A Psychoanalytic Moveable Feast

The author describes his development as a psychoanalyst. He describes the weaving of his formative experiences into a source of motivation in the pursuit of psychoanalysis as a vocation. He describes the gradual development of the ability to utilize the synergism of the evolution of his self-analysis, clinical experience, and psychoanalytic knowledge in the evolution of his work as a psychoanalyst.     

Psychologist as Mentor and Detective in the Mirror of the Soul

A case study is presented of a client, involved in business dealings and personal relationships with members of organized crime, who upon looking into his mirror one morning recognized for the first time that his life was quickly slipping away. Unless he broke free, he decided, by doing something bold and outrageous—in the style of his free-spirited and violent youth—he was doomed to a depressive existence for the remainder of his days. He stalked women by night. Disturbed by a series of frightening dreams of his involvement in the murder of a stalked and raped woman, he approached the author for psychological help. During the course of treatment it became apparent that the client lacked a sense of personal goodness. An exploration of the problematic nature of virtue and constructive behavior in psychotherapeutic theory is presented here, together with a rationale for the role of the therapist as mentor as well as therapist for people who lack early and present experiences with constructive role models.     

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

In this article, the author, an eminent psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and writer, presents a brief introduction to the problem of human mortality as one of the givens of human existence, locating the problem squarely in the domain of self- awareness or human consciousness. He names the problem as death anxiety, a fear that can erupt into terror depriving an individual of happiness and fulfillment. Having identified the problem of death anxiety, the author then goes on, through a personal memoir, to disclose his personal ideas about death, their autobiographical sources, and how they have affected his life, as well as his coming to terms with the necessity of his own death. Within this autobiographical essay, he touches on experiences of death and dying from his youth, adolescence, and adulthood as well as his experience of the death of three of his most prized mentors: Jerome Frank, John Whitehorn, and Rollo May.     

“FREEDOM TO GROW”

Writing is a dangerous activity, especially as it is seemingly harmless: we rarely know what we are getting into at the start. Continuing her work on the writings of J.M. Barrie, especially on the question of the “lost child” who never grows up, the author invites the reader to listen to Sándor Ferenczi’s “lost childhood” between the lines of his Clinical Diary. He begins the Diary on January 7, 1932 and the last entry is October 2 of the same year; Ferenczi died on May 22, 1933. The exceptional text of the diary is the fruit of his incisive clinical insights, his disappointment and anger with Freud and his ruthless self-analysis. The author pinpoints her reading of Ferenczi, the “wise baby—lost child”.     

A lifelong attempt to understand and assess personality

The author recounts the story of his life and career in clinical psychology from 1917 to 2003. He offers hypotheses about parts of his personal life that may have predisposed him to develop a special interest in assessing personality, discusses formative influences on his particular approach to the topic, and describes the settings in which and some of the colleagues with whom he participated in some principal pieces of research on this aspect of psychology.     

Why did freud choose medical school?

Abstract

After demonstrating the unsatisfactory nature of the reasons Freud gave us for his choice of medical school, the author shows how it is possible to throw new light on it on the basis of his letters to his adolescent friend Emil Fluss. This relationship played a crucial role in forcing Freud to come out of his isolation and the defensive dissection of his feelings that he used to practice, and thus experience an intimate relationship as a better source of self-knowledge and growth. This is the context in which his choice of medical school took place, which can consequently be conceptualized in terms of his unconscious—and self-concealed—pursuit of a growth-promoting and self-healing agency and experience. It thus was an interpersonal event which compelled him to deviate from his original purpose, i.e. the study of law or the humanities, and take up the “unconscious plan” to soften his defensive apparatus. This is consequently the new meaning we can attach to the experience of “rest and full satisfaction” he made in Brücke's laboratory between 1876 and 1882. What he defines as the “triumph” of his life thus also acquires a new meaning: the possibility to take up again his original interest in psychology not on an exclusively defensive basis any more, but eventually in a constructive way. Such a personal itinerary also represented one of Freud's most convincing experiences of the power of the unconscious, as he formulated it in his book on dreams—and as he articulated it in the new field of psychoanalysis. Since, in the author's opinion, the attempt at self-cure lies at the root of our own choice of our profession, this must have been also Freud's case, at a much earlier time than what is traditionally referred to as his self-analysis. At variance with what Freud himself used to claim, the study of his life remains one of the best keys to the understanding of his intellectual legacy.     

