Marie Bonaparte,her first two patients and the literary world

Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) played a critical role in the development of psychoanalysis in France. Her clinical activity is not well known yet she was one of the first female French psychoanalysts. The journalist–writers Alice and Valerio Jahier were Bonaparte’s first two patients. She conducted this dual analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein (1898–1976). Alice and Valerio exchanged analysts on several occasions. During his analysis, Valerio began corresponding with Italo Svevo (1861–1928), the author of La Coscienza di Zeno, who imparted his doubts on the therapeutic merits of psychoanalysis. Valerio described his difficult analysis in his letters to Svevo. Bonaparte consulted Freud on the subject, but was not able to prevent Valerio’s suicide in 1939. The Princess of Greece encouraged Alice in her vocation as a writer and enabled her to benefit from her connections in literary circles. On the margins of this unpublished story of the two analyses, which is based on archived documents recently made available, we discover the importance of the links which were formed – around Marie Bonaparte – between psychoanalysis and literature. In addition to Italo Svevo, we come across the acerbic writer, Maurice Sachs, as well as the famous novelist, Stefan Zweig.     

On Not Quite Taking Up the Gauntlet: Reply to Adam Phillips

Muriel Dimen replies to Adam Phillips’s interest in her understanding of psychoanalysis. She focuses on psychoanalysis—its method, thought, and practice—as all interminable, as process, as becoming.     

The Theory of Transformations and Autistic States Autistic Transformations: A Proposal1

This work integrates two areas of thinking: one in which the author develops considerationsregardingobservationmethodsofmentalphenomenainpsychoanalysis according to Bion's theory of transformations; the other in which she is concerned with the investigation of primitive mental states‐protomental states‐more specifi cally, the autistic states of neurotic patients, described by Tustin. Some ideas on the ‘philosophical’ position underlying transformations theory are elaborated, particularly emphasizing the idea that the same phenomenon in psychoanalysis may be considered from different perspectives, as long as it is situated within the theoretical reference frame to which it belongs. The author considers the idea that this method of phenomenon observation is part of a wider context of general human knowledge, in which uncertainty and relativity of concepts are the main components. By adopting transformations theory as a perspective of phenomena observation that pervades the analytical meeting, the author questions whether it is possible to include other groups of transformation of emotional experiences in this theory, which shows particular phenomena with specifi c qualities, distinct from those emphasized by Bion. She hypothesizes that autistic phenomena present in neurotic patients, characterizing autistic states, may be considered and detached, making up a particular group of transformation of emotional experience, which analysts often face in their daily practice. She names this group ‘autistic transformations’.     

Make New Friends but Keep the Old: The Sisterhood Bonds that Have Shaped Me

The relationships in an Asian American psychologist's life have helped to shape her as a person as well as a professional. Specifically, a review of significant female relationships indicates that they have contributed to the author's therapeutic style. In this article, the author explores some of the relationships with other women in her life and illustrates how they have informed her role as a therapist. She concludes with a case vignette illustrating how some of these concepts were applied to a long-term therapy client.     

Karen Horney: Theorist in Psychoanalysis and Feminine Psychology

Karen Horney is unique and unparalleled in personality theory. She has the distinction of being the only woman whose theory is detailed in personality textbooks. Horney is known as a neo-Freudian for her revision of Freudian thought; a social psychological theorist for her emphasis on cultural and social influences; a humanist for her holistic view and emphasis on self-realization; and a feminist for her development of a feminine psychology. She was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and founder and dean of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, a training institute. She was a teacher who could simplify the most difficult concepts; a therapist with deep human involvement; Editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis ; a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association; a regular contributor to scientific sessions; and a prolific writer. She was personally and professionally a "well-rounded balance of an abundance of striving and creative possibility."     

Loving, hating, vacillating: Agreeableness, implicit self-esteem, and neurotic conflict

An implicit preference for the self over others may be beneficial when pursuing one's own desires but costly when adjusting the self to the desires of others. On the basis of this reasoning, the authors hypothesized that Agreeableness and implicit self-esteem would interact in predicting measures of neurotic distress. Three studies and one meta-analysis, involving 235 undergraduate participants, confirmed that high levels of implicit self-esteem were beneficial (i.e., less neurotic distress) within the context of low levels of Agreeableness but costly (i.e., more neurotic distress) within the context of high levels of Agreeableness. Because findings were robust across various measures of Agreeableness, implicit self-esteem, and neurotic distress, the interpersonal principles examined here appear to have broad relevance for understanding this particular form of intrapsychic conflict and its manifestation in neurotic distress. Results therefore support Horney's (1945) theory concerning the consequences of intrapsychic conflicts related to interpersonal motivation and cognition.     

The psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald

Hans Loewald is a comprehensive and original theorist on a par with any major post-Freudian thinker, yet neither his ideas nor his person have become the basis for a Loewaldian school or approach, and he is not as well known as other innovators of comparable quality. In this paper the author attempts to characterize the scope and depth of Loewald's theory-his vision of the psyche and psychic life, or metapsychology, his characterization of the psychoanalytic process, and his vision of the clinical and human goals of psychoanalysis. She suggests that Loewald holds in all of these realms, and without apparent contradiction, a doubled-emphatically ego-psychological and emphatically object-relational-perspective, and an equal commitment to both the first topography and the structural theory. His views throughout are undergirded by a bi-directional developmental view that centers on differentiation and integration. The paper includes brief reflections on how to assess psychoanalytic theories, like Loewald's, developed before empirical research that seems to challenge them.     

Clinical issues in analyses over the telephone and the internet

There is professional consensus that teleanalysis, the practice of psychoanalysis conducted remotely using the telephone and the Internet, is increasing in response to more mobility in the population. But there is controversy as to whether the use of technology leads to a dilution of analysis or to adaptive innovation that is clinically effective and true to the tenets of psychoanalysis. The author reviews the psychoanalytic literature and shows the development of analytic thinking about this technology-assisted practice of psychoanalysis. She summarizes analysts' perceptions and experiences of the advantages and disadvantages, and considers the indications and contra-indications. She focuses on the clinical concerns that arise in terms of the frame, resistance, and the development of analytic process through the unconscious communication of internal objects, unconscious fantasy, transference and countertransference. She gives vignettes from the analysis of a man with trauma-related depression to address the concerns raised and to support her argument that analysis using the telephone and the Internet is a viable, clinically effective alternative to traditional analysis where necessary.     

一例人际交往焦虑咨询的案例报告

来访者是一名女大学生,偏内向,在人际交往中,因对他人态度判断时存在不合理认知而形成焦虑情绪。经过收集其资料,心理咨询师排除了其患精神病性或神经症性的可能,鉴定为人际交往焦虑,属一般心理问题。心理咨询师与来访者商定了阶段性的咨询目标,主要运用合理情绪疗法,帮助来访者改变不合理认知,消除其焦虑情绪,促进社会交往功能。     

Taking time: the tempo of psychoanalysis

In this article the author argues that in order to be psychoanalysis, the 'here and now' technical approach needs to be firmly grounded theoretically and technically in a practice that includes the notion of reverie or its equivalent. The author has argued previously that the analyst's theory is the essential 'third' of the two-person analytic situation. She now suggests that it is specifically the theories of temporality and the attitude of 'evenly suspended attention' or its more contemporary development, 'reverie', that are the crucial aspects of that theory. She refers to these essential aspects as the 'theory in practice' in so far as they are more than a technical approach or a theory of practice but reflect directly a particular analyst's internalisation of the whole psychoanalytic theoretical corpus. While she believes this to be an essential component in any true psychoanalysis, in developing her argument the author looks at situations in which the analyst is particularly prone to forgo this temporal aspect, as is the case when patients show an absence of symbolic thinking within the analytic situation. In fact, with those patients reverie and the visual images it produces within the analyst's mind offer perhaps the only hope of a meeting ground between the concrete and the symbolic and the possibility of avoiding an impasse. Impasse, she suggests, has at its root the absence of reverie as a third and temporal element, inevitably giving rise to concrete thinking on the part of patient and analyst and so to a situation that cannot evolve.     

