Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis
... 134-135) Unquestioned in this otherwise detailed research is the assumption of regression as detrimental to individuals and organizations as a whole; an assumption traceable to the appropriation of Kleinian ideas in particular. First, and echoing Britton (1998), ''regression from the depressive position into a paranoid-schizoid mode is very familiar in the Kleinian literature' ' (p. 72). ...
... 72). Yet, as Britton (1998) also rightly notes, ''if we look closely at Melanie Klein's own writings we find that she described the paranoid-schizoid position sometimes as a defence, sometimes as a regression and sometimes as part of development'' (p. 70). ...
... Curiously, this is despite the fact that Bion apparently rarely uses the term regression in his published works. AsBritton (1998) observes, a comparative assessment of regression only appears in a line from Bion's unpublished notebook: ''Winnicott says patients need to regress: Melanie Klein says they must not: I say they are regressed'' (p. 71). 4 And indeed,French and Simpson (2010) revert toBion's (1961) more blanket propositions in Experiences in Groups when they note, ''basic-assumption mentality is rooted precisely in resistance to development; it represents 'the hatred of a process of development…a hatred of having to learn by experience at all, and lack of faith in the worth of such a kind of learning'(Bion, 1961: 89)'' (p. ...
The impetus for this essay arose from a close reading of the work of American psychoanalyst Hans Loewald. Little referenced in the psychoanalytic literature on organizations, Loewald offers a unique and highly influential set of ideas that both prefigure contemporary psychoanalysis and redefine classical theory. In this essay I explore how Loewald might deepen the psychoanalytic literature on organizations by focusing on his central notion of ''replenishing regression.'' This notion is placed in dialogue with the prominent paradigm of systems psychody-namics to demonstrate how regression in organizations too often gets cast as a dysfunctional and inhibiting experience to be overcome rather than tolerated and appreciated. By upending this common thinking, Loewald's work is shown to carry intriguing implications for organizational life, including the prospects of feeling ''more alive …though not necessarily the more stable.''
... Where trauma and terror are projected onto and into subsequent generations, containment, a concept developed by Bion (1962) offers the possibility of containing and processing such distress. Developed by Bion (1962), who built upon the work of Klein (1946) and Winnicott (1960), containment relates to the symbiotic relationship between mother and infant in the earliest stages of life, which is reproduced in the therapeutic encounter, to facilitate integration and development of the self (Bion, 1962;Britton, 1998). In Bion's (1962) model, in a clinical setting containment is an interactive process between therapist and patient, whereby the patient's unassimilated psychic material, in the form of trauma or other overwhelming experience, is detoxified and meaning is created. ...
... The clinical application of containment renders unbearable states of mind tolerable, 'the containing function represents an area of mind or mental connection that attempts to find ways of tolerating undeveloped psychic content and emotions so they can be held in mind and understood' (Cartwright, 2010: 5). The functions of containment in therapy are to provide a safe, boundaried space to detoxify and to make meaning from distressing emotions and experiences (Britton, 1998). Gradually, the patient can introject meaning from the therapist, which enables them to contain their own experience, to develop their own insight and strengthen their sense of self (Hinshelwood and Fortuna, 2017). ...
... If the mother is unable to contain the baby's distress, and in some cases might project even worse terrors back into the baby, from her own state of mind, for instance if she is living in social conditions of violence, threat and terror, the baby will not have the capacity to build up a reservoir of meaning-making experiences (Hinshelwood and Fortuna, 2017). In a clinical setting, Britton (1998) posits that patients who have experienced problems with maternal containment respond well to the psychoanalytic psychotherapist's use of containment. In modelling the mother-baby relationship in therapy, the psychotherapist contains the patient's projections (β), introjects them, so that they can be worked through, '"detoxified" and permitted to gather new meaning' (Cartright, 2010: 141), (α), when the patient has developed sufficient capacity to tolerate them. ...
In this article, I consider role of the television show Derry Girls in providing containment for the unbearable aspects of conflict-related and transgenerational trauma in the context of Northern Ireland. Derry Girls is a situation comedy set during the political conflict of Northern Ireland in the 1990s. The show provides nostalgic, satirical and affectionate observations on the seemingly mundane and at times farcical misdemeanours of a group of young people living out their everyday lives in the backdrop of sectarianism, bigotry and political violence. First airing in 2018, 20 years after the peace agreement in Northern Ireland, Derry Girls offers a forum for experiencing a flavour of life in the height of the Troubles, evoking strong emotional reactions in audiences through laughter, consternation and tears. I consider the role of psychosocial studies in framing understanding of the show as a cultural outlet for and container of societal level trauma and collective pain.
... His defensive situation of simultaneously knowing and not knowing had served as a protection from the emotional cost of his knowledge. In this vein, Britton, 1988) asserted that knowing and not knowing at the same time is central to the inner lives of some people and serves as a defensive organization that protects them from fantasies about both the external and their internal world: "Such people appear to possess knowledge of the facts of life but also not to know anything of them. Similarly, they appear to know a good deal about themselves but also to know nothing about themselves" (p. ...
