RECOVERING THE FATHER IN MIND AND FLESH: HISTORY,TRIADIC FUNCTIONING,AND DEVELOPMENTAL IMPLICATIONS

This paper aims to restore the father and paternal function to their rightful place alongside the mother and maternity in order to counter the prevailing matricentric, dyadic bias in psychoanalytic theory and technique. The author contends that both the symbolic and the actual, flesh‐and‐blood father are necessary to optimize his child's development. The paternal function inevitably operates in a triadic matrix; thirdness is always psychically in existence—with the father ever present in the mother's unconscious mind—and the paternal third is necessary to open up symbolic space. As an embodied other, the actual father, both as a separating agent and an attracting object, is called upon to recognize his child's otherness throughout the inescapable father–child rivalries, neglect, and desire.     

MY FATHER,MYSELF

This essay presents material from the second analysis of an offspring of two Holocaust survivors, each of whom lost a child during the war. The first analysis (Kogan 2003 ) focused primarily on the patient's relationship with her mother. This second analysis revolves around the elaboration of the complex and painful father–daughter relationship, centering on the events surrounding the death of the patient's father. The discussion includes an exploration of the father's deferred action on account of his Holocaust trauma, which he passed on to the next generation; the break in the idealized paternal representation; and the daughter's identification with her father's disavowed aggressive aspects. It also examines some of the unique transference and countertransference problems that arose, mainly because patient and analyst belonged to the same traumatized large group.     

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.     

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.     

ROY SCHAFER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING: FROM CLINICAL SENSIBILITY TO THE ANALYTIC ATTITUDE

The author reviews Schafer's contributions to psychological testing, emphasizing his development of the test battery, his significant contributions to psychoanalytically oriented Rorschach interpretation, and his understanding of the complex interpersonal dynamics involved in psychological test interpretation. The author also discusses his use of Schafer's writing in his own teaching and academic work, noting that Schafer's contributions have not only provided innovative methods for examining test data, but have also promoted a respectful, humanistic, and individualized approach to the patient in testing and treatment. The author asserts that Schafer's later seminal contributions to psychoanalysis had their origins in his early career as a psychologist applying psychoanalytic ideas to testing.     

THE “AS‐YET SITUATION” IN WINNICOTT'S “FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS”: YOUR FATHER “NEVER DID YOU THE HONOR OF”… YET

The author proposes a new hypothesis in relation to Winnicott's “Fragment of an Analysis”: that as early as 1955, in the case described in this text, Winnicott is creating the paternal function in his patient's psychic functioning by implicitly linking his interpretations regarding the father to the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit. The author introduces an original clinical concept, the as‐yet situation, which she has observed in her own clinical work, as well as in Winnicott's analysis of the patient described in “Fragment of an Analysis” (1955).     

MOURNING,DREAMING, AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

The author argues that the structure of mourning and the structure of the Oedipus complex are triadic, the latter being obvious and easy to conceptualize, while the former is quite subtle. When it is the father who is mourned, the son must repeatedly invoke the dead object so that libidinal cathexis can be reinvested in living objects. Such was the situation in which Freud found himself in 1896 when his father died—the triadic nature of the Oedipus complex ironically not yet discovered by him. In the author's belief, Freud's mourning and his attendant rich dream life occurring between 1896 and 1897 gave him access to the unconscious raw material that would eventually help him conceptualize the triadic structure at the instinctual core of the Oedipus complex.     

THE MISSING FATHER FUNCTION IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND TECHNIQUE: THE ANALYST'S INTERNAL COUPLE AND MATURING INTIMACY

This paper argues that recovering the “missing” paternal function in analytic space is essential for the patient's achievement of mature object relations. Emerging from the helpless infant's contact with primary caregivers, mature intimacy rests on establishing healthy triadic functioning based on an infant‐with‐mother‐and‐father. Despite a maternocentric bias in contemporary clinical theory, the emergence of triangularity and the inclusion of the paternal third as a separating element is vital in the analytic dyad. Effective technique requires the analyst's balanced interplay between the paternal, investigative and the maternal, maximally receptive modes of functioning—the good enough analytic couple within the analyst—to serve as the separating element that procreatively fertilizes the capacity for intimacy with a differentiated other. A clinical example illustrates how treatment is limited when the paternal function is minimized within more collusive, unconsciously symbiotic dyads.     

New frontiers in psychoanalysis – in our international community

The paper discusses what the author calls “The seduction by the father”. It would occur when, in the Oedipus complex, the father reverses his role: instead of being the one who castrates, he seduces. Seduction here is understood in the sense that he does not act as the one who imposes limits to the child. Consequently the child can not project his hostile impulses onto the father.

