The structural theory and the representational world

I have attempted to articulate a means of incorporating representational world concepts firmly within the structural theory, while still maintaining their clarity, a view which I believe can be useful both clinically and theoretically. It can facilitate an analyst's working with complex clinical material that reflects conflicts at multiple developmental levels, without forcing a premature commitment to restrictive conceptualizations which could impede his listening to the full richness of the material. In addition, I have argued that the perpetual resurgences of representational world psychologies may be understood as an indication of the need for the inclusion of those phenomena in our theory in a clear and integrated way. Finally, I have presented some basis for suggesting that the drive-defense and the representational world models represent coordinate aspects of the structural theory, each with its vantage points for highlighting and clarifying certain phenomena, but best used complementarily in our observations of psychopathology at all levels of development. I do not believe this represents a totally new view or departure within psychoanalytic thinking. On the contrary, I have assembled, organized, and attempted to make explicit certain understandings which I believe we often apply naturally through the use of empathy and intuitive gifts. In an analysis which is going well, an analyst operating within a drive-defense framework is almost certainly finding some natural way of dealing with self and object issues, even if he does not formulate them explicitly to himself. To set down and make explicit, however, the functions we may much of the time perform without awareness is worthwhile preparation against times of difficulty in understanding a particular case. At those times we need at our disposal as specific, as inclusive, and as illuminating a theory as we can find to assist us. It is that clinical need which has guided me in these attempts at theoretical clarification.     

Compromise Formation Theory: An Intersubjective Dimension

This paper has two purposes. The first is to elaborate compromise formation theory from an intersubjective perspective. The second is to explore the implications of this vantage point for our understanding of the modes of therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.

I pursue the goals of this paper by outlining the essentials of compromise formation theory and by elaborating what I mean by its intersubjective dimension. Then I present and discuss analytic data to demonstrate the value of the theory for understanding aspects of mode of therapeutic action. Finally, I contrast this perspective with competing theoretical points of view.     

Fictional objects, non-existence, and the principle of characterization

I advance an objection to Graham Priest??s account of fictional entities as nonexistent objects. According to Priest, fictional characters do not have, in our world, the properties they are represented as having; for example, the property of being a bank clerk is possessed by Joseph K. not in our world but in other worlds. Priest claims that, in this way, his theory can include an unrestricted principle of characterization for objects. Now, some representational properties attributed to fictional characters, a kind of fictional entities, involve a crucial reference to the world in which they are supposed to be instantiated. I argue that these representational properties are problematic for Priest??s theory and that he cannot accept an unrestricted version of the principle of characterization. Thus, while not refuting Priest??s theory, I show that it is no better off than other Meinongian theories.     

Are color experiences representational?

The dominant view among philosophers of perception is that color experiences, like color judgments, are essentially representational: as part of their very nature color experiences possess representational contents which are either accurate or inaccurate. My starting point in assessing this view is Sydney Shoemaker’s familiar account of color perception. After providing a sympathetic reconstruction of his account, I show how plausible assumptions at the heart of Shoemaker’s theory make trouble for his claim that color experiences represent the colors of things. I consider various ways of trying to avoid the objection, and find all of the responses wanting. My conclusion is that we have reason to be skeptical of the orthodox view that color experiences are constitutively representational.     

Taking Representation Seriously: Rethinking Bioethics Through Clint Eastwood��s Million Dollar Baby

In this article, I propose a new model for understanding the function of representation in bioethics. Bioethicists have traditionally judged representations according to a mimetic paradigm, in which representations of bioethical dilemmas are assessed based on their correspondence to the "reality" of bioethics itself. In this article, I argue that this mimetic paradigm obscures the interaction between representation and reality and diverts bioethicists from analyzing the tensions in the representational object itself. I propose an anti-mimetic model of representation that is attuned to how representations can both maintain and potentially subvert dominant conceptions of bioethics. I illustrate this model through a case study of Clint Eastwood's film Million Dollar Baby. By focusing attention on the film's lack of adherence bioethical procedures and medical science, critics missed how an analysis of its representational logic provides a means of reimagining both bioethics and medical practice. In my conclusion, I build off this case study to assess how an incorporation of representational studies can deepen-and be deepened by-recent calls for interdisciplinarity in bioethics.     

Cross-Continental Divides Regarding Survival,Play, and Enactment: Reply to Commentaries by Keene,Ilahi, and Coen

The author distinguishes between the ways that the Independent Group and Relational Theorists conceptualize object survival, play, enactment, and mutuality. American relational theory is simultaneously focused on both the patient's and analyst's experience and the patient's inner representational world. Interaction is informed by and informs our understanding of the patient's conflicts including forms of enactment. In contrast, analysts from the Independent Group tend to view the American interest in interpersonal phenomena and perceptual dimensions of the patient's experience as a distraction from unconscious representations. For relational analysts in the United States, maternal functions of reverie emphasized by the Independent Group are seen as one dimension of the analyst's complex subjectivity, which may be used in containment and interpretation. For relationally oriented analysts containment itself is postulated as to some degree porous unlike the notion of analytic functions of reverie emphasized by the Independent Group. The author tries to focus on these points of divergence and overlap between the two theoretical orientations and their application to case material.     

