turned towards the external world, it is the medium for the perceptions arising thence, and during its functioning the phenomenon of consciousness arises in it. It is the sense-organ of the entire apparatus…We need scarcely look for a justification of the view that the ego is that portion of the id which was modified by the proximity and influence of the external world…the ego must observe the external world, must lay down an accurate picture of it in the memory-traces of its perceptions…The relation to time, which is so hard to describe, is also introduced into the ego by the perceptual system; it can scarcely be doubted that the mode of operation of that system is what provides the origin of the idea of time. (Freud, 1933, pp. 75-76)
In Freud’s view, the ego is developed out of the id over many stages to form increasingly complex representations of the external world and the objects in it. The ego is not just reason or logic but that which allows for perceptions and consciousness in general (Freud, 1923a, 1938). Freud (1915b) holds a Kantian view that the external world and its objects are only perceived as “subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived” (p. 171)[1]. As expressed in the quotation above, he even holds that the ego must also form a subjective sense of space and time and they can also be taken to develop and become more complex along with our representations of objects (Freud 1920, p. 28). Freud’s Kantianism appears to be something that perplexes most of his critics and the failure to understand it has been part of a great regression in psychoanalytic thought across many schools.
I will be releasing a series of articles that will tackle Freud’s idea of primary narcissism, beginning with this one. In explicating what his Kantian view entails, I will show how many criticisms of Freud’s work misinterpret his positions. This misinterpretation goes hand and hand with ideology which I see, in part, as a desire to import findings from unrelated disciplines into psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has its own clinical approach and generates data from it. When theorists seek to appeal to other disciplines it often goes beyond this data and constitutes an appeal to authority. For example, it is very common to hear that Freud’s drive theory is outdated and based upon a Newtonian mechanistic model. The appeal is to how physics has moved on since Newton to relativity and quantum advancements and therefore Freud’s approach must be wrong. However, it is forgotten that Newton’s formula can still be used to calculate some instances of gravity and, in parallel, some drive behavior is very simple and mechanistic. For example, I get hungry, I eat food, and then my hunger goes down or I feel inferiority, strive to get more money, success, or prestige, and with my sense of triumph in an achievement my inferiority tension goes down. Moreover, Freud’s theory has a place for the confluenceof multiple drives and superego functions in a single act and claiming his theory to be mechanistic in every motivation is very uncharitable and simplistic on another level.
In this article, I begin with Freud’s opening thoughts on narcissism: that there can be a move from actively pursuing a romantic object to a state in which one just fantasizes about one. This is the sense of narcissism as “developmental recession” as opposed to the narcissistic defense which is “the libidinal complement of egoism” or the commonplace understanding of narcissism as excessive self-love (Freud 1917a, pp. 222-223). I will explicate developmental recession as the move from the oedipal to the pre-oedipal in which the former is defined as the stage in which one is driven to pursue a single object for sexual or love (aim-inhibited sexuality) gratification. In contrast to the full Oedipal object drive, Freud defines the pre-oedipal in relation to earlier component drives and I will use the term component objectsto denote what these drives seek. Moreover, I will show that Freud doesn’t merely define these objects as fantasy objects and will offer a phenomenological account of how to conceive of external pre-oedipal objects. I will argue that Freud’s model is best understood by two ideas: the earlier the object, the greater the magnitude of idealization and the earlier the object, the simpler the representation of it. The Oedipus complex, in regards to a developing ego, quasystem perceptual-consciousness, is defined as achieving the most complex view of an object[2].
I will use the term four-dimensional to encompass the idea that the complex representation of the object also includes a sense of it over time. We form a representation of the object, but also of ourselves, in which we can come to appreciate how someone has grown, changed, or potentially become as shadow of their former selves. The pre-oedipal will be discussed as seeing an object that becomes three, two, and at its earliest form, one-dimensional. Ultimately, this earliest level will be compared to the earliest parental-substitutes, God and the Devil, who represent both the greatest magnitude of power/authority/idealization as well as the most one dimensional view of objects being pure goodness/light or pure evil/darkness. I will also bring the oedipal ego drives of power/work into the discussion. They similarly have the most complex cognition for their work object and competitiveness regarding one’s reputation. The magnitude of the importance of one’s work project or ambition for power increases in relation to the growing idealization in earlier stages.
I will use Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective approach as an example of ideology. As stated, she has sought to import recognition theory from the academy and she does not engage with Freud’s Kantianism to understand it as a foundation to psychoanalysis. I will argue that she returns to a naïve empiricism of imagining that there is an“other who is truly perceived as outside, distinct from our mental field of operations” (1990, p. 35). This lays a foundation in which she makes the neat division of dealing with a “real” external object in contrast to an “intrapsychic” object which makes our interactions with others a relation to fantasy. However, this effaces two important distinctions that Freud makes. First, the binary between interacting with others based upon “death drive” repetition-compulsions and interacting with them under Eros or pleasure is obscured. Two, his model of love that is based, in part, on putting the object into the ego ideal/superego, which comes from primary identification with the parents, is ignored. Ultimately, love will always reference a previous object in some way, even when it goes with loving an object whose individuality we are able to glimpse.
Lastly, I will finish off this article by turning to defensive narcissism and its complement, echoism, in order to give an example of what an intrapsychic version of love actually looks like. While narcissism deals with power issues and the defense of superiority to not feel inferiority, echoism deals with issues of belonging and the defense of seclusion to not feel exclusion. This exclusion is the loss of the object’s love— in work life, love life, or friendship— whether from its death, departure, or from its hate, anger, or lack of approval (Freud, 1923a, 1926, Berliner, 1942, 1948). Seclusion signifies the idea of no longer feeling this exclusion by becoming empty, estranged in dissociative phenomena, withdrawn, lost, lonely, preoccupied with one’s difference from others, one’s brokenness or one’s badness, or generally outside of lifein identification with the dead object (Freud, 1917b, Reich, 1990, Horney, 1939, Eigen, 1996, Pederson, 2015a, 2018, 2020a)[3]. In the defenses of narcissism and echoism our search for love isn’t based upon finding a parental-substitute, but includes the idea of finding a part of ourselves in the object.
[1]One need not commit to Kant’s phenomenal vs. noumenal distinction in taking this view. Hegel (1977) offers a version of transcendental idealism in which representations are “a difference that is not a difference.” In short, although representations are not identical with what is perceived, the difference is simply perspectival and not indicating a metaphysical world beyond the illusion of this one. Moreover, Hegel’s theory would make the noumenal synonymous with what science can discover as opposed to Kant’s view of it being unknowable.
[2]This isn’t to say that a child forms her most complex view of people at the age of three to seven. The position is that she gets her most complicated hardware at that Oedipal stage and that life experience will allow her to develop this to varying degrees later on. Gaining wisdom in life is making more complicated software on this initial hardware.
