Will We Ever Meet Again? (original) (raw)
Countertransference and Oedipal Love, 2021
In this essay, the author will explore the use of countertransference in the therapeutic process, with particular emphasis on Oedipal love. We begin with countertransference as conceptualized by interpersonal psychoanalytic theorists, who immediately pointed out the technical relevance of the therapist as a person, and the importance of the use of the therapist's feelings, thoughts, life experiences, and states of mind in the therapeutic relationship. Just as dreams, slips of the tongue, peripheral thoughts, and physical gestures are useful in reading the patient's unconscious experience, accepting, examining, and exploring countertransference become useful in reading the analyst's unconscious experience. The author will then identify a more radical and contemporary conception of countertransference as representative of the analyst's unconscious receptivity to the patient within the enactments in which transference and countertransference reciprocally affect each other. Finally, the author will concentrate on the Oedipal feelings experienced by the therapist and their importance in treatment. A clinical case will illustrate the clinical ramifications of these hypotheses.
A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Abandonment Issues: A Case Study
This paper undertakes a comprehensive exploration of the intricate facets inherent to issues associated with abandonment, elucidating their psychological ramifications through the lens of psychoanalysis. Comprising a structured framework, the research encompasses five principal sections, each meticulously dissecting the genesis and underlying intricacies encountered by individuals grappling with challenges rooted in abandonment. The study orchestrates an immersive investigation into diverse dimensions, encompassing realms of phantasies, masochistic tendencies, the familial narrative, orality, somatic expressions, object relations, and the intricate interplay of transference and countertransference dynamics within the context of a meticulously examined case study.
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2014
Karnac, London, 2012; 448 pp; £29.99 paperback This is a remarkable collection of essays, each closely argued and quietly sceptical of orthodoxies. It aims to be a 'staging post' (p. xiv) in the development of Independent thinking and technique, alongside Gregorio Kohon's The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition (1986) and Eric Rayner's The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (1991). A sense of history and the importance of history taking indeed characterizes the Independents' approach. In a detailed and masterly opening chapter, John Keene traces the multiple strands of contemporary Independent thinking to a common source: Freud's over-estimation of the capacity of average maternal care. For Ferenczi and the Hungarians, this could not be taken for granted. Their observation that the infant is the dynamic product of an interrelationship opened the way from one-to two-person psychology; mother and baby, analyst and patient, like conscious and unconscious, internal and external, are in constant interaction. In a later chapter, 'The Inter-Subjective Matrix', Joan Raphael-Leff brings this line of thought to a new 'staging post': long overdue acknowledgement that the mother is a fully experiencing subject in her own right effects a further paradigm shift. Both parties in the relationship change, baby and mother, patient and analyst; and there are as many models for inter-subjective relating as there are subjectivities. Theorizing, Keene emphasizes, always takes its emotional colouring from the social and political context: in Freud's case, a late 19th century idealization of motherhood; in the case of the Controversial Discussions in the 1940s, a struggle for orthodoxy and succession following Freud's death which, as Keene writes, led to examples of institutional pathological thinking 'as convincing as one could wish for'. Notable among these was (and is) the polarization 'tough, challenging, superegoish, "pure" psychoanalysis', deriving its authority from the Freud of the life and death drives, versus 'tender, excusing, cosy psychoanalytic psychotherapy based on environmental factors' (p. 34). Keene carefully charts the points of theoretical divergence between Kleinians and the emerging 'Middle Group', especially around assumptions about mothers and babies, noting significant areas of overlap too, between Klein and Fairbairn, for instance, over the nature of aggression: innate or/and reactive? As he suggests (p. 20), the question of whether Independent objectrelations theory is consistent with the Freudian account of the instincts and drives is still open. Is it, the reader might ask, more than a conceptual sleight of hand to regard libido as object-rather than purely pleasure-seeking, as Fairbairn did, or might we need to learn from group analysis and posit a fourth, social, agency, a 'nos' to supplement ego, id and superego, as another Hungarian, Tom Ormay (2012), has recently done?
