The Sleeping Beauty and the Therapist’s Gaze: Commentary on Hours and Mayers’s Article on Finding a Path toward Re-Enchantment

In their article, Hours and Mayers make the case that in the imaginary world of fairy tales children have an opportunity to engage and symbolize and also to reflect on the experiences and motives of imaginary characters. This was the case with 8-year-old Barbara who responded to the fairy tales that were narrated to the group by joining in and beginning to share her ideas and reactions. In this commentary, it is argued that it was not just the experience of enchantment that enabled Barbara to begin to listen more attentively to the stories and to engage with her peers. It was also her experience of the narrator's gaze, the therapist who wanted to tell a story to her to make her feel enchanted by all the images and emotions stories can evoke to anyone who listens to them.     

The Protective Skin of the Analyst’s Case Formulation: Commentary on Paper by Tom Wooldridge

The contours of every psychoanalytic process are shaped by its case formulation. This discussion of Tom Wooldridge’s paper (this issue) of the long-term, psychodynamic treatment of a patient with severe anorexia provides opportunity to demonstrate that formulation derives from aspects of the clinician’s clinical education and personal growth. Wooldridge’s metaphor of the containing functions of the entropic body is extended to include particular paternal functions that an analyst provides his patient and that are suggested in the dialogue of this clinical material. Psychoanalytic case formulation distinguishes it from other aspects of an integrated treatment plan for eating disorder patients; in particular, clinician and patient discover important metaphors and elaborations of personal history that assist in recovery. Thinking through a case from different lenses provides real gratification for the psychoanalyst and a bulwark to assist in potentially life-saving work because of its protective and enriching functions. Drawing upon the metaphors Wooldridge expands upon such as secondary skin formations and the entropic body, I suggest that clinicians who work in the field of eating disorders could draw great benefit from learning more about what psychoanalytic case formulation offers patients. Detailed, evocative case examples such as the one Tom Wooldridge puts forward may be one way to reach this important audience because they bring to life many of the unique features of contemporary psychoanalysis.     

The Proof is in the Pudding: Commentary on Papers Updating Anna Freud’s Diagnostic Profile

ABSTRACT

This fine collection of articles documents efforts to bring Anna Freud’s diagnostic profile (1965) up to date by integrating more recent theory and research in attachment theory, inter-subjective theory, and theories deriving from the work of Bion on the process of “containing” (Bion, 1988). While some of the articles present the theoretical context for this integrative effort, Melandri’s (this issue) thoughtful and comprehensive clinical case shows us how an updated diagnostic profile can be put to work in the consulting room.     

Inside the Revolution: Power,Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis”

This essay situates Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” in its local and global histories, even while reading it for what it can tell us about psychoanalysis now. Even as it is taken on its own terms, this essay serves also as a means to consider psychoanalysis as host to crucial tensions, its ideas and their relation to technique, its traffic in power, and sexuality and the primal crime. Using a clinical vignette, the essay argues the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to psychoanalysis are a gift to later generations, even if they made trouble for Freud. In celebration and critique, it examines, in effect, where Freud was and where psychoanalysis is now.     

The End of the Supersensory World’s Mythology: Marx’s Ontological Revolution and Its Contemporary Significance

The whole of Western metaphysics, particularly Platonism, sets up a partition between the sensory world and the supersensory world, laying the foundation for the mythology of the supersensory world. After Descartes set contemporary metaphysics on its course, Feuerbach became the first to attack the essence of the supersensory world on an ontological level and to transfer the criticism of theology to that of metaphysics in general. While in the final analysis Feuerbach’s criticism fails, Marx’s revolution appeals to the ontological notion of “sensory activity” or “objective activity” (i.e., practice), the core of which rests in piercing and overturning the fundamental framework of contemporary metaphysics—“the immanence of consciousness.” It is this ontological revolution which reveals the camouflage of the supersensory world’s mythology (i.e., ideology) and which simultaneously establishes a solid foundation for the critical analysis of the latter. Marx’s “science of history” is based on this foundation and develops from it.     