Who is my Jung? Memories,Reflections, Prospects

The author describes his personal and professional journey in relation to the subject of the AJA 40^th anniversary conference, ‘Who is my Jung?’ The first part of the paper covers his early life and his attempt to bring together two opposing parts within him: valuation of a scientific approach, and an interest in the inner world, dreams and the paranormal. Discussion of his professional life follows, including his relationship with Gerhard Adler, past problems and splits within the Jungian community and the author's attempts to heal these. The value of both remembering and forgetting is questioned. This leads onto ideas that bring value and meaning to his work and life, and which bridge the inner divisions he felt in his early life: notably Jung's focus on applying scientific theory to the mystery of the psyche, his relational attitude (exemplified by the dialectical process and his interest in countertransference) and his theory of synchronicity. Recent discussion in Jungian writing has questioned the nature of synchronistic experiences and explored how they may emerge naturally from complex systems. The paper ends the author's continuing journey with two personal vignettes describing how meaning may emerge from the unconscious.     

Recognizing Charles Rycroft

This article aims to outline, in brief, the life and work of Charles Rycroft. He had been one of the brilliant and fecund psychoanalysts of the second half of the Twentieth century, although his legacy has unfortunately often been neglected. The author suggests that this might have been because of his withdrawal from the British Psychoanalytic Society, which made him, in many ways, “invisible” to his own colleagues and that continues even today—more than ten years after his death—to preclude a real recognition of his personal and original clinical thinking and working style.     

The analyst's theory: A third source of countertransference

The author asserts that the analyst's theory, personal and/or academic, is an important source of countertransference which complicates our traditional understanding of the analyst's emotional responses as being constructed from a mix of his transferences and the patient's effects on him. From this perspective, theory - because it has no intrinsic relevance to the essential phenomena of individual analytic processes - may be a confounding, as well as a necessary, factor in clinical work. Although the analyst's theory might be conceptualized as a component of his personality that shapes his emotional reactions to a patient, the author believes that there is a valuable increment of conceptual clarity and additional clinical utility to thinking about a more direct role of theory in the process of countertransference formation. He uses aspects of the clinical analysis of narcissistic resistances to illustrate how some theories might predispose an analyst to confounding unconscious enactments by generating either positive or negative countertransferences which can be used defensively by the patient and/or analyst. He also illustrates how, in some contexts, an analyst's theory might attenuate potentially informative countertransference reactions and interfere in this way with the analyst's apprehension of the patient's psychic functioning. Finally the author addresses the importance of 'fit' between an analyst's working theory and a patient's psychopathology, and considers implications of his ideas for psychoanalytic training and practice.     

Fear of breakdown and the unlived life

Winnicott's Fear of breakdown is an unfinished work that requires that the reader be not only a reader, but also a writer of this work which often gestures toward meaning as opposed to presenting fully developed ideas. The author's understanding of the often confusing, sometimes opaque, argument of Winnicott's paper is as follows. In infancy there occurs a breakdown in the mother–infant tie that forces the infant to take on, by himself, emotional events that he is unable to manage. He short‐circuits his experience of primitive agony by generating defense organizations that are psychotic in nature, i.e. they substitute self‐created inner reality for external reality, thus foreclosing his actually experiencing critical life events. By not experiencing the breakdown of the mother–infant tie when it occurred in infancy, the individual creates a psychological state in which he lives in fear of a breakdown that has already happened, but which he did not experience. The author extends Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that the driving force of the patient's need to find the source of his fear is his feeling that parts of himself are missing and that he must find them if he is to become whole. What remains of his life feels to him like a life that is mostly an unlived life.     

The analytic initiation: the effect of the archetype of initiation on the personal unconscious

The author proposes the term 'analytic initiation1' to describe a rite of passage from childhood to adult life effected by psychotherapy. He suggests this passage is based upon a personal regression within the embrace of an archetypal symbolic process. Archetypal symbols orientate the analysand towards the transformative potential of a regressive experience. They also contain him as he separates from parental complexes and tolerates their dissolution. The analysand's growth depends on his submitting to an intrapsychic and interpersonal experience of the initiatory process with its attending regression. Correspondingly, it relies on the analyst being available for both the personal and impersonal transference/countertransference interaction. Over time, the analysand's participation in this process brings his ego in greater relationship to the Self.
The most important outcome of a successfully constellated analytic initiation is not the dissolution of a group of complexes. Rather, it is the establishment of a symbolic process that allows the individual to continue to evolve. The author supports his findings with a critical review of Jung's writings on initiation and additional case material.     

