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.     

Exit Dora: Freud's Patient Takes Leave

Why did “Dora” leave Sigmund Freud—why did she end her psychoanalytic treatment with him prematurely? This question haunts Freud's Dora study, his first extensive and perhaps most famous narrative of a psychoanalytic treatment. I pursue this question through a close reading of Freud's text. I focus not only on the interaction between Freud and Dora but also on the literary qualities of “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905)—qualities that place this work firmly in the tradition of Viennese fin de siècle drama and prose.     

The Unconsciously Constructed Virtual Other

Neuroscience has confirmed Freud's assertion of the primacy of unconscious process in relation to conscious experience. However, unconscious process, for many neuroscientists, is viewed as something that is devoid of meaning. This paper suggests that there are different levels of unconscious process. This conceptualization of unconscious process may help to reconcile the psychoanalytic assumption of a meaningful unconscious with the conception that unconscious process is a meaningless code, a belief held by most neuroscientists. To effect this reconciliation we must return to Freud's earlier theory of unconscious process as described in his Interpretation of Dreams. A dream-like unconscious process, employing metaphor, unconsciously organizes our affective experiences while we are awake.     

Scientific activities of the associazione di studi psicoanalitici (ASP) (Milan) for the years 1995 and 1996

This paper discusses Freud's "Oedipus complex" both in its elaboration of the "u¨ber-ich" and from a broader point of view, which relates to the development of man's moral sense. It is a disturbing experience to watch the continuous twilight of the function of the father, either as the head of the family or as the belief in a God or in a Truth that establishes a well-defined morality. At the same time, the function of the father as Lawgiver is supplanted by the function of money as the only value and the measure of all things. Since Freud's days, the field of morality has been increasingly invaded by the discourse of experts and administrators who determine Good and Evil with the intention of reaching a maximization of the profits and a more complete domination of our bodies. This paper questions the actual validity of the Oedipus complex as the organizer of modern man's sense of morality through its provocative title: "do we still have anything to do with the old blind man?"     

From the EEL to the EGO: Psychoanalysis and the Remnants of Freud's Early Scientific Practice

While numerous historiographical works have been written to shed light on Freud's early theoretical education in biology, physiology, and medicine and on the influence of that education on psychoanalysis, this paper approaches Freud's basic comprehension of science and methodology by focusing on his early research practice in physiology and neuranatomy. This practice, taking place in the specific context of Ernst Brücke's physiological laboratory in Vienna, was deeply concerned with problems of visuality and the revelation of hidden organic structures by use of proper preparation techniques and optical instruments. The paper explores the connection between such visualizing practices, shaped by a physiological context as they were, and Freud's later convictions of the scientific status of psychoanalysis and the function of its method as means to unveil the concealed structure of the “psychical apparatus”.     

The Question of a Jungian Community

The author describes her relationship with the reality of Parkinson's disease—how she twists and turns and pivots and falls with this rapacious intrusion, and how a new, hitherto unknown space opens between Parkinson's and herself. This new space claims its own dynamic, objective reality. In attempts to consciously access the reality of this third space, the author faces paradox, “plays” with metaphor, and tries to recognize the right “reality.” She considers Freud's reality and pleasure principles, Winnicott's iconoclastic declaration of “health being the ability to play with psychosis,” and Jung's transcendent function. She also calls on Hermes with his wings to fly through otherwise impenetrable borders. As an incantation, an evocation or a pathway, she implores Hermes to breathe in flight. In the midst of this inner work, the dragonfly literally appears, emanating transformation.     

Anna Freud's contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of development

This paper elaborates key areas of Anna Freud's theory of development, setting these in the context of Freud's structural model and its influence on her early work. The centrality of the role of the ego and the beginnings of one of her major achievements, the elaboration of a psychoanalytic developmental psychology, are shown in evidence in 1936, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. The author develops this theme in an exploration of the 1965 work Normality and Pathology in Childhood, looking from the base of normal development, via defence and conflict, to regression and significant developmental factors.     

