PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE ARTS: THE SLIPPERY GROUND OF APPLIED ANALYSIS

The ways in which today's psychoanalysts approach art closely follow the avenues opened by Freud a hundred years ago. Drawing mainly on Freud's studies on Jensen's Gradiva (1907) and on Leonardo da Vinci (1910a), the author examines the main paradigms he used in discussing artistic activity, including his doubts and hesitations. Present‐day approaches to art are then examined via a discussion of the advantages and pitfalls of psychobiography, of the case study, and of textual approaches. The author makes a case for the type of interdisciplinary dialogue in which the goal is to establish a cross‐fertilization between psychoanalysis and other fields of knowledge while striving to avoid hypersaturation of a work of art in order to foster expansion of the mind.     

RUPTURES IN THE ANALYTIC SETTING AND DISTURBANCES IN THE TRANSFORMATIONAL FIELD OF DREAMS

This paper explores some implications of Bleger's (1967, 2013) concept of the analytic situation, which he views as comprising the analytic setting and the analytic process. The author discusses Bleger's idea of the analytic setting as the depositary for projected painful aspects in either the analyst or patient or both—affects that are then rendered as nonprocess. In contrast, the contents of the analytic process are subject to an incessant process of transformation (Green 2005). The author goes on to enumerate various components of the analytic setting: the nonhuman, object relational, and the analyst's “person” (including mental functioning). An extended clinical vignette is offered as an illustration.     

THE ONEIRIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GEORGES PEREC

Georges Perec's book La Boutique Obscure (1973; translated into English in 2012) serves as the basis for this paper. The book is a collection of dreams that its author dreamed from May 1968 to August 1972. The present author treats these dreams as chapters in a bizarre autobiography, elaborating Perec's life through a discussion of those dreams and using them as a starting point with which to discuss his views of dream interpretation and the role of dreams in psychoanalysis.     

THE THREE ESSAYS AND THE MEANING OF THE INFANTILE SEXUAL IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freud's Three Essays on Sexual Theory (1905a) are still today highly significant because of their novel way of considering the human sexual dimension. The author intends to show that a close reading of the Essays, combined with the reintroduction of the seduction theory by Jean Laplanche, provides a specific and foundational sexual theory for psychoanalysis.     

LOYALTY AND THE ART OF WISE LIVING: THE INFLUENCE OF PLATO ON THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF JOSIAH ROYCE

This essay investigates Josiah Royce's sustained interest in the Platonic dialogues by focusing not only on Royce's explicit commentary on Socrates and Plato but also on significant philosophical connections between Royce and these figures. In section 1, we explain the nature of loyalty according to Royce and how Socratic loyalty exemplifies Royce's ideas in both evident and surprising ways. In section 2, we claim that Royce's treatment of “lost causes” (particularly truth as a lost cause) relates to Socrates' dedication to the logos; the Platonic dialogues are reinvestigated in order to make this point. In section 3, we explain the nature of “cause” both in Royce's thought and in the Platonic dialogues in order to see how loyalty to a cause culminates in the art of wise living—Socrates' philosophical practice.     

THE SECOND SPHERE AND THE STORY OF NO STORY

The author discusses Roy Schafer's ideas of the second self and second reality, as well as his consistent theme of storyteller and story. The latter theme is also explored in the context of more recent psychoanalytic influences, such as Bionian thought, trauma theory, the French approach, and the interpersonal perspective. To illustrate the idea of the nonstory in today's clinical encounters, the author presents two clinical vignettes.     

THE OBJECT‐PRESERVING FUNCTION OF SADOMASOCHISM

The terms sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism seem to have become increasingly, if loosely, associated with aggression in psychoanalytic discourse. This is due in part to the fact that Freud's changing ideas generated confusion about the relative contributions of libido and aggression. The author reviews Freud's variable usage and offers a clinical vignette to illustrate the importance of noticing how sadomasochism may maintain a tie to the object by controlling it. The author offers a developmental speculation for the role reversibility typical of sadomasochistic manifestations. He closes with a comment on the role of sadomasochistic aims in adult sexual perversion.     

THE INTERPLAY OF DEDUCTIVE AND INDUCTIVE REASONING IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIZING

Deductive and inductive reasoning both played an essential part in Freud's construction of psychoanalysis. In this paper, the author explores the happy marriage of empiricism and rationalism in Freud's use of deductive reasoning in the construction of psychoanalytic theory. To do this, the author considers three major amendments Freud made to his theory: (i) infant and childhood sexuality, (ii) the structural theory, and (iii) the theory of signal anxiety. Ultimately, the author argues for, and presents Freud as a proponent of, the epistemological position that he calls critical realism.     

FROM EXTENSION TO REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE RADICAL INFLUENCE OF BION AND WINNICOTT

This paper addresses the radical departure of late Bion's and Winnicott's clinical ideas and practices from traditional psychoanalytic work, introducing a revolutionary change in clinical psychoanalysis. The profound significance and implications of their thinking are explored, and in particular Bion's conception of transformation in O and Winnicott's clinical‐technical revision of analytic work, with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients. The author specifically connects the unknown and unknowable emotional reality‐O with unthinkable breakdown (Winnicott) and catastrophe (Bion). The author suggests that the revolutionary approach introduced by the clinical thinking of late Bion and Winnicott be termed quantum psychoanalysis. She thinks that this approach can coexist with classical psychoanalysis in the same way that classical physics coexists with quantum physics.     