[3]I also give examples of how it’s not just one’s own exclusion but witnessing the exclusion a loved one suffers can lead to seclusion as well (Pederson, 2018, 2020a, 2020b).
... Family therapy, as a field, has attended to social justice and systemic forces that create structural inequities affecting individuals and families (Hoffman, 2001;McDowell et al., 2002), as well as how "systemic maldistribution of power and the politics of identity" produce both resilience and vulnerability (Curtis et al., 2020). Psychoanalytic scholars such as Dalal (2002), Altman (2010), and Aron and Starr (2014) challenge the field to consider how colonialism, racism, and structural forces influence personality development, transference, the therapeutic relationship, attachment styles, and many other psychodynamic dimensions. ...
There is a rich history of psychological movements that call upon the field to collaborate with clients to both acknowledge and resist oppression, as well as an increasing emphasis in professional guidelines on conceptualizing clients with attention to the role of the social and physical environment, to contemporary experience with power, privilege, and oppression, and to institutional barriers and related disparities. These calls indicate the need for psychological case conceptualization to move beyond preconceived assessments of which aspects of clients’ identities are salient to them, to engage with clients’ sociocultural identities as situated within systems of power and oppression, and to engage in advocacy to improve clients’ socioenvironmental contexts and to challenge structural oppression. In this article, we attend to the foundational contributions of Black psychology, intersectionality, liberation psychology, Indigenous healing, and radical healing for using case conceptualization to guide structurally responsive and impactful treatment and advocacy. We then present a case example drawn from a composite of clinical encounters that captures client distress interwoven with structural forces such as addiction stigma, intersecting classism and sexism, White privilege, and caregiver leave policies. To demonstrate how to integrate structural forces with theory, we present how this case would be conceptualized utilizing psychodynamic frameworks infused with attention to the ways in which structural forces shape and perpetuate the client’s distress. To move from naming to integrating structural competency in case conceptualization, psychotherapy training must address how structural forces shape how client distress develops and is maintained and necessitates advocacy outside of the session.
... concepts de diversité et influences mutuelles sont aussi transposables à la relation thérapeutique. C'est d'ailleurs ce que soulignent les auteurs dans leur ouvrage Une psychothérapie pour le peuple : vers une psychanalyse progressiste (Aron & Starr, 2013) : ils rappellent que la psychanalyse doit s'ouvrir à la diversité, renoncer à une toute puissance doctrinale et retrouver un statut vulnérable et marginal source de créativité. ...
... These expressions of ambivalence can be understood as Freud's attempts to overcome his own homosexual desire as well as feminine aspects of his identification arrays, in light of historical forces that included the pathologization of homosexuality and the racialization of the Jew, in the context of which the Jew was perceived as feminized Aron & Starr, 2013 ). ...
... Whilst the mother regulates the child, the child regulates the mother. Contemporary analytic thinking has reduced the distance between curing and caring (Aron & Starr, 2013;Hirsch, 1994), and between therapeutic and natural interactions, as in the case of affect regulation (Schore, 2003). The more I talk with colleagues, the more it becomes evident how disturbing and not yet fully trusted this border is. ...
All the empirical literature on what is effective in psychotherapy, not just psychoanalytic therapy, ends up emphasising relationship and personality. And when you talk about relationship or about the working alliance, you're talking about the two parties making an attachment to each other, which is just a fancy word for love. I will try to show how this applies to a very difficult case.
... Our analyses are not meant to be conclusive, and we invite readers to offer divergent or additional interpretations. We focused our attention on the changes that have taken place from within the discipline-that is, changes that evolved as a result of developments in the theory and practice of psychoanalysisand then, additionally, interpret how those changes may have been influenced by events or movements outside of the field, including psychopharmacology, feminism, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQI spectrum, the civil rights movement (Bergmann, 2002;Aron & Starr, 2013), and other social events. We strove to perceive these results through a lens that focuses on the bidirectional influence of psychoanalysis and culture. ...
Inspired by the work of Fonagy (2008) and Dent and Christian (2019), this study applies a form of quantitative textual analysis to 300 terms of psychoanalytic interest in the PEP archives by tracking their historical prevalence in five-year increments using the aggregate number of articles featuring each term in the field's journals. Our results confirm some of the more well-known inflection points in the history and application of psychoanalytic theory, while also revealing some intriguing surprises. Psychoanalysis remains fundamentally a depth psychology, yet it has increasingly acknowledged the external causes of distress and trauma. Changes in the prevalence of terminology around psychopathology, defense mechanisms, development, gender and sexuality, and psychoanalytic technique are discussed.
... The proliferation of various schools of psychotherapy, pharmacological approaches and the limited allowance of treatment due to the restrictions of American healthcare and individual insurance companies are just a few of the factors that continue to contribute to crowded and increasingly competitive space within which psychoanalytic practice exists. The marginalization of psychoanalysis is partially a self-inflicted wound that can be outlined on several fronts (Aron & Starr, 2012), including psychoanalysis' failure to be more inclusive to a larger demographic of practitioners and patients, and its reluctance to adapt to cultural changes and conduct systematic empirical research that parallel advances in the field. ...
The author describes some obstacles encountered teaching undergraduates psychoanalytic theory. In academic environments that reflect a broader cultural skepticism, disinterest and animosity to analytic ideas, the author argues that it is imperative to develop and utilize teaching methods that have an experience‐near quality. Without clinical experience and perhaps hesitant to use their own personal lives for material, students may seemingly lack data to test out the explanatory value of analytic ideas. This essay illustrates one device the author developed of using students' “celebrity object” relationships to idiosyncratically cathected popular culture figures to allow for increased engagement with analytic ideas.
La psicología humanista y el psicoanálisis suelen ser representados como dos corrientes teóricas contrapuestas e irreconciliables. Ambos enfoques se presentan en forma dicotómica, reproduciéndose un relato equivocado acerca de la relación que la segunda y la tercera fuerza han mantenido a lo largo de su historia. Este relato tiende a omitir los numerosos lazos genealógicos que emparentan a estas dos tradiciones a través del intercambio personal y académico entre los fundadores del movimiento humanista norteamericano (Maslow, Rogers, May, Perls, etc.) y algunos destacados representantes del psicoanálisis post-freudiano (Adler, Rank, Horney, Sullivan, etc.). En este artículo se presenta un breve repaso por los principales vínculos que conectan a la segunda y la tercera fuerza de la psicología, demostrando que las bases conceptuales y clínicas de la psicología humanista se forjaron, en gran medida, a partir de la recepción de un conjunto de ideas provenientes del campo del psicoanálisis post-clásico.
Psychoanalysis is often viewed as a practice relevant only to educated people of means. This article describes a project that matches psychoanalytically trained clinicians with unhoused and formerly unhoused adults in a large urban community. D. W. Winnicott's ideas about impingement, the holding environment, fear of breakdown, and careful monitoring of the analyst's interiority have proven to be most valuable theoretical and clinical tools. A decade-long case example demonstrates the challenges and healing potentials of the work.