Adorno: Cultural Education and Resistance

In recent years, culture has become significantly politicized, or conspicuously de-politicized, in different parts of the UK, making its appearance in education policy of pivotal interest and ripe for critical attention. From the vantage point of Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industry and his writings on the work of the teacher, I argue that cultural education is a site where something crucial and distinctive takes place. Within the Enlightenment tradition, critical self-reflection and resistance to heteronymous ways of thinking are core aims of education. Adorno’s contribution to an understanding of these aims leads us to consider the importance of ‘live contact with the warmth of things’ as essential to ethical and intellectual life. The kindly tolerance of the pluralist ideal is now being teased and goaded by acts of terror and widespread concern about personal and social security. At such an unstable juncture, an understanding of cultural education as an experience of ‘incorrigible plurality’ enriches and informs the beleaguered ideal of pluralism and points a way forward in troubled times.     

Bildung and Decline

My point of departure is the idea that Wittgenstein's work, especially his later work with its explicit emphasis on practices, seeks to engage a reader who is likely to come to philosophy with a certain cast of mind that includes unexamined commitments from a particular cultural context. I show how a substantial number of remarks by Wittgenstein in which he addresses cultural topics bring out the importance of the quite specific connections he saw between the philosophical problems with which he grappled and the historical cultural context in which those problems have arisen. Not only is a grasp of this aspect of his writing integral to a proper understanding of Wittgenstein as a thinker, bringing out these connections serves to put these remarks into a coherent conceptual framework. In assessing the relation of Wittgenstein's cultural concerns to his engagement with metaphysics, I show how his development of Spengler's thought is an important connecting link. Particularly important for this analysis will be my discussion of Wittgenstein's understanding and employment of the concept of a Betrachtungsform , as well as a few closely related concepts. I then offer an interpretation of what I believe to be the significance of the connection in his later thought between his philosophical activity and his views about the modern West.     

Hume's Unified Theory of Mental Representation

On its face, Hume's account of mental representation involves at least two elements. On the one hand, Hume often seems to write as though the representational properties of an idea are fixed solely by what it is a copy or image of. But, on the other, Hume's treatment of abstract ideas (and other similar cases) makes it clear that the representational properties of a Humean idea sometimes depend, not just on what it is copied from, but also on the manner in which the mind associates it with other ideas. Past interpretations of Hume have tended to focus on one of these elements of his account to the neglect of the other. But no interpretation of this sort is likely to capture the role that both copying and association play within Hume's discussion. In what follows, I argue that the most plausible way of understanding Hume's discussion involves attributing to him a unified account of mental representation in which both of these elements play a central role. I close by discussing the manner in which reading Hume in this way would alter our understanding of the relationship between Hume's thought and contemporary philosophy of mind.     

Processing trauma in psychoanalysis in ‘real’ time and in dreams: the convergence of past,present and future during COVID-19

In the current collective unrest, we and our analysands are living in real time and need vantage points from which to make meaning, as subjective experience of time is collapsing. For many analysands, the past is being relived in the present, with no imaginable future. During the time of COVID-19, dreams are providing a valuable mechanism in working with atemporal emotional trauma, previously uncontextualized. Dream metaphor can provide a transitional space to move around in within the analytic framework. This paper explores a variety of dreams from individual analysands demonstrating different ways of conceptualizing personal and collective experience, bridging between the past, present, and future. Parallels between feeling states related to the current condition and unprocessed implicit memories from the past will be examined, as a vehicle for processing past trauma. Dreams expressing current states of dread for an unimaginable future, as well compensatory dreams showing a hopeful vision of the future will be considered.     

Evaluating progress in training: character or competence?

Jung was mercurial in his attitudes to method and technique, leaving us a problematic legacy when it comes to evaluating the progress of trainees. Some would say that those of us involved with the assessment of candidates during their training continue to rely too heavily on intuition and subjective assessments. However good our admissions' procedures and the structures in place to review progress, the emotional and financial demands for trainees of embarking on an analytic training, the tendency for analytic institutes to remain opaque and slow to link up with the external world and the cliques within our profession make more objective assessments of progress and readiness to qualify at best haphazard and at worst inadequate. Some trainees have an immediate talent for analytic work; others develop their gifts more slowly; some never find this capacity. Working from a definition of analytic talent, the paper begins to map out a Jungian framework for assessing progress, emphasizing the significance of both character and competence and the developing relationship between them.     

Political Divide in the Consulting Room*

This paper addresses a treatment relationship that tests the analyst’s capacity for empathy within an impinging political context. It involves a Ferenczian “relaxation of technique” within the analytic frame, while the analytic couple attempts to negotiate a polarized transference and countertransference. Specifically, within a long-term treatment imbued with positive transference, my patient becomes openly outraged by my insensitive anti-Trump remarks. Increasing confrontations around the expression of political views illuminate our otherness. He complains of psychic ostracism within a liberal cultural context, which tolerates no divergence from mainstream liberal ideas or discourse. I come to embody the oppressive other: the liberal “thought police”, “silencing” him for his perspective. Empathic breaches between us take center stage: how I don’t see the world as he does, and don’t see or hear him.     

