The psychology of modern memorials: the affective intertwining of personal and collective memories / La psicología de los monumentos modernos: la implicación afectiva de los recuerdos personales y colectivos

Abstract

This paper explores collective memory and grief as they are experienced and expressed at modern memorial sites. What makes them collective is the way they are interpreted and felt as a ‘we’, in first-person plural. From a cultural psychological perspective, we conceptualize memorials as cultural and historical artefacts that mediate these processes and in so doing give meaning to the past based on present and future challenges. Along these lines, we analyse visitors’ situated and evolving experiences of two memorial sites: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Ground Zero National September 11 Memorial in New York. Results focus on individuals’ particular modes of experiencing and appropriating modern memorial sites, which in contrast to classic ones are purposely built to generate a wide range of different meaning-making processes and ways of interacting with them.     

Which Is in Front of Chinese People,Past or Future? The Effect of Language and Culture on Temporal Gestures and Spatial Conceptions of Time

The temporal‐focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space–time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space–time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co‐speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back (besides future‐in‐front/past‐at‐back) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back space–time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space–time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space–time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space–time mappings, but a cross‐cultural comparison of space–time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal‐focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space–time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space–time mappings and the relationship between language and thought.     

Time (also) flies from left to right

Everyday linguistic expressions in many languages suggest that back and front space is projected onto temporal concepts of past and future (as in the sentencewe are years ahead of them). The present experiment tested the psychological reality of a different space-time conceptual metaphor—projecting the past to left space and the future to right space—for which there are no linguistic traces in any language. Participants categorized words as referring to the past or to the future. Irrelevant to this task, words appeared either to the left or right of the screen, and responses were given by keypresses of the left or right hand. Judgments were facilitated when word position and response mapping were congruent with the left-past right-future conceptual metaphor. These results are discussed in the context of current claims about the embodiment of meaning and the possible mechanisms by which conceptual metaphors can be acquired.     

MAX EITINGON'S RISE AND DECLINE: THE BERLIN YEARS

Max Eitingon's main achievement was the foundation of the Berlin psychoanalytic Poliklinik that served both as an outpatient center and a training institute. Another area of his responsibility was the Verlag, the International Psychoanalytic Press. By 1926, he occupied several leading positions, including presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association and editorship of the major psychoanalytic journal of the time. The basis of his power was his personal relationship with Freud, as well as his monetary wealth, which he put into the service of the Freudian cause. By 1932, he had suffered an overall setback, however, with the Berlin Institute losing its best teachers, the Verlag barely escaping bankruptcy, and the journal's editorship returning to Vienna.     

Transference: "an original creation".

While the psychoanalytic process explores the past, it does so within the context of the immediacy of the present. A clinical vignette is used to demonstrate the distinction between unconscious fantasies which, though buried, are alive in the present, and the historical past which shaped those fantasies. On that basis, interpretations and reconstructions are distinguished. The tension between singular process and dyadic interaction is also considered in the light of the centrality of present experience. Finally, the place of current sensation in connection to memory is addressed.     

Like a phoenix from the ashes – or “sack cloth and ashes”?:1 The reconstitution of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany since 1945 and its consequences

Abstract

Here, I attempt to formulate some thoughts about the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis and its institutions in Germany. To do this, I have employed my varied experience as a supervisor and consultant to many such psychoanalytic institutes over the past several years. Themes discussed include the history of psychoanalysis in postwar Germany, the organizational structure of German psychoanalytic institutes, and their cultures in regard to group and organizational dynamics, and political and economic aspects. Finally, I add brief thoughts about the future, taking into account recent developments relating to planned changes in laws governing psychotherapy in Germany. Further, I attempt to analyze and comment on: coming to terms with the past; how to begin after the “Zero Hour”; the form of organization of psychoanalytic institutes in Germany; missing patients and missing candidates; constructive debate and hurting people’s feelings; the lack of “detoxification” and “recycling” of the poisonous remains of psychoanalytic processes; and the future of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany. I end with an example of a typical primary task used in conducting large groups in the institutes in which I worked, and include an anonymized table listing individual interventions, their duration, and frequency. These should provide an idea of my way of working, and an overview of the dimensions of the task.     

