Psychoanalysis Traumatized: The Legacy of the Holocaust

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. It was founded and flourished in central European centers that would be destroyed by the Nazis. A core group of refugees who lived through persecution and exile were instrumental in rebuilding their movement on alien shores. They had no opportunity to mourn the loss of their culture or their leader, Freud, whose death was overshadowed by the cataclysmic upheaval around them. Though its trauma has been dissociated, it is represented in psychoanalytic ideas and enacted in institutions within the context of delayed or incomplete mourning. For example, authoritarianism in psychoanalytic institutions will be explored as a reliving of the trauma of both fascism and exile, and not merely typical group psychology. Further evidence of the impact of dissociated trauma includes the astonishing scotoma for actual events in treatment of Holocaust survivors; the extreme privileging of infantile fantasy over reality, and attention to childhood neurosis at the expense of adult catastrophic events.     

Stray thoughts – seeking home: Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt read in light of Wilfred Bion's ideas

Peer Gynt, the main character in Ibsen's dramatic poem from 1867, has fascinated scholars since its publication. After a lifetime of escapades, Peer finds himself lonely, detached and with feelings of deadness. Gradually, the underlying structure of his personality confronts him. With the help of Wilfred Bion's ideas, it is possible to trace a distinct pattern, where unprocessed thoughts seem to play a decisive role in hindering Peer's self‐realization. The main female character, Solveig, spends her life waiting for Peer. Eventually she develops into a container, ready to welcome Peer's stray thoughts. This paper demonstrates how she evolves Bionian capacities like reverie, and eschewing of memory and desire. The interpretation that follows thus challenges a tradition where Solveig is seen as a romantic figure who, like Goethe's Gretchen, is designed to save the male protagonist by unconditional love. This paper argues that Solveig plays a more active role towards Peer in offering significant tools for personal development. The paper concludes that Ibsen and Bion have uncovered elements of basic human conditions that in some significant ways seem to coincide.     

The Cornered Object of Psychoanalysis: Las Meninas, Jacques Lacan and Henry James

Long recognised as a painting ‘about’ painting, Velázquez’s Las Meninas comes to Lacan’s aid as he explicates the object a in Seminar XIII, The Object of Psychoanalysis (1965–1966). The famous seventeenth century painting provides Lacan with a visual mapping of the ‘ghost story’ he discovers in the Cartesian cogito, insofar as it depicts the unravelling of the Cartesian representational project at the moment of its founding gesture. This article traces Lacan’s argument as he turns to art, linear perspective and topology to model how the object a persistently eludes the grasp of scientific knowledge. Following a discussion of distance-point perspective in Renaissance Italy and the role this innovation played in enabling distorted depictions of objects in space, I propose Henry James’s ghost story, “The Jolly Corner,” as the sequel to Lacan’s reading of Las Meninas. In James’s tale, we obtain a narrative account of what the figures in Velasquez’s painting might ‘see’ as they return our gaze towards us.     

We-ness,Embodied Simulation,and Psychoanalysis: Reply to Commentaries

Neuroscience is progressively revealing the intimate relationship between embodied simulation and the understanding of verbal communication, including its affective quality. The neuroscientific investigation of linguistic aspects of interpersonal relations and the functional mechanism of embodied simulation are discussed in relation to the understanding of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis.