Methodological problems in the psychoanalytic interpretation of literature: a review of studies on Sophocles' Antigone.

Through a critical review of several studies dealing with Sophocles' drama, the Antigone, I have explored some of the prominent methodological problems encountered in the psychoanalytic interpretation of literature. Foremost among these is the inherent difficulty that the interpretation of literature is unable to benefit from the process of the analytic situation. Divorced from the realities of the therapeutic process, the drama itself is often used to corroborate an author's theoretical bias or to advance some special interest, with consequent distortion or blurring of the text. Although data about the artist's life and sociocultural environment may be of crucial significance, it is the text itself that must be the ultimate object of study. Through a re-examination of the Antigone as an aesthetic totality I have sketched out what appears to be an alternative manner of approaching the drama, and suggested that works of art reach us on both unconscious and conscious levels. I have stressed the need to analyze our emotional response to a work as affording a valuable source of insight into the work itself. Throughout, I have drawn attention to the need for greater scholarly rigor and the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. An open recognition of the problems in the psychoanalytic study of literature should serve to minimize dilettantism and raise the level of scholarship.     

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.     

Beyond Racial Visibility and Invisible: Reply to Hartman and Sheehi

In responding to the rich discussions from Stephen Hartman and Lara Sheehi (this issue), the author builds on the ways each discussant explores how invisibility and visibility shape phantomatic obstacles to reckoning with race in psychoanalytic theory and practice. A struggle with the nexus of racial and other discursive hierarchies of interpellation can serve to liberate clinical movement, otherwise infected by incarcerating categories. This effort is demonstrated to challenge both patient and analyst to find ways to trans-form racial stereotypes of rescuer and victim. Escape from such discursive traps as understanding, empathy, containment and/or recognition challenges the analyst, as Hartman reminds, to embrace vulnerability as a guiding muse and nonrecognition as a source of learning. Such efforts are offered to facilitate a trans-formation process for both clinical participants as intersubjects, complexly constituted by conscious and unconscious ideological (Sheehi, this issue) histories and affiliations.     

THINKING CATASTROPHIC THOUGHTS: A TRAUMATIZED SENSIBILITY ON A HOTTER PLANET

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - While catastrophizing has traditionally been pathologized within psychoanalytic traditions, in this paper I suggest that cataclysmic realities of climate...     

A Mixed Bag: The Realities of Psychoanalytic Practice

For a variety of reasons, psychoanalytic training is done in somewhat of a vacuum. It teaches a theory and a way of practicing that does not always translate well to day-to-day private practice work. The clinical realities of psychoanalytic practice prove the psychoanalytic method to be one that provides help to a wider audience than classical psychoanalytic training programs might suggest. The psychoanalytic approach offers the analyst many special opportunities to work with and help a wide variety of patients. Analysts who accept both the limitations as well as the wide application and broad benefits of the psychoanalytic approach may have a more fulfilling experience than their training experiences might foster. At the same time, the analyst's level of therapeutic skill, the patient's diagnosis, and many multiple external factors create different limitations in the practice and outcome of psychoanalytic work. Extensive case material is used to show the broad range of patients who are helped by the psychoanalytic method. The clinical material also shows the less than perfect, but often good enough outcomes of these difficult cases with often severely disturbed patients.     

On the nature and standing of psychoanalytic psychotherapy

In this paper, I offer some reflections on the standing of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the National Health Service (NHS), with special reference to contemporary forms of evidence-based thinking. I consider what may follow when a narrow view of science or psychotherapeutic practice becomes conventional wisdom and assumes dominance. I place stress on the potential loss to NHS psychology and psychiatry if psychoanalytic psychotherapy becomes increasingly marginalized on the one hand, or overly standardized on the other.     