Who Do the Words Come From: A Psychoanalytical Tale
The Psychoanalytic Review, 2019
My first experience in analysis with a classically trained analyst left an unexpected but profound imprint on me. After enduring that kind of one-person analysis for eleven years, I was not left with a favorable impression of the method. Originally trained as a classical psychoanalyst, I have since chosen to work intersubjectively and interactively, and I am shifting more deliberately and with more conviction toward an assimilative integrative psychotherapy approach. In this paper I tell the story of my personal analysis and outline the conclusions I have drawn from it that created a seismic shift in my way of thinking and working as a psychoanalyst.
‘Who’s your Daddy?’ A question of sovereignty and the use of psychoanalysis
The love of the law is flighty. Indeed, it represents itself as ‘without desire’. It is a love imagined emanating from a sovereign that does, and has, and may again, exercise its whimsical decision and render the subject, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) has described abandoned and as Jacques Lacan has offered: castrated. Consequently this love is experienced, on some level, as precarious. It is a love that can be withdrawn, or directed to an-other, at any time. What evokes the law’s desire is neither obvious nor apparent. It is hidden from the ordinary subject.
2020
This is an innovative, interesting and creative way of exploring key psychoanalytic concepts. This most significant book offers a number of short presentations from prestigious analysts who explore and illustrate fundamental psychoanalytic concepts from a contemporary perspective. Clinical examples illustrate the different theoretical approaches that the authors follow, how they think and practise. Rooted on Freudian thinking, the reader will encounter different perspectives on concepts such as the presence of the analyst, transference, listening and interpretation, figures and forms, the frame and setting, the role of the drives, of trauma, sexualities and otherness among many other fundamental concepts. This book will be of great value to both psychoanalysts and to a wider interested readership alike." Catalina Bronstein, Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London "This is a great profoundly psychoanalytic contribution. Parsimonious, deep, insightful and introducing me to lots of things I halfknew or hadn't thought about. Good to keep by and browse at random. Will repay hours of attention." David Tuckett, formerly president of the European Psychoanalytic Federation,
Conversation with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 01/2019
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2019
JILL CHODER-GOLDMAN, LCSW In Global Perspectives, we bring you interviews with psychoanalysts from around the world in an effort to explore the influence of culture, politics, and socioeconomics on psychoanalytic training, theory development, clinical technique, and psychoanalytic practice in general. left my hotel in the 6th arrondissement and strolled south to Elisabeth Roudinesco’s apartment, passing through the famed Luxembourg Gardens. My walk was a fitting prelude to our conversation; I experienced a wonderful cross-section of the Parisian populace, a microcosm of the culture, if you will, in the beautiful setting of this classic French park. Men playing boulles, children playing football and tennis. Friends, young and old, were scattered about in garden chairs, in small groups, in animated discussions, reading or just enjoying the dappled sunlight of a late spring day. Dr. Roudinesco is a historian. She is also a psychoanalyst, but history is where her heart and passion lie. She was brought up with books, loves books, and when you walk into her home, you immediately feel the impact of her love of books, for it is filled from floor to ceiling with them: books on French history and philosophy, as well as autobiographies and biographies of well-known French historians, novelists, and psychoanalysts. The books are surrounded by plants of all sizes, both in her living area and on her outdoor balcony. Gardening is another one of her passions. I looked around before we began, thinking about how much she has not only read but written, for she is both a prolific reader and prolific writer, on topics ranging from the situation of psychoanalysis worldwide to the history of the French Revolution, perverts and perversion, Judaism and Auschwitz, and Lacan. Her most recent book, a biography of Freud, was prominently displayed on its own beautifully carved antique column. There was so much I wanted to talk about, but in the interest of time I tried to focus yet still include as many of her ideas as possible in our conversation.
