Freud

The author explores the evidence-base and selection criteria for a short-term supportive dynamic approach for patients whose psychological mindedness and quality of object relationships is low. Illustrating this approach with a case example he outlines the central features of Supportive Dynamic Therapy. He describes a psychodynamic conceptual and developmental framework that can be used to guide the therapist's interventions and responses, and modulate the patient's anxiety. A dynamic focus presented in the form of a central issue is shown to have a significant function both in containing the patient's anxiety, and in giving shape to the therapist's efforts to support the patient's ego-strengths and adaptive abilities. The therapeutic work can be seen to result in an alteration in the trajectory or reiterating pattern of the patient's life.     

Inventing Freud

Written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth, this paper construes Nina Coltart's statement that "if Freud did not exist it would be necessary to invent him," with its implicit comparison of Freud to God, to refer to (a) the things that Freud taught that are incontrovertibly true; (b) the unavoidable subjectivity in all judgments of Freud; and (c) the resemblances between psychoanalysis and religion. This last comparison is likewise seen to have both positive and negative aspects. Freud's ideas have inspired many people, yet he unscientifically arrogated sovereign authority over psychoanalysis. Freud's admirers are reminded of his extreme difficulty in admitting he was wrong and changing his mind when he should have known better, while his detractors are encouraged to consider the evidence supporting many of Freud's core tenets and to recognize that his discovery of psychoanalysis is indeed one of the supreme achievements in human history.     

Sigmund Freud

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Teaching Freud

Books reviewed: Jonte‐Pace, Diane, Teaching Freud
Reviewed by William McDonough
College of St. Catherine     

Freud heute

Zusammenfassung Aus Anlass des 150. Geburtstags von Sigmund Freud untersuchte der Autor in einem Festvortrag in der Universit?t München den Standort der Psychoanalyse in der gegenw?rtigen Kultur und Gesellschaft. Auf der Basis von Das Unbehagen in der Kultur und der Beobachtungen Bions in Gruppen sieht er den Einzelnen in einem Spannungsfeld zwischen individuellem und kulturellem über-Ich. Unbehagen entspringt daraus, dass die Entwicklung des Einzelnen mit den Fortschritten der Kultur nicht Schritt h?lt. Hinzu kommen die Verhei?ungen von Glück und Allmacht, die die Kultur an die Stelle Gottes gerückt hat, und die im Alltag entt?uscht werden. Die Psychoanalyse ist an der Entwicklung des Unbehagens nicht unbeteiligt. Sie strebt nach gesellschaftlicher Anerkennung und steht dadurch in Gefahr, das Unbewusste als ihr Zentrum aufs Spiel zu setzen. Ob sie überleben wird, h?ngt davon ab, ob es ihr gelingt, aus einer Randposition heraus hilfreich für den Einzelnen und die Gesellschaft zu sein.

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Freud today

Abstract On occasion of the 150th birthday of Sigmund Freud the author elaborated the position of psychoanalysis in the present culture and society in a lecture in the University of Munich. On the Basis of Freud’s “Civilisation and its Discontents” and of Bion’s “Experiences in Groups” he regards the individual within a discrepancy and tension between the personal and the cultural superego. Discomfort arises when the development of the individual subject is no longer in line with the progresses which occur in culture. In addition, the omnipotent promises of happiness and grandiosity, by which culture has replaced God and which are disappointed in the every day life, contribute to contemporary discontents. Psychoanalysis has participated in the development of discomfort and supported it. It has aspired for cultural acceptance and attractiveness and gets by this into danger to loose the unconscious as its center. Whether it will survive depends on whether it is successful in returning to a cultural boundary position where it can be of help for both—the subject and the civilisation.

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Münchener Freud-Symposion, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t München, 5. Mai 2006. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Wolf Kohl und Michael Ermann, München. Dieser Beitrag erscheint in ver?nderter Fassung auch in Ermann M (Hrsg) Was Freud nicht wusste. Neues in der Psychoanalyse. Brandes und Apsel, Frankfurt aM (In Vorb.).     

Freud in America

Taking the lectures that Freud delivered at Clark University in 1909 as a starting point, this paper explores the features of the American cultural psyche that share deep affinities with some of the assumptions that underlie Freudian psychoanalysis. Using a variety of literary texts, the author locates two central points at which a strain of the American imagination intersects with psychoanalysis. The first is the belief that there is sense in everything, a belief that can be traced back to Puritan theology and that is secularized but not lost in the 19th century and beyond. According to this belief, the world is a text calling to be interpreted. The interpretation of this text may not be historically guided, as it is in psychoanalysis; it is, however, an interpretation that can only come through experience. An epistemology grounded in experience also develops out of Puritan theology, with its insistence on the individual's unmediated relation to the Creator. The author then considers the ways in which certain 19th-century literary texts employ a performative rhetoric that insists on the centrality of experience as the means to knowledge by forcing the reader into transformative acts of interpretation. This activity mimics what psychoanalysis calls transference, which itself insists that experience is the ground of knowlege. The emphasis on experience that emerges in the literary texts and in the transference leads to a pronounced split between the private and public aspects of the individual. In conclusion, the author examines the different ways in which psychoanalysis and American culture have negotiated that split.     

Freud and hedonism

The Journal of Value Inquiry -