... Stern, 2009;Schore, 2012). His sense of knowing and not knowing at the same time served as a defensive organization (Britton, 1988); his unsubstantiated personal beliefs, as I learned from his unconscious derivatives, stood in contrast to the fact-based belief that without intercourse, there is no pregnancy. ...
Freud argued that people perceive reality through their unconscious fantasies while striving to fulfill their wishes. This paper claims that the role of unconscious fantasies should be expanded beyond Freud’s description; and that our unconscious imaginary process generates inner communication that is motivated by thoughts and emotions about relating to oneself and others. The clinical case illustrates the role of analysis in closing the permeable gap between reality and unconscious fantasy. In analysis, uncovering unconscious fantasy can serve as a bridge to reality and can be used to facilitate resolution of the patient’s underlying conflicts.
... Following the growing trend in higher education of creating opportunities for study abroad, scholars have begun to explore student experiences in order to understand and improve the impact of these international endeavors on the development of cultural awareness and global competencies (Byram & Dervin, 2008;Holmes et al., 2015;Messelink et al., 2015;Penman & Ratz, 2015). Research points to home institutions as essential in supporting student transitions abroad and in enhancing genuine intercultural contact (Messelink et al., 2015). ...
... Emotional holding in psychodynamic thinking grows out of the attunement to the other's needs and distresses; held in mind, they are acknowledged as real prior to being responded to (Britton, 1998). Bringing these observations into the present project enables us to think of the learning provided by 3rdSP (e.g. about culture shock) in relation to its content but also as an act of providing students with a sense of having their actual or potential concerns named and thought about and, therefore, of being held. ...
Opportunities for working, volunteering, and studying abroad have become popular in higher education as vehicles for the development of cultural awareness and global citizenship. However, such experiences on their own do not guarantee the development of such attributes. What appears to be essential to maximizing the benefits of educational sojourns are well-designed training and support provisions. In this paper, we present an analysis of a training and support program that we piloted in order to explore what aspects of the program facilitated the development of intercultural skills and how they did so. In our analysis, we draw on concepts from psychodynamic theory to discuss the impact that preparation and support can have in enabling students to venture out into the world of difference. Illuminating the phenomenon of study abroad through psychodynamic theory can offer a useful lens that may facilitate a move towards more relational and reflexive practices, promoting meaningful intercultural engagement. Abstract in Greek Τα τελευταία χρόνια τα διακρατικά προγράμματα ανταλλαγής φοιτητών για σπουδές, εργασία και εθελοντισμό έχουν συγκεντρώσει την προσοχή ως ένα μέσο ανάπτυξης της πολιτισμικής συνείδησης και της αντίληψης του εαυτού ως πολίτη του κόσμου. Η οργανωμένη και μελετημένη εκπαίδευση και υποστήριξη των φοιτητών στα ταξίδια τους είναι καθοριστική για την ενίσχυση αυτών των εμπειριών, καθώς και για την μεγιστοποίηση των οφελών τους και της ανάπτυξη της (δια)πολιτισμικής συνείδησής των φοιτητών. Στο άρθρο αυτό παρουσιάζουμε την ανάλυση ενός πιλοτικού εκπαιδευτικού και υποστηρικτικού προγράμματος που συστήσαμε, με σκοπό να διερευνήσουμε τα χαρακτηριστικά που ενθαρρύνουν την ανάπτυξη διαπολιτισμικών δεξιοτήτων. Στην ανάλυση μας στρεφόμαστε σε ψυχοδυναμικές θεωρίες για να κατανοήσουμε τον τρόπο με τον οποίο τόσο η προετοιμασία όσο και η υποστήριξη των φοιτητών επιτρέπει και διευκολύνει την εξόρμησή τους στην «διαφορετικότητα». Θεωρούμε οτι οι ψυχοδυναμικές θεωρίες αυτές μπορούν να βοηθήσουν στην κατανόηση του φαινομένου της διακρατικής εκπαίδευσης και να ενθαρρύνουν την υιοθέτηση πιο σχεσιακών και στοχαστικών/ενδοσκοπικών προσεγγίσεων με σκοπό την ανάπτυξη μιας πιο ουσιαστικής και βαθύτερης εμπειρίας διαπολιτισμικότητας.
... It could be seen how couples set up shared defences to manage shared unconscious phantasies, leading to a relationship in which, for example, strong feelings are avoided and the presenting problem is a lack of intimacy and sex. More recently, very fixed and more deeply unconscious phantasies that grip a relationship have been thought about as unconscious beliefs about being a couple (Britton, 1998c;Morgan, 2010;Humphries, 2015). ...
... Unconscious beliefs (Britton, 1998c) are conceptualised as a type of unconscious phantasy that has not developed and remains deep in the unconscious in an unchanging state. Sometimes the couple or one partner holds unconscious beliefs about the meaning of being a couple (Morgan, 2010). ...
... Besides being theoretically important, Ogden fnds these papers eminently readable, and he impressively emphasizes and savours the experiential-the almost textural-quality of getting to grips with and immersing himself in them. There are, of course, many other analysts who read and work in similarly literary, close-encountering ways; in contemporary British psychoanalysis, the names of Michael Parsons (2000) and Ron Britton (1998) spring immediately to mind. ...
... Figuring this out is the most determining task in the oedipal drama where the child's gradual realization of its separateness is concomitant with the process of accepting that one's parents are persons in their own right, alive for reasons, and engaged in activities that stretch far beyond my existence, and finally, that there is no way they could protect me from all the evils of the world. An existential reading of the oedipal complex (Britton, 1998;Eriksson, 2017) will focus on how the child, in a facilitating or "good-enough" environment, is doing its first experiences of limitations and finitude. There is a limit to their love, for themselves, each other, and for me. ...
... Artinya, pengetahuan kita sebelumnya dan saat ini memiliki dampak besar pada cara kita memandang sesuatu [15]. Meskipun terdapat kemungkinan ketidakbenaran dalam apa yang dipercayai atau dipersepsikan, seseorang biasanya bertindak berdasarkan reaksi emosi atas kepercayaan tersebut, sebab ia awalnya menerima kepercayaannya itu sebagai fakta [16]. Persepsi memiliki tujuan memberikan deskripsi tentang lingkungan, yang kemudian digunakan oleh fungsifungsi pikiran lainnya, seperti penalaran, pengambilan keputusan secara sadar, atau tindakan [17]. ...
Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui persepsi guru mengenai konsep dan karakteristik guru ideal. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan fenomenologi agar dapat fokus pada persepsi individu, yaitu guru SMA Kecamatan Simboro sebagai partisipan, dengan cara mewawancarai mereka secara semi terstruktur. Teknik analisis data kualitatif diaplikasikan dengan menggunakan bantuan software NVivo. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa konsep guru ideal menurut partisipan adalah guru yang bermanfaat bagi siswa, institusi, masyarakat, bangsa dan negara. Sedangkan kriteria atau karakteristik guru ideal menurut mereka yaitu guru yang memiliki karakter positif, menguasai konten atau materi yang diajarkan, memiliki kompetensi pedagogik, professional, berpengalaman, melakukan kontribusi sosial, dan terus melakukan pengembangan diri.
... In der Tradition Kleins wurden verschiedene Theorien bezüglich des Zusammenhangs zwischen der depressiven und schizoiden Position formuliert (siehe z. B. Segal, 1996;Bion, 1989;Britton, 1998;Carveth, 2018;Ogden, 2000;Steiner, 1992;Wilkinson & Gabbard, 1995 Ogden (2000) geht zum Beispiel davon aus, dass eine dialektische Beziehung zwischen den Positionen 42 besteht, wobei jede Position synchron existiert und die andere "erschafft, erhält und negiert" (ebd., ...
Eine verbreitete Auffassung von Gesundheit (vgl. z.B. Faltermaier, 2017) wirft die heiklen Fragen nach dem Wohlbefinden und der Funktionalität des Menschen auf. Diese beiden Fragen werden in der vorliegenden Arbeit vor dem Hintergrund der Annahme diskutiert, dass psychische Gesundheit als eine Form der Freiheit gedacht werden kann. Das Thema der Funktionalität des Menschen wird in die Fragen nach der spezifischen Fähigkeit und der spezifischen Funktion des Menschen aufgegliedert, deren Beantwortung den Hauptfokus dieser Arbeit einnimmt. Positive Freiheit als eine graduell ausgeprägte Fähigkeit von Personen liefert einen Ansatz für die Beantwortung dieser Fragen und damit eine nähere Bestimmung von psychischer Gesundheit als Funktionalität. Um dem traditionell vieldeutigen Begriff der positiven Freiheit eine theoretisch fundierte Bedeutung zu verleihen, werden die psychoanalytischen Ansätze des Möglichkeitsraums (potential space) (Winnicott, 2018) und der positiven Freiheit (Fromm, 1941) dargestellt und diskutiert.
... 5 Maclean and Eekelaar's research (2005) identifies a distinction between white British interviewees, who were more inclined to see themselves as active agents choosing 'tradition' when they decided to marry, and ethnic-minority interviewees, who were more likely to regard themselves as following the conventions of their religious or cultural group and/or the wishes of their parents. 6 This is what Britton (1998) calls an 'unconscious belief'. 7 See Layton (2002Layton ( , 2004 for discussions of the normative unconscious and normative unconscious processes. ...