In Inghilterra nel 2007 è stato avviato un esperimento nazionale con l'obiettivo di affrontare "il più grande problema sociale del Paese": la depressione. È stato così lanciato il programma Impro-ving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), che consiste nell'offrire terapie psicologiche evidence-based a tutti i pazienti con depressione e ansia. Il NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) stabilì che la terapia cognitivo-comportamentale (cognitive-behavior therapy [CBT]), non i farmaci, doveva essere la prima scelta. La via era spianata. Lo IAPT si propose tre obiettivi: aumentare rapidamente l'accesso alla CBT, diminuire la prevalenza di depressione e an-sia e, il più ambizioso, ottenere un guadagno per le casse dello Stato riducendo il peso economico della depressione, cioè abbassando le assenze lavorative per malattia. Era un New Deal per la depressione, e anche per la CBT. Ma ha funzionato? Noi psicoanalisti siamo disposti a cogliere ciò che ci ha insegnato lo IAPT e sostenere un New Deal per la psicoanalisi evidence-based? Di fron-te alle sfide della disoccupazione, delle crescenti disuguaglianze, del cambiamento climatico, delle guerre e dei lutti dovuti alla pandemia di COVID-19, la necessità di questo New Deal non può essere più urgente.
A description of partnership between a school of psychology and a human rights organization that offers asylum services is used as a basis for probing the ethical complexity of activism. “Doing good” is complicated by the insertion of asylum evaluation services into the reductionist and metrics‐based evaluative mechanisms utilized in conventional psychological services and demanded by U.S. and European immigration proceedings. Conceptualization of migration through the lenses of decoloniality, necropolitics, and critical refugee studies lays bare the extraordinary complexity of the journey of involuntary migrants. Some consequences of the imperative to reduce such complex suffering to simple psychometric parameters and medicalized diagnoses are explored, and the paper ends with a plea for a situated, culturally sensitive, and clinically complex understanding of the human suffering entailed by involuntary migration. Activism, it is suggested, is best practiced within complex ethical frameworks that ensure that, at a minimum, we do no harm to those we seek to serve.
The introduction will lay out the epistemological underpinnings, methodology, and approach of this book to decolonial psychoanalytic theory and technique. It will describe the clinical conundrums that contemporary trainees and seasoned practitioners encounter, such as who brings up culture, identity and power, the patient or the therapist? Why and when should they bring it up? What clinical purpose does that serve? If it is clinically relevant (and it often is), how do we do this? Answering such questions will help us overcome the divide between first learning the clinical “basics,” and later learning about “diversity” as an “advanced topic.” To address these questions, the book will pose a methodological “mobius strip,” working through the foundational theories of Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, and Jacques Lacan through the lens of decolonial theorist and clinician Frantz Fanon’s work. Through this mobius strip, the book will address a series of “broken circuits” in psychoanalysis, between its theory of mind, clinical technique, and critical theory of the sociocultural, yielding an integrated theory and technique. To set the foundations of the chapters that follow, the introduction will also provide a historical review of our social world today, and articulate a theory called the “intersectionality of suffering” to help us think through the interconnectedness of suffering, a theoretical framework that helps us connect therapeutic action with clinical action. The introduction will conclude by reviewing the structure of the book and subsequent chapters.
In the UK in 2007 a national experiment was initiated with the aim of tackling “Britain's Biggest Social Problem”—Depression. Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) was devised as the solution. A universal free‐to‐access talking therapies program would make available evidence‐based treatment to all adults with depression. NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), the body that decides on what is cost‐effective, said CBT, not antidepressants, should be its first line offer. The starting gun was fired. The promise from IAPT was 3‐fold: to scale up access to CBT rapidly; to achieve recovery targets that would reduce the prevalence of depression over time; and—most ambitious of all—to ensure the Treasury would see a return on its investment by reducing the economic burden from depression. People who were on invalidity benefits due to depression would be supported back into employment. It was a New Deal for depression. As well as for CBT. But did it work? A decade and a half on with IAPT, are we in any position to give an answer? This paper will seek to draw lessons about “What Worked”, and what didn't, to ask ourselves a question: are we —those of us in the applied psychoanalytic community—willing to garner what can be learned from IAPT to advocate a new deal for evidence‐based psychoanalysis? Faced with challenges from unemployment and widening inequalities, against a backdrop where global economic recovery must heed the existential threats from climate change and ongoing warfare, to say nothing of the scale of loss and grief for those already impacted by bereavement due to the pandemic, the need for some such deal could not be more urgent.
Türk edebiyatı içerisinde savaşların doğurduğu büyük kırılma anlarının mühim bir yeri vardır. Yazarlar millî şuuru diri tutmak, kimlik unsurunu pekiştirmek, tarihsel veriyi bir hafıza unsuruna dönüştürmek gibi nedenlerle savaşlar dönemine ait eserleri; savaş önce, sıra ve sonrasında verebilirler. Savaş öncesi eserlerini ise propaganda amacıyla, savaş sonrası eserlerini hafıza oluşturma ve resmî tarihin alternatifi olma arzusu içerisinde yazdıkları şeklinde değerlendirmemiz gerekir. Savaşın devam ettiği dönemde kaleme alınan eserlerin ise daha özel bir anlam alanı söz konusudur. Doğrudan savaş edebiyatının alanına giren bu eserlerin dramatik üslupları ve hedefleri dışında pek çok işlevi de mevcuttur. Toplumsal hayatın sözcüsü olma görevini üstlenen sanatçının savaşa dair tanıklığı, bu eserleri doğrudan tarihsel bir malzeme hâline de getirmektedir. Savaş içerisinde eser veren yazar, anlatıda estetik mesafeyi kaldırmak, gözlem ve samimiyeti artırmak durumundadır. Bununla birlikte savaş sırasında yazılan eserlerin hedef kitlesi de önemli bir meseledir. Kimi zaman cephedeki askere cesaret vermek kimi zaman da cephe gerisindeki halka moral aşılamak kimi zaman dünya devletleri için bir kanaat oluşturmak kimi zaman da olası bir kayıp durumunda gelecek kuşaklara tarihsel, kültürel ve iletişimsel bir bellek ve mekân inşası sunmak adına eserler verilir. Yazar, savaşa da katılmış ve cephe içerisinde veya gerisinde görev almışsa, eser veriş amacı savaş nevrozlarını aktarmak da olabilir. Bu nedenle savaş edebiyatı kavramı, tarihsel ve sosyal şartları içerisinde değerlendirilmeli ve anlam alanı çok doğru tahlil edilmelidir. Türk edebiyatında mühim bir külliyat oluşturan savaş edebiyatı ürünleri, özellikle Tanzimat sonrası edebiyatından başlayarak bir hafıza ve tarih oluşturma noktasında oldukça değerli ve bütünsel okumaya uygundur. Bunlar içerisinde özel bir örnek de Halide Edip Adıvar’ın, savaş devam ederken ve yazar da cephede görevliyken kaleme aldığı Ateşten Gömlek romanıdır. Yazarın bu romanı, içerisindeki izlekler takip edildiğinde Freud’un savaş nevrozları düşüncesine uygun bir okuma sunmaktadır. Bu makalede psikanalizin önemli bir başlığı olan savaş nevrozları, Sakarya Savaşı’nın romanı olarak kabul edilen Ateşten Gömlek romanına uygulanacaktır.
