Reflections on Freud's Dora Case After 48 Years

I revisit Freud's case of Dora from the vantage point of current literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. Mahony (this issue) argues that Freud's understanding of Dora is unconvincing to the modern reader because Dora is a victim of trauma rather than sexual repression. I extend Mahony's ideas in terms of the development of psychoanalytic ideas, place Freud's view in the context of my psychoanalytic education in the mid-20th century, and suggest that modern contributions to trauma theory and memory further support the thesis that Dora was a victim of trauma rather than of conflicted libidinal desires.     

The effectiveness of psychoanalysis in a case study using multi‐perspective methodology: Conflict in choosing a partner due to transgenerational mandate

A case study is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and the persistence of its benefits 20 years later in a young woman with severe depression, professional inhibition, and difficulties in partner selection due to transgenerational mandate (TGM). The investigation was carried out with psychoanalytic interviews with the patient and analyst, which were evaluated by both psychoanalytic and non‐psychoanalytic judges following a methodology based on one tested in Germany by Leuzinger‐Bohleber et al. (2003). The psychoanalytic treatment began in the early 1980s in Monterrey, Mexico. The study concludes that the psychoanalysis was effective in assisting with the patient's character disorder and partner selection, mainly because of the therapeutic alliance, the analysis of transference and character, and the patient's increased capacity for mentalization as a result of the interpretation of the TGMs.     

The psychogenesis of the ego: notes on Freud's 'case of homosexuality in a woman'

This paper examines Freud's (1920) case study 'The psychogenesis of homosexuality in a woman' in the light of the second topography that was being elaborated in his theoretical writing at that time. The analysis of the ego and its defence mechanisms, which was to become such an important part of clinical technique in Anglo-American psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling, is not set out explicitly in any of Freud's case studies. However, in this last case study presented by Freud, it is possible to see how an attention to family dynamics, Oedipal structures and patterns of identification set the stage for the new notion of the ego to emerge. This 'turning point' in theory and clinical technique is also, in this case, intimately related to theories of sexuality, and Freud's own assumptions about homosexuality and heterosexuality are considered here in relation to his account of the ego.     

Feeling one's way in the world: Making a life

This paper argues for the psychoanalytic relevance of the works of James Gibson and Susanne Langer in explicating the early development of the human child and makes use of this combined formulation of development to think about psychoanalytic theory and practice. From the insights of James Gibson's ecological psychology we can appreciate the embodiment and embeddedness of the child's growing mind within both her physical and social environments. Making use of Susanne Langer's concept of feeling to redefine ecological psychology's perceptual counterpart to action allows us to understand the child's seamless transition into active participation in her culture, as she learns to project her animalian capacity to feel into intersubjectively defined forms of behavior and experience with others. The paper presents a lengthy exposition of Gibson's ecological psychology, before explaining Langer's thinking and launching into the combined insights of these scholars to explicate the nature of the child's mind as she feels her way in the world and makes a life for herself within it. This is the life she will be able to remake in the embeddedness of a psychoanalytic therapeutic relationship where she can learn to feel her way in the world in a new light.     

In Retrospect: Reflections on a Psychoanalytic Career

This account of the author's psychoanalytic education and the subsequent evolution of his theoretical and technical beliefs emphasizes his sustained attachment to classical Freudian principles. The refinement of his views consequent to his close friendship and collaboration with Charles Brenner is described. In recent years, his study of the work of certain colleagues who are exponents of other psychoanalytic points of view has resulted in some modulation of his technical stance, without altering his fundamental convictions about the nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise.     

Discussion: The Analyst's Involvement in the Creative Aspect of Analysis

Recent formulations on the psychology of creativity in the analytic context, such as Albert Rothenberg's “homospacial thinking,” Arnold Modell's “unconscious metaphoric thought,” and Thomas Ogden's “transformational thinking,” are discussed. These concepts enable previously unconnected experiences to be combined within the mind, while emphasizing interpersonal imaginative processes such as identification and empathic knowledge; the dual cognitive features of these formulations permit awareness of the complexity of feelings in oneself and others, essential for psychoanalytic creativity. Further, the articles in this issue are synthesized, highlighting the importance of the analyst making creative (new and valuable) use of his or her entire life experience, feelings, attitudes, and fantasies in treatment. From this dicussion, it is evident that the analyst's creative use of self should be more systematically incorporated into psychoanalytic theory of technique.     