Psychoanalysis, Self and Context SILENCING OF SADNESS: FINDING THE STORY IN THE BODY
The silencing of sadness, embedded in our cultural zeitgeist, is often linked to a radical form of dissociation that bypasses the lived body: “It is through my body that I understand other people” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 295). Sadly, radical dissociation separates us from the knowledge our bodies contain and the stories that are yet to be heard and told. This work continues my journey into the exploration of bodily emotion by extending my earlier formulation of a primordial sense of being that suggests a felt-sense of authenticity I have called core affective experience (2011) with a consideration of ending the silencing of sadness. Explored here is the importance of bringing embodied experience into the rela- tional process using (a) an emotional phenomenological framework for investigating the lived body; and (b) an extralinguistic affective form of mutual influence in preparing the way for imbuing bodily emotion with linguistic experience. A specific focus concerns transmuting problems associated with “having a body” (depicted as the objectified body) into problems associated with “being a body” (viewed as the lived body). This process renders the silencing of sadness a perceptible phenomenon in the treatment of those suffering from radical dissociation. Keywords: bodily emotion; lived experience; Merleau-Ponty; emotional phenomenology; extralinguistic interaffectivity
From the perspective of human attachment research, human beings develop in the matrix of relationship. The child’s relationships begin in profound somatic ways, inside the mother’s body or perhaps within the parents’ minds. After thousands, millions of interactions with care-givers they then organize an embodied and psychic self that is felt and known. Yet for those who have been impinged on too early by trauma, loss or neglect, dissociation has been woven into their way of being with parts of experience cut-off or hidden. Those who suffer loss or trauma later in life must also traverse a path through disorganization of experience, with attendant disorientations in space, time, reasoning, language, perception and the somatic self: World and self can become, for a time, very unfamiliar. Contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy seeks to foster (re)connection by (re)establishing a sense of safety and orientation, and pays very close attention to embodied and felt experience within the ...
Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, Study Day November 2013
Further to my questions regarding perversion, neurosis and discourse, it becomes important to delineate the differences between perverse structure and perverse trait. In discussing what the pervert does with desire, the difference needs to be noted between neurotic perverse trait (and repression) and how disavowal operates in perverse structure.
This paper examines a form of interpersonal relationality that takes the form of a speech event in which one participant produces a spoken turn that exhibits a poetic relationship to a co-participant's unspoken thoughts or unarticulated mental imagery. This examined in relation to an earlier analysis of a speech error during therapy which appeared to reflect some form of telepathic communication between patient and analyst. Drawing from sociological studies of the organization of everyday social interaction, I sketch some ways in which a sociological approach can contribute to psychoanalytic reflections on telepathic experiences between patient and analysts.
Although we tend to regard telepathic communication as anomalous or uncanny, outside the range of scientific explanation, many paranormal experiences can be understood scientifically as the type of unconscious affective communication about which there is a growing body of scientific research and evidence. An information-processing model illuminates how a patient’s dissociated attempts to communicate through sensory experiences may be converted to the verbal symbolic via the analyst’s use of evoked images in the dissociative process. Understanding projective identification as a dissociative process of communication by which the patient projected his own unacceptable emotions into the analyst, who could then know experientially what the patient was feeling, can be understood scientifically as telepathic communication. When a patient experiences the effects of severe trauma and is very dissociative, as in the case presented, it is difficult to track and reflect upon these processes as they occur, making it virtually impossible to become and remain empathically attuned to his many self states. In the dissociative attunement deconstructed here, the therapist– patient dyad resonated increasingly in a telepathic attunement, despite much discord and confusion
Adult Attachment Interview and Psychoanalytic Perspective: A Single Case Study
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2003