Zwischen Tod und Urszene

Are there psychoanalytic ideas about what it means to be fully and creatively alive? Thoughts about this are prompted by Winnicott’s account of living by compliance or by creative apperception. A necessary aspect of independent, creative aliveness is a capacity to be interested in what disturbs our usual thought processes. Clinical examples show the truth of this for therapists in the clinical situation and it applies to life in general as well. Being fully alive involves a particular use of memory so as to move actively up and down one’s life experiences between past and present and also the ability to extend this imaginatively into the future, including particularly the experience of one’s own death which is ultimately and inescapably ‘uncanny’. Such freedom of internal movement makes it possible to see the present as a point of encounter between the past and the future. The past is bounded by the primal scene and the future by death, which represent the beginning and end of time. The present is thus also an encounter between time and timelessness. To tell a dream in an analytical session is to bring the timelessness of the unconscious into a time-bound framework. A clinical example shows how a sense of this crossover between time and timelessness helped a patient use his dream experience to develop a greater sense of aliveness. Vermeer’s painting of ‘The Kitchen Maid’ pouring milk is analysed as a visual representation of the intersection of time and timelessness. A case in a clinical seminar is described, which produced a disorienting sense of timelessness in the seminar group. The seminar leader then needed to help the discussion stay poised at a crossing-point between timelessness and time. A discussion of the myth of Orpheus considers Orpheus’ compulsion to look back at Eurydice as a failure of aliveness because he could not dream Eurydice at the intersection between the timelessness of the underworld and the linear temporality of everyday existence.     

Beyond illusion: Psychoanalysis and the question of religious truth1

In this paper the author critically examines the nature of the positive, reconciliatory attitude towards religion that has become increasingly prevalent within psychoanalytic thinking and writing over the past 20 years. She shows how this positive attitude rests on a change in the nature of the prototype of religion and its reassignment to the realm of illusion, thus making irrelevant an issue most central both to psychoanalysis and to traditional Judeo‐Christian belief ‐ the passionate search for truth. The author demonstrates how the concern with truth, and specifically with the truth of religious claims, lies at the basis of the opposition between psychoanalysis and religion but, paradoxically, also provides the common ground for dialogue between the two. She argues that, as Freud developed his ideas regarding the origin of conviction in religious claims in his Moses and monotheism (1939), the nature of this common ground was expanded and the dialogue became potentially more meaningful. The author concludes that meaningful dialogue emerges through recognition of fundamental differences rather than through harmonisation within a realm of illusion. In this light, the present study may also be seen as an attempt to recognise fundamental differences that have been evolving within psychoanalysis itself.     

From developmental metaphor to developmental model: the shrinking role of language in the talking cure

Psychoanalysts have invoked infant development diversely to understand nonverbal and unspoken aspects of lived experience. Two uses of developmental notions and their implications for understanding language and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis are juxtaposed here: Hans Loewald's conception of developmental metaphors to illuminate ineffable aspects of the clinical situation and Daniel Stern's currently popular developmental model, which draws on findings from quantitative research to explain therapeutic action in the nonverbal realm. Loewald's metaphorical use of early development identifies and thus potentiates a central role for language in psychoanalytic treatment. By contrast, Stern and his colleagues exaggerate the abstract, orderly, and disembodied qualities of language, and consequently underestimate the degree to which lived interpersonal experience can be meaningfully verbalized, as demonstrated here with illustrations from published clinical material. As contemporary psychoanalysis moves toward embracing developmental models such as Stern's, it is concluded, psychoanalysts accept a shrinking role for language in the talking cure.     

DREAM DIAGNOSTICS: FRITZ MORGENTHALER'S WORK ON DREAMS

The unique approach to dreams of Swiss psychoanalyst Fritz Morgenthaler (1919–1984) is presented and discussed. Although rarely discussed in the English‐speaking psychoanalytic world, this approach is very alive in German‐speaking countries. Focusing on the distinction between the remembered hallucinatory experience of dreamers and the event of telling dreams within psychoanalytic sessions, Morgenthaler made two major innovations: first, he proposed a new understanding and handling of associations to dreams, and second, he offered what he called dream diagnostics as an instrument with which to integrate both resistance and transference into clinical work with dreams.     