Based on clinical data, the Author says that, in the male child, the seduction by the father hampers the transformation of the two Oedipal attitudes towards the father into identifications. The consequences of this fact upon the construction of the “nostalgia of the father's protection” are discussed, so as the transformation of this father into the symbolic father.     

THE PATIENT'S OBJECTS IN THE ANALYST'S MIND

In every analysis, the analyst develops an internal relationship with the patient's objects—that is, the people in the patient's life and mind. Sometimes these figures can inhabit the analyst's mind as a source of data, but at other times, the analyst may feel preoccupied with or even invaded by them. The author presents two clinical cases: one in which the seeming absence of a good object in the patient's mind made the analyst hesitate to proceed with an analysis, and another in which the patient's preoccupation with a “bad” object was shared and mirrored by the analyst's own inner preoccupation with the object. The use and experience of these two objects by the analyst are discussed with particular attention to the countertransference.     

Projective identification,containment and sojourn in the psyche: Clinical notes on a specific type of transference-countertransference interaction

Abstract

This paper suggests that the interplay between transference and countertransference is considered to be a valuable channel of communication. The author puts an emphasis on the containing function of the analyst. The patient strives for an experience of an object (analyst) that tolerates and copes with the patient's projections. There are some moments when analysts feel themselves to be invaded, controlled or abused by their patient's products. As Bion has postulated, this situation takes the form of a sojourn in the analyst's psyche. Clinical vignettes are given to provide support for the ways in which the analyst contains and elaborates the projections of the patients in his or her own mind and the therapeutic role that these processes have.     

STABILITY OF BIOLOGICAL FATHER PRESENCE AS A PROXY FOR FAMILY STABILITY: CROSS‐RACIAL ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE LONGITUDINAL DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTION REGULATION IN TODDLERHOOD

The current study, utilizing data from the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (Love et al., 2005) explored the relationship between biological father presence and emotion regulation over toddlerhood among children from low‐income families. Conceptualizing biological father presence as a proxy for family role development, results are interpreted from a role development theoretical perspective. The latent growth curve model was compared based on child ethnoracial status (African American, Caucasian, Hispanic) and child gender. Consistent biological father presence was associated with toddlers’ regulatory development across toddlerhood, and this relationship was most robust among Caucasian toddlers as compared to African American toddlers. Findings for Hispanic toddlers were not significantly different from those of Caucasian or African American families. Results bolster the literature on father presence and child outcomes. Analyses address consistency in father presence as a proxy for coherent role development and define a link between consistent father presence and children's regulatory development, demonstrating ethnoracial differences which are likely attributed to the social construction of family roles.     

The correspondence between Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung on the occasion of the November pogroms, 1938

In the light of recently‐published correspondence between Jung and Neumann, this paper considers and connects two aspects of their relationship: Jung's theory of an ethno‐specific differentiation of the unconscious as formulated in 1934, and the relationship between Jung and Neumann at the beginning of the Holocaust in 1938–with Jung as the wise old man and a father figure on one hand, and Neumann as the apprentice and dependent son on the other. In examining these two issues, a detailed interpretation of four letters, two by Neumann and two by Jung, written in 1938 and 1939, is given. Neumann's reflections on the collective Jewish determination in the face of the November pogroms in 1938 led Jung to modify his view, with relativization and secularization of his former position. This shift precipitated a deep crisis with feelings of disorientation and desertion in Neumann; the paper discusses how a negative father complex was then constellated and imaged in a dream. After years of silence, the two men were able to renew the deep bonds that characterized their lifelong friendship.     

BECOMING RELATED: THE EDUCATION OF A PSYCHOANALYST

The author uses a “professional memoir,” a story about his first experiences in clinical work, to illustrate what he believes to be certain fundamental aspects of an analytic attitude. Taking place in a psychiatric hospital, it is meant to highlight the central place of intuition, emotional receptivity, empathy, relatedness—and their inherent dangers—in engaging therapeutically with patients' emotional disturbances. The author postulates that these and related aspects of clinical psychoanalysis are not sufficiently emphasized in psychoanalytic training and are often eclipsed by idealizations of psychoanalytic theories and their derivative techniques, third‐party demands for evidence‐based data, preoccupations with neurobiological correlates of experience, etc. Despite the clinical fact that psychoanalysis can be extraordinarily helpful to patients, he questions whether clinical psychoanalysis is rightly regarded as a “treatment.”     

