Will We Ever Meet Again? (original) (raw)
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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.