PSYCHOTHERAPY AS PHASE-SPECIFIC INTERACTION

I am writing this paper to help myself, and hopefully some readers, to a better understanding of why some analysands in certain phases of the analysis develop the idea that they are homosexuals or that their analyst is homosexual. My basic thought is that even if these ideas have their individual roots and differ from case to case, they are also dependent on certain phenomena that are included in the analytic encounter and specified by different gender constellations constituting the analytic couple. I will present two examples from my own practice. From these two vignettes, I will draw some conclusions which are supported by my general psychoanalytic experience. The first example concerns male analysands. I have often seen male patients develop the fantasy that they “in reality” are homosexual. This fantasy is so common that it is a rule in my experience. I see it as a product of the fact that the psychoanalytic constellation consists, as in my case, of two men. The second example concerns female analysands. In a few cases with female analysands, I have seen the fantasy emerge that I, the analyst, am homosexual—a fantasy not seen in my male cases. Another difference is that I can't see this as a rule like the fantasy of the male analysands. In both the male and the female cases, I see the homosexual fantasies as a protection against discovery of the mother-transference to me. However, the fantasies have found different expressions depending on the specific gender constellation of the analytic couple: man and man and woman and man, respectively.     

Truth and Consequences: What We Lose and Gain in Psychoanalytic Postmodernism

In this article, I use the psychoanalytic concept of truth as a lens through which to explore how psychoanalysis has changed and not changed under the influence of postmodernism. I suggest that the seeking after truth remains in current psychoanalytic practice even though under different guises or conceptual umbrellas, for instance in the high value placed today on authenticity (or trueness) to self and of relationship. Although, admittedly, the search for truth in the sense of compiling historical facts has receded, our current interest in the construction of narratives still comes with the requirement that the stories we co-create with our patients at least have the ring of truth if they are to facilitate psychic growth and psychological intimacy. Additionally, I offer an overview of some of the salient characteristics of postmodern psychoanalysis, with suggestions as to how each of these might relate to the concept of truth. In closing, I borrow a brief clinical vignette from the unpublished notebooks of Melanie Klein for the purpose of making a brief comparison between earlier and current ways of interacting in the treatment relationship.     

Childhood and Trauma

In this paper, I follow the evolution of the concept of trauma within psychoanalytic theory, and some of the effects of this evolution. Starting out from the point where Freud gives up the theory of trauma as the cause of neurosis in 1897, and the alleged reasons for such a change, I analyze the theoretical and clinical consequences of this change within psychoanalysis. I proceed to develop Ferenczi's ideas on trauma, their relevance to present-day psychoanalytic theorizing and practice, as well as for the understanding of the psychic processes in children, tracing the development of some of these ideas in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.     

How Do You Get Where You Want to Be When You Don't Know Where You Want to Be?

I tell the story of my own development from the childhood of a psychiatrist's daughter in wartime Britain, through a brief career in family medicine, to the position of a member of the Independent tradition in British psychoanalysis. As well as having psychoanalysts from different theoretical orientations in my family, I became confused during my training by the different strands of thought and technique taught and promulgated in the British Psychoanalytical Society. For some time after qualification, I took the lonely path of listening mostly to my patients' material as the prime source of understanding mental suffering. It was only after a few years that I was satisfied at being able to connect psychoanalytic theory with what I heard in the consulting room, and following this was further able to explore different strands of psychoanalytic thinking to reach my own position.     

On the Importance of Being (Earnestly) Hybrid—Or,Qualms of a Quasi-Postmodernist: Commentary on Paper by Susan Fairfield

Dr. Fairfield makes a strong case that contemporary analytic theorists fail to live up to their apparent aspiration to present a thoroughgoingly postmodern conceptualization of the self. She argues instead in favor of a “hybrid” model—one that includes a dollop of modernism in the postmodernist brew. In this commentary, I critique the theorizing process inherent in psychoanalytic postmodernism, and then comment on and give a clinical example involving the self's “configurality.” I argue that we need to embrace the challenges of postmodernism without so privileging this position that we let it loosen our grasp of the realities of everyday clinical experience that might cause us to question postmodernism's tenets or values. Moreover, we must not assume that we can gauge the full impact of our “model of subjectivity” on the therapeutic process by knowing what we think we think.     

Becoming (and Remaining) an Analyst in Latin America

The following overview of the development of psychoanalysis in Brazil and in Porto Alegre outlines the current situation and the challenges to psychoanalysis in my country. I will explain my own experiences on becoming an analyst, the main reasons for my choice, my main influences, and my evolution as a clinical psychoanalyst and as a member of psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions. I include my main contributions to psychoanalysis and consider two broad areas of interest: psychoanalytic technique and its teaching, and the relationship of psychoanalysis and culture. As for the former, my main interests are studies on countertransference and analytic neutrality, to which I will propose a comprehensive concept. As for the latter, I discuss a culture that contrasts vividly with the one in which Freud created the discipline, psychoanalytic views on violence and perversity, psychoanalytic institutions, and the application of analytic ideas for the understanding of some artists and their work.

I will also describe some general features of my country and the development of psychoanalysis in it; report my experiences as a candidate and an analyst; and offer some information about my evolution as an analyst through papers I have written over the past 30 years.     

Neo Homo Economicus and the End of the Subject

Neo-liberalism is now a dominant ideology and sociopolitical-economic organizing principle. Following Nancy Hollander’s (this issue) illuminating foray into its psychological demi-monde, and in full agreement with the understanding that the subject contains and reflects the social, my commentary aims to elaborate on neo-liberalism’s subjective and intersubjecrive correlates. I also raise some more general questions about the relations between the subjective and the social, and our ways of thinking about them. I begin in exploring the value attached to caregiving and attachment. Attachment as goods exchanged and as investment. I follow by highlighting the slippage between ethical and economic meanings in terms such as “value,” “debt,” “guilt,” and “redemption,” a slippage that points to the the probable co-emergence of ethics and markets. Leaning on Foucault’s notion of homo economicus and on the psychoanalytic concept of libidinal economy, I outline some questions about the psychology of the homo economicus of neo-liberalism. I question what seems to me a nostalgic sentiment that runs through neo-liberalism as well as recent psychoanalytic theories, suggesting that this similarity demonstrates how psychoanalytic thinking itself reflects the current order of things. Finally, I wonder whether, under this ideology, we are encountering not only a new kind of subjectivity but also the end of subjectivity as a fundament of human life.     

Consultation from the Consultant's Perspective

This presentation examines psychoanalysis from the standpoint of fictionalism. Fictionalism maintains that all aspects of human experience are creations of imagination, that mind‐made realities constitute for human beings their sole realms of existence, and that it is only about these realms that anything at all can be known. No other knowable realities exist. Fictionalism is an aesthetic orientation that considers these imaginative constructs artistic renderings that are aesthetically formed and experienced, and that must be comprehended and evaluated aesthetically. Furthermore, it regards these artistic constructs as works of fictions—invented textual realities woven by the perpetual interplay of multitudinous signifiers into ever‐changing psychical configurations. From a fictionalist's perspective, “truth”; becomes, paradoxically, a manifestation of fiction. The term fiction intends not only to underscore the radical divergence of fictionalism's philosophical perspective from realism's but to emphasize its reinterpretation of the materialities realism posits as also inventions of imagination. Fictionalism does not, however, simply reverse the hierarchy and valuation of the real/fiction dichotomy but modifies the very understanding of this dichotomy's conceptualization and, by reinscribing realism as itself a form of fiction, even diminishes some of the antagonism inherent in this age‐old rivalry. Rooted deep in psychoanalytic tradition, realism's role has been complex, inconsistent, contradictory, and often embarrassingly naive. Fictionalism contests the many postulates of realism that psychoanalysis has incorporated so fundamentally into its theory and technique. Focusing primarily on transference, I argue not only that this phenomenon has been misconstrued within a realist framework but that most of the other features of psychoanalysis have been as well because psychoanalysis is basically a fictional enterprise.     

Child psychotherapy: Converging traditions

In this paper I outline some of the ways in which I believe the psychoanalytic traditions in North America and in Great Britain are influencing each other. I identify points of convergence and divergence at this moment in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory and technique. I then point out some of the implications of relational perspectives in child psychotherapy as this perspective is developing in the United States.     

Psychoanalytic concepts of the etiology of severe mental illness

In this paper I challenge some prevalent psychoanalytic concepts of the etiology and pathogenesis of severe mental illness which I believe to be in need of revision. There is insufficient evidence to conclude that the etiology of the two major adult psychoses, schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness, can be attributed to failures in development or fixations during the earliest years of life. Furthermore, I believe it incorrect to ascribe these failures of development to deficiencies in the early maternal environment. I base my disagreements on three main considerations: the misinterpretation of the etiological significance of regression, the relevance of new biological data, and erroneous conclusions drawn from lack of diagnostic distinctions. I also challenge the generally held concept of etiologic phase specificity which proposes that failures during various early phases of development can be correlated with different kinds of adult psychopathology. In calling this concept into question, I argue that current psychoanalytic concepts of the etiology of the borderline group of disorders also need to be reevaluated.     

Psychoanalysis and the Body–Mind Problem

In this paper I have tried to clarify some of the differences between on the one hand ordinary doubts and uncertainties that are part and parcel of the psychoanalytic process, and on the other hand the sort of doubt that Socrates called 'aporia', that is, philosophical and conceptual. I have described one point at which philosophical doubt may creep into psychoanalytic thinking on body/mind issues. I presented a psychoanalytical model of the mind, based largely on Bion and Anzieu, in which mind is seen to be emergent from a body–mind nexus, to which we may, under pressure, regress. I elaborated this by reference to an example of my own somatisation, and to Anzieu's theory of a skin ego. Finally I made some comparisons between philosophical solutions to anxieties arising both in the mind/body area and in general epistemology, and psychoanalytic approaches to similar anxieties in life.     

Psychoanalytic aspects of inpatient treatment

This paper looks at the experience of inpatient hospital treatment at the Cassel Hospital and how formal psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with its emphasis on the transference and the inner world, fits into that context and orientates itself to some of the realities of the setting. It outlines how psychotherapy and nursing can work to inform and enrich each other, and what is psychoanalytic about the overall work. A bridge of understanding is built using the patients' perceptions of, adjustment to and conflict about the inpatient setting, and the affective impact of the processes on patients and staff alike. Two clinical examples of severe child abuse family cases are given, the first of Munchhausen syndrome by proxy, the second in which a baby sibling had been killed. They show how in-depth psychoanalytic work with mother and child and individual psychotherapy of the child can be combined with psychotherapy of the parents and intensive work in the therapeutic community. Such a combination can contribute, even in cases of severe pathology, to the development of the relationship between mother and child and promote successful rehabilitation in the outside community.     

The Evolving Nature of Psychoanalytic Supervision: From Pedagogical to Andragogical Perspective

In what primary ways has psychoanalytic supervision evolved over the course of its 100-year plus history? In this paper, I address that question by: (1) sketching out some of the historical differences that have been identified as characterizing the patient-centered, supervisee-centered, and relational-centered supervision perspectives; (2) placing those three perspectives within an adult education framework; and (3) considering their pedagogical (youth-focused) versus andragogical (adult-focused) nature. Based on this examination, I propose the following. Due to the infusion of interpersonal/intersubjective views into the body psychoanalytic, (1) the “maturing” of vision in psychoanalytic supervision (i.e., the movement from a youth-focused to an adult-focused approach to supervision) was made possible; (2) a shift from a supervisory “one-person model times two” to a triadic conceptualization was actuated; (3) traditional perspective on power and authority in supervision was upended; and (4) a more egalitarian, empowering, co-participative approach to supervision emerged and now endures. Attending to the six core principles of adult learning is presented as one primary way in which that “maturing” of vision is most evident in the contemporary practice of psychoanalytic supervision.