Se joignant à l’effort politique et académique qui veut conduire le projet psychanalytique vers une plus grande cohésion, l’auteur propose une méthode standard axée sur un pluralisme clinique, structuré et éclectique, selon une formulation empruntée à la physique. Il utilise des arguments psychanalytiques et philosophiques ainsi que des considérations tirées des idiosyncrasies personnelles des patients pour en conclure qu’il se révèle impossible de donner corps à une métapsychologie unique et globale. Autrement dit, et en dépit de leurs ardents efforts, les théoriciens de la psychanalyse, y compris Freud (1895/1991), Rangell (1975, 2006), Greenberg et Mitchell (1983), Wallerstein (1988, 1990, 2002, 2005, 2013) et d’autres encore, n’ont pas réussi à créer des modèles rendant compte des variables dont l’interaction dynamique donne vie à la subjectivité humaine. Leurs tentatives de jeter des ponts entre les théories du psychisme et la méthode psychanalytique ont également échoué. Par conséquent, l’auteur suggère que le destin ultime de la psychanalyse clinique réside dans l’organisation de ce que Wallerstein (2005) a appelé notre « base commune » (« common ground ») (p. 626), cela grâce à une méthodologie invitant les praticiens de la psychanalyse à puiser dans la mine de l’opus psychanalytique « sa pléthore de métaphores théoriques » (Wallerstein, 2013, p. 36), « ses théories qui nous guident » (Greenberg, 2015, p. 17), « ses paradoxes utiles » (Lament, 2020, p. 196) ou bien encore ses « dialectes régionaux » (Fulgencio, 2020, p. 15). L’application cohérente d’une métapsychologie basée sur le pluralisme pour guider les processus cliniques plutôt que pour fournir des cartographies du psychisme offre une unité des plus nécessaires à l’application clinique de la psychanalyse.
This paper offers a preview of a forthcoming article on the world's first, universal free‐to‐access, evidence‐based talking therapies programme to treat depression: Improving Access to Psychological Therapies. It was pioneered not in the USA, but the UK, in 2007. At one time it could have been led by psychoanalysts, but it wasn't. It was a New Deal, in fact, for CBT. But did this New Deal in 2007 also offer psychoanalysis an opportunity to renew its vitality as a discipline, after decades of being eroded by our long‐term retreat into private practice? Illustrated in the film From Here to Eternity, through characters played by Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra, this Preview shows how applied psychoanalysis can once again aspire to become a universal, genuinely popular, relevant professional discipline. How would we engage ethically with psychiatric casualties of war, for example, within an evidence‐based practice framework today? A novel, brief psychoanalytic treatment for depression, Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy, was developed for use in the UK's Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. It is recommended by NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) as cost‐effective for treating depression. By engaging with evidence‐based practice in this way—as Street Level Bureaucrats—we can reclaim our position at the centre of contemporary publicly funded mental health services.
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered clinical practice in immeasurable ways. This article expands this discussion by exploring the impact of the COVID pandemic, its restrictions, and the co-occurring events of social unrest, protests, and violence on the teaching and learning of psychoanalysis in a clinical training context. In our experiential accounts we explore the dynamics of identity, the dynamics of power, and the dynamics of clinical presence.
Repetition compulsion is a foundational concept in classical psychoanalytic theory. Relational theory extends our understanding of repetition compulsion by proposing the importance of the inability to feel in the face of relational severing. In this paper, we conceptualize how the model of repetition compulsion, one that has previously concerned the intrapsychic and interpersonal realms, can be extended to systems-level dynamics that occur under neoliberalism. Defunding of social programs in tandem with centering individuals as hyper-responsible for their wellbeing tasks the therapeutic dyad with responsibilities that have been structurally disavowed. A case example illustrates these points.
Beginning in 1920 and in keeping with Freud’s sustained encouragement, the first two generations of European psychoanalysts initiated a progressive mental health movement by offering very low cost and free psychoanalytic services that were in harmony with Austrian social democratic and socialist political leaders’ commitment to societal reforms in light of the economic and social inequities after the First World War. This synthesis of biographical and autobiographical accounts of early Freudian, Ego Psychology and Neo-Freudian theorists’ contributions highlights their consideration of the effects of social injustice as central challenges to the development of psychological growth.
In response to Dr. Tronick’s article on the evolution of responses to trauma, I explore the advantages of extending his study by differentiating between three types of trauma. I suggest that as analysts recognize chronic trauma that derives from pervasive racial and cultural prejudice, critical domains of social relevance open up for psychoanalytic consideration on levels of theory and practice. On a clinical level we are enabled to address suffering associated with social marginalization and neglect otherwise thought to be outside the realm of psychoanalytic applicability.
This essay describes haunting memories that returned in response to a psychoanalytic listserv discussion which followed the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The author reflects on her efforts to engage dialectically with her attachments to both psychoanalysis and progressive politics, as well as to her personal history.
À partir de la psychothérapie psychanalytique d’un adolescent transgenre, les auteurs abordent l’après-coup de l’infantile à l’adolescence. En fondant leurs observations cliniques sur le « modèle traductif » de Jean Laplanche et en puisant par ailleurs dans les théories du « double lien », ils tentent de montrer comment les signifiants à caractère énigmatique ou paradoxal que l’enfant se voit précocement implanter par les adultes sont retraduits selon les codes pubertaires. Plus précisément, ils proposent une réflexion autour de l’identité de genre en inscrivant cette dernière dans le contexte plus global du remaniement des imagos parentales à l’adolescence. Ils tentent ainsi de donner un sens aux diverses pratiques de marquage et de modification corporelle envisagées par le patient à la lumière des messages verbaux et extra-verbaux que ce dernier aurait reçus de la part de ses parents. En décrivant les traductions successives des signifiants issus de cette communication intersubjective, ils questionnent accessoirement le positionnement du clinicien face aux mouvements d’« auto-analyse sauvage » déclenchés par le processus adolescent.