Tanya and the Adaptive Dialectic of Romantic Passion and Secure Attachment

My analytic work with Tanya illustrated one unique, heightened, individual version of a pervasive human conflict: the way in which erotic passion can be experienced as inherently conflicting with other relational bonds and broader values. In virtually every culture throughout human history, we find expressions of this tension between passionate Eros and other forms of love.

My clinical approach entails an openness to multiple analytic perspectives, including Mitchell's posthumous views in Can Love Last. In addition, I make use of a sensibility informed by evolutionary biology as a vantage point for understanding the individual struggle of patients like Tanya, as well as illuminating some of the larger issues about Eros and attachment. I suggest that romantic aspects of Eros may have evolved as part of a complex psychological system designed to deal with specifically human existential vulnerabilities and anxieties, as well as a way of challenging the inherent human tendency to over-accommodate to the subjective world of the other.     

Psychology and Culture: Back to the Future?

Psychology has a poor record in addressing cultural phenomena. One response is to turn to ancient concepts from local traditions and to use these as alternative analytic categories to explain behavior. However, there are problems with such an approach. These concepts will be read from the vantage point of the present and interpreted differently so as to propose different diagnoses (and solutions) for contemporary social problems. As an alternative, rather than using ancient resources as analytic categories in the explanation of behavior, we could instead examine how they are used as categories of practice as people actively make sense of their social context and themselves. Attending to such contemporary ‘lay’ usage (and the contestation it entails) allows for a more dynamic conception of cultural processes than is typical in psychology. More generally, I believe that it is possible to use our psychological constructs so that we can see the distinctive particularities of the phenomena before us in new and interesting ways, and in ways that respect their cultural specificity. This claim is illustrated through reference to recent work using the concept of social identity to illuminate aspects of Hindu pilgrimage.     

Light and color in a void: The analysis of a special needs child

This clinical report comes from the five year, four day a week analysis of a male child. What is special is that this treatment is of a child with marked mental retardation. I have retained this nomenclature because that is how Ricardo's parents described his mental capacity. What they meant was that he was greatly impaired in his cognition and this could be seen in Ricardo's severe cognitive, social, behavioral, and relational improprieties. I have privileged the function of psychoanalytic understanding and the role of transference to bring about modifications in this child's internal world. And I have considered the patient's psychotic mental state to be in need of psychoanalytic treatment not withstanding his psychosis's connection to his cognitive handicap. I have also added information I have received after the analysis, information that demonstrates continued integration coming from the analytic process. Owing to Ricardo's limited mental capacities, this article advances clinical information that is not often found in analyses of children. There are possibly many other children like him who nonetheless would benefit from dynamic psychoanalytic understanding. On the other hand, I shall not discuss this matter theoretically, even though some theoretic considerations are necessary. Clinical practice and the transferential relation are this report's principal material.     

Intuition and Reflection in Arithmetic: Bob Hale

Michael Potter considers several versions of the view that the truths of arithmetic are analytic and finds difficulties with all of them. There is, I think, no gainsaying his claim that arithmetic cannot be analytic in Kant's sense. However, his pessimistic assessment of the view that what is now widely called Hume's principle can serve as an analytic foundation for arithmetic seems to me unjustified. I consider and offer some answers to the objections he brings against it.     

In Search of a More Reliable Truth: Mourning and Donald Capps’s Psychological Portrait of Jesus

This article is an abridged version of a chapter in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I examine the relationship between personal experience and public theory within certain strands of contemporary psychology of religion and pastoral theology. My guiding theory is Peter Homans’s “mourning religion” thesis. In this chapter, I examine the life and work of Donald Capps, who is the most prolific contemporary writer in the fields of psychology of religion and pastoral theology. I argue that Capps addressed various personal losses in a deeply personal way during his fifties, and I believe that the key moment for Capps in overcoming his melancholia occurred after his application of his melancholia theory to Jesus, because there Capps was able to integrate and to sustain in a satisfying way his various selves and, therefore, open himself up to mourn in a non-defensive way—the way of humor.     

Perceptual Content Defended

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has content apply only to accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational.     

Contribution to the Discussion on the Analytic Frame

Our conception of the analytic frame or setting has changed over the years, partly as a necessary response to the changes in the pace and conditions of modern life, but also as a consequence of our deeper understanding of the analytic relationship and the patients' emotional needs. The shape taken by the setting at any moment of the treatment is a co-construction—partly conscious and partly unconscious—of the pair. However, the manifest setting, its impact on the parties, and its unconscious meanings are also something to be explicitly analyzed during the analytic dialogue. I present a brief clinical vignette of an analysis in which the changes in the setting, determined by external factors, later revealed their unconscious relational meaning. The various stages of this treatment were (a) a standard four-sessions-a-week analysis on the couch, (b) a condensed analysis with two double-sessions held once a week on a same day, and (c) a telephonic analysis interparsed with some occasional presential sessions. I discuss the tranference–countertransference implications of this evolution.