An early, on the borderline between dream and transference, unconscious fantasy of Freud on the psychoanalytic situation (1898). A contribution to psychoanalytic creativity

Taking 24 hours in the life of Freud, the author shows how significant the interplay of dream, day-dream, unconscious phantasy and transference can be in solving scientific problems. This is documented by using the correspondence between Freud and Fliess on March 9/10, 1898, by taking Freud's dream of a botanical monograph, his day-dream of a glaucoma operation, his remarks on the "real" course of the day, and segments of self-analysis.     

Four men in treatment: an evolving perspective on homosexuality and bisexuality, 1965 to 2000.

The author surveys his work with gay and bisexual men and his evolving clinical understanding, spanning a thirty-five-year period from 1965 to 2000. Four cases are discussed briefly, one from each decade, to illustrate the changing clinical approach, and the following conclusions drawn: (1) sexual orientation and mental health should be approached as independent dimensions; (2) heterosexual orientation is not a required outcome for successful analysis; (3) an analytic process focused on uncovering a presumed "pathological etiology" inevitably distorts the process and obscures more relevant analytic needs; (4) unrecognized heterosexist assumptions and unfamiliarity with norms of gay men's lives pose special barriers to analytic work with gay men. Ongoing self-analysis and self-education are necessary to reduce interferences that keep analysts from listening to their gay patients with open and unbiased attention.     

Die institutionelle und die innere Familie des Analytikers

The author postulates the existence of an intense interaction between the analyst’s two families, the historical one of his infancy and the institutional one of his psychoanalytic education. In his opinion they both step into the analyst’s work with his patient on the level of his inner fantasy and to different degrees according to the various moments in the work. He points out that the common element between the infantile experience and the analytic one is the enormous opportunity for profound introjection. There are important moments that favor introjection in the young analyst’s training course which establish and constitute the cultural, theoretical and clinical foundations of his working ego and of his working self. The importance of a thoroughly analyzed separation process from the personal analyst and from the supervisors during the analysis is strongly emphasized.     

My Art by the Numbers

The author explains his affinity for numbers as it relates to his work as an artist spanning his long career. This affinity helped him invent one of the first systems for making four-color digital prints. Having been only recently introduced to the book Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz, the author finds that he is in full agreement with her depth psychology theories on number. Recounting a synchronicity that he experienced while writing this paper helped the author to understand Jung’s concept of the unus mundus, as explained by von Franz in Number and Time. He speculates that number archetypes must have evolved in human consciousness over very long periods of time and writes about the number zero as a “recent” example. The author also describes his experience of a spontaneous mathematical vision that led him to create an algorithm, which in turn led him to realize that crystals having fivefold symmetry could exist in nature, which was considered impossible at the time. The author discusses his new inventions of quasi-periodic and random tile patterns, which were inspired by 15th-century Islamic tile patterns, as they related to the aperiodic patterns invented by Roger Penrose in the 20th century. He speculates about the ability of artificially intelligent computer software to be able to generate random quasi-periodic patterns. Lastly, the author recounts a synchronistic experience that occurred during the month of his 72nd birthday, in which his work with numbers is seemingly reciprocated by nature.     

Timelessness as a positive and negative experience

We create a sense of time, our understanding of time and subjective time in our minds by experiencing memories, images and chains of events in life as consecutive sequences. We also create timelessness within ourselves. If a person powerfully experiences the present moment, linking this feeling of integration to the self the feeling of timelessness and illusion of eternity is reinforced, making both the past and the future seem less significant than the present moment. A negative experience of timelessness is linked both to the fear that life will end as well as to the fear of disintegration, shattering, the loss of the self and corporeality. By contrast, a positive experience of timelessness enriches and integrates the personality, linking experiences together in a highly personal and authentic way with a great feeling of freedom which is not tied to a specific point in time. The author argues that a creative experience is always based on an inner, timeless dialogue, even when it is manifested in the transference of psychoanalysis. Through his attitude, an analyst can influence both the analysand's creativity and his experience of timelessness by reinforcing the role of the analysand's true self in his experiences of the self as a whole. Further, a mystical experience could be an act of sublimation taking place during psychoanalytic transference, while communing with nature, or while being creative. Deeply experiencing something truly representing a personal truth as a timeless experience, in a mystical experience or a dream, is probably linked to the ability to fully experience a moment in and of itself, without external stimuli, and with the ability to objectify the self. During such moments, a person can look into himself truly and openly, without any other immediate aspirations.