Part of an ongoing political and scholarly effort to move the psychoanalytic project towards greater cohesiveness, the author proposes a standard method, borrowing the phrase from physics, for a structured, eclectic clinical pluralism. She [or he] uses psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments, as well as considerations of patients' personal idiosyncrasies, to conclude that achieving one, over-arching metapsychology will prove impossible. In other words, and despite their ardent efforts, psychoanalytic theorists, including Freud (1895/1991), Rangell (1975, 2006), Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), Wallerstein (1988, 1990, 2002, 2005, 2013), and others, failed to create models accounting for the dynamically interacting variables creating human subjectivity. Their struggles to bridge psychoanalytic theories of mind and method also fell short. As a result, the author suggests, clinical psychoanalysis' ultimate fate lies in organizing what Wallerstein (2005) called the "common ground" (p. 626) into methodology which invites psychoanalytic practitioners to mine the psychoanalytic opus for its "plethora of theoretical metaphors" (Wallerstein, 2013, p. 36), "controlling fictions" (Greenberg, 2015, p. 17), "useful untruths" (Lament,020, p. 196), or "regional dialects" (Fulgencio, 2020, p. 15). Cohesively applying a pluralistically based metapsychology to guide clinical processes, rather than provide maps of the mind, offers much-needed unity to psychoanalysis' applied wing.
This contribution focuses on expanding understanding of anti-psychoanalytic attitudes in psychology. Psychoanalysis and related approaches have been openly vilified and discounted within academic and organized American psychology. Socio-historical antecedents of this antagonism provide a framework for understanding how the marginalization of psychoanalysis has been maintained despite the significant empirical, historical, and socio-cultural evidence supporting it. I argue that such marginalization has contributed to professional monoculture, failure to provide consumers with access to effective forms of treatment, and disconnection from critical multicultural frameworks grounded in psychoanalytic tenets. Patterns of psychoanalysis’ exclusion highlight the field’s difficulties in addressing historically situated ideological biases and disputes over resources.
In this paper, we explore the dialectical nature of psychoanalytic social work practice and the benefits - theoretical and clinical - of doing so. We posit being mindful of the dialectic 1) aides us in our effort to identify and speak to differing themes, each of which ‘...each of which is understood...’ understood to be a piece of glass in the mosaic that is the totality of the client’s experience as a human being, 2) enhances our awareness of what might be going on in the clinical moment, particularly the shared experience between client and clinician, and 3) facilitates holding multiple perspectives in mind. On the other hand, non-acknowledgement of the dialectical nature of our theories and interventions seems linked with moments of clinical impasse and fuels the false dichotomies that often confront psychoanalytic social workers, individually and collectively. Appreciation of the dialectic can help us overcome these challenges and enables us to conceptualize our work as a process of becoming, which we see as highly relevant to clinical work with pressing contemporary issues such as trauma, diversity, and the theme of access. We demonstrate these claims through two vignettes, one explicitly clinical and the other an example of contextual factors affecting practice, to show how dialectical thinking allows for a deepening of things both inside and outside the consulting room.
Resumen: Este artículo destaca el proceso por el cual los mensajes culturales relacionados con las categorías contingentes de género y "raza" logran infiltrarse en el inconsciente individual. El autor analiza en primer lugar la introducción del género en el psicoanálisis francés por Jean Laplanche y su expresión original con la teoría del impulso sexual. De este modo, explora las asignaciones de género ambivalentes implantadas en el yo corporal del niño por una constelación de cuidadores seductores y otros adultos comprometidos que, como proveedores culturales, inscriben lo social. Estas prescripciones, que están contaminadas por lo inconsciente del adulto impulsado por la pulsión y el sobreconocimiento inconsciente, son enigmáticas tanto para el emisor como para el receptor. Por lo tanto, deben ser descifradas a través del trabajo psíquico de la traducción basándose en códigos relacionales, anatómicos y sociales. Posteriormente, el autor recurre a las contribuciones de los estudios feministas y de género, así como a los psicoanalistas estadounidenses contemporáneos, para proponer un modelo "sobreinclusivo" de los mensajes enigmáticos "a traducir". Este modelo subraya un enfoque interseccional de las categorías de identidad al considerar las relaciones de poder y los patrones culturales de opresión. La cuadrícula analítica sugerida se extiende luego al paradigma de "raza" leyendo el sesgo del color de la piel a la luz de ejemplos clínicos, artísticos y teóricos. Abstract This article highlights the process by which cultural messages relating to the contingent categories of gender and "race" manage to infiltrate
This response to Kathleen Del Mar Miller’s paper “A Radically Open Analysis: Writing as Wrapping, Video as Skin” (this issue) focuses on the question of form: the form of the psychoanalytic case study and forms of embodiment.
In a direct letter to the author Kathleen Miller (this issue), I take up her radical invitation to “call and respond, or call and call, respond and respond” to her rich, poetic writing in hopes of further “queering” her ideas that emerged from clinical work with her genderqueer patient, K (this issue). Such authentic exchange at the margins has the potential to “queer,” as verb: to keep critically unsettling conventional psychoanalytic thinking, dialogue and practice through clinical activism and (alter)theory. Further, I map Miller and K’s lived “radical openness” which makes “queer use” of poetry, performance and personal injury, onto the phenomenon of “queer environ-mentalization,” a term that emerged in my own clinical work with trans and genderqueer people who bring their lived experiences from the margins—between their internal experience and society’s normativizing of gender—into focus in the treatment encounter with them, skin-to-bone, which radically opens my mind and heart to the full authenticity of their being and our engagement.
As a white cis queer analyst working with queer and trans patients, I’m continually struck by how often the subject of skin — corporeal, psychic and technological — appears in my clinical work. These appearances can be overdetermined or enigmatic, taking the form of verbal and non-verbal, conscious and unconscious communications between patients and myself. But what are we really talking about, these patients and I, when we talk about skin? My preoccupation with this subject, laden with generalities, as well as nuance, began with an affinity for Didier Anzieu’s skin-ego theory and subsequently, led me through the spectacular terrain of numerous fields of study: psychoanalysis, queer theory, critical race theory, cultural studies, philosophy, somatechnics, media studies and film theory, among others. As theory and clinical work are bound together — informing and reforming one another, it has been my relationship with K which has brought this material alive and generated new forms of thinking.
The body plays an important role in the book of Job – as do animals. According to psychoanalytical specifically object-relations theory, a subjective body image was partly constructed through the internalisation of external stimuli from significant others who mirrored the subject through their feedback or through their own bodies, which served as an ideal or critique to the subject. Amongst the external stimuli, animals constitute such significant others. Animals could therefore have impacted Job’s subjective body image, particularly as their bodies were described in detail by God as a response to Job’s complaints and searching.Contribution: Two theoretical and interrelated problems were acknowledged although they cannot be satisfactorily solved: the cultural aspect of the body image and the relationship to animals.
This paper introduces and elaborates the establishment of the first formal training program in Community Psychoanalysis at an accredited psychoanalytic institution: the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and the affiliated Community Psychoanalysis Consortium. We see this as a ground-breaking step in which the formal definition and scope of psychoanalysis is fundamentally transformed; it marks a sea change in what can be formally considered the domain of psychoanalysis, who it serves and what is deemed teachable in a psychoanalytic institute. We situate the development of this training model in a larger psychoanalytic history, and describe fundamental principles that undergird it.