THE VIBRANT CHALLENGES OF CLINICALLY EFFECTIVE PSYCHOANALYTIC MINDEDNESS

In addressing the central challenges of developing and maintaining the analyst's psychoanalytic mindedness, this paper focuses on two particularly challenging core components of clinical effectiveness not so easily developed despite the rigors of the tripartite training model. The first is the analyst's receptivity to unconscious communication, which entails the analyst's curiosity, acceptance of human nature, doubt, restraint, narcissistic balance, and integrity. A brief clinical vignette illustrates this. The second factor is recognizing and managing the inherent disappointments and narcissistic challenges in working psychoanalytically. The author maintains that the ability to lose and subsequently recover one's analytic mind entails discipline, courage, and faith that only experience can provide.     

THE ELUSIVENESS OF MASCULINITY: PRIMORDIAL VULNERABILITY,LACK, AND THE CHALLENGES OF MALE DEVELOPMENT

Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive—an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.     

INSIGHT AGONISTES: A READING OF SOPHOCLES'S OEDIPUS THE KING

In this reading of Sophocles's Oedipus the King, the author suggests that insight can be thought of as the main protagonist of the tragedy. He personifies this depiction of insight, calling it Insight Agonistes, as if it were the sole conflicted character on the stage, albeit masquerading at times as several other characters, including gods, sphinxes, and oracles. This psychoanalytic reading of the text lends itself to an analogy between psychoanalytic process and Sophocles's tragic hero. The author views insight as always transgressing against, always at war with a conservative, societal, or intrapsychic chorus of structured elements. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate this view of insight.     

THE VALUE OF UNCERTAINTY

The author discusses some of the characteristics of Roy Schafer's contributions to psychoanalysis that he finds most valuable, such as his openness to uncertainty, his anti‐reductive view of analytic constructions, his unique formulation of the analyst's role, and his close attention to how the patient engenders particular emotional reactions in the analyst. The author also presents a clinical vignette illustrating the value of the analyst's tolerance of uncertainty in the face of the patient's push for interpretations, explanations, and reassurance.     

CLIMATE CHANGE,LAUDATO SI', CREATION SPIRITUALITY,AND THE NOBILITY OF THE SCIENTIST'S VOCATION

This exploration into spirituality and climate change employs the “four paths” of the creation spirituality tradition. The author recognizes those paths in the rich teachings of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si' and applies them in considering the nobility of the scientist's vocation. Premodern thinkers often resisted any split between science and religion. The author then lays out the basic archetypes for recognizing the sacredness of creation, namely, the Cosmic Christ (Christianity); the Buddha Nature (Buddhism); the Image of God (Judaism); the “Primordial Man” (Hinduism), as well as the premodern universal teaching of “God as Beauty.” He addresses the subject of evil which deserves serious attention in the face of the realities posed by climate change and the resistance to addressing them. In the concluding section, the author speaks of a new Order of the Sacred Earth that was launched in fall 2017 to gather persons of whatever spiritual tradition or none to devote themselves to preserving Mother Earth.     

THE NECESSITY OF TOMORROW'S SEA BATTLE

In chapter 9 of De Interpretatione, Aristotle offers a defense of free will against the threat of fatalism. According to the traditional interpretation, Aristotle concedes the validity of the fatalist's arguments and then proceeds to reject the Principle of Bivalence in order to avoid the fatalist's conclusion. Assuming that the traditional interpretation is right on this point, it remains to be seen why Aristotle felt compelled to reject such an intuitive semantic principle rather than challenge the fatalist's inference from truth to necessity. The answer, I contend, lies in Aristotle's theory of truth and truthmakers.     

THE USE OF THE ANALYST AND THE SENSE OF BEING REAL: THE CLINICAL MEANING OF WINNICOTT'S “THE USE OF AN OBJECT”

“The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications” (1968) represents Donald Winnicott's theoretical and clinical legacy. The author develops this concept from a clinical point of view, through the analysis of a woman with psychotic functioning. He reflects upon the dramatic quality of risks inherent in the processes linked to the use of the object with seriously disturbed patients. He explores different meanings of the analyst's survival, linking it to the analyst's response. The processes of the use of the object—that is, the encounter between the patient's potential destructiveness and the analyst's capacity to respond through his own judicious subjectivity—let the patient experience the analyst's capacity to keep his own subjectivity, authenticity, and creativity alive. It is starting from the traces of this live object that patients gradually form their own personal sense of being real.     

ISLAM AND SCIENCE: THE NEXT PHASE OF DEBATES

This article reviews the new developments that have occurred in the past ten to fifteen years in the field of Islam and science: (1) the emergence of a “new generation” of thinkers, Muslim scientists who accept modern science's fundamental methodology, theories, and results, and try to find ways to “harmonize” it with Islam; and (2) the exponential increase in the popularity of the I‘jaz ‘Ilmiy “theory,” the “miraculous scientific content of the Qur'an” (and, some say, the Hadith) as well as the continuation of the traditionalist school (Iqbal and others, following Nasr) among a section of the Muslim intelligentsia. The author then focuses on the next phase of issues, that is the “challenges” that this “new generation” must address, including the integration of methodological naturalism and evolution (biological and human) in the Islamic worldview, and positions to adopt regarding divine action and miracles. The author also mentions “educational and social issues” where Islam and science interface, and concludes with “the way forward.”     

THE SERMON ON MOUNT MORIAH: FAITH AND THE SECRET IN THE GIFT OF DEATH

This essay is an investigation of three attempts to think faith. I find my starting place in Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death, 1 one of the most important treatments of Christianity in Derrida's later thought, which was increasingly insistent in its engagement with religious questions up until his death in 2004. This reading of The Gift of Death will focus particularly on the question of secrecy and its relationship with faith, leading necessarily to an account of Derrida's reading of two of his primary references in this text: the second essay of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals 1 and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. 1 Rather than simply rendering a judgment on Derrida's reading, I will endeavor to read these texts together, extending (or expanding upon) Derrida's reading while questioning some of the positive formulations he makes in his own name – all the while remaining attentive to the gambles involved in thinking faith.