When Daniel Stern published his monograph on the Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) he has retrospectively opened a new phase in the history of psychoanalysis. There had been the immense work of many generations of clinicians to reconstructing their patients´ account of history in the clinical setting 1 underscoring the importance of development: This genetic point of 1 These intensive endeavours created the clinical reconstructed baby-to be more specific created the many clinical babies one in each theory "These descriptions are constructions created by fathers and mothers such as Freud, Abraham, Klein, Ferenczi, A. and M. Balint, Winnicott, Mahler, and Kohut. Everyone is aware that the various psychoanalytic babies differ greatly. The designers of the models must put up with the fact that their creations are compared. Kohut's tragic man lies as an infant in the cradle surrounded by an environment (the so-called selfobjects) which only partially reflects his innate narcissism. The fact that Freud's theory of narcissism was the godfather makes the tragedy almost inevitable, but it is nevertheless bathed in a relatively mild light: evil is not a primary force, and oedipal guilt feelings are avoidable, according to Kohut, if the early tragedy is limited and the narcissistic self discovers itself in the mirror of love (Kohut 1984, p. 13). In Kohut's theory, Freud's guilty, oedipal individual and his intrapsychic conflicts are the product of a narcissistic disturbance in early childhood. Without this disturbance, the oedipal conflicts of 3-to 5-year-old children would be principally pleasurable transitional phases, leaving no appreciable guilt feelings as long as a healthy self had already developed. Kohut's theory gives the individual the prospect of a future free of oedipal conflicts. It can be inferred from Kohut's late works that, provided the empathy of the selfobjects is good, the human tragedy also stays within reasonable bounds. Klein's (1948, 1957) psychoanalytic infant is quite different. This time the godfather was Freud's death instinct, ensuring a malevolence whose early manifestations are unrivalled and which can only be endured by dividing the world into a good breast and a bad breast. The tragedy of the infant's later life is then profound, in contrast to Kohut's mild form, which may find expression in selfironic humor. Klein's adult was born as Sisyphus, condemned to eternal failure in his attempts to atone for the imaginary wrongs inflicted by hate and envy. Throughout life the processes of projective and introjective identification, and their contents, remain the basic vehicles of interpersonal processes, within families and between groups and whole peoples. In restricting ourselves to the description of the essential features of two influential models of the psychoanalytic infant, we have highlighted dissimilarities and contradictions. This was our intention. Our current concern is not to advocate pragmatic eclecticism and recommend that the most plausible components be extracted from all the psychoanalytic theories of early childhood and amalgamated with elements of general developmental psychology or parts of Piaget's theory. Rather, we believe that productive eclecticism within psychoanalysis, and within neonatological research into interaction, is only possible if we also examine the aspects which are neglected in the different constructions. It is, after all, disturbing that similar empathic View publication stats View publication stats
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2012
Reading this book was a rather humbling experience in that I realized that there is so much more research on the impact of early life trauma than I knew, even though I was familiar with quite a number of seminal papers in the field. One of the remarkable aspects of the book is the range of research that it covers, from the epidemiology of childhood trauma and the history of professional attitudes to the problem, through diagnostic controversies, psychosocial issues, longitudinal studies on the immediate and long-term neurobiological, psychological and physical effects of early relational trauma, to the implications all these hold for clinical work with children and adults who have suffered early-life trauma. This huge body of research is discussed and summarized in three sections, each of which has short co-authored chapters, so that the expertise of key researchers and clinicians across the whole field of traumatology is represented. The editors of the book are three psychiatrists, Ruth Lanius and Claire Pain from Canada, and Eric Vermetten from the Netherlands, all neuroscience and trauma research specialists who also explore the implications of empirical research for clinical psychotherapy practice. The focus of almost all these papers is on the hugely damaging impact that neglect or abuse by primary caregivers has on the psychological and emotional development of the human infant, creating lifelong consequences in terms of brain development, attachment and affect dysregulation, altered stress responses and a range of psychological symptoms, from the flashbacks and hyper-arousal of PTSD to altered perception, epileptic-type phenomena and dissociative states of varying degrees of severity, including borderline personality and dissociative identity disorder. This evidence from neurobiology powerfully supports the argument that it is real-life experience rather than innate unconscious phantasy that determines most of the problems our patients bring to the consulting room and so is highly relevant to our clinical practice. In Section I, the epidemiology and history of childhood trauma are first described, with several authors commenting on the reluctance of some professional groups to accept the link between childhood trauma and a range of physical and psychological symptoms they see in their patients. In the synopsis to this section, McFarlane suggests that: 'Clinicians' capacities for observation and description of patients' predicaments are more determined by the models of psychopathology that clinicians adhere to than the history presented to them by the patient' (p. 44). McFarlane suggests that psychoanalytic theory carries considerable responsibility for 'the millions of patients whose stories were told but not believed, being dismissed as oedipal fantasies' (p. 44). But medicine, psychology and psychiatry also failed to recognize the destructiveness of childhood abuse, as part of a broader denial of the significance of trauma. Van der Kolk highlights the shocking example of one psychiatric textbook, published in the 1970s that actually extolled 'the possible benefits to a child of incest' (p. 58).