This article examines the refugee experience as a loss of home. When home is viewed as much more than simply a place but is understood as a concept that signifies how human beings locate themselves among other human beings in the world, the loss of home is seen as almost always traumatic. The article begins with the psychoanalytic literature on the refugee experience. Then with reference to a study of the refugees of the Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor explosions, it discusses the societal traumas that drive people out of their homes. It is suggested that all humans share a sense of radical anxiety upon being disconnected from or unstably bonded to home. Next, Buber’s understanding of home is considered. The article concludes with an illustrative clinical vignette and a discussion of the possible intergenerational transmission of exile and homelessness starting with the experience of early humans.
Harry Stack Sullivan, the founder of interpersonal psychoanalysis, was a gay man. His sexuality, far from being an incidental aspect of his life, was integral to his clinical and theoretical innovations. Sullivan was also a path-breaker in dealing with many aspects of gay civil rights that are still at issue today. Sullivan's writings about lust and sexuality have been difficult to understand and relatively ignored. When one decodes Sullivan's neologisms, one can appreciate how he was working toward a radical new formulation of sexuality's place in human living.
The pluralism in models of development, pathogenesis, and technique and the expansion of the applicability of treatment that characterizes the current psychoanalytic scene further erode the traditional criteria for psychoanalysis and the long-standing but increasingly fragile distinction between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The purpose of this article is to delineate general features of the psychoanalytic process that are more encompassing of contemporary theoretical models and to use these features as criteria to explore ifa meaningful distinction can be made between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Following a brief historical review of the literature, I reassess on the basis of theory, research, and practice the so-called extrinsic and intrinsic criteria for psychoanalysis, and I conclude, from today's perspective, that a meaningful distinction with psychoanalytic psychotherapy cannot be made. I then arrive at what, in my view, are the fundamental features of the psychoanalytic process that can include all psychoanalytic approaches.
Lothane Z. The Schism between Freud and Jung over Schreber: Its Implications for Method and Doctrine. Int Forum Psychoanal 1997;6:103-115.Freud's interest in Schreber's famous Memoirswas not to examine Schreber, a life, in all its historicity, but to use the book as case material to illustrate a specific theory he had formulated in 1908: the causal connection between repressed homosexual libido and the paranoid syndrome. While of undoubted heuristic value, this causal connection has not stood the test of time as a universal clinical formulation. In singling out this combined drive and developmental explanatory theory, Freud left untapped many descriptive, diagnostic and dynamic aspects in the story of Schreber.This formulation also illustrates the perennial tension in psychoanalysis between the breadth of method and the narrowness of theory, or doctrine. Whereas method addresses such general issues as the creation of meaning in health and disease, of meaning as mediated by language, memory, perception and imagination, trauma and transference, theory is concerned with the role of specific etiological forces and factors. The theory in question, the sexual etiology of neuroses and psychoses, has been variously contested during Freud's lifetime and thereafter.The debates about the privileged role of sexuality were important in the history of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic movement, the various Freudian and now-Freudian schools, and the Freud-Jung relationship. The differences between Freud and Jung concerning the libido theory and Schreber led to their fateful clash and final parting of the ways.
This commentary rebuts James L. Fosshage’s (1997) conclusion that there is no meaningful distinction in the process between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. J. L. Fosshage’s position is seen as part of a politics of leveling, an unfortunate alternative to the politics of pluralism in our discipline.
This essay proposes that the formative years of psychoanalytic theory and praxis were affected by the fascism, war, and genocide in their midst. That this impact was largely absent from analytic discourse throughout most of the 20th century may be attributed to a number of factors. Analysts at the time had hopes for a positivist psychoanalysis-a "new science" both universal and independent of context. Subjective experiences of the trials and expulsion of mostly Jewish professionals were thus viewed as a threat to the status of both the theory and its practitioners. Some analysts may have also been reluctant to dwell on their ordeal because they felt lucky to be alive and to start anew, unlike those left behind. Finally, the relative silence on the topic may represent a response to trauma, to experiences so overwhelmingly conflictual as to be only partially appreciated, or at times adaptively dissociated. Focusing as much on what has been omitted as on what is included in writings and interviews of analysts from the period, this discussion attempts to discern a presence in absence, noting the style and tenor of the work that theorists and clinicians left behind, all in an effort to find traces of a personal and collective catastrophe that altered theoretical and clinical ideas. © 2010 William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
Transgender subjectivities are paradoxical in that they both undermine the gender binary and ratify it. The contradictions inherent in trans require that we consider trans as more of a process than a thing in itself, a gerund, rather than a noun or adjective, a continuous work in progress, rather than a static fact of the self. But despite cultural upheavals and increasing tolerance, we still want our gender straight up. While we approve and often applaud efforts at excellence in masculinity and femininity (including surgery) that are sex and gender concordant, we are still deeply disturbed by any efforts toward confounding that gender, or crossing over to the “other” one.
This paper illuminates how the “inner world” of wishes, fantasies, affects, and self- and object-representations and the “outer world” of overt behavior and social reality continuously and reciprocally co-create each other. Basing its presentation both on case material and theoretical analysis, it demonstrates the limitations of a linear, archaeological theoretical vision of surface and depths. In its place, the paper shows how daily life and conscious and unconscious subjective organization mutually shape and maintain each other and in the process maintain the individual's dominant personality patterns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
"Neurotic misery" is not the only treatable source of suffering that can be subtracted from the sum of unavoidable "everyday unhappiness." Social inequality and injustice represent another powerful source of unnecessary suffering that, in principle, can be modified and diminished. This article explores the implications of psychoanalytic understanding for developing better approaches to addressing this dimension of human distress, which has been largely neglected in the psychoanalytic literature. In the process, it also reexamines some commonly held assumptions about the nature of the psychoanalytic process and considers how new observations deriving from work with people from different cultural and class origins can contribute to the refinement and further development of psychoanalytic propositions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Even in routine analytic work, for what is dissociated to become symbolized and available to conflict resolution, a patient must experience sufficient interpersonal safety to free working memory while activation of unprocessed dissociated experience is taking place. The author proposes that this necessary synthesis of affective security and relational risk depends on what a given patient and analyst do in an unanticipated way that is safe but not too safe--an enactment of the relational failures of a patient's past while allowing "safe surprises" in the here-and-now to occur. Remarkable convergence is found between cognitive research (W. Bucci, 2003), neuroscience research (J. E. LeDoux, 2002), and an interpersonal/relational psychoanalytic approach that works at the interface of dissociation and conflict. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Contemporary psychoanalysis has come to view all aspects of the analyst's subjectivity as potentially exerting an influence on the analysis. Nevertheless, the analyst's religious background and beliefs about God have not been investigated for their influence. The author's own theoretical and clinical contributions have centered on the themes of mutuality and asymmetry in the analytic relationship. It is not accidental that his or her religious imagination also rests on these dimensions of the relationship between God and the individual. The Brit, or covenant, between God and the people is the core foundation of the Jewish faith. A covenantal relationship requires mutuality, not symmetry or equality, because it is clearly hierarchical, but nevertheless it must be reciprocal, and its centrality implies Judaism's foundations in this mutual relation. Thus, the author uses his own experience as an example of the subtle ways in which religious ideas may influence psychoanalytic theorizing and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This discussion of Charles B. Strozier's "Heinz Kohut and the Meanings of Identity" amplifies Strozier's work by underscoring the history of Austrian antiSemitism that constitutes the background of Kohut's biography and by relating this history to Kohut's self-psychological analysis of religious experience. Kohut's central contribution, the study of narcissism, may be understood as having its origins in Kohut's deep feelings of shame and self-hatred regarding his Jewishness and the vertical splitting and dissociation of this aspect of his religious identity. What made Kohut a great psychoanalytic theorist was his ability to transform his own psychological struggles into a theory and treatment approach that transcended the limitations of his own life and that continues to shed light on the tragic and heroic dimensions of all human experience. © 2007 William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
Several scholars have asserted that medieval Christians believed that Jewish men menstruated. Their arguments, made in support of a grander claim that Jews as a collectivity were gendered feminine in Christian thought, rest on numerous misreadings. Though such a belief did appear around 1500, prior references to a Jewish bloody flux derived from textual traditions that were not gendered. The rupturing of Judas's belly (Acts 1:18-19) inspired accounts of heretics and other betrayers of Christ dying with blood and/or guts coming out of their anuses. In the twelfth century this anal bleeding was exegetically linked to Jewish deicidal bloodguilt via the verse 'may His blood be upon us and upon our children' (Matt 27:25). In the thirteenth century this motif was rationalized using terms drawn from humoral medicine. Simultaneously, a new verse was adduced in support of the notion of supernatural anal bleeding: 'He smote His enemies in their posteriors' (Psalms 77:66). Monthly bleeding was first alleged in 1302, but only among the male descendants of the Jews who had accepted responsibility for the crucifixion. The earliest mention of gendered, monthly bleeding appeared in the 1503 account of the ritual murder trials held in Tyrnau in 1494.
Contemporary psychoanalysts maintain a widespread consensus on the interactive nature of the psychoanalytic process. Mitchell (1997) compares and contrasts the clinical work of three well-known contemporary analysts from three different analytic traditions: Theodore Jacobs, Darlene Ehrenberg, and Thomas Ogden. Mitchell uses this exercise to demonstrate that we each have our own idiosyncratic styles of engaging the world, and thus it follows that we each participate in distinct varieties of analytic interaction. This article places Mitchell's own clinical approach squarely in line with the interpersonal tradition. The article argues that among all of the various schools of psychoanalysis, the interpersonal approach is unique in the freedom that it gives to analysts to behave flexibly and spontaneously with interventions other than interpretation. The article comments on Mitchell's unique qualities as a clinician and teacher.
Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality--or a mixture of all of these? In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religion in the modern period--and why Jewish thinkers have fought as well as championed this idea. Ever since the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers have debated whether and how Judaism--largely a religion of practice and public adherence to law--can fit into a modern, Protestant conception of religion as an individual and private matter of belief or faith. Batnitzky makes the novel argument that it is this clash between the modern category of religion and Judaism that is responsible for much of the creative tension in modern Jewish thought. Tracing how the idea of Jewish religion has been defended and resisted from the eighteenth century to today, the book discusses many of the major Jewish thinkers of the past three centuries, including Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Zvi Yehuda Kook, Theodor Herzl, and Mordecai Kaplan. At the same time, it tells the story of modern orthodoxy, the German-Jewish renaissance, Jewish religion after the Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish individual, the birth of Jewish nationalism, and Jewish religion in America. More than an introduction, How Judaism Became a Religion presents a compelling new perspective on the history of modern Jewish thought.
Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals--German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists--have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish cultureand a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day.
Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.
Two paradigms have dominated psychoanalytic praxis: the classical model that views the impersonal analyst as objective mirror, and the interpersonal-relational model that views the analyst as intersubjective participant-observer. A shift in psychoanalytic consciousness, however, has been taking place, giving rise to coparticipant inquiry, a third paradigm that integrates the individualistic emphasis of classical theory and the social focus of participant-observation, avoiding the reductionism of each. This new perspective, which is rooted in the radical teachings and clinical experiments of Sandor Ferenczi and the early writings of Benjamin Wolstein, presents a significantly different concept of analytic data, technique, and process, and a different perspective on the nature of analytic participation. This essay articulates the seven guiding principles of coparticipant inquiry and reviews their implications for such analytic issues as transferernce and counter-transference analysis, defense analysis, the therapeutic role of immediate experience, the uses of self-disclosure, and the curative effects of the living through process. The clinical dialectics of the interpersonal and the personal dimensions of the coparticipant self are examined. The inherent mutuality, bidirectionality, psychic symmetry, egalitarianism and dyadic uniqueness of coparticipant inquiry and its implications for analytic work are examined. in all this, the unifying theme is that of psychoanalytic inquiry as a personal encounter.
This chapter tries to determine the pleasure that can be attributed to a reading of Freudian text. It examines Freud's Das Unheimliche, which is concerned with tracking down the concept das Unheimliche, or the uncanny. It considers the three occasions where Freud confronts the Unheimliche and looks at his attempts to describe it. The chapter also studies a paradox of writing, where it stretches its signs in order to reveal the secret that it ‘contains’. Here, ‘fiction’ becomes an anticipation of non-representation, a secretion of death, and a combination of silence and language.
Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the "survivor syndrome." Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms.
Shame is briefly described in terms of affective experience, its signal qualities, and its role as trigger and response to characterological defenses. While patient shame has been elaborated in recent years, the analyst's shame has been less considered. Since shame is so contagious a noxious emotion, exploration of patient shame inevitably evokes shame in the therapist. Sources of analyst/therapist shame are assessed in this paper, including countertransference reactions, convictions of inefficacy in the therapeutic endeavor; and responses to patients' non-mutually determined termination. Broader patterns of analyst shame are examined with regard to the training institution (e.g., training analyst status, referral patterns); the broader community (e.g., the role of dynamic psychotherapy in the pantheon of psychological and medical treatment); and personal factors (e.g., aging and illness). A perspective is offered on these subjective shaming assaults.
This issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues takes up transgender subjectivities in all of their dimensionality and complications. The papers grapple with the theoretical paradox of trans, how it both queers gender and ratifies it, while also documenting the struggles of trans persons who are trying to navigate those contradictions so as to lead a livable life. When the bodymind (Dimen, 2000) is at war with itself, there is torment. As gatekeepers, the authors of these papers consider how, and when, it is the body that has to give way.