CLINICAL WINNICOTT: TRAVELING A REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

The author contends that, contrary to the usual perception that Winnicott followed a linear progression “through pediatrics to psychoanalysis,” Winnicott's vision was always a psychoanalytic one, even during his early pediatric work. His place in the development of psychoanalytic theory is highlighted, and the author discusses such key Winnicottian concepts as transitional space, the false self, and the use of the object. Winnicott's unique approach to the form and value of analytic interpretation is particularly emphasized, and his thoughts on the treatment of depression are also addressed, as well as his distinction between regression and withdrawal. Included is a summary of convergences and divergences between Winnicott's thinking and that of Bion.     

DIFFERENT ARCHITECTURES OF CREATIVITY: LOUIS AND NATHANIEL KAHN

The author analyzes Nathaniel Kahn's documentary film My Architect: A Son's Journey, a tribute to the writer‐director's father Louis, the famous architect, who died suddenly when Nathaniel was eleven years old. The film's poetic, evocative images form a testimony to the silent working through that Nathaniel did in searching for his lost father and to the complex intertwining of mourning and creativity. Creativity is seen as both the cause and the effect of working through, as it gives life to a new meaning and allows replacement of the lost object by an object found again. Bereavement, symbolization, and the birth of representation appear to be connected with one another, both when the most elementary representations are involved and when the more complex and artistic ones are. Where and when it is possible to recover a representation that can survive the absence of the lost object, there is a potentially creative psychic space that can be made fertile again.     

‘Just black sometimes’, part 2: reflections on an adolescent's journey

In this second article about work at a refugee centre for unaccompanied minors in Berlin, the author discusses his encounter with Syrian and Afghani adolescents who were enrolled in the program. Issues around adaptation to a new culture are explored with attention to the dynamics of conformity and marginalization. The questions of what happens to adolescent refugees separated from their families, and how their identity formation is shaped by this burden is explored in relation to the author's meeting with a Syrian adolescent living in Berlin. To illustrate the long reach of a missing father who has been left behind, characters from Virgil's Aeneid are discussed to amplify heroic and spiritual aspects within father‐son relationships. The interplay between needing help and allowing for resilience is explored as an important aspect of refugees’ transitions, while also considering variables such as dependence and independence, foreign and familiar, being with or without family, and adjusting to the present and/whilst relating to the past; tensions between these alternatives can create various psychosocial challenges for adolescent refugees.     

FORWARD,TO THE EAST: NAPTHALI HERZ IMBER'S PERCEPTION OF KABBALAH

Naphtali Herz Imber is famous as the author of the Jewish national anthem, “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”). He is also quite well known for his non-conformism, vagabond lifestyle, and excessive drinking. However, his interest in the occult and Kabbalah are much less known. Imber wrote several articles on Jewish mysticism, translated some kabbalistic texts, and published the first journal on Kabbalah—Uriel: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Cabbalistic Science (of which only one issue appeared). Although much scholarly literature has been devoted to Imber and his famous poem, his interest in the occult and Jewish mysticism has not been investigated. This article will discuss Imber's encounter with late-nineteenth-century esotericism, specifically the doctrines of Laurence and Alice Oliphant and the Theosophical Society. It presents Imber's notions concerning Jewish mysticism and examines the impact that the Theosophical Society and the Oliphants' principles had on his perception of Kabbalah. Finally, it discusses the connection between Imber's Zionism and his interest in Kabbalah and shows that his perception of Jewish mysticism, which was greatly influenced by Western esoteric ideas, was shaped in the framework of fin de siècle Orientalism and Jewish nationalism. Imber's positive evaluation of Jewish mysticism and its nationalistic interpretation anticipates the position of later Zionist scholars of Jewish mysticism, whose vision of Kabbalah and Hasidism largely shaped the way Jewish mysticism is perceived and studied today.     

The role of a parent's illness in the emotional experience of a child evidence from Klein's Narrative of a child analysis

Abstract

The analysis of Richard, described by Melanie Klein in Narrative of a Child Analysis, gives us some insight into the effect on a child of threats to the health of his parents. His mother was involved in a road accident when Richard was 2; his father collapsed during the time of the analysis when he was 10. This paper links these events with disturbances in Richard's relation to his father and to his mother, as well as with threats to his own integrity, as demonstrated in the analysis. Richard's reversal of roles with his father and mother is discussed, as are Klein's reaction to Richard's report of finding his father ‘ill and nearly fainting’ and Richard's response to her behaviour. The paper draws attention to the way in which a child's reaction to the ill health of one parent can affect relations with both parents, as well as disturbing his sense of himself.