Blurring Boundaries or Why Do We Refer to Sexual Misconduct With Patients as “Boundary Violation”

I argue for the notion that we reserve the term boundary for the psychic realm because the psychic boundaries of psychoanalysis are so fundamentally complex, dense, and intrinsically confusing that bringing in the realm of behavioral ethical violations is actually unnecessarily vague and mystifying. The notion of a psychological boundary as a term in psychoanalytic work is a fragile, metaphoric construction that allows us to explore fantasy, affect, symbols, and elements of shared and unique realities. Psychoanalysis hinges on a social compact by patients and analysts to open up otherwise forbidden territory offered through this metaphoric construction. Rather than conflate forensic vocabulary (“violation”) with a central psychic concept for conducting psychoanalytic work (“boundary”), I suggest that we refer to ethical misconduct in more straightforward conventional terms such as misconduct (behavioral referents) or with specific psychological understandings of the many determinants of this behavior that we have available to us as psychoanalysts.     

Out of the Analytic Shadow: On the Dynamics of Commemorative Ritual

This paper explores the dynamics of commemorative ritual as it is embodied and enacted outside the consulting room. While the function of lifelong acts of memorial in marking traumatic loss has been well documented, psychoanalysis has given short shrift to the value of these ongoing commemorative rituals in instances of “ordinary” (i.e., less traumatic) loss. Historical and sociological writers have explored their functions, but commemorative rituals have tended to evoke resistance within psychoanalysis, perhaps because of their collision with the termination ideal and the value of relinquishment. Here, I build on previous essays concerning Jewish mourning ritual (shiva) by addressing the function of several acts of commemoration including that of Yizkor (Jewish memorial ritual). Enacted across the lifespan, commemorative rituals serve multiple functions. They allow us to mark absence and create “presence” as we access and sometimes reshape personal memory. Such rituals can create a sense of linkage to “like mourners.” At their best, these acts—in their multiple incarnations—mimic aspects of psychoanalytic work by helping us deepen emotional connectedness and facilitating integrated remembering in a way that enriches and frees rather than binds us.     

Dystopian Narratives: Encounters with the Perverse Sadomasochistic Universe

ABSTRACT

In a number of dystopian novels that I explore, including Orwell’s (1949) 1984 and Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World, I identify themes of soul murder, destruction of differences, murder of reality, and attacks on the parental couple as a generative twosome. In my view, dystopian fiction captures, thus, many facets of the perverse sadomasochistic core. I demonstrate that the leaders of dystopian societies are fueled by a desire to debase and eventually eliminate the feeding mother, the Oedipal father, and the creative parental couple by becoming god-like creators of a new and idealized fecal universe. Although dystopian narratives tend to locate the catastrophe in a future social disaster, they represent a psychological breakdown that has already occurred in the past and is, therefore, present in the individual’s internal world. The dystopian narrative enables this internal catastrophe to be projected into a future plot and a cast of characters that stand for both victims and perpetrators in the internal object world. I offer a psychoanalytic perspective, which can help our understanding of the increasing popularity of dystopian fiction among the young adult readership.     

Adolescent Developmental Disruptions: Haunted by the Future,Guarded by Haunting Ancestors

This article will explore two potentially disruptive developmental phenomena that occur during life transitions. One is the role of anticipatory haunting during adolescence, and the other is the strict adherence to an already defined life narrative at the gate to young adulthood (Levy-Warren, 2016a, 2016b). Historically, in psychoanalytic theory, we have looked at flaws in an adolescent’s foundation as causal in adolescent paralysis. Anticipatory haunting, fearing what is to come, also can be traumatic enough to disrupt an adolescent’s development. Similarly, in the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood, we have assumed that the past must be left behind for the youth to progress in development and that focusing on the past can inhibit the envisioning of a future. In this instance, the necessity for a particular kind of reworking of the young adult’s history so that a future can be envisioned is articulated. Each of these points of view represents a departure from traditional ways of understanding and treating developmental disruptions.     

