Freud as Philosopher and Metaphysician: The Case of Dora

The Dora case is examined, for its use of psychoanalytic constructs and concomitant reliance on neurological terminology. Boothby and Robertson are cited as commentators, and it is concluded that both Dora and The Interpretation of Dreams point us in the direction of an intriguing, not-quite-materialistic philosophy of mind.     

Back to a crossroad: Nietzsche,Freud, and the east

Nietzsche's work reveals a gradual reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism, coming to view the latter no longer as an anaesthetising religious neurosis, but as a methodology for negation that inspires a conquest over ressentiment, a healing of internalized division, and a celebrative existence. This trend was influenced by his relationship to Schopenhauer and Deussen, and his own personal maturation. Both the source of this philosophy and the reasons for Nietzsche's failure to realise it in his own life are traced to conflictual intrapsychic oppositions in his own parental internalizations. Freud's central concepts (the unconscious, instinctual repression, neurosis, internalized good and bad parental objects, and the discontents of civilization) were modeled on Nietzsche's thinking. Yet Freud rejected oriental mysticism and its somatic focus as regressive. His failure to take up Nietzsche's eventual insight into Buddhism, and his consequent pessimism, are attributable to his personal and theoretical resistance to the issue of the early symbiotic union of mother and infant.     

Supervision, transference and countertransference

The author discusses supervision, transference and countertransference as seen in the context of the clinical case of a patient who had been first seen as a training analysis case and who later, in a fortuitous way, was treated by the supervisor of the training analysis. The supervisor, who in the first instance did not recognize the patient, discusses the reasons for this unusual experience in terms of the presence and absence of transference during the analysis of this patient as a training case and the problems inherent in the task of supervising. The patient's feelings towards the first and the second analyst and the vicissitudes of transference and countertransference during the supervision of the training analysis and its influence on the presentation of the analytical sessions by the student are also detailed and discussed. The question of recorded supervision presentations and their possible influence on the dynamics of supervision is raised.     

Freud and the figure of Moses: the Moses of Freud.

Moses was a lifelong preoccupation of Freud, representing a double and idealized self and object. Freud identified with different aspects of Moses during different periods of development, from concrete hero to abstract ideal. He turned to Moses in the concluding phase of his relationship with Fliess and his self-analysis, and then at other times of crisis. The Moses recreated by Freud is important to the evolution of the concepts of the superego, and his Moses studies simultaneously illuminate the developmental significance of internalization, identification, and abstract symbolic thought. Latently autobiographical, the Moses motif is related to the analysis of unconscious conflict and trauma and to issues of Jewish identity and analytic ideals.     

Transference, countertransference and mentoring: the ghost in the process

The concepts of transference and countertransference are used in this paper to explore some of the deeper dynamics of the relationship between mentor and mentee; it is hoped that this perspective gives a useful gaze on the mentoring process. Three aspects of the relationship are examined. The first is an exploration of the ambivalent relationship of mentor and mentee to the third party at the meeting--the organisation. The second is an examination of the mentoring process where transference theory illuminates aspects of the power, authority, control, affiliation and resistance in the freezing, unfreezing and refreezing aspects of the ebb and flow of transference and countertransference. The third aspect is an examination of the relationship between mentor and mentee with a glance at the narcissistic impulses of altruism and a sceptical brush with the dominant image of unconditional positive regard that is commonly supposed to flow from mentor to mentee.     

Psychical Transmissions: Freud,Spiritualism, and the Occult

This paper explores Freud’s reflection on telepathy, a reflection generally dismissed as a marginal or even slightly embarrassing aspect of his writings. Ernst Jones’s influential Life and Work of Sigmund Freud exemplifies best this marginalization as it rigorously examines Freud’s consideration of telepathy but frames it as a paradoxical feature of the latter’s character or as proof of the difficulty, even for men of genius, to overcome irrational superstitions. The paper offers a historical perspective on the conflict between Freud’s intellectual engagement with telepathy and the scientific community’s rejection of occult beliefs generally associated with the spiritualist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author argues that the treatment of Freud’s reflection on telepathy as a result of superstition not only fails to recognize the caution he undertook within his inquiry into the occult but also omits the important questions that motivated his investigations. Ultimately, Freud’s probes into the possibilities of certain occult phenomena such as telepathy had less to do with superstitions than with a critical examination of the limits of communication as they demonstrated the need within psychoanalysis to reevaluate certain unexplained transmissions of meaning.     

Tacit assumptions,countertransference and psychoanalytic technique. Part two: The influence of countertransference on theory and technique

In this article, the author examines bodily symptoms attributed to psychic mediating factors in the light of a psychoanalytic model of affect and sym- bolization. He uses clinical material from a consultation-liaison setting and a psychoanalytic treatment to illustrate how the model might help to understand different bodily symptoms as manifestations of different degrees of failure in the psychic elaboration of affect. On a more personal note, this could be seen as an attempt to understand, using a newly acquired conceptual tool, what went on in his 20 years of experience in the general hospital psychiatry setting.     

Fordham, feeling, and countertransference: reflections on defences of the self

This is a paper about the difficulties we as analysts get into when we find that a patient has activated something in our unconscious which we cannot resolve in our work with them. Fordham described at the end of his life, in a number of papers, his difficulties and discomfort at not being able to resolve an impasse with one of his patients. From the conversations we had about this situation I knew this caused them both a lot of pain. After Fordham's death his former patient consulted me. Arising from these consultations I describe how I have understood the impasse to have arisen between Fordham and his patient. This paper links character and clinical interests, personality and impasse, developmental failures and defences of the self. It is a personal statement in which I have struggled to represent the meaning in the pain these two men suffered during their analytic engagement, which lasted more than ten years. The theme of fathers and sons was central to the problem.     

Freud and the Hammerschlag family: a formative relationship

From his obituary of Samuel Hammerschlag, we know of Freud's great veneration for his teacher of Jewish religion. However, not only Hammerschlag himself but his whole family had a formative influence on young Freud, who was deeply impressed by their humanity. This paper describes Freud's relationships with all the family members. In particular, it shows how warmly he felt towards the only daughter, Anna Hammerschlag, who was his patient for a while and whom he chose as a godmother for his youngest daughter Anna. By virtue of the crucial role she played in Freud's 'specimen dream' of July 1895 ('Irma's injection'), she also became as it were the godmother of Freud's magnum opus, The Interpretation of Dreams. All the known extant letters from Freud to members of the Hammerschlag family are published here for the first time in English translation.