Faint voices from Greenwich Village: Jung's impact on the first American avant-garde

In 1913 Jung made a trip to New York which was to have an important impact on the creation of modern American culture. At the invitation of Beatrice Hinkle, the first Jungian analyst in the country, he spoke to the Liberal Club, a forum for discussing progressive topics. Jung was the leading spokesman for psychoanalysis and his ideas about creative fantasy resonated with popular interest in the ideas of William James and Henri Bergson. This paper will document that visit and the influence that Hinkle had on the young people who had gravitated to Greenwich Village. She promoted Jungian psychology through her analytical practice and her translation of Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido as Psychology of the Unconscious. Her influence is evident in four key neighbourhood institutions: The Masses, a socialist magazine, The Seven Arts, an avant-garde literary magazine, the Provincetown Players theatre ensemble, and the Heterodoxy Club, America's first feminist group. Her influence is also evident at The New School where several pioneering anthropologists employed the theory of psychological types as a tool for understanding social behaviour. This paper will demonstrate that a cultural moment usually seen through a Freudian lens had, in fact, a remarkably Jungian character.     

Infant observation: A range of questions and challenges for contemporary psychoanalysis1

The author attempts to integrate several perspectives within the field of infant observation that reflect the analyst's personal experience as a clinician, as a professor at the analytic institute and as a researcher in the field of psychoanalysis. Can infant observation contribute to analytic technique, theory and training? If so, what would be the nature of such contribution? To answer these questions, the author reviews the literature on infant observation from Freud to the present, highlighting Latin American contributions to this subject. She makes reference to the role of technological innovations, which have allowed videotaping, repeated observations, temporal segmentation and computerized programs, thus giving rise to microanalytic research. This discussion prompts the question about the contributions made by systematic research to clinical practice. To tackle this question, the author presents both a clinical vignette taken from her personal experience, and the current debate on this subject as it appears in the work of Daniel Stern and André Green. Finally, she presents some conclusions that are part of an ongoing debate in the psychoanalytic field.     

Psychoanalysis: a dysfunctional family?

The discussion opens with an account of the author's mother's bizarre family in which a strong, charismatic grandmother maintained absolute control over her large family by encouraging a neurotic dependence in them through daily reports of their complaints.
Getting interested in psychoanalysis in an effort to understand the dynamics of this dysfunctional family, the author, a biographer, turned to the study of Melanie Klein, becoming entranced by her ideas. Her research also revealed how Klein had discouraged her followers from developing ideas that diverged in any way from her own. Her portrait of the pioneer analyst provoked intense indignation. A similar pattern of absolute loyalty to his person and theories was to be found in Freud's Secret Committee, formed primarily as a means of getting rid of Jung who had been showing disturbing signs of independence. When Ferenczi and Rank began to pursue independent lines of enquiry in their work, they too were thought to be undermining the foundations of classical psychoanalysis.
Finally, the author concludes that though there have been sorry incidents in psychoanalysis, we should be mature enough to accept both the contributions of the early pioneers and the realizations that new ideas must be permitted to evolve.     

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and psychosexuality - a reminder

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, who would have turned 90 this year, had a passion for truth that placed her work at the very heart of psychoanalysis. Never leaving the field of Freudian analysis she explored the inevitable difficulties, due to our premature birth, to become moral subjects. Psychoanalysis was to her, as it was to Freud, a psychology of conflict. She was suspicious of seemingly optimistic views which saw conflict as created between the potentially free subject and one repressive external system or another. Freedom is always limited in psychoanalysis. In an attempt to follow the line of thought in her vast production the article touches upon her critique of Freud’s so called phallic monism, the significance of both parents’place in the psyche, the question of “Falsehood”, perversion as a dimension of the human psyche, and her concerned view on the situation of Western thought today. The author suggests that we might benefit from her radical Freudian stance in a time when the view on truth is undergoing many unfathomable transformations. Perhaps Chasseguet-Smirgels thought can also be an important reminder about the foundations of our work; not just sexuality, not just mental acts but their specific relationship to each other     