The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm explores the ongoing strength and insidious grip of couple-normativity across changing landscapes of law, policy and everyday life in four contrasting national contexts: the UK, Bulgaria, Norway and Portugal. By investigating how the couple-norm is lived and experienced, how it has changed over time, and how it varies between places and social groups, this book provides a detailed analysis of changing intimate citizenship regimes in Europe, and makes a major intervention in understandings of the contemporary condition of personal life. The authors develop the feminist concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ and propose the new concept of ‘intimate citizenship regime’, offering a study of intimate citizenship regimes as normative systems that have been undergoing profound change in recent decades. Against the backdrop of processes of de-patriarchalization, liberalization, pluralization and homonormalization, the ongoing potency of the couple-norm becomes ever clearer. The authors provide an analysis of how the couple-form is institutionalized, supported and mandated by legal regulations, social policies and everyday practices, and how this serves to shape the intimate life choices and trajectories of those who seem to be living aslant to the conventional heterosexual cohabiting couple-form. Attending also to practices and moments that challenge couple-normativity, both consciously chosen and explicit, as well as circumstantial, subconscious and implicit, The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm makes an important contribution to literatures on citizenship, intimacy, family life, and social change in sociology, social policy, socio-legal studies, gender/sexuality/queer studies and psychosocial studies.
... Patterns of relating in the couple, therefore, can be clearly linked to the beliefs and attributions about relationships formed in childhood. Morgan (2010) develops the theory of how unconscious beliefs, described by Britton (1998), are created about the nature of relationships and that these form and influence a couple's life together. Morgan explains that "Unconscious phantasies are the stories we create to explain our experiences of relating externally and internally. ...
... He was frustrated with what he came to identify as "his voice," that wouldn't allow him to feel and express himself, and from which he desperately wanted to break free. He railed against being imprisoned in set ways of thinking and being, feeling trapped in his own Internal Script (Britton 1998), and wanting change: "Nothing changes." "I am fed up with myself. ...
The author focuses on enactments in the temporality of the analytic process, taking place around analytic breaks. Being part of the rhythm of psychoanalysis, breaks can be experienced as disruptions, with increased anxiety. Threats to the integrity of the frame provide points of vulnerability and challenge to containment that may result in enactment. This is especially so when related to the patient’s unique psychic time, touching on depth of disturbance that is unmetabolised and cannot find verbal expression. Enactments are discussed as representations of unconscious material, to be contained retrospectively by analytic thinking, at specific points of the patient’s psychic readiness. Only after an “unthought-out action” on the part of the analyst does he/she become alive to it. Guilt and shame are often experienced following enactments. These feelings can be utilised for understanding the enactment events and their underlying affects, in the intersubjective arena, potentially furthering the analytic process. A clinical illustration is presented of a mental enactment combined with a disruption to the frame around a break, which coalesced with the patient’s internal unique timing. Being an expression of the patient’s unconscious readiness for transformation, the enactment is understood as occasioned in the conjunction between psychic time and analytic time frame.
... Differentiating between subject and object, self and other, is one measure of healthy psychological development. Britton (1998) differentiates between the two faces of projective identification, the first being the "I am you" projective identification that is attuned and empathic and thereby benign, and secondly, a more hostile form Britton describes as "You are me". This is the form of projective identification Thorpe is exploring in the paper and suggests that what I find unacceptable in me, I place in you, for you to experience it and behave in a manner which saves me from having to do so. ...
Through the lens of Mark Thorpe’s thought provoking research summary on projective identification, this commentary briefly explores the growing need for psychoanalytic, and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, to create for itself an evidence base for its efficacy. The commentary explores whether in the pursuit of improving its standing in the psychological “market place,” is psychoanalytic psychotherapy compromising some of its underlying theoretical and clinical principles? Waitara Mai i te karu arotahi o te whakaaro whakakārangirangi whakarāpopotonga rangahau mō te whakapūreo tuakiri a Mark Thorpe, ka rapua potohia ake e tēnei kōrero te hapa o te tipu ake ō te tātaringa hinengaro me te mātauranga tātari hinengaro, hai waihanga pū taunakihanga kia mau niho ai. E rapu haere ana te kōrero kia kite mēnā i a ia e whakatairangi ana i tōna tūranga i roto i te ‘ao hokohoko’, e whakaitihia ake ana ētahi o ana mātāpono ariā mātāpono haumanu matua?
Autor artykułu bada wzajemne zależności między modelami i metaforami umysłu stworzonymi przez Freuda. Przedmiotem psychoanalitycznej refleksji jest tu komplementarność Freudowskich modeli i metafor opisujących działanie aparatu psychicznego. W dalszej części artykułu autor przywołuje wybrane modele umysłu i jego funkcjonowania, które powstały po Freudzie. Celem jest pokazanie psychoanalizy jako wiedzy, która ulega ciągłym przekształceniom i poszukuje kontaktu z coraz bardziej pierwotnymi stanami umysłu, a jednocześnie rozwija coraz bardziej złożone i inkluzywne teorie, podejmujące próbę zrozumienia naszego życia psychicznego, a zwłaszcza jego nieświadomego wymiaru.
