Blind mothers of suffering babies

Abstract

In this paper, the author presents case material related to a patient who asked for psychotherapy as she was having difficulty managing her problems within the family. This clinical vignette reveals how some mothers have difficulties being, as Winnicott said, “ordinary devoted mothers.” These mothers are “psychologically blind,” in that they not able to psychologically “see” or feel the pain of their babies or children. The author discusses the case material using Winnicott and Bion’s essential concepts of how the patient is deprived of maternal functioning.     

Lucy's dividing family: My discovery of the person in the subject

Abstract

This essay is excerpted from a larger project the author conducted with adolescent and preadolescent children of divorce. It tells the personal story of the author's first interview experience with her first participant in this project, here called Lucy. At the time of the interview, she was 11 years old and her parents had been divorced for 3 years. In the effort to engage the reader as an outside interpreter of her story, this essay invites the reader in, to the “raw data” of Lucy's experiences, as described in her words. Presented here in dialogue are the two voices of participant and researcher, as well as researcher reflections and recollections of this memorable experience.     

Disbelief and Trust in Psychoanalysis - A Case Study

A case of unorthodox psychoanalysis with a 27-year-old woman, during the years 1994-1998 is presented. The patient, Silja, suffered from severe character neurosis with depression. She studied humanities at the University of Helsinki with poor results, because of severe inner demands of perfection. The therapy was unorthodox, because it was necessary to change the method a few times. After two years of psychoanalysis, a life-threatening crisis occurred in 1996, and I was obliged to take a more active role and even give direct advice concerning her studies. This was successful, and she could achieve her B.A., the lower university degree. The change of method was necessary to avoid suicide. In the end we could resume psychoanalysis and analyse what had happened. Suddenly in the summer of 1998 Silja's depression disappeared and her looks improved. Therapy ended in November 1998, when she was ready to try on her own. According to her both the holding and love and also the direct advice were the most important elements in her cure. After a three years' follow-up her condition had further improved, she was married, had a job and was expecting a baby.     

Change,Vulnerability, Fear,and Taking Risks–An Interview with Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

The author addresses the mythic characters of Ulysses and Penelope as archetypes for herself. She reviews divergent attitudes, beliefs and aspirations of her life by detailing an internal conflict between her identification with Ulysses1 adventuresomeness and her reluctant realization that Penelope can also represent her, however much she rejected her for seeming dull and repetitve

In this process the author notes how she constricted her own creativity when she took on uncritically the patriarchal beliefs about the roles of wives and mothers. Nevertheless she wonders whether present-day women's liberation from archaic notions about women inadvertently sacrifices the optimal development of children because of the rigid demands of the work-place.

Finally she experiences the symbolic reunion of Penelope's and Ulysses' different images within herself, and considers how what each represents can have renewed meaning for her as she moves towards the end of her life.     

Frieda fromm-reichmann,loneliness and deafness

Abstract

This paper explores the rôle that Fromm-Reichmann's parents' adult-onset severe familial deafness may have played in the development of Fromm-Reichmann's career choice and of her charismatic style. She, too, became deaf. Her final paper, “Loneliness” is perhaps her most emotionally evocative work. Perhaps her own increasingly severe experience of loneliness motivated her writing on this theme. Just as she expected self-honesty from her Chestnut Lodge colleagues, this paper demonstrates that she held herself to this same standard. The author urges the deaf community to seek out the newly deaf and to encourage their learning to sign, thus ameliorating the newly deaf individual's loneliness.     

Precedent Autonomy and Subsequent Consent

Honoring a living will typically involves treating an incompetent patient in accord with preferences she once had, but whose objects she can no longer understand. How do we respect her “precedent autonomy” by giving her what she used to want? There is a similar problem with “subsequent consent”: How can we justify interfering with someone's autonomy on the grounds that she will later consent to the interference, if she refuses now? Both problems arise on the assumption that, to respect someone's autonomy, any preferences we respect must be among that person's current preferences. I argue that this is not always true. Just as we can celebrate an event long after it happens, so can we respect someone's wishes long before or after she has that wish. In the contexts of precedent autonomy and subsequent consent, the wishes are often preferences about which of two other, conflicting preferences to satisfy. When someone has two conflicting preferences, and a third preference on how to resolve that conflict, to respect his autonomy we must respect that third preference. People with declining competence may have a resolution preference earlier, favoring the earlier conflicting preference (precedent autonomy), whereas those with rising competence may have it later, favoring the later conflicting preference (subsequent consent). To respect autonomy in such cases we must respect not a current, but a former or later preference.     

