II Spatial metaphors and somatic communication: the embodiment of multigenerational experiences of helplessness and futility in an obese patient

This paper explores the analysis of an obese woman who came to experience her flesh as a bodying forth of personal and multigenerational family and cultural experiences of helplessness. The paper discusses the ideas and images that formed the basis of how I engaged with these themes as they presented countertransferentially. My thesis is that clinical approaches which draw on spatial metaphors for the psyche offer valuable tools for working with people whose inner world expresses itself somatically because such metaphors can be used to engage simultaneously with the personal, cultural, and ancestral dimensions of these unconscious communications. The paper builds on Jung's view of the psyche as comprised of pockets of inner otherness (complexes), on Redfearn's image of psyche as landscape‐like and on Samuels’ thinking on embodied countertransference and on the political psyche. It also draws on Butler's work on the body as a social phenomenon and on the theme of being a helpless non‐person or nobody as explored in Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead which retells Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of two of the play's ‘bit’ characters.     

Is the Self other to the self? Why does the numinosum feel like another? The relevance of Matte Blanco to our understanding of the unconscious

Using Ignacio Matte Blanco’s approach to the unconscious, this paper attempts to explain why the experience of the Self or the unconscious, for example in dreams, is difficult for the ego to understand. Matte Blanco believes that the logic of the unconscious is radically different from the logic of consciousness. The unconscious uses processes that Matte Blanco refers to as symmetry and generalization. Symmetry means that the converse of any relationship is identical to it, so that asymmetrical relationships are treated as if they were symmetrical. Generalization means that the unconscious treats any object as belonging to a larger class of objects that is a subset of an even larger class which is in turn a subset of a wider class ad infinitum. Hence Matte Blanco’s idea of the unconscious as infinite sets. These unconscious mechanisms, combined with the possibility that the unconscious has more dimensions than consciousness, contribute to the difficulty of understanding dreams, and help to explain why the Self is experienced as other to the ego.     

Psychoanalysis and cultural change: Perspectives based on Lacan's rereading of Freud

Psychoanalysis cannot distance itself from culture and its transformations. It cannot ignore cultural ideals, which each individual uniquely appropriates to produce identifications, find his place within the human community, express his desires, and manifest the suffering occasioned by each difficult experience. This article will try to demonstrate this necessity of taking culture into account by drawing on Lacan's approach, which is based on the lessons of Freud. The author emphasizes the fact that every culture has its “discontents,” which stem from the incompleteness at the very heart of human experience, and that our cultural constructions are therefore constantly being reworked. By doing so, she aims to cast a different perspective on the relationship between the psyche and culture, and bring out the inherent complexity of the now fashionable notion of the “decline of the father,” which is systematically used to explain the new symptoms and ills of modern society. By detecting this decline, by searching for the visible signs of this deficit, do we not instead end up creating them ourselves?     

Transcending the caesura: Reverie,dreaming and counter‐dreaming

The author reflects about our capacity to get in touch with primitive, irrepresentable, seemingly unreachable parts of the Self and with the unrepressed unconscious. It is suggested that when the patient's dreaming comes to a halt, or encounters a caesura, the analyst dreams that which the patient cannot. Getting in touch with such primitive mental states and with the origin of the Self is aspired to, not so much for discovering historical truth or recovering unconscious content, as for generating motion between different parts of the psyche. The movement itself is what expands the mind and facilitates psychic growth. Bion's brave and daring notion of ‘caesura’, suggesting a link between mature emotions and thinking and intra‐uterine life, serves as a model for bridging seemingly unbridgeable states of mind. Bion inspires us to ‘dream’ creatively, to let our minds roam freely, stressing the analyst's speculative imagination and intuition often bordering on hallucination. However, being on the seam between conscious and unconscious, dreaming subverts the psychic equilibrium and poses a threat of catastrophe as a result of the confusion it affords between the psychotic and the non‐psychotic parts of the personality. Hence there is a tendency to try and evade it through a more saturated mode of thinking, often relying on external reality. The analyst's dreaming and intuition, perhaps a remnant of intra‐uterine life, is elaborated as means of penetrating and transcending the caesura, thus facilitating patient and analyst to bear unbearable states of mind and the painful awareness of the unknowability of the emotional experience. This is illustrated clinically.     

