Voice of the Analyst: The Body/Mind Dialectic Within the Psychoanalytic Subject: Finding the Analyst's Voice

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

The Analyst as Comic and the Comic in Analysis: Reply to Commentary

This discussion elaborates aspects of the use of humor and jokes in clinical psychoanalysis. The use of humor, like dreams or other symmetrical processes, facilitates the patient's development of the capacity to symbolize unconscious experience and mitigates the need to evacuate unconscious experiences and fantasies into the external world. In focusing on specific clinical interventions I highlight three dimensions of the process: the concept of coconstruction in the emergence of humor in the psychoanalytic relationship, the authority of the patient's psychopathology and affective and cognitive development, and the analyst's willingness to take the risks of self-exposure and possibly hurting the patient implicit in the use of humor and jokes in the analytic relationship. Different forms of humor are described in relation to the different clinical situations, including mutually created jokes, caricatured enactments, cartoonlike images, and self-depreciating commentary on the analytic process. In using jokes and humor in psychoanalysis we introduce the possibility of pleasure within an intense, intimate moment which allows for the transformation of unacceptable aspects of both patient and analyst as they become joined within a broader human experience.     

The Analyst in the Pharmacy

The merging of medication and analysis has been more widely endorsed in recent years. However, the issue of the analyst needing pharmacotherapy and how its use presses on the analytic frame has not been considered. This essay will look at how the analyst's need for medication threads into the structure of treatment. Issues of stigma and shame triggered by medication use are discussed, as well as the treatment consideration of self-disclosure as an intervention. The author offers both objective and subjective data on this subject, and includes a clinical case example to illustrate how self-disclosure of medication status can offer greater degrees of freedom in a patient's analysis.     

The Mind as a Process

Essentially all behavior is regulated by the brain in response to information received from within the body or from the environment. The tangible structures of the brain serve as devices for processing thoughts and emotions as well as information. Stored among the interacting neural structures are memories of past experiences and responses to them. These intangibles participate in determining the decisions made and the actions performed by the brain's structures. There are valuable studies of the clinical and neurological effects of environmental stimuli, but we need to learn more about the processes that lead to these effects. More definitive correlations could be made between environmental stimuli and the neurological pathways they create by studying individual's real life experiences rather than laboratory simulations alone.     

The Body and Mind (Including of the Analyst) in the Treatment of a Psychotic State: Some Reflections: Commentary on Paper by Riccardo Lombardi

Riccardo Lombardi's paper is considered from a British (Independent) object relations perspective. Although the paper deals with the experience of shame and its relationship to fantasies about sex and death and how these are experienced (including in the body), shame is also a profoundly object related mental state, perhaps one of the most damaging when suffered in infancy, leading to reflexive functioning. The nature of shame is touched upon and its impact on personality development, and how this is handled in the transference and countertransference by Riccardo Lombardi with his particular patient. Although the patient's struggle to own his own hate is Lombardi's principal focus in the clinical account, this author suggests that Lombardi was attuned primarily to the patient's developmental failings due to the impact of shame and, by working primarily in the countertransference, was able to facilitate growth of certain personality functions for the first time.     

Light and Shadow as a Function of the Religious Psyche: The Evil Eye

Psychology today has a tendency to pathologize anything which deviates from the Cartesian medical paradigm. It is a great injustice of the field to rob the psyche of its shadow, its evil side. The late Rabbi Shneerson spoke about this aspect of personality in terms of light and shadow (good and evil) and how we need to allow both in an attempt to create balance which then leads to harmony. This paper is an attempt to look at the ancient struggle of good and evil in terms of the Etz Chayim, or the Tree of Life. The ancient knowledge of Judaism has much to offer the young field of psychology concerning human nature and life cycle. The evil eye as a religious function of the psyche is an attempt to expound on the importance of taking the full spectrum of human nature into account, seeing and understanding the entire picture. Perhaps we can change from pathology to the stories of our monsters or gremlins and what they have to teach us. It is only through allowing the light and the dark to co-exist, that we can create a place for balance and unity. Lectures extensively at universities, to professional organizations, and community groups     

A Crisis in the Subjectivity of the Analyst: The Trauma of Morality

This paper explores the dilemmas that arise when treatment is offered in circumstances when spiritual and ethical survival comes into conflict with physical survival and material well-being. Through an exploration of the author's experience in South Africa's war of liberation, this conflict is explicated. Although these experiences are now historical, it is argued that they are pertinent at the current time as the West, following 9/11, finds itself encouraged to think in terms of war, as notions of both a war against the West and a war against terrorism have become part of many public discourses. Questions that may arise for us as relational analysts and as individuals as a result of this are flagged, and although no easy answers are proposed, the importance of this exploration is highlighted.     

The Writer and the Analyst on and in Time

The paper reflects on the metaphors of time that Dr. Seligman’s piece make available to us, specifically on his deep and inspiring account of the role of time in the analytic process.     

Heaven on Earth: The Mind Uploading Project as Secular Eschatology

This paper addresses the greatest aspiration of the transhumanist movement: achieving immortal life through a procedure known as mind uploading. This procedure consists in keeping our minds fully and indefinitely operative after death by transferring them to a non-biological substrate that allows man to be liberated from his bodily confinement. My main thesis is that the mind uploading project presupposes a secular eschatology, consummating the Promethean utopia according to which human beings could redeem themselves, expelling God definitively from their existential horizon. On this basis, the paper offers meaningful contrasts between the uploading as secular eschatology and the Christian tradition.     

The Mind as Skills and Dispositions: On Normativity and Mediation

On the occasion of the critique of Alfredo Gaete and Carlos Cornejo, this article explains and extends the hybrid theory of the mind that I recently presented in this journal. Taking inspiration from Rom Harré’s program for a hybrid psychology, the theory is supposed to be integrative and aims to broaden Harré’s hybrid psychology by including not just the brain, but also the body, social practices, and technological artifacts as mediators of the mind. The mind is understood not as a substance of any kind, but as a set of skills and dispositions to act, think, and feel. This implies a normative view of the mind, according to which psychological phenomena do not simply happen, but are done, and can consequently be done more or less well. I provide arguments in favor of grounding psychology in normativity rather than conscious experience, and I explain why the emphasis on mediators does not represent a threat to the ontological primacy of the person in psychology.