Focusing on the case of a young man with symptoms of a nonverbal learning disorder, we review the many psychoanalytic approaches to thinking. The core of these approaches is that mental and cognitive capacities are not separate to emotional and psychic development but are coterminous. We foreground Bion’s theory of thinking and the role of the containing function of the caretakers’ minds and Winnicott’s focus on the centrality of the caretaker and partner’s holding in the human child’s development of self, sense of aliveness, and the coherence of psyche and soma. Trauma, whether massive or ongoing and cumulative, and disruptions in holding and containing are instantiated in the mind and body, in thinking itself. Accordingly, we suggest that the difficulties in using one’s mind that may manifest as NVLD are representations of developmental trauma that has yet to have form in the mind. We offer a brief overview of the psychoanalytic treatment of the young man to illustrate how holding and coherence emerged such that he experienced an enhanced ability to organize and utilize his mind and his thoughts with agency, purpose, and efficacy.KeywordsContemporary psychoanalytic approaches Bion Containing function Winnicott Freud Klein Mind-building Apparatus for thinking Beta elements Containing function Metabolizing instrument Transitional space Mother-infant dyad
The aim of this paper is to distinguish between conscious and unconscious conceptions of objects. I will argue that we consciously ascribe different properties to the same object based on their coexistence in time and space. For example, the colour and flavour of an apple are ascribed to the same object as they relate to the same spatiotemporal location. However, since there is no reference to time in unconscious thinking, we cannot ascribe properties unconsciously to objects based on spatiotemporality. Instead, I hypothesize, properties are unconsciously ascribed to the same object based on the drive they satisfy. This hypothesis accounts for substantial unconscious processes such as condensation, displacement, splitting and certain linguistic features of unconscious thinking. Moreover, it enables the identification of a type of suppression of unconscious content—logical suppression—used to classify levels of personality organization. The clinical merit of this hypothesis will be presented through various case reports.
This paper compares presentations of disorders of the sense of body ownership and agency from psychoanalytic and neurological perspectives to demonstrate similarities in symptomatology proposing these similarities arise from adjustments in Friston's generative model of self-organization and selfhood. The implications for the analytic model of the Self, for clinical practice and for neuroscience research are considered. Patients with narcissistic disorders use projective defences resulting in a disordered sense of what belongs to whom. This applies to mind and body of self and other and is central to understanding transference and countertransference. Clinical observations of this disordered sense of ownership and agency mirror findings in neurological disorders. This paper proposes that in both neurological and psychological disorders Friston's 'internal generative model' of selfhood is adjusted. Further to this whilst this adjustment may be either neurogenic or psychogenic, the final neural mechanism and symptomatic outcome are similar. On the basis of these observations the paper compares the concept of the Self from Jungian and psychoanalytic perspectives. Finally, the implications for the concept of the death instinct and Britton's concept of Xenophobia are explored along with the implications of these observations for clinical practice.
The paper takes up Wisdom's (1964) little known but significant critique of Bion's book, Learning From Experience. While Wisdom appreciates Bion's clinical and theoretical innovations, he criticised the at times confusing structure of themes that were not sufficiently segregated, the extraneous use of mathematical notation, and the scientific/deductive part of Bion's monograph. In deploying a crucial distinction from Wisdom's critique, one that separates the scientific/deductive aspect of Bion's work from its clinical/inductive trajectory, the author offers an approach to reading Bion's complex text.
In this discussion of Dr. Chefetz’s and Dr. Bartlett’s responses (this issue, 2022), we further explore the inevitability of enactment in the process of treating dissociation in the face of relational trauma. Trauma, we propose, attacks human subjectivity by rapturing its being-in-time. Instead of being the creator of time, the subject finds himself doomed to be the object of time and living in the perpetuation of repetition compulsion. Paradoxically, it is only through repetition that one can break this time-loop and begin to feel and change his or her traumatic past. In the act of repetition, one subjugates the other (and reality as a whole) to his own frozen dissociations, yet with that very act also invites the other into his frozen experiences. When the other “accepts” the invitation, i.e., “answers” with an invitation of his or her own, an intersubjective encounter of frozen repetitions – a “dissociative third” - is created, which enables one to reclaim his or her own lost experiences and re-create his sense of time.
This article illustrates analytically oriented psychotherapy with the homeless. The concept “Difficulty to Reside” is introduced to describe the inherent emotional difficulty of many homeless people to tolerate the idea of a home as well as an actual physical residence. This is not only the difficulty of bearing a home in the physical sense, but the difficulty of being within the envelope of a close relationship, and even a failure of the individual to be close to themself. Three layers of the difficulty to reside are noted, by means of clinical examples: the autistic-schizoid layer, the psychotic layer, and the layer of trauma, personality disorders and substance abuse. Modes of intervention are suggested. The therapist’s mind as a metaphorical home for the patient is illustrated. The emotional dynamics of treating the homeless are analogized to Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” as alternation between destruction and construction. The homelessness in the therapist’s psyche is emphasized. Finally, the metaphor of “the Edge of Chaos Theory” (physics/biology) is presented as an area of encounter between homeless patient and therapist.
