Using Drawings to Elicit Nonverbal Constructs in Experiential Personal Construct Psychotherapy

Clients who have experienced psychological wounds prior to the use of language frequently struggle to articulate and make sense of their core constructs around self and others. These early wounds can have a significant influence on future relational interactions, even though they may be experienced at a nonverbal level. While eliciting these preverbal constructs may be essential to the healing process, without verbal representation the therapeutic task can be difficult. In this article, we will discuss the use of symbolism within personal construct psychology as well as the use of drawings as representations of nonverbal constructs. We will then discuss experiential personal construct psychotherapy and its focus on the ways we both connect and disconnect from others. Finally, we will present Kristen, a therapy client who experienced early relational wounds and increasingly dissociated in response to relational stress as she matured. Kristen's work in therapy around her fragmented sense of self included drawing her internal self-parts. Only then was she able to wrap words around that which she previously experienced nonverbally. In this case study, Kristen's drawings and her core constructs as elicited during four years of therapy will be presented and discussed.     

Poetics in the shadow of the other's language: The melancholic discourse of the trilingual poet Amelia Rosselli

In this paper, I propose a psychoanalytic reading of some of the writings of Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet who, at the age of seven, lost her father Carlo, who was persecuted and murdered by Mussolini's regime. History and her history conflate into personal and collective trauma which defies human possibilities to work through and mourn. Rosselli's work testifies to such predicament of the human subject of the 20th century, his/her dislocation, alienation and internal irreconcilable divisions. In particular I examine Diary in three tongues, which is the most autobiographical of her works and a self‐analytic piece, written after the conclusion of her second analysis. In the Diary, Rosselli employs textual strategies which convey the fragmentation and destructuring of language, where her traumatic experience resides as a wound inflicted to the symbolic order. I propose that her writings contain her unconscious memories in an estranged and melancholic language which becomes the crucible to express her impossible mourning, in a complex mixture of Eros and Thanatos which allowed her to survive psychically and to create a very personal experimental poetic discourse which made her a literary figure of international acclaim. My primary engagement will be with Freud's theory of mourning and melancholia and its successive elaboration by Kristeva, who maintains that the melancholic discourse finds its expression in the pre‐verbal and infra‐verbal aspects of language, which she calls ‘semiotics’, in dialectic articulation with its symbolic components. Drawing on literary texts, significant inferences can be made on the psychoanalytic listening to the prosodic aspects of language as the carrier of inchoate forms of representation of that which exceeds language: trauma, raw affects, mnemic traces, that is, the unrepresented and/or unrepresentable.     

A mismatch of meaning and intentionality between analyst and analysand

In this paper, I will consider a type of misunderstanding in the analytical dialogue and the possible unconscious motivations underlying this. I will also make reference to the patient's use of the analyst's words for the purpose of narcissistic enactment and will explore the extent of the analyst's involvement in this. The subjects of misunderstanding and narcissistic enactment will be dealt with in relation to a patient's way of processing certain interpretations at the beginning of analysis and the concealment of her way of processing the analyst's words. By contributing dreams and other significant material in the sessions, the patient gradually revealed her phantasies which enabled the analyst to uncover the possible factors which determined her particular attribution of meaning to the analyst's words and her retention of information about how she had initially construed his interpretations.     

The infant's developmental path in phonological acquisition

Research on how language acquisition begins has been fragmented both in terms of scientific communities and in terms of the phenomena that are taken to characterize developmental progress. In her article, Marilyn Vihman argues for an integrative approach that takes the child's efforts at speech production as primary, and notes that infants' knowledge of how words sound may accrue over a protracted period developmentally. Here, I briefly discuss how reconceptualization of the process can help integrate perspectives previously at odds.     

Embodied Pedagogy: The Body and Teaching Theology

This essay is a reflection on my own experience of teaching undergraduates in light of research on proxemics (social and personal space) and kinesics (body language). I discuss ways to structure classroom space to encourage interaction and discussion, using Edward Hall's distinctions between three types of space (fixed feature, semi‐fixed feature, and informal). I explain the importance of body language in verbal communication and describe how I use my own body to illustrate and reinforce what I say in class. I then offer strategies to incorporate students' bodies in the learning process. I conclude by arguing that embodied pedagogy calls us to look beyond the classroom and to acknowledge the importance of our bodies in all aspects of our lives.     

Trauma Lives in Speech

The author approaches the topic through infant observation. At the age of eight months the baby moves in the borderland between the physical and the symbolic. When the baby hurts herself, she needs the mother's arms to protect her: at the same time, her budding spoken symbol "mama" is comforting in itself, it carries the memory of the mother's arms. Can speech - tone of voice, rhythm, pauses - and the moments of loss, absence, the losing of self also be intertwined? The author discusses the question of how trauma starts to live in speech through two patients. She talks about "a silent language" which speaks in between the words and sentences - changes the rhythm of speech, makes lose words, tears a hole in speech. This "silent language" talks about trauma, reaches for its very essence - a bodily experience and meaning to the wholeness/disruption of self.     