Sabina Spielrein: out from the shadow of Jung and Freud

Abstract: Since the 1982 publication of Aldo Carotenuto's book, A Secret Symmetry: Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud, there has been renewed interest in the life and work of Sabina Spielrein. She was Jung's first psychoanalytic case at the Burghölzli Hospital in 1904, and was referred to several times in The Freud/Jung Letters. Spielrein recovered, enrolled in medical school, and went on to become a Freudian analyst. Her most famous paper, published in 1912, ‘Destruction as a cause of coming into being’, was referred to by Freud in 1920 in relation to his Death Instinct theory. In the few Freudian publications on this controversial theory since 1920, Spielrein's contribution is consistently omitted. Jung also neglected to refer to her ‘Destruction’ paper in his early 1912 version of ‘Symbols of transformation’, even though he had edited her paper and had promised to acknowledge her contribution. He did refer extensively to Spielrein's first paper, her medical thesis, ‘On the psychological content of a case of schizophrenia’, published in 1911, as yet unpublished in English. In her paper Spielrein sought to understand the psychotic delusions of Frau M, a patient at the Burghölzli, much in the style of Jung's ‘Psychology of dementia praecox’ (1907). The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent Spielrein's Frau M paper, and its companion ‘Destruction’ paper, make an original contribution to both Jung and Freud's emerging theories on the possible creative versus destructive outcomes of neurotic or psychotic introversion, culminating in Jung's concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ (1916) and Freud's concept of a ‘Death instinct’ (1920).     

Contexts,Polarities, and Pluralism. Discussion of Slochower’s “Going Too Far: Relational Heroines and Relational Excess”

In her searching paper “Going Too Far: Relational Heroines and Relational Excess,” (this issue) Slochower finds the potential for excess as inherent in any psychoanalytic theory. I argue that context is key in understanding this phenomenon within relational psychoanalysis; what she describes may not be the case for other theories. The beginnings of relational theory as a movement, generational and radical, could lead to therapeutic overconfidence or certainty around countertransference insights and disclosures. Slochower sees an abundance of certainty in this stance, as well as pressure for premature mutuality. As a complement or balance to this intense mode of interpersonal engagement, Slochower elaborates her own work on holding, wherein the analyst “brackets” her experience and respects the patient’s need for privacy and nonimpingement. Uncertainty is an affirmative stance in letting the patient’s inner life come into being. There are a number of polarities in Slochower’s paper—between mutuality and privacy, certainty and uncertainty, and in the origin story of relational psychoanalysis between relational and classical theories. I argue that pluralism offers a path forward from polarities to a rich complex world of multiple possibilities and recognition of different minds and theories.     

Ripples in mental space caused by dark matters and twisted tales: Some reflections on memory,memoirs and therapeutic work

In this paper, the author reflects on the issues of memory and the writing of personal memoirs, and how this impinges on our professional work. Her title is drawn in part from the work of theoretical physicists who can hypothesise about the existence of dark matter by measuring the deformations it causes in surrounding stars and galaxies. What she suggests is that there may be limitations in keeping strictly to disciplinary boundaries, and our professional lives may defy our efforts to box them in. The opening of doors to a more extensive world of ideas is often helpful, both for psychoanalysis and for the fields which it can illuminate and by which it can also be illuminated. She uses the example of the publication and critical reception of her own memoir, Pieces of Molly to make links with our professional selves and our clinical work. She draws on the work of Freud, and other seminal thinkers in the field, as well as her own clinical work to illustrate the ways in which mental space and the memories within it can be contained and transformed over time, but also can be beset by both internal and external saboteurs.     

THE PSYCHOANALYST OF THE FUTURE: WISE ENOUGH TO DARE TO BE MAD AT TIMES3

What sort of patients do we have in psychoanalysis now, at the beginning of the third millennium, and what sort will we have in the future? In the author's clinical experience, the patients who are currently seeking help from the psychoanalyst use primitive defence mechanisms alongside neurotic ones. Most of them do not explicitly request psychoanalytic treatment, but this does not mean that they would not want it if they knew what it was. She argues that is the psychoanalyst's task to identify the latent request behind the ‘non‐request’. To conduct a psychoanalysis with such patients, the psychoanalyst has to identify and interpret both primitive and neurotic psychic mechanisms; moreover, he has to use not only language that speaks to patients but also language that ‘touches’ them, because these patients are difficult to reach through verbal symbolism. This implies that the psychoanalyst must be attentive to the bodily manifestations and bodily phantasies accompanying his countertransference feelings. The author shows through clinical examples what she means by ‘language that can touch patients’. The psychoanalyst gradually builds up this language while, at the same time, daring to discover in himself his own mad aspects and giving himself enough psychical freedom to accept them.