Dying to live: mourning,melancholia and the adolescent process

The author reviews the main points in Freud's 1917 paper 'Mourning and Melancholia' and relates them to the process of both normal and troubled adolescent development. Using clinical examples she illustrates the ways in which the processes Freud describes in melancholia operate in some disturbed adolescents such that instead of mourning the lost objects of their childhood, they become stuck, remaining ambivalently attached to them and incorporating them into their final adult identity and sexual organization.

L'auteur passe en revue les points essentiels du texte de Freud « Deuil et mélancolie » (1917e [1915]) et les relie aux processus du développement, normal et pathologique, de l'adolescence. À l'aide d'exemples cliniques, il illustre la manière dont les processus décrits par Freud dans la mélancolie sont mis en ?uvre chez certains adolescents perturbés?:?au lieu de faire le deuil des objets perdus de leur enfance, ils restent bloqués dans l'ambivalence de leur attachement À ceux-ci et s'efforcent de les incorporer dans leur identité adulte et leur organisation sexuelle finale.

L'autrice passa in rassegna i punti principali dell'articolo del 1917 di Freud 'Lutto e melanconia' e li mette in relazione al processo dello sviluppo adolescenziale sia normale che disturbato. Utilizzando esempi clinici l'autrice illustra i modi in cui i processi che Freud descrive nella melanconia operano in alcuni adolescenti disturbati cosi' che invece del lutto per la perdita degli oggetti dell'infanzia, gli adolescenti rimangono incastrati e ambivalentemente attaccatti ad essi, incorporandoli nella loro identita' adulta finale e nell'organizzazione sessuale.

Die Autorin rezensiert die Hauptpunkte in Freud's Abhandlung ' Trauer und Melancholie' und bezieht sie auf den Prozess sowohl der normalen als auch der gestörten adoleszenten Entwicklung. Anhand von klinischen Beispielen illustriert sie die Art und Weise, in denen die Prozesse, die Freud in der Melancholie beschreibt, in einigen gestörten Jugendlichen operieren, so dass sie anstatt die verlorenen Objekte ihrer Kindheit zu betrauern, sie festgefahren sind und ambivalent an sie gebunden bleiben und sie letztlich in ihre Erwachsenenidentität und sexuelle Organisation inkorporieren.     

From one room to the other: a story of contamination. The relationship between child and adult analysis

Does the analyst who works with both children and adults using ostensibly the same theoretical model perform similar mental operations in these two fields? The author suggests that child analysis is rooted in a different creative process from that of adults. Comparing the analysis of children to painting and that of adults to writing, and making use of the debate between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell on the relative merits of words and images, the author explores the psychoanalytic debate on the role of child analysis in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Child analysis, initially regarded as an application of psychoanalysis, ended up acting as a catalyst for a true epistemological revolution in the 20th century through the work of Klein and Bion. Playing is not only an alternative medium to words for representing the unconscious but a different method for giving shape to representations through a specific creative process. The reverie which is born in the child analyst’s consulting room reproduces itself through the body’s actions during play, whereas in the adults’ consulting room the analyst’s capacity to dream presupposes the suspension of action. Child analysis, deploying a distinctive creative process that makes use of the body and serves itself of action in its development, may be said to rest on a similar creative process to that of figurative art. For this reason, the child analyst’s mind relates to objects in a different way, being in a more prolonged state of fusion with these as a result of ‘concentration of the body’. The significance of the unspeakable things that take place can often only be conceptualized in après‐coup. Although this difference in the development of the process suggests a significant distinction between the two ‘arts’ of child and adult analysis, the aesthetic sensitivity acquired through child analysis can be profitably used with adults, as will be demonstrated with the help of several clinical examples.     