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Touching (Up/On) Luce Irigaray's Ethics and the Interval Between: Poethics as Embodied Writing

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice.     

Final Insults & Other Family Matters

We didn't want to put her in a nursing home. Until the last minute, and even after that, we believed it could be otherwise. I'd plan to fly Mom down to stay with me. I painted the guest room and made lace curtains. My sister mentally arranged and rearranged the furniture in her apartment, converting the livingroorn into a bedroom for Mom. But in the end, our mother's dying overwhelmed us. She was so difficult, so unhappy to be dying, and not about to impart: words of wisdom and comfort from her deathbed. The medication, Dilaudid, made her very dark, like she used to get on alcohol. Mean things bubbled out of her mouth. When I came to take her home after her second stay in the hospital, she frowned at me and said, “You're not even the person I want to see.” I found it hard to believe it was just the drugs speaking.     

I,Me, Mine: Body‐Ownership and the Generation Problem

The Body Ownership Thesis states that each person owns her body. I address a prominent objection, the Generation Problem: the Body Ownership Thesis apparently implies that parents own their children: as we own the fruit of our property, if a parent owns her own body, she must own her child and her child's body. I argue that a person does not own the fruit of her property when that fruit is a person or the body of a person. Persons have conclusive title to their bodies, but only defeasible title to the fruits of their bodies.     

The use of the analyst as an autistic shape

In this paper I describe through detailed clinical material the challenges posed by patients who employ entangled autistic defenses. I discuss the complicated nature of treating a patient who employed entangled autistic defenses and utilized my voice in an effort to preserve an undifferentiated state of dual unity. My patient's pursuit of dual unity took a very concrete form in her attempt to mitigate the terror of separateness. This concreteness was expressed via the patient's urgent request that I read letters she wrote to me between sessions. This type of autistic defense placed great strain on my ability to think analytically and I also became increasingly concrete in my response to the patient. Crucial to the analyst's regaining a space in which to think and a sense of separateness is the ability to contact the ground floor of her separate bodily experience. This is just the beginning step in the analyst separating herself from the powerful press to join the patient in a state of dual unity. Interpretation in action (Ogden, 1994) was an effective way to convey the importance of creating and tolerating internal space in myself and begin to create internal space in the patient. Previously such space had been closed down in order to manage primitive fears of annihilation. When a patient is absorbed in an entangling autistic retreat words do not reach the patient on a symbolic level but rather are experienced primarily as an assault on the need for dual unity with the analyst. The patient's need to be wrapped in a sensation based world of dual unity is preferable to a world of spoken words that carry the danger of delineating psychic separateness. In essence there is no self to speak words, only a whirl of an amorphous sensation self lacking definition. I believe with certain kinds of patients it may be necessary to first lose and then work to regain one's analytic mind, as I have powerfully described in the case of Linda. Linda's profound loss of connection to the ground floor of her experience could only begin to be addressed when I worked to extricate myself from ‘our magic carpet ride’ of dual unity, contacting the reality of my bodily experience, and begin to tolerate the terror I felt regarding my separateness from Linda. I also describe the confusing vacillation between entangled and encapsulated defenses in patients like Linda as previously identified by Cohen and Jay (1996). Ultimately, this kind of slow difficult analytic work began to help Linda develop a capacity to think and provided an alternative to the deadened world of her autistic protections.     

Dancing Contact Improvisation with Luce Irigaray: Intra‐Action and Elemental Passions

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language, Elemental Passions creates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.     

How a Kleinian Analysis Also Tells a Relational and Intersubjective Story Commentary on Paper by Meira Likierman

Dr. Likierman narrates her case in ways that differ dramatically from the usual discourse of relational analysts, and she frames her work with constructs that derive primarily from contemporary Kleinian theory. Yet I believe that if we listen closely to her clinical material, we can see how she and her patient live out a deeply relational/intersubjective process—intersubjective in both Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood's (1987) broad sense and Benjamin's (1995) more developmental point of view.

I suggest is that there is real mutuality in their relationship, a reciprocal, unconscious, taking in of the mind and role of the other—a mutual change in which, paradoxically, both parties seem more real and, more deeply than ever, to express themselves. Ultimately, I think we can see that analyst and patient have “enacted” a slightly subversive, yet vital, mutual dance into and through precisely the paradoxes that Likierman recognizes as “forbidden” territory in the therapeutic relationship.     

Beauvoir‐in‐America: Understanding,Concrete Experience,and Beauvoir's Appropriation of Heidegger in America Day by Day

This paper reads Simone de Beauvoir's travel journal America Day by Day for its philosophical content. I argue that this work provides a unique approach to feminist, embodied philosophy, one that has been overlooked by the categorization of her writing into philosophical works and feminist ones. Such an approach, I contend, is enacted here through her use of Heidegger's concept of the everyday to inform her own treatment of understanding and experience.     