Whence the Happiness Revolution? A Book Review of Richard Easterlin’s An Economist’s Lessons on Happiness

Journal of Happiness Studies -     

The secular and the sacred: reflections on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age represents a remarkable achievement. Taylor insists in a reasoned way that the sacred continues to have an important and legitimate role, and challenges assumptions, whether based on Weberian or Durkheimian understandings of religion in society, that faith no longer has a place. In doing this, he distinguishes among different aspects of the secularisation thesis. In this article I assert that there is a coherence to Taylor’s body of work, including A Secular Age, and I trace certain themes, such as a concern with notions of the self, that run through his work. I also identify in Taylor’s argument links to the thought of thinkers like Blondel, Gilson, Maritain and Marcel, and to the notion of an apologetics of hope.     

The Man of the House: Commentary on Thomas Burkhalter’s “Foregrounding Masculinities in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy”

Thomas Burkhalter is complemented on so vividly bringing the reader into his personal struggles to find a true masculinity in the unforgiving context of contemporary South Africa where White masculinity is associated with apartheid. The struggle to be free of old identifications with the patriarchal order and gender binaries saturate the paper, and attention is drawn to the lingering presence of older conceptions of masculinity as a monolithic concept that leaves women as victims and nurturers and the male as dominant. Burkhalter’s clinical vignette is examined and found to illustrate well his struggle and to capture the vulnerability to genderized enactments and the enduring presence of the old order manifested by a reliance on defense analysis that constrains his construal of Mr. Jones’s statement that he is “after all the man in the house.” Potential alternative meanings of this phrase that foreground grief, hope, and a plea for companioning in pain are offered and a deeper engagement with Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s conscious and unconscious worlds is encouraged.     

Mind Leaks: A Commentary on Wooffitt’s Poetic Confluence: A Sociological Analysis of an Enigmatic Moment

This commentary on Wooffitt’s lucid article discusses three major implications of the phenomenon of poetic confluences or ESP puns to our understanding of minds and selves. The first reinforces the view of mind as associative and metaphorical, rather than merely computational. The second reviews various strands of evidence, including experimental research on psi phenomena, to reveal that selves and individuals are not sharply distinct or separate from others. The final, epistemological, implication is that poetic confluences add to the irresolvable causal uncertainty about mental events.     

Hintikka’s Logical Revolution

Hintikka thinks that second-order logic is not pure logic, and because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, he suggests that we should liberate ourselves from the mistaken idea that first-order logic is the foundational logic of mathematics. With this background he introduces his independence friendly logic (IFL). In this paper, I argue that approaches taking Hintikka’s IFL as a foundational logic of mathematics face serious challenges. First, the quantifiers in Hintikka’s IFL are not distinguishable from Linström’s general quantifiers, which means that the quantifiers in IFL involve higher order entities. Second, if we take Wright’s interpretation of quantifiers or if we take Hale’s criterion for the identity of concepts, Quine’s thesis that second-order logic is set theory will be rejected. Third, Hintikka’s definition of truth itself cannot be expressed in the extension of language of IFL. Since second-order logic can do what IFL does, the significance of IFL for the foundations of mathematics is weakened.     

The Ego and the Yid,Revisited: Commentary on Daniel Gaztambide’s “A Preferential Option for the Repressed: Psychoanalysis Through the Eyes of Liberation Theology”

In this commentary on Daniel Gaztambide’s “A Preferential Option for the Repressed: Psychoanalysis Through the Eyes of Liberation Theology” we discuss the Ego and the Y(id) to emphasize the otherness of the unconscious. In the idiom of racial anti-Semitism, the Y(id) was the personification of the feminine, the infantile, the irrational, the perverse, the primitive, and of “Blackness.” Gaztambide rightly refers to psychoanalysis’s marginal and progressive origins and to the role of Freud’s own racial identity as a Jew in producing that marginality. However, we caution against Gaztambide’s metaphorical equation of psychoanalysis and prophecy, and contend that psychoanalysis is at its best when it occupies a position of thirdness, critiquing both from within and without.     