I Working with dissociative dynamics and the longing for excess in binge eating disorders

In this paper the author describes her work with a woman who, in her mid 20s, sought analysis for her non‐vomiting binge eating disorder. The paper explores how two aspects of Jung's view of the psyche as healthily dissociable were used to think about the potential for change contained within the explosive, aggressive energies in this patient's bingeing. The resultant approach takes the patient's splitting defences, dissociations and self‐destructive behaviour as a point of access to her unconscious. Seen in this way, these behaviours contain the seeds of recovery and are the starting point for analysis rather than defences against it. The paper also brings a number of Jungian and post‐Jungian ideas into conversation with aspects of contemporary thinking about subjectivity, identity and the longing for excess developed by Leo Bersani and Judith Butler.     

Phantom narratives and the uncanny in cultural life: psychic presences and their shadows

Abstract

In this paper the author explores the emotional factors that are activated at the level of the cultural unconscious, that produce experiences of the uncanny that are expressed through Phantom Narratives. Phantom Narratives as a hybridized term is the author’s way of linking personal and social activity of unconscious story formation through psychic presences (images). Phantom Narratives are expressions of the unconscious at the level of the group that shows the psyche’s way of narrating its relationship to the group, through the expressions of cultural, social, and political issues. The uncanny, at the level of the social, is seen as those disturbances of feelings that alienate us from the familiar social world of others. What is uncanny about Phantom Narratives is how group emotional dynamics are represented as psychic presences. Making use of the author’s own subjectivity (i.e. psychoanalytic literary genre) he uses an approach from analytic psychology (Jungian) called amplification, which allows for the elaboration of symbolic processes, to create a meaningful (semantic) context for exploration.     

How Much Jungian Theory Is There in My Practice?

This non-clinical paper consists of the author's subjective and personal value judgements on theory and practice. He discusses nine topics: I) What is analysis and why do people seek therapy? 2) Dangers of reification and hypostatizing: reinforcement of narcissistic defences and schizoid unrelatedness. 3) The problems of archetypal psychology and amplification. 4) The cultural and political aspects of the unconscious psyche, and the value of studying the philosophical background to the psychodynamic approach. 5) Criticism of the classical Jungian over-emphasis of the intrapsychic at the expense of the interpersonal. 6) Psychosomatic healing through experience and interpretation of psychosomatic identity in the transference/countertrans-ference; idea of the ‘animating body’. 7) Dangers of theoretical hndamentalism and crusading among Jungian schools: envy and intolerance. 8) The need for the analyst to have enough good objects. 9) An acknowledgement of theoretical influences other than Jung on the author's practice; although Jung's ideas facilitate a personal pluralism - the spirit of Jung.     

The mind beyond our immediate awareness: Freudian, Jungian, and cognitive models of the unconscious

Abstract: Several branches of cognitive science now focus on the nature of the unconscious. This paper explores some of the findings and models from this research. By introducing formulations based on non‐clinical data, the cognitive scientists—in neural linguistics, computational modelling, and neuroscience—may depart from the older psychoanalytic formulations. An understanding of unconscious neural processes is nevertheless emerging showing how synapses are modified by experience and how learning, conscious and unconscious, is due to this important aspect of brain plasticity. Freud and Jung's formulations about the unconscious psyche, representing the main tenets of depth psychology, are also based on a conception of the mind as extending beyond immediate awareness. However, their models are more hypothetical in that their data, almost exclusively, come from treatments of psychotherapy patients and their verbal accounts. So how do these two conceptions of the unconscious match, where do they differ? And how does the neural understanding in the present research support theories and practices of analytic treatments?     