This article explores the importance of intersectionality and critical thinking for social work students and how this paradigm can develop a more nuanced understanding of Black and South Asain mothers. By using intersectionality as a framework, we can begin to understand and problematise unequal power relations and structures that lead to marginalisation and social injustice.
A presentation of emotional detachment is sometimes encountered in working with challenging patients. The term ‘disavowal’ describes a particular kind of splitting of consciousness in which the person repudiates awareness of disturbing realities or their meanings. Disavowal involves a distortion of emotional significance, rather than a distortion of perception, as in the case of a dissociative split in consciousness. Detachment protects the individual from emotional contact, which is experienced as potentially overwhelming. Safety is achieved, but at the cost of denuding mental life of meaning. With the help of detailed clinical material, the challenges of working with a person who has established a psychic retreat based upon disavowal are outlined. I describe the clinical challenges of working with someone who places themselves out of reach of emotional engagement. A state of inbetweenness protects the person from knowing about their aggressive impulses, their need for care and the passing of time. This forestalls experiencing the dangerous, shameful feelings of dependence. The clinician needs to recognize the necessity for the defensive retreat, whilst being patiently ready to enter engagement when the patient becomes available.
This chapter aims to explore how the pandemic has changed both social and internal relatedness, through sudden, dramatic, traumatic and far-reaching effects on living, from which have emerged a strange set of ambiguities and contradictions. I characterise the dilemmas arising from the pandemic as a conflict between narcissistic and object relations ways of relating to the real, virulent threat from the pandemic, that upset and dislocated habitual ways of being, and generated changes to sharing space with others. Narcissistic relatedness aims to deny the importance of these experiences, to restore previous ways of living and to avoid mourning. This way of relating can be intensely destructive and oblivious of the harm being caused. Object relatedness, in contrast, enables engagement with painful and frightening realities through retaining inner links with good experiences, through which realistic hopes for the future can be sustained, including creating better ways of living with each other and the environment. I suggest that a new ‘Covid object’ in the internal object reconfigures how we view relationships. This involves the internalisation of the new kind of ambivalence; the Covid object includes protectiveness towards self and other, leading to a better, more ‘care-full’ way of living, alongside a paranoid relationship, based on the mutual capacity to infect and be infected. Taking a protective view of ourselves, and mourning for past expectations in the world we have lost, rather than adopting narcissistic solutions, can create a way of living with the virus, leading to realistic rather than illusory hope, and underpinning for these further struggles.
This article proposes that psychic experiences of ‘dyslocation’, ‘dysembodiment’ and ‘psychic slippage’ can occur in relation to the object ‘on’ or ‘in’ the screen – ‘the screen object’ – in the context of working remotely using televideo technology with children in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This is explored in the context of a child’s experience when treatment started in person and then changed to remote working. The loss of the therapeutic setting and frame in mid-treatment can constitute a rupture and a trauma, experienced at a primitive level as the loss of ‘bounded space’ and of psychic orientation to the object. This experience may evoke psychotic or borderline-type anxieties associated with disembodiment, depersonalisation, derealisation or annihilation. Concepts from Linguistics of deixis, endophora and exophora – concerning orientation in place, time and person relative to context – are applied to the situation of remote working with televideo technology, to highlight tensions in this setting in the way emotional meaning and understanding are derived from the surrounding context. The screen as part of the setting/frame gives rise to ‘slippages’ of various kinds. In order to explore the theme of ‘the screen object’, the author draws on experimental psychology research on infant responses to televideo technology; psychological or psychiatric theories of disembodiment; and psychoanalytic theory related to the ‘body ego’ and ‘skin-ego’, the psychoanalytic setting, and remote or virtual psychoanalysis. It is speculated that elements of the psychic experience of ‘the screen object’ are likely to be present to some degree in all remote working using video technology, whether in response to a traumatic disruption to treatment in person as discussed in this article, or whether remote treatment is the agreed treatment from the beginning.
L'Autore affronta specificamente due argomenti: il concetto di processo psicoanalitico ed il lavoro di trasformazione che in esso si svolge. In particolare, in relazione al lavoro di trasformazione, vengono principalmente esami-nate le vicissitudini di uno degli elementi che contribuiscono a renderlo possibile: la costru-zione, nella mente dell'analista, di segmenti di teoria nel lavoro clinico.