In this commentary I support Layton's vision of psychotherapy as an unavoidably political practice. However, I caution against a belief in empathy as a primary means of motivating political activity. By sketching a brief history of the concept of empathy, I argue that it is a problematic concept that ultimately will not lead the profession to the type of progressive political practice Layton encourages it to undertake. Empathy preoccupies therapists and patients with inwardness, self-absorption, a modified but sometimes still present objectivism, and an apolitical vision trapped in the Cartesianism from which it originated. I suggest alternative terms to describe what therapists do when they believe they are acting empathically; offer philosophical, political, and socioeconomic reasons why therapists are reluctant to think in alternative terms; and make a link between those terms and a more effective, hermeneutic way of attending to the social realm. I conclude that empathy is not a natural, instinctive process that produces an automatic result and that what therapists mean by empathy is much more a culturally formed moral virtue than a technical skill; it is not a natural, instinctive process that produces an automatic result. Therapists, patients, and the society would be better served if we came to understand and appreciate the difference between virtues and skills, and confront the implications of that difference for both the politics of therapy and a therapeutic politics.
The place of the analyst's “influence” in psychoanalytic theory and practice is explored. There is a current in the literature in which it is welcomed as an aspect of “corrective experience,” although usually legitimized by being forced into the narrow channel of interpretation and understanding. A taboo on influence persists despite theoretical shifts that would seem to clear the way for greater acceptance of its importance. Among other factors, the aversion to influence is traced to its association with hypnotic “suggestion,” which implies little room for the patient's autonomy. Opening the door to embracing the possibility of influence goes hand in hand with, on one hand, the analyst respecting the patient as a competent free agent and, on the other hand, the analyst combining willingness to take a stand with willingness to reflect critically on his or her participation. In that context, and with those caveats, the analyst takes on the responsibility to combat destructive introjects and to become an inspiring, affirmative presence in the patient's life. The analyst's passion for the patient's well-being and for changes that entail the realization of dormant potentials now has its place. Different kinds of expression of therapeutic passion in the countertransference are described and illustrated.
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.
I develop my argument concerning the question of where have all the patients gone in a sequence of three parts. First, I indicate, very briefly, the nature of the issue and the array of confluent socioeconomic causes—as they are usually outlined—that are held responsible for it. Then I take up the remedy for this problem posed by Arnold Rothstein in his book (1998). which is the trigger to this series of invited commentaries, and I indicate how I both appreciate the merits of his proposal to recast the issue as much as possible within a psychological framework, amenable to psychoanalytic influence, and nonetheless feel his approach to be based on a one-sided, and to that extent, a limited and flawed assessment of the problem, and therefore an only partially useful remedial perspective. And lastly, 1 offer an alternative view of the internal historical developments in psychoanalysis that have played their complementary role in the evolution of this perceived “crisis” and the alteration of perspectives, based on my account of our contending current viewpoints on the nature of the relationship between psychoanalysis and its derivative psychoanalytic psychotherapies, that can perhaps promise a more effective counter to the crisis, despite the multiple external socioeconomic developments that are usually accorded causative primacy and that no doubt are indeed formidable.
The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats by religious and medical “experts,” but also of surgical assaults on female reproductive systems (Longo, 1979, 1986; Scull & Favreau, 1986; Sheehan, 1997). Less well known is the apparent obverse: the use of medical techniques to stimulate the female genitalia as a means of treating hysteria and other mental disorders (Maines, 1999; Schleiner, 1995). In this paper, I trace the cultural history (mainly Anglo-American) of the psychiatric enhancement, as well as repression, of female sexual pleasure, through various genital treatments, including the surgical and the electrical.¹ I then make the case that these “opposite” treatments are, in the context of Victorian society, two sides of the same coin of the patriarchal, medical control of female sexuality.
This article examines the clinical and theoretical contributions of Stephen A. Mitchell. Relating his work to aspects of his character, it demonstrates a unifying theme in his life and work. Mitchell employed his methodological strategy both in navigating clinical stalemates and in his momentous theoretical breakthroughs. In working out theoretical entanglements, Mitchell first laid out before his readers two contrasting approaches to a problem and then showed how, by examining the problem from a different level of abstraction, one can find a third alternative reconciling the tension between the first two. Similarly, when dealing with therapeutic impasses, Mitchell learned to tolerate, sustain, and identify the entrapped states in which he found himself until he could free his imagination and gradually discover some third avenue along which to proceed. These methodological approaches were central to Mitchells development of relational psychoanalysis.
To anchor my response to three issues raised by Berman and Bonomi, I rely on Ferenczi's concept of “traumatic aloneness.” First, I agree with both discussants that identification often has constructive and life-creating effects, but I suggest that it may generally arise in response to (sometimes hidden) anxiety, specifically about separation or aloneness. Second, I examine what Ferenczi termed “introjection of the guilt feelings of the adult”—trauma victims frequently feel that they are “bad”—and explore this complex feeling both as an effort to preserve others as good objects and as a way to protect oneself from a frightening aggressor. Finally, I consider the idea that trauma leads to partial psychic death. While I think it is clinically dangerous to assume that trauma can cause the actual, permanent destruction of part of the personality—this assumption can lead to unwarranted therapeutic pessimism—trauma certainly often carries the subjective experience of partial death or dying. The therapeutic effort to undo dissociations and achieve authenticity and intimacy can be thought of as rediscovering one's aliveness through the process of sharing it with someone.
Transgender subjectivities are becoming an increasingly popular area of inquiry for relational psychoanalysis. Postmodern feminist analysts, perhaps especially, grapple with the seemingly contradictory position that the trans subject embraces both binary and multiple, both essentialist and constructivist, modes of being sexed and gendered. Using a composite clinical example, this paper explores some of the dynamics between a transmale psychoanalytic psychotherapist and his transmale patients. Through a close-up lens on the trans–trans analytic dyad, and with an emphasis on metaphors and experiences of the body in both flesh and fantasy, this paper illustrates a model of transmasculine subjectivity in which the language of material substance carries interpretive power. It is suggested that a post-postmodern theory of gender and sex is needed to fully articulate transgender subjectivities.
A Small History of Postcolonial Studies
No profession in the United States has a broader perspective on human needs than social work. Bold but also functional, social
work distinctively places the pursuit of social justice on a par with the clinical treatment of individuals, pairs and families.
Yet for much of the twentieth Century, proponents of the “macro” and of the “micro” approaches to practice have challenged
each other’s commitment to social progressivism and humanist values. Interestingly, this on-going debate has hardly changed
the core “person-in-environment” psychoanalytic paradigm at all. It is time to set aside this hidebound dispute, I argue in
this article: social work is not two institutions folded into one but one profession that must be understood dialectically.
Drawing on the history of the early psychoanalyst’s intense social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and
working classes, I show how psychoanalysis shares in the transformation of civil society and helps restore individuals and
communities alike to self-regulation and productivity.