Between memory and destiny: Repetition1

This essay focuses mainly on the topic of repetition (agieren)—on its metapsychological, clinical, and technical conceptions. It contains a core problem, that is, the question of the represented, the nonrepresented, and the unrepresentable in the psyche. This problem, in turn, brings to light the dialectical relation between drive and object and its specific articulation with the traumatic. The author attributes special significance to its clinical expression as ‘destiny’. He points out a shift in the theory of the cure from recollection and the unveiling of unconscious desire, to the possibility of understanding ‘pure’ repetition, which would constitute the very essence of the drive. The author highlights three types of repetition, namely, ‘representative’ (oedipal) repetition, the repetition of the ‘nonrepresented’ (narcissistic), which may gain representation, and that of the ‘unrepresentable’ (sensory impressions, ‘lived experiences from primal times,’‘prelinguistic signifiers,’‘ungovernable mnemic traces’). The concept‐the metaphor‐drive embryo brings the author close to the question of the archaic in psychoanalysis, where the repetition in the act would express itself. ‘Another unconscious’ would zealously conceal the entombed (verschüttet) that we are not yet able to describe‐the ‘innermost’ rather than the ‘buried’ (untergegangen) or the ‘annihilated’ (zugrunde gegangen)‐through a mechanism whose way of expression is repetition in the act. With ‘Constructions in analysis’ as its starting point, this paper suggests a different technical implementation from that of the Freudian construction; its main material is what emerges in the present of the transference as the repetition of ‘something’ lacking as history. The memory of the analytic process offers a historical diachrony whereby a temporality freed from repetition and utterly unique might unfold in the analysis. This diachrony would no longer be the historical reconstruction of material truth, but the construction of something new. The author briefly introduces some aspects of his conception of the psyche and of therapeutic work in terms of what he has designated as psychic zones. These zones are associated with various modes of becoming unconscious, and they coexist with different degrees of prevalence according to the psychopathology. Yet each of them will emerge with unique features in different moments of every analysis, determining both the analyst's positions and the very conditions of the analytic field. The zone of the death drive and of repetition is at the center of this essay. ‘Pure’ repetition expresses a time halted by the constant reiteration of an atemporal present. In this case, the ‘royal road’ for the expression of ‘that’ unconscious will be the act. The analyst's presence and his own drive wager will be pivotal to provide a last attempt at binding that will allow the creation of the lost ‘psychic fabric’ and the construction, in a conjectural way, of some sort of ‘history’ that may unravel the entombed (verschüttet) elements that, in these patients' case, come to the surface in the act. The analysand's ‘pure’ repetition touches, resonates with something of the new unconscious of the analyst. All of this leads the author to underline once again the value of the analyst's self‐analysis and reanalysis in searching for connections and especially in differentiating between what belongs to the analyst and what belongs to the analysand. A certain degree of unbinding ensures the preservation of something ungraspable that protects one from the other's appropriation.     

Language,life praxis and scenic understanding in psychoanalytic therapy

Freud held that the repressed unconscious arose from the separation of thing‐presentations from word‐presentations. The author divests these terms of the implication that they are objectively existing entities by citing some of Freud's other texts. Thing‐presentations are memory‐traces of (as yet) non‐language‐based interactions – that is, precipitates of actions that have been experienced and models of future actions. Scenic understanding, which, on the basis of participation by the therapist in the patient's play, treats all material presented by the patient by an approach analogous to the interpretation of dreams, is therefore the royal road to the unconscious.     

REVIEW ARTICLE

For the last thirty years, we have been witnessing an upsurge of the capitalist mode of production in a neoliberal avatar. One consequence is that the political state has become more brutal and oppressive. The hard-won welfare state has been gradually dismantled under the pressures of free market ‘logic’. On the other hand, we have also witnessed the rise of identity politics in myriad forms, invariably justified with the help of postmodernist notions. This identity politics proclaims itself as being far more radical than the orthodox left. The paper, by a close reading of the book The Sikh Memory and by tracing postmodern thinkers' political affiliations, argues that any kind of politics that ignores the fundamental issues of capitalism, class, labour and social injustice in favour of identitarianism and such things as cultural memory, collective unconscious, affect, intuition, aesthetic and non-rational has an inherent tendency to fall prey to fundamentalist political practices in one form or another.     

South Korean culture and history: The implications for workplace bullying

This paper began by suggesting that culture might influence how people construe workplace bullying. Referring back to the studies of cultural differences in cognition, it was suggested that people of the Far East might construe workplace bullying differently from the people of Western countries. Taking South Korean culture as an example, this paper explained how historical background and culture shaped Korean's psyche in relation to workplace bullying. Currently available evidence was discussed including the way Koreans construed workplace bullying and how close social bonding might act as a buffer against a conflict escalating into bullying.     