The Atonement of the Alleged Perpetrator's Daughter: Understanding of Model Scenes and Space Attachment in Analytical Dance Therapy

In this rich paper the analysand Annabelle is sent by her analyst to the dance therapist who reports in great detail how Annabelle manages to throw off and—to a certain extent—integrate not only her own life-long misunderstanding but also those of her parents. The reason for Annabelle's referral was straightforward: the analysis had ground to a halt. Words no longer reached her. The reader is reminded of the emotive-relational-motor clusters described in Chazan's and Shahar-Levy's papers. Body image distortions and space misperceptions curtailed this patient's ability to function. When she began to bring her distress to her analytic dance therapy sessions, she could not associate verbally but made use of props her therapist had in store. As she slowly progressed toward true symbolization and expression, her therapist found herself embroiled countertransferentially. The patient's long-suffering mother was remembered as someone who would, or could, only give partial information about the family's history. The father had been a Nazi and was now blamed for all the suffering the family had lo endure. This fact resonated both with Annabelle's analyst and the dance therapist who managed to take a long look at their own family's records during that troubled time.     

The Dying Process of a Conscious Woman—Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

This article relates the author's experience with Virginia Satir in the last eight days of her life. The detail of incidents and interactions is most revealing of Virginia's ability to deal with such a poignant time in her own life in an open, focused manner and in a process like she taught others. There is a strong spiritual and human quality that the reader will find deeply moving.     

A Queer Death: The Funeral of Diana,Princess of Wales

Abstract

Elizabeth Stuart opens her paper by commenting that she feels that the most significant part of Michael Vasey's book, Stranger and Friends, is the final chapter on death. Vasey, she notes is one of the very few people to address the question of sexuality and death and his call for the queering of death has to be taken seriously. Stuart goes on to explore what a queer death might actually look like by reference to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Through a close reading of the event, combined with personal experiences of having been in Hyde Park, Stuart shows how the many different mixed and ambiguous messages were brought together in the one event. The overall effect of this ambiguity was to subvert what should have been a national establishment ritual to make it accessible to many different people, especially to those who are gay, lesbian or bisexual. Stuart sees this as a possible pattern for the future and calls for far more work on this neglected area of sexuality and worship.     

Dementia–A Spiritual Journey Towards the Divine: A Personal View of Dementia

SUMMARY

This chapter presents a moving account of one woman's journey into fronto-temporal dementia. Bryden grapples with the difficult issues of loss of self and relationship with God. She examines the significance of memory in the Christian journey, and finally, she proposes ways for relating to her as she moves further into dementia. The strategies suggested uphold her as a fellow member of the Body of Christ, where others may become her memory, and where she can still be nurtured through the love of others and feel God's love through them.     

REASON-EXPLANATION AND THE CONTENTS OF THE MIND

This paper takes a close look at the kinds of considerations we use to reach agreement in our ordinary (non‐philosophical and non‐theoretical) judgments about a person's reasons for acting, and the following theses are defended. First, considering the circumstances in which the action occurs is often enough to remove our puzzlement as to why someone acts as she does. Second, in those situations where we do need to enquire about the agent's state of mind, this does not, in the normal case, lead us to look for hidden, inner events that are candidates for the causes of her action. Finally, even though there are cases in which the agent's introspections, reflections, and deliberations are relevant to our search for reasons, such cases do not lend support to the idea that reasons are hidden or inner causes of action. This suggests a problem for most philosophical accounts of what it is to act for reasons and for most philosophical accounts of the nature of mental states.     

My father,Herbert Rosenfeld

Abstract

This is the modified version of the powerpoint that Angela Rosenfeld, the elder daughter of Herbert Rosenfeld (1910–1986) – one of Melanie Klein's most important collaborators – presented in Nuremberg, his native town, on October 5, 2014, upon the invitation of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG). In it, Angela Rosenfeld reconstructs not only her father's main life events, but also her personal relationship to him and the family climate in which she grew up. The traumas brought about by Hitler's rise to power in 1933 are partly still reflected in the holes and/or open questions that the author herself became aware of while writing and presenting the paper – and which profoundly touched and moved her audience.     

Who,What, When,Where, How,and Mostly Why?

SUMMARY

The death of a client by suicide was very emotionally destabilizing to this therapist. She worked hard to distance herself personally from the pain at first and at the same time she found herself overfocused on the “psychological autopsy.” She had difficulty accepting new clients and wanted to withdraw from a meaningful appointment to a state advisory committee. Only when she was able to identify with the client's pain and realize how that pain touched her own history of loss was she able to grieve productively. She realized that gender was relevant in her identification with the victim and in sorting out each of their histories of loss.     

Gaining knowledge via other minds: Children's flexible trust in others as sources of information

In five experiments, we examined 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds’ understanding that they could gain knowledge indirectly from someone who had seen something they had not. Consistent with previous research, children judged that an informant, who had seen inside a box, knew its contents. Similarly, when an informant marked a picture to indicate her suggestion as to the content of the box, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds trusted this more frequently when the informant had seen inside the box than when she had not. Going beyond previous research, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds were also sensitive to informants’ relevant experience when they had to look over a barrier to see the marked picture, or ask for the barrier to be raised. Yet when children had to elicit the informant's suggestion, rather than just consult a suggestion already present, even 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds were no more likely to do so when the informant had seen the box's content than when she had not, and no more likely to trust the well‐informed suggestion than the uninformed one. We conclude that young children who can ask questions may not yet fully understand the process by which they can gain accurate information from someone who has the experience they lack.     