PATIENT‐ANALYST “WITHNESS”: ON ANALYTIC “PRESENCING,” PASSION,AND COMPASSION IN STATES OF BREAKDOWN,DESPAIR, AND DEADNESS

This paper focuses on the analyst's “presencing” (being there) within the patient's experiential world and within the grip of the psychoanalytic process, and the ensuing deep patient–analyst interconnectedness, as a fundamental dimension of analytic work. It engenders new possibilities for extending the reach of psychoanalytic treatment to more disturbed patients. Here patient and analyst forge an emergent new entity of interconnectedness or “withness” that goes beyond the confines of their separate subjectivities and the simple summation of the two. Using a detailed clinical illustration of a difficult analysis with a severely fetishistic‐masochistic patient, the author describes the kind of knowledge, experience, and powerful effects that come into being when the analyst interconnects psychically with the patient in living through the process, and that relate specifically to the analyst's compassion.     

Psychoanalytic Ideals,New Technologies,and the Expropriations of the Corporate Self: Commentary on Paper by Stephen Hartman

Seligman admires Stephen Hartman's ability to enter and empathize with the emerging psychosocial ambience of the new social media while maintaining his focus as a psychoanalytic clinician and theorist. He then delineates how the new modes of constructing what constitutes “reality” and the aesthetics of subjectivity may mark a departure from ideals of authenticity and privacy, which are at the center of the psychoanalytic project. Finally, he worries that these shifts are linked to an overall concentration of corporate power and ownership of media and other ideological apparatuses supporting an alienated, fetishized culture of consumption and market-minded vacuity.     

Comments on the Ikonen and Rechardt papers on the death drive and the origin of shame

In this paper, psychoanalysis is viewed as a method in opposition to the reigning spirit of our age with its demands for fast and measurable results. The concept ?the psychoanalytic room” is introduced in order to grasp the uniqueness of psychoanalysis and how it distinguishes itself from what is ordinarily held to be included under the category of work. The psychoanalytic room is explored in both a concrete and metaphoric sense and is discussed in relation to the concept of time, reality, Ogden's concept of the analytic third, and, inspired by Winnicott, children's play. The playroom of the child and its similarity with the analytic room is illustrated by the book ?Benny's Bathtub” by the Danish author Flemming Kvist Møller.     

The empiricist as rebel: Jung,Freud, and the burdens of discipleship

However little they share in common, both Freudian and Jungian commentators have long agreed that Jung's theoretical development in the years following his psychoanalytic affiliation prompted an open “split” with Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. Careful examination of Jung's principal “rebel” works does not sustain this thesis, however, but rather indicates Jung's honest belief that his limited appropriation of certain psychoanalytic mechanisms and attendant theoretical modifications constituted full-fledged loyalty to psychoanalysis as he understood it. This perception receives significant support from the Freud-Jung correspondence which reveals Jung openly articulating the ground rules defining his loyalty to psychoanalysis as early as 1906, and Freud accepting, and even approving, his protégé's empirical reservations over the course of the next five years.     

The Analytic Principle and Attitude: Mobilizing Psychoanalytic Knowledge to Maximize Social Work Students' Practice Competence

Although psychoanalytic approaches have been marginalized in the foundations of contemporary clinical social work practice, there are core themes in various psychoanalytic theories that can be made accessible to maximize students’ practice competence. We elucidate the psychoanalytic principle of unconsciousness as well as the analytic attitude of inquisitive listening and its components. Using vignettes, we demonstrate how we teach this attitude in bachelor's in social work (BSW) and master's in social work (MSW) classrooms. This approach can help students begin to think and listen psychoanalytically. It offers them a way to better understand the person beyond the symptoms.     

Strangers to Ourselves: Exploring the Limits and Potentials of the Analyst's Self Awareness in Self- and Mutual Analysis

The analyst's self-analysis—originally fashioned on Freud's solo foray into his own unconscious mind—continues to play an important psychoanalytic role. A summary of relevant literature is presented that includes recent relational psychoanalytic and neuroscientific data. Three major findings emerge: First, analysts' achievement of self-awareness in the analytic setting is clearly limited, more limited than we might like to admit, especially when we act alone; second, analysts reaching clinical self-awareness is a mutual, interactive process that, in addition to psychological processes, can be understood on the basis of operations uncovered by neuroscience, especially the mirror neuron system; third, accordingly, a form of “mutual” analysis is seen as an indispensable element of the analytic process. Analysts' achievement of self-awareness is discussed with a particular focus on our intrinsic relationality, and on mentalization, self-reflexivity, new relational experience, and therapeutic action. Illustrative case material is discussed.     

A DISCOURSE ON SOPHOCLES: FREUD AND DETERMINISM

A study on the subjective experience of neuroleptic treatment is used as an example of research that employs psychoanalytic theory and methodology outside the clinical situation. Psychoanalytic tenets such as psychosexuality and the unconscious are highlighted, and the systematic study of internal reality is discussed with reference to the study on neuroleptics, the results of which are presented in extenso. Metapsychology is considered as a means for systematization, and self-reflexive countertransference analysis is seen as a means for fostering trustworthiness and reliability. The validity criteria discussed are clinical relevance, coherence, and originality (as distinct from merely confirming received theory). Value conflicts between academic and psychoanalytic scientific cultures are described with reference to the data of the specimen study. The concluding discussion includes a brief comparison of the time-limited interview method with long-term, clinical psychoanalytic inquiries.