The paper focuses on psychic states in which living and bearing one's vitality have become hindered or totally obstructed, either as a result of a primary trauma or of a late‐onset trauma. The author relates especially to patients who have been severely traumatized and have withdrawn into encapsulated states with schizoid/autistic‐like features that create complex challenges in therapy. The paper weaves together clinical cases with theoretical understandings and with a discussion of the Kurdish movie Turtles Can Fly, in which many orphan Kurdish refugee children try to survive emotionally the traumatic life they have been going through. The author discusses the complex states of mind of the patients presented and of the orphans in the movie, who are sentenced to life, having lost all their hope and ability to tolerate their own vitality or that of others, due to extreme traumas. Consequently an encounter between themselves and another person, including a therapist/analyst, frequently becomes a flooding experience that is beyond their abilities to assimilate, being experienced as an annihilating threat to one's emotional existence and being in danger of creating states of a therapeutic and undigestible excess for which the term toxemia of therapy is suggested.
A mild-mannered man developed paranoid psychosis following the onset of tinnitus. He subsequently killed a workmate whom he believed had poisoned him causing tinnitus. Post-homicide, the patient’s calm state was rapidly restored. We eventually came to understand that prior to the tinnitus the patient’s inner world was dominated by a phantasy of an idealised ever-available, ever-understanding internal maternal object unconsciously represented by the patient’s love of classical music which unfailingly assuaged his anxiety. Tinnitus, denying him this soothing input, was unconsciously experienced as a hated paternal object destroying the loving union of mother and infant. The homicide victim came to represent this paternal object, the source of projected oedipal murderousness. Retrospectively, the patient’s easy-going ‘chameleon-like’ pre-breakdown personality was understood as a pathological organisation based on acquisitive projective identification with a phantasised mother with ideal receptive capacity – an ‘identificate’ (Sohn 1985) – with (paternal) violence and destructiveness split off and inaccessible. Failure of separation, denial of loss and lack of acceptance of the Oedipus situation precluded the development of the ‘third position’ required for insight and symbolisation. Five years weekly psychotherapy in a secure unit provided some understanding of his inner world and the tragic course of events together with a significant degree of psychic development.
In this paper, the idea of an internal creative couple is explored in relation to parenting. The internal creative couple is seen as an outcome of psychic development, which may or may not have occurred, been impaired or temporarily lost. Examples of the way this can affect the couple and their parenting are given, elaborated through clinical illustrations. The process of psychic development enabling this capacity is described, highlighting several stages that seem crucial, though it is important to note that this development does not necessarily occur in a linear way, and involves returning to, and reworking at different developmental points in life. Creative couple relating, both internally and as manifested in couple and parenting relationships, is challenging and not always possible. Several reasons why this might be so are given.
Jane Caflisch’s discussion (this issue) of white liberal guilt is recognized as a bold and ground-breaking exploration of how the Kleinian concepts of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions may shed light on the question of reparation for racial injustice. I suggest that, in addition to persecutory and depressive guilt, melancholic guilt also operates in racist mind-sets, and constitutes the more serious obstacle to reparation. Guilt of this sort prompts defensive repetition, thereby perpetuating racist mind-sets and acts and taking one further and further from the possibility of reparation. On the other hand, the more normal interplay between persecutory and depressive guilt, which is illustrated through a clinical vignette, is seen as opening up a path to reparation. Brief vignettes are offered illustrating points about melancholic guilt and how a culture of facing rather than evading persecutory guilt enabled an opportunity for reparation to be recognized and used.
In the face of movements like #me too and Time’s Up, clinicians are challenged to navigate the intricacies of socio-political multi-dimensionalities of prejudice and the ways prejudice weaves through various aspects of psychological work. In this paper, I suggest that the intersubjective experience of prejudice is a collapse of thirdness, a collapse of the dialectical recognition of sameness and difference, or self and other. Furthermore, leaning on principles of intersubjectivity and relational psychoanalysis, I also offer a refinement of the concept of thirdness in relation to prejudice by pointing to the need to bring into focus larger socio-political currents and layers of experience that are intricately woven into the fabric of thirdness, thus constituting a social thirdness. Particular emphasis will be placed on understanding the clinical pertinence, as well as collapse and repair of social thirdness in the context of gender and sexuality. I will use several carefully disguised clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and their relevance to psychotherapeutic work.
The paper presents and discusses hypotheses related to the manifestation of fanatical aspects in the analytical field. Initially, fanaticism is discussed as a social phenomenon. In sequence, clinical facts are presented. The first hypothesis involves factors related to primitive symbioses that manifest themselves mainly in adolescence, through adherence to religions, ideologies and other social facts. Clinical vignettes of adult patients deepen the study of possible factors that contribute to fanatical behaviour. It is proposed that container/contained relationships experienced in childhood as insufficient and fraudulent, and defensive narcissistic organizations, articulated with early inculcations of fanatic configurations, originate fantasies which manifest themselves as fanaticism. Deficits in the symbolisation processes, resentment and transformation into hallucinosis, among others, are presented as clinical facts. The text ends with analogies between the delusions of the Schreber case and fanatical behaviour.