Margaret Atwood and Assisted Reproduction: From Fantasy to Reality

ABSTRACT

This article raises the bewildering impact of artificial reproduction techniques (ART) for analysts, for the family, for the couple, and for their children. It explores a number of concerns, some of which include: the dissociation of sex from reproduction; the relative absence of the usual time limits that people have traditionally taken into consideration to conceive; questions about generation and age; the risk of perceiving oneself as omnipotent; the need to renovate the story of how one came to be; the impact of ART on the way the primal scene and the Oedipal complex are worked through when there is no longer only a triangle, but more people involved in procreation; the children’s identity (Who are my real parents?) and the impact on the identity of the women involved in participating in the procreation such as the egg donor or surrogate. It also addresses the impact of ART on the analyst who has to deal with situations for which he or she is not prepared either personally or professionally. It begins by exploring Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and its present day relevance to ART. Atwood’s vision was prescient. The similarity between the lives and experiences of her Handmaids and that of today’s commercial surrogates in India is often striking. It also presents some ways in which literature and media are predicting the challenges that ART will bring in the future. It explores how what was fiction a few decades ago has become reality and how what we presently think of as fiction will perhaps be a reality in the not-so-distant future. The second part of the article presents a clinical vignette in which a couple presents with infertility in the wife, whose infertility was the consequence of chemotherapy treatment she received as a young adult. She decided to look for a donor in a European country and succeeded at getting pregnant. However, though successful, the pregnancy proved to be extremely difficult. When a second pregnancy was desired, the same donor provided with her ova. To avoid the complications of the first pregnancies, the couple accepted the wife’s sister’s offer to carry the pregnancy. Their daughters are now two and four years old.     

Prayer and the Theologian of the Cross: Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther

This article constructs a dialogue between Julian of Norwich and the concept of “theologian of the cross,” as found in Martin Luther and his recent interpreters. Since she is Catholic and medieval, one might begin by suspecting that her theology is not acceptable to someone who follows Luther's teaching in the Heidelberg Disputation. However a closer look will suggest that what she has to say is largely in accord with Luther's standard for a theologian of the cross. Put more positively, Julian is a theologian of the cross, in spite of her use of different language and concepts from those of Luther. The focus of the article is the subject of prayer: what Julian teaches about it, and what may be inferred about prayer from Luther's dramatic theses in his disputation.     

Discovering the Inner Life of a Child

Abstract

Using Winnicott's concept of transitional space, joint attention, theory of mind, and a case vignette, the author describes techniques in elucidating and elaborating a child's play space, hence, psychic life. Explicating the child's theory of mind uncovers the dynamics, motives, conflicts, and unconscious material used by the analyst to form interpretations and encourage the child's self-reflective function (Fonagy & Target, 1996). Finally, a case vignette illustrates the enhancement of play space by elucidating the child's theory of mind.     

Interview with mara selvini palazzoli and giuliana prata

Abstract

As anyone who has encountered her in person or through her writings knows, Mara Selvini Palazzoli is an impressive woman. 1 found her to be powerful, attentive and, most of all, intellectually restless impatient with psychotherapeutic approaches that work slowly or not at all, with the reluctance of family therapists to undertake thorough training, and with my inability to understand immediately some of her explanations.

Giuliana Prata, in contrast, is quiet, stable, ready to supply the correct English word or to expand on one of Palazzoli's comments. She seems ideally suited to her job of conducting the intensive telephone interview required before a family comes to the Milan Family Institute.

Although I had corresponded with Mara Selvini Palazzoli before our interview in Milan on March 30, 1982, I had not sent her any actual questions. Nevertheless, showing a certain prescience, she launched into an answer to my first question before I had a chance to voice it! That question was: Would you talk about your evolution from psychoanalyst to family therapist to paradoxical therapist SEB     

Review Essay: Beyond the Fear of Intimacy

Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time by Stephen A. Mitchell (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002, 224 pp.)

This article reflects on the importance of Mitchell's work in the United Kingdom, where notions of intimacy sit uneasily with psychoanalytic practice. The author argues that a reluctance to take up intimacy in the consulting room has a deleterious effect on intimate relations outside it. Drawing on her work with women, in particular, she posits that the erotic is still an undertheorized area of relational analysis. Although most orthodox theory has been jettisoned, new theory is necessary for an understanding of what the author observes to be a “false” erotic in many of her patients in whom the erotic is temporarily available but is unreliable as a desire and as a source of identity.