“Flechsig's Brain science is the theory and Schreber's delusions are the practice of the same traumatic collapse of…subjectivity, of the gap separating bodily cause and symbolic effect. Schreber's point would seem to be that the elimination of the gap—the attempt to fill it with neuroanatomical knowledge—is nothing short of soul murder.” Eric Santner (1996), My own private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's secret history of modernity (p. 75)     

Reflection on the relationship between psychoanalysis and christianity

Coming to terms with Freud's ideas and attitudes toward religion is prerequisite to any consideration of the compatibility between psychoanalysis and Christianity. In a previous essay and in this one I have attempted to sort out Freud's ambivalence and ambiguity in the area and to point out their relevance to the issue at hand. In this paper I survey and criticize the opinions of a number of writers, as well as putting forward some of my own. I emphasize that the compatibility question is one of value, rather than of fact, and that one's answer to it depends largely on one's conception of psychoanalysis itself. The issue is not clear-cut. Some aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice appear more reconcilable with Christian theology, ethics, and spirituality than others. A few psychoanalytic tenets seem in direct contradiction to religious ones. I close with an historical-sociological point that I believe has some bearing on the matter.     

Love in the counter-transference: The uses of the therapist's excitement

SUMMARY

The psychoanalytic tradition has always had difficulty with the question of the therapist's sexual feelings toward the patient. This paper traces that difficulty: from Freud's original struggle to replace moralism with a psychoanalytic mode of understanding, to the more recent literature on countertransference which still seems particularly averse to the possibility of the therapist's sexual experience. By way of a discussion of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I argue for the sometimes central therapeutic role of the therapist's experiencing, and then containing, excitement.     

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.     

Conflict in psychoanalysis and in life

Abstract

Unconscious conflicts are at the center of Freudian psychoanalytic inquiry, in the psychoanalytic situation as well as in the theory of personality and pathogenesis. The core dynamic formulation, intrapsychic conflict resulting in new psychic formation, is addressed in the paper in the following steps.

First, the development of the concept of conflict throughout the history of Freudian psychoanalysis is reviewed. Next, the analytic and synthetic aspects of conflict theory are explored and the role of conflict in the development of personality organization and pathogenesis is clarified. Then, the contemporary extensions and elaborations of structural theory are presented.

To illustrate analysis focused on conflict, clinical material covering the phases of psychoanalytic process is highlighted. From the beginning stage of analyzing the patient's initial diffuse state of indifference and “weirdness”, analysis proceeds to address primary and secondary symptoms of impotence and exhibitionism and underlying passive-phallic personality organization with conflict around aggression. This leads to the patient's sense of mastery over previously enslaving and “immobilizing” internal turmoil.     

Psychoanalysis and Human Values

Psychoanalysis can contribute quite a lot to the question of values and to a theory of ethics. While the first part of this presentation is focused on the impact psychoanalysis continues to exert on present day ethical theory, the second part discusses Erich Fromm's particular approach to psychoanalysis. Fromm was the first to reformulate in his psychoanalytic approach the idea of an ethic of the virtues. With his theory of character (and of social character) he made values an integral part of psychoanalytic theory. Hence, what matters most morally from a psychoanalytic stance is the quality of character orientation. Despite the fact that - in Fromm's own socio-psychoanalytic approach - man's character is the product of adaptation to the environment, morality for him is dictated by economic and social requirements - whatever common sense may tell us to the contrary. For Fromm there is an intrinsic primary tendency to growth in all human beings. Thus, morally good is whatever furthers the growth of our own powers by which we relate to the outside world and to ourselves in a loving, "sane" and creative way. The last section reflects some implications of Fromm's approach to understanding values as an integral part of psychoanalytic theory, and finally discusses whether the search for truth and human values is as obsolete as postmodern thinking claims.     

Revision from the Margins: Fromm's Contributions to Psychoanalysis

Fromm's important contributions to the modern development of psychoanalytic thought are often ignored and frequently misunderstood. An early proponent of revisions of psychoanalytic theory and therapy similar to recent trends in object relations, self-psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis, Fromm was a visionary for a Freudian theory built upon orthodoxies of the past but going beyond them. It is argued here that Fromm's unique role in helping create a new version of psychoanalysis for the 21st century was as sociological as it was intellectual. Fromm's contributions were intimately linked to his institutional positioning close to the center but on the relative margins of the discipline. This paper will outline how sociological dynamics shaped Fromm's revision of psychoanalysis. We will conclude by discussing how Fromm was able to have a more dramatic influence than other Freudian revisionists who were less favourably positioned.