Melanie Klein’s seminal concept of projective identification provides an important theoretical mechanism for working through the Oedipus complex. Klein saw it as the key to achieving emotional maturity. As well as the choice of object, which decides our sexual identity, Klein sees a second choice to be made as subject, which shapes our gender. The question is not only ‘what does a woman (or man) want?’, as Freud and Jones argued, but ‘who (and how) does a woman (or man) become?’, as Simone de Beauvoir memorably asked. How is our gender acquired for us and by us? Queer theory asks us to refuse gender normativity. That is one response. But unless we arrive at our own answer to gender, says Klein, the capacities both to love and to be loved will remain elusive.
Klein invites us to leave Oedipus behind in Ancient Thebes and move the stage to Paris in 1920, the setting for a novel by Julien Green, If I Were You. Our Modern hero is a young man, Fabian Especel. This article rediscovers Fabian and adds to Klein’s theory of internal objects the role of queer objects as Weberian ‘abject types’, to update the Oedipus complex today.
Therapists’ quest for constructing meaning systems of their patients’ experiences progresses in cycles. These cycles consist of: (1) efforts to achieve closures, propelled by the depressive position with its concomitant judgments, resolutions, and decisiveness, and (2) efforts to dissolve closures, propelled by the schizo-paranoid position, searching anxiously and excitedly for new ways to construct meaning. By struggling to facilitate their supervisees’ cycles of achieving and dissolving closures, supervisors help them to grow as clinicians. Supervisees usually welcome the supervisors’ help in constructing meaning systems and achieving closures. They become wary, however, when their supervisors suggest that they dismantle these systems and dissolve their closures because these suggestions undermine their self-assurance as well as their sense of morality, both nourished by the depressive position. Several approaches are suggested for supervisors to facilitate their supervisees’ efforts to dissolve closures.
This paper discusses the importance of parallel processes within the therapeutic and the supervisory context of therapy with an eight-year-old boy diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. During the first months of the therapy, through powerful projective identification, the therapist found herself in the ‘clothes’ of the ‘dead mother’. She was unable to think and feel in the sessions. Deadness could not be symbolised – it was enacted in the sessions. The therapeutic encounter had to start elsewhere: the supervisor’s reverie brought to life the patient’s material in the context of the supervision, allowing thinking to occur, first within the supervisory relationship and only then in the therapeutic relationship. In the context of supervision, the encounter of two mentally alive people could contain anxieties, metabolise them and open the way to mental connections. This encounter facilitated the development of creative thinking of both the therapist and the young patient in the consulting room, which allowed the child to become the subject of his existence and to evolve.
Insight is an important notion in psychoanalysis, as it is regarded as the main mediator of psychic change in therapy. In this article I provide an account of a specific kind of insight, which I call self-insight. Self-insight is that which lies at the roots of what Bell and Leite (Bell, D., and A. Leite. 2016. “Experiential self-understanding.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 97 (2): 305–332) describe as experiential self-understanding, a process of increasing articulate awareness of one’s psychic life. So conceived, self-insight has four key characteristics: (1) it is distinct from merely intellectual self-knowledge, (2) it arises directly out of first-person experience, (3) it encompasses a lived perspective, and (4) it often requires the overcoming of resistance. My account of self-insight makes use of the notion of construal, a mental state that is constitutive of emotion and plays an important role in motivation. Specifically, I propose that one gains self-insight when one becomes insightfully conscious of a previously unconscious construal, which involves construing one’s construal as the construal it is. This account of self-insight shows how it exhibits the key characteristics described above.
I explore the way in which unconscious primitive and nonsymbolic experience is communicated to the analyst’s unconscious through enactment. As the analyst receives the projections unconsciously, she is encouraged to enact aspects of the patient’s internal world. The analytic work then is through the understanding of these subtle and ubiquitous enactments. I value the work of understanding enactments as a rich and subtle pathway into the deepest levels of the patient’s unconscious. I explore the nature of this work and illustrate my point with clinical examples.
Intertwined personal narrative of somatic healing from abuse though yoga, psychophysical theories of trauma, and critical theories of feminism, racism and orientalism to understand social oppression through the mechanism of projective-introjective identification. My master’s program did not require a thesis, so this 62 page work functions as a capstone of my clinical training and transition to performance studies.
Narcissism, personality disorders, oppression, entitlement, rage, ego threat, autobiography, autoethnography, critical theory, feminism, orientalism, yoga, martial arts, embodiment, corporeality, movement, therapy, trauma, recovery, transgender, queer theory, gender, race, Japan, child abuse, theatre, performance studies, drama therapy
Experiencing fear is a central feature of managing disturbed states of minds. In this paper, I will describe the experience of being terrified by a patient who was overtaken by extreme anxiety. Aetiologically, I will suggest that the lack of containment created terror in her mind. I will also describe my experience of leadership in a voluntary organisation. Using Hopper’s concept of a fourth basic assumption, I will highlight the omnipresence of annihilatory anxiety in an example of organisational trauma. I will suggest that focusing on the issues of countertransference, working through experiences of being terrorised and paying attention to how you emotionally respond are crucial to lessening terror.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.