WITHSTANDING TRAUMA: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EMMA ECKSTEIN'S CIRCUMCISION TO FREUD'S IRMA DREAM

The author considers the medical rationale for Wilhelm Fliess's operation on Emma Eckstein's nose in February 1895 and interprets the possible role that this played in Freud's dream of Irma's injection five months later. The author's main argument is that Emma likely endured female castration as a child and that she therefore experienced the surgery to her nose in 1895 as a retraumatization of her childhood trauma. The author further argues that Freud's unconscious identification with Emma, which broke through in his dream of Irma's injection with resistances and apotropaic defenses, served to accentuate his own “masculine protest”. The understanding brought to light by the present interpretation of Freud's Irma dream, when coupled with our previous knowledge of Freud, allows us to better grasp the unconscious logic and origins of psychoanalysis itself. 1     

Cultural unconscious in research: integrating multicultural and depth paradigms in qualitative research

Culturally focused research has gained momentum in many disciplines, including psychology. However, much of this research fails to pay attention to the unconscious dynamics that underlie the study of culture and culturally influenced human beings. Such dynamics may be especially significant when issues of marginalization and oppression are present. Therefore, this paper seeks to contribute a framework for understanding cultural dynamics, especially unconscious cultural dynamics, within depth psychological qualitative research influenced by Jungian and post‐Jungian scholarship. Inquiry that is approached with a commitment to making the unconscious conscious seeks to empower and liberate not only the subject/object studied but also the researchers themselves. Following a brief review of multiculturalism in the context of analytically informed psychology, this paper offers several case examples that focus on researchers' integration of awareness of the cultural unconscious in their study of cultural beings and topics.     

Different Realities: What Is Reality and What Difference Does It Make?

Consciousness does not exist apart from psyche; it reflects it. Different realities are not interchangeable with other manifestations of psychic reality. “Borderland consciousness” is the term I have conceived for people who, in one way or another, have a living dynamic connection to and relationship with nature. Given this understanding, the oral traditional and Native American cultures manifest a reciprocity psyche, and are today the closest manifestation of the psychic reality in Genesis, pre-expulsion from Eden. Navajo language contains no words for religion, guilt, human, inanimate, psyche, or ego. The Western psyche manifests a dominion psyche; that is, a binary consciousness borne as a result of the expulsion in Genesis, and wedded to logic as an uncompromising characteristic of sanity and health. This kind of consciousness too often crushes the spirit dimension, which is transrational. An awareness of borderland consciousness is entering into the Western cultural collective. This is the telos of the Garden of Eden expulsion, and itself represents the dominion psyche and the reciprocity psyche in dialogue. This dialogue offers a critical counterbalance to the rogue behavior of the overspecialized Western ego of the dominion psyche. This article urges Jungians to develop new methods of connecting with borderland consciousness since the dominion psyche and its technology alone cannot save our species in the face of the threat of a global climate change disaster.     

When ancestral heritage is a source of discomfort: culture, pre-object relatedness, and self-alienation

The ancestral claims on an individual can evoke mental conflict when they involve separating from an ethnic group whose beliefs and customs are devalued by the dominant culture. However, these claims are engraved on the psyche early in development by caretakers to the level of pre-object relatedness, where contents and affect tones are implicit and may be unavailable for later psychoanalytical interventions. In addition, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes, one's culture of origin precedes the development of psyche and creates its own set of claims that must be renegotiated when one encounters a different domain of cultural symbols, a confrontation that can produce psychological dissonance and self-alienation. In this paper, three cases are examined in which mental conflicts were evoked by attempts at divesting ancestral claims in response to conscious efforts to assimilate into the dominant culture. These patients suffered from separation guilt and unstable self-esteem and reported dream imagery suggesting psychological imbalance. The requirement to carefully delineate the ancestral claims on psyche as well as those contents and affects that may not be accessible to therapeutic intervention is emphasized, and the importance of compromise and acceptance with respect to the psychological demands of the unconscious are considered.     

Archetypal images emerging in the therapy of Lithuanian cancer patients

The goal of this paper is to show through clinical examples how archetypal images connected with nature emerged in Lithuanian cancer patients, to analyze how these images helped them to get in touch with their emotions and meaningful personal experiences, and to discuss how these archetypal images are related to the Lithuanian cultural unconscious, and may also assist the psychological treatment of cancer. The analyzed examples permit the preliminary conclusion that when ill with cancer, a person's psyche generates universal archetypal images that constitute an important part of the process of coping psychologically with the disease.