Embodied Religious Thought: Gender Categories in Mesoamerica

Soon Huemac found out [that] his daughter was sick.He then asked the women who were taking care of her‘What did she do? [. . .] How did this heat enter my daughter?’And the women who took care of her answered,‘It’s the Tohuenyo, he who’s selling chili:he has put fire in her, he’s made her restless. That’s how it began, that’s how it is that she fell sick’.-Códice MatritenseBody perceptions are embedded both in gender and culture. Mesoamerican sources are particularly revealing of that relationship. Concepts like equilibrium and fluidity are fundamental to grasp perception-constructions of bodies in ancient Mexico. A review of primary sources for the history of ancient Mexico manifests a conception of corporality that could be denominated ‘embodied thought’. Equilibrium, fluidity and gender define the way the body is conceptualized.     

An Elegy,a Love Song,and a Lullaby

In the course of the past decade, I have found himself looking as much to poets and the experience of reading poetry as to the work of other analysts in my ongoing effort to become a psychoanalyst. Both the poet and the psychoanalyst are individuals whose life's work is that of making “raid[s] [on] the inarticulate” (Eliot, 1940, p. 128) in their effort to delve as deeply as possible into what it is to be human and to render that experience in the medium of language. To this end, I offer a reading of Seamus Heaney's (1987) “Clearances,” an elegy Heaney wrote for his mother soon after her death. I explore the ways in which the experience of mourning—whether in a poem or in an analytic experience—is not simply “conveyed” (as if illuminating something already there) but created in the very act of writing/saying the poem or of bringing feelings to life in words in an analytic session.

I begin by presenting a brief biographical account of Heaney not to “explain” his poetry in analytic terms but to allow the reader to create a more imaginative, more human reading of the poem as he or she enters into the conversation between the life of the man and the life of the poetry. Then I discuss the ways in which “Clearances” comes to life as a variety of coexisting forms of love that together shape an experience of grief.     

As If Religion Matters: Teaching the Introductory Course as if it Does

This essay chronicles the academic odyssey of a young professor who sets out to revise the department's Introduction to Religion course only to realize that she must first clarify her vocational commitments before she can create a teachable course. She is convinced through working with many students who express disdain or even hostility toward the subject matter that she wants to model a relationship to the subject matter that says religion matters, but is uncertain how to do this. After an autobiographical foray into her academic upbringing in active learning, the author articulates four values to model in her teaching: personal relevance, academic responsibility, ethics, and community. The author then engages current scholarship in active learning, and narrates the process of translating those four values into concrete course goals and particular assignments. The essay concludes with an assessment of teaching the revised course.     

The Virtue Epistemology of Maria Montessori

This paper shows how Maria Montessori's thought can enrich contemporary virtue epistemology. After a short overview of her ‘interested empiricist’ epistemological framework, I discuss four representative intellectual virtues: sensory acuity, physical dexterity, intellectual love, and intellectual humility. Throughout, I show how Montessori bridges the divide between reliabilist and responsibilist approaches to the virtues and how her particular treatments of virtues offer distinctive and compelling alternatives to contemporary accounts. For instance, she emphasizes how sensory acuity is a virtue for which one can be responsible, highlights the embodied nature of cognition through a focus on physical dexterity, interprets intellectual love as a way of loving the world rather than as a love that takes knowledge as its object, and presents an alternative account of intellectual humility to contemporary emphases on the interpersonal dimensions of this virtue.     

Sibling rivalry,separation, and change in Austen's Sense and Sensibility

The paper explores a process of growth represented in the interplay of Jane Austen's characterizations of Marianne and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, approaching the text through the lens of psychoanalytic theories on oedipal sibling rivalry, separation, and processes of change. A close reading of Sense and Sensibility tracks Marianne Dashwood's repudiation of any ‘second attachment’ as the surface of an unconscious fantasy, denying a rival for the mother's love. A psychoanalytic view contrasts Marianne's lack of separation from her mother, her use of denial and projection, and her near death after losing the man she loves, with her older sister Elinor Dashwood's capacities for depression, reflection, and greater acceptance of loss and separation. The narrative portrays Mrs. Dashwood's identification with and idealization of her daughter Marianne, which contribute to her oedipal sibling ‘victory’. In the language and structure of the novel, the projections, identifications, aggressions, and separations (conscious and unconscious) of the sisters in the vicissitudes of their adolescent loves and rivalries constitute a process of growth. Austen's novel brings to life, with the vividness and coherence of great literature, forces and fantasies in oedipal sibling rivalries, inspiring renewed attention to their subtle presence in the transference and countertransference of the psychoanalytic process.     

Emilie du Châtelet on the Existence and Nature of God: An Examination of Her Arguments in Light of Their Sources

Many commentators have suggested that the metaphysical portions of Emilie du Châtelet's Institutions de physique are a mere retelling of Leibniz's views. I argue that a close reading of the text shows that du Châtelet's cosmological argument and discussion of God's nature contains both Lockean and Leibnizian elements. I discuss where she follows Locke in her arguments, what Leibnizian elements she brings in, and how this enables her to avoid some of the mistakes commonly attributed to Locke's formulation of the cosmological argument. I show that while du Châtelet accepts the causal principle ex nihilo nihil fit, she does not utilize Locke's stronger causal principle. I also discuss her use of the principle of sufficient reason in both improving the Lockean cosmological argument and in proving the attributes of God.