The ego in Lucy R: notes on conflict in one of Freud's first cases

This paper focuses on Freud's discussion of the case of 'Lucy R' presented in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). It is possible to see here a notion of the 'ego' being employed by Freud many years before the 1920 'turning point' in his work, and an account of the ego as a 'dominant mass of ideas' is used to explain how psychical conflicts for his patient are transformed into physical symptoms. The image of the ego defending itself against an 'incompatible' idea structures Freud's own account, and it also structures recent critical commentaries on Freud's work from within feminist writing and studies of rhetoric. Some consequences for present-day psychodynamic practice are reviewed in the course of the discussion.     

“This beastly science…”: On the reception of psychoanalysis by the composers of the Second Viennese School, 1908–1923

This paper explores the links between psychoanalysis and music in Vienna between the years 1908 and 1923, focusing in particular on two members of the highly influential Second Viennese School, the composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern. While there is little evidence of an actual interaction between Freud and his circle and contemporaneous musicians in Vienna, this paper discusses the direct personal and professional contact Webern and Berg had with Freud, and also with Freud's one-time colleague Alfred Adler; Berg's wife Helene also underwent psychoanalytic treatment. Both composers documented their experiences with and feelings about psychoanalysis, offering critical insights into the reception of psychoanalysis in musical circles in Vienna, and into the actual connections between psychoanalysis and Vienna's most important musical figures. This paper examines Berg and Webern in the context of Freud's Vienna, Adler's musical background and his treatment of Webern, and Berg's knowledge of psychoanalysis and strong ambivalence towards his wife's psychoanalytic treatment, and concludes by considering Berg's opera Wozzeck (1925) as an example of a musical work influenced by contemporary Viennese attitudes towards psychoanalysis.     

Making a Memorial Place: The Photography of Shimon Attie

Assisting the analysand in making the past a living present held within a bearable yet unpredictable future is what psychoanalysis is so much about. Events of the past can never be redone, or fully repossessed, but they must be reconstructed in the context of the transference–countertransference experience of the analytic relationship. In order to make the past a useful present and presence, we need metaphors to give it shape—metaphors that capture the memorial activity linking the past with the present and future in a meaningful manner. In this paper, I explore the ways in which the work of the American photographer Shimon Attie creates a memorial place in which the past is not simply remembered but instead is actively mourned. In The Writing on the Wall, Attie collects broken fragments from prewar German-Jewish life in Berlin, and, by projecting these found shards of former lives onto the buildings in the Berlin Scheunenviertel, which once housed these people, he creates a potential space in which a present can suddenly come alive by the superimposition of a past that was supposed to have been obliterated. In this transitional realm, the spectator is given a wide realm of to-and-fro movements between past and present that permits the creation of an object world that did not exist before. I suggest that Attie's intricate weavings of past, present, and future serve as instructive models for the psychoanalytic process in which the analyst can find himself in a similar position of opening up a playground where the past can be brought into the present and where the presentness of the past can come alive. The ability to move back and forth between the present and the past suggests a link to the Freudian concept of deferred action, later taken up by Lacan under the notion of après-coup, where the impression (Prägung) of an earlier event, having lain dormant for a long time, breaks through into the present through a retroactive action that then completely reshapes the present impression. I draw comparisons to psychoanalytic practice, in which the superimposition (the stacking on top of one another) of recollections, dreams, and associations pries open in the analysand's mind a psychic space in which memories of a seemingly insignificant past absorb a sudden sense of urgency when revisited through this retroactive process.     

A Dilemma for Kant's Theory of Substance

This paper poses a dilemma for applying the category of substance given Kant's different conceptions of substance in the Critique of Pure Reason. Briefly stated, if the category of substance applies to an omnipresent and sempiternal substance, then although this would ensure that all experiences of empirical objects take place in a common spatiotemporal framework, one could not individuate these empirical objects and experience their alterations. If the category of substance applies to ordinary empirical objects, however, then although one could individuate these substances and experience their alterations, the category would not pick out a common spatiotemporal framework for these experiences. I will argue that this dilemma can be overcome by examining the development of Kant's conception of substance in his final work, the Opus postumum.     