Prolepsis and the Physics of Retrocausality

Ted Peters has emphasized the theological concept of prolepsis and a “retroactive ontology” in which God creates from the future. We consider here possible connections between prolepsis and scientific theories about transmission of signals backwards in time. After considering objections to time travel, we discuss putative means of achieving it—tachyons, “time machine” solutions of Einstein's equations, waves in dark energy, and advanced solutions of wave equations. We then reflect on ways those theoretical constructs, if realized, might be of theological interest. Applications to the resurrection of Jesus, predictive prophecy and the creation of the universe will be discussed.     

Beyond the word in psychoanalysis the unspoken dialogue

The practice of psychoanalysis, traditionally, has privileged verbal communication. In relational theory the therapeutic significance of unconscious, semantically unformulated, but nonverbally encoded communications has been recognized. While patients are understood to generate significant nonverbal material for use in the treatment process, similar nonverbal productions from analysts rarely have been acknowledged as useful for treatment. In this paper, I demonstrate a way to recognize and use the nonverbal productions of analysts as well as of analysands within the analytic process. A brief review is offered of contemporary authors who have conceptualized the importance of the nonverbal realm for psychoanalytic treatment. An approach is then described that builds on process conceptualizations derived from the infant research literature. The model, illustrated with two clinical examples, provides a way of conceptualizing “process contours”; on a nonverbal level of exchange between analyst and analysand that becomes the medium for catalyzing the transition from presymbolic interactions to symbolic language. Working on this level, analyst and analysand coconstruct scenes from both the dreaded past and the hoped‐for present/future, which, when reflected on in a joint process of narrative construction, provide a new context for accessing previously dissociated affective experience.     

Conditions favoring retroactive interference between antecedent events (cue competition) and between subsequent events (outcome competition)

Retrieval of a target association (A-B) is often impaired if training of a similar association is interpolated between target training and testing; this is known asretroactive interference. Two experiments, in which rats were used as subjects in a sensory preconditioning preparation, studied the associative nature of retroactive interference between antecedent events (i.e., A and C in the A-B, C-B paradigm) and between subsequent events (i.e., B and C in the A-B, A-C paradigm). With the present preparation, retroactive interference was equally strong between antecedent events and between subsequent events. Moreover, interference occurred only if (1) an association was trained in the interpolated phase and (2) the target and interpolated associations had a common element in a common temporal location.     

Response to “Comparing Fruit and Oranges: Response to Philip A. Ringstrom” by Robert D. Stolorow and George E. Atwood

Some people feel that aspects of their past or limitations of their present prevent them from living a life they experience as worth living. They embark on the project of fully re‐creating themselves. This article traces various manifestations of the desire for self‐creation. An extended clinical example shows how this project led a patient to the brink of death, because it was more important for her to feel that she had authorship over her life than to be alive. The desire for self‐creation has found cultural expression in the Cartesian program of cleaning the mind from any external influence. In less sublimated forms, this desire can be found in bodybuilding and certain forms of sexual fantasy. This article ends by discussing psychoanalytic and existentialist approaches to the protest against fatedness, which motivates the project of self‐creation.     

Nunc pro tunc. The Problem of Retroactive Enactments

In this paper, I present a problem for the realist with respect to the institutional sphere, and suggest a solution. Roughly, the problem lies in a contradiction that arises as soon as institutional contexts are allowed to influence the institutional profile of objects and events not only in the present, but also in the past. If such “retroactive enactments” are effective, in order to avoid contradiction the realist seems to have to accept the unpleasant conclusion that institutions can create a past that has never been present. I will defend a solution which involves a distinction between temporal and atemporal types of institutional kinds that has, I maintain, independent interest.     

When Consonance Is Not Enough … A Study of the Use of Dissonant Music In Psychotherapy*

This study explores the thesis that dissonant music is of significant help in psychoanalytic process and treatment. The survey emphasizes the spiritual dimension of abstract music, which creates an ego-less state, affording an important treatment toward the listener's well being. The term “spiritual” as used here, refers not to organized religion, but rather to positive, evolutionary self-growth beyond the ego. The investigation involved seven individual listening sessions conducted in psychoanalytic training schools and four sessions with non-analytic minded subjects. The verbal feedback showed that dissonant music, abstract and unfamiliar sound styles, can make a meaningful contribution to healing during psychoanalytic treatment.