Inside Southwark Cathedral: a study in the congregation’s motivational style

This study draws on religious orientation theory, as proposed by Allport and Ross and extended by Batson and Ventis to profile the motivational style of 266 participants attending the Sunday services at Southwark Cathedral who completed the New Indices of Religious Orientation. Compared with data gathered from three other cathedrals published by Francis and Williams, participants at Southwark Cathedral recorded higher levels of quest-style motivation. The implications of these findings are discussed for the development of cathedral ministry.     

Betrayed? That’s Me: Implicit and Explicit Betrayed Self-Concept in Young Adults Abused as Children

Attenuated awareness of betrayal, or “betrayal blindness,” is a proposed survival mechanism in relationships where awareness of betrayal will mobilize confront-or-withdraw responses that jeopardize a needed relationship. Empirical tests of betrayal blindness and its effects are hampered by the methodological conundrum of how to measure an absence of awareness. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the validity of a novel empirical method to measure implicit betrayed self-concept, the first step in a long-term research aim to operationalize “betrayal blindness.” Informed by betrayal trauma theory, we hypothesized that a history of betrayal within close childhood relationships (but not recent close relationships or “not-close” relationships) would predict implicit betrayed-self associations in young adulthood. An adaptation of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and measured implicit and explicit betrayed-self associations and self-reported history of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse in 529 university undergraduates was designed. Internal consistency reliability of the betrayed self IAT was low but adequate. Hierarchical regression modeling revealed that history of abuse within close childhood relationships (but not recent close relationships or “not-close” relationships) predicted betrayed-self IAT scores. The effect size was small, β = .12, p < .05, 95% CI [.01, .07], R² = .12. In addition, history of betrayal by someone close (but not someone “not close”) at any age predicted increased explicit evaluations of the self as betrayed versus respected, a small effect size, R² = .16. Findings indicate that implicit betrayed self-concept can be measured empirically.     

The Principle of Necessity,and the Necessity of Principle: Commentary on Steven Stern’s Paper “Holistic Thinking and Therapeutic Action: Building on Louis Sander’s Contribution”

Steven Stern’s principle of necessity underscores the importance of being open to the emergence of something new, something therapeutically vital and alive to both patient and therapist, requiring a unique alertness to the unbidden, the previously not-thought-about, the on-the-edges-of-our-experience type impressions in the course of living through the otherwise familiar and the usual. This commentary addresses Stern’s principle of necessity and, equally so, the continuing necessity of principle in analytic work—a kind of ongoing sensibility that argues for placing aside theoretical knowledge and intervention categories in favor of striving to be open to the emergence of the unusual and the unexpected, to what ultimately proves therapeutic. We strive to work at and tolerate suspending our preconceptions, our theories, and our assumptions about how things should unfold in the clinical setting—what is referred to as analytic courage.     

The Impact of Insecure Attachment on Mothering: A New Mother’s Story

This article describes the treatment of a first-time mother and her daughter. The mother’s impoverished primary relationships and the fragility of her early attachments contribute to her challenges with motherhood. Through parent-infant treatment she is gradually developing the capacity to reflect upon her experience and beginning to make discoveries about her attitudes toward herself and others. My work with Leslie has deepened my appreciation for Daniel Stern’s notion of “the motherhood constellation” and for the power of insecure attachment to destabilize the parent and consequently the parent-child relationship. During the treatment, I used the Newborn Behavioral Observations system as an adjunct to therapy to help demonstrate to this distressed new mother her infant’s competencies. Later, I also used the Adult Attachment Interview to enhance her curiosity about her own childhood, and in particular her relationship to her mother and the impact of that relationship on her own mothering.