On the early history of male hysteria and psychic trauma

This paper discusses the influence of Jean-Martin Charcot's views on Sigmund Freud's early theory of hysteria and the notion of psychical trauma. We consider the early history of both psychical trauma and male hysteria, for in Charcot's view traumatic hysteria and male hysteria are identical. Freud's two 1886 lectures on male hysteria, delivered after his return from Paris, are crucial to the subject because they present Freud's first impressions of Charcot and his teaching. Some of the ideas presented in the two lectures foreshadow Freud's later generalization of the etiological role of trauma and his theory of the role of psychical trauma in the genesis of hysteria; that is, each hysterical symptom is due to a psychical trauma reviving an earlier traumatic event—the so-called principle of deferred action (Nachtraglichkeit). Several arguments substantiate the thesis that Freud's notion of psychical (sexual) trauma was developed in reference to Charcot's notion of traumatic hysteria, and that the early psychoanalytic theory of psychical trauma is clearly indebted to Freud's encounter with Charcot's male traumatic hysterical patients. The discussed Freudian development points out the major role of (physical) traumata in eliciting psychopathological pictures and in this way is of definite historical relevance for the present-day discussion on the traumatic nature of the so-called multiple personality syndrome and other dissociative disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorders.     

Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking–doing children's emotional geographies

The paper introduces Anna Freud's early writing from the perspective of the theory and practice of children's emotional geographies. Discussing especially Freud's view on the theory of defence mechanisms and her early arguments with Melanie Klein about the nature of the child's mind, it explores how children's emotions can be approached beyond children's own representational accounts of their emotional experiences. The paper advocates an engagement with Anna Freud's work and psychoanalysis that would account for different forms of knowledge produced in the intersubjective processes of research and for the significance of the relationships with child participants.     

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.     

A practitioner's notes on the free-associative method as existential praxis

Freud's pre-1914 texts demonstrate why he consistently asserted that his free-associative method was the sine qua non of his discipline. Prior to 1914, Freud's theorizing was intimately and inextricably connected to his lived experience with the discovery of this method. After 1914, he became more speculative in this thinking and writing; his models of the “mental apparatus” and its functioning drew increasingly on conceptual sources other than his experience with free association. The four fundamental coordinates of his discipline (the methodical disclosure that self-consciousness is repressive, the nonlinear “time of the mind,” the significance of our sensual embodiment or libidinality, and the formation of the repression barrier by the incest taboo) are all closely tied to free-associative experience. By contrast, post-1914 theoretical preoccupations (from object relations to the structural-functional model, and other formulations generated after Freud's life) are comparatively divorced from such experience. These conceptual edifices imply a conventional depiction of the theory–practice relationship, which is radically challenged by free-associative discourse. The notion of praxis is introduced as contesting the prevailing depiction of practice as an application of theory, and as serving to rescue psychoanalysis from the somewhat “sterile debates” over its scientific status and over the relevance of metapsychological speculation to clinical treatment. Against the normative ideology of theory and practice, the lived experience of free-associative discourse, with its potential for change and healing, can only be understood in terms of this notion of praxis, and this justifies Freud's claim to have initiated “a critical new direction in science.”     

GRADIVA: FREUD,FETISHISM, AND POMPEIAN FANTASY

This paper is a critical reconsideration of Freud's analysis (1907) of Wilhelm Jensen's novella Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy (1903). Freud's interest was aroused by the parallels between Jensen's presentation of dreams and Freud's model of dream formation just published in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud also acclaims Jensen's presentation of the formation and “cure” of his protagonist's delusion about a marble bas‐relief of a woman walking. This paper argues for the centrality of the phenomenon of fetishism, briefly considered but excluded from Freud's analysis. The fantasy of Gradiva as “the necessary conditions for loving” (Freud 1910, pp. 165–166) is also a key thesis of the essay, which makes use of the newly translated Freud–Jensen correspondence contained in this article's Appendix.