Freud's prehistoric matrix-Owing 'nature' a death

This paper is informed by contemporary literature in two fields-neonatal research, on the one hand, and the burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in Moses and monotheism, on the other. The author postulates that a cluster of traumatic events during the first two years of Freud's life compelled him to repeat what could not be remembered. Embedded in charged implicit schema, these affects remained unprocessed in Freud, who alone of all psychoanalysts did not have an analysis, manifesting in an uncanny dread/allure of the 'prehistoric' as a dark and dangerous era relating to the archaic feminine/maternal matrix and fratricidal murderousness. Furthermore, she cites evidence to suggest that for Freud this unconsciously excluded subtext of the preoedipal era became associated with ancient Egyptian and Minoan-Mycenaean cultures, a passionate fascination actualized in his collection of antiquities yet incongruously absent in his theoretical work, with three exceptions-Egyptian allusions in Leonardo's unconscious attachment to his archaic mother; the 'Minoan-Mycenaean' analogy on discovering the pre-oedipal mother shortly after the death of Freud's own mother; and Egypt as cradle of humanity in his uncharacteristically rambling, troubled text of Moses and monotheism. The author sees Freud's conceptual avoidance yet compulsive reworking of the prehistoric matrix as a symptomatic attempt to expose early unformulated representations that 'return to exert a powerful effect.'     

Constructing the truth From ‘Confusion of tongues’ to ‘Constructions in analysis’1

The author hypothesizes that the papers Freud wrote in the period 1934‐9 constitute a fi nal turning point in his work resulting from an attempt to work through, by means of self‐analysis, early traumatic elements reactivated by the conditions of his life in the 1930s. The author emphasizes that the ups and downs of Freud's relationship with Sándor Ferenczi and the mourning which followed his death in 1933 played an important role in this traumatic situation. He suggests that through these last works, Freud pursued a posthumous dialogue with Ferenczi. This working through led Freud, in Moses and monotheism, to an ultimate revision of his theory of trauma, a revision which the author examines in full, in the light of the works of the Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. A new analytical paradigm emerges: that of constructions in analysis developed in the article of the same name. The activity of construction appears as an alternative to the mutual analysis proposed by Ferenczi and is closely bound up with the notion of historical truth. In psychoanalysis, it would mean constructing a historical truth whose anchoring in the material truth of the past is essential, though it should not be confused with it.     

Beyond illusion: Psychoanalysis and the question of religious truth1

In this paper the author critically examines the nature of the positive, reconciliatory attitude towards religion that has become increasingly prevalent within psychoanalytic thinking and writing over the past 20 years. She shows how this positive attitude rests on a change in the nature of the prototype of religion and its reassignment to the realm of illusion, thus making irrelevant an issue most central both to psychoanalysis and to traditional Judeo‐Christian belief ‐ the passionate search for truth. The author demonstrates how the concern with truth, and specifically with the truth of religious claims, lies at the basis of the opposition between psychoanalysis and religion but, paradoxically, also provides the common ground for dialogue between the two. She argues that, as Freud developed his ideas regarding the origin of conviction in religious claims in his Moses and monotheism (1939), the nature of this common ground was expanded and the dialogue became potentially more meaningful. The author concludes that meaningful dialogue emerges through recognition of fundamental differences rather than through harmonisation within a realm of illusion. In this light, the present study may also be seen as an attempt to recognise fundamental differences that have been evolving within psychoanalysis itself.     

Freud's baby: Beyond autoerotism and narcissism

The prevailing notion in the psychoanalytic literature is that Freud's thinking on neonatal object relations is completely captured in terms of his concepts of autoerotism and primary narcissism. Indeed, for Freud, autoerotism and primary narcissism conceptualize the earliest libido distributions, but these concepts do not exhaust Freud's model of early mental life. In this paper, the author endeavors to show that Freud's hypothetical infant arrives at autoerotism and narcissism at the expense of, and secondary to, primitive object-relatedness. More specifically, an appreciation of Freud's views on primitive object relations in light of the self-preservative instinct demonstrates his view that the infant is born into a state of mutual adaptation with the mother. The author makes detailed use of Freud's writings to show his conception of an infant who, from the inception of neonatal life, has the mental sophistication to maintain complex relations with instinctual objects, the sources of gratification or frustration, part-objects confusedly perceived because of cognitive immaturity and/or fantasy distortion. Such complexity includes the infant's capacity for primitive forms of perception, boundary formation, reality testing, and defensive, splitting-based projections and introjections.     

Repression and substitutive formation: the relationship between Freud's concepts reconsidered

This paper examines Freud's concept of repression and the relationship between repression and substitutive formation as it presents itself in Freud's writings. The author shows that Freud gives at least four different meanings to the term "repression": Freud uses it interchangeably with defense, as a consciously intended forgetting, as a specific unconscious mechanism of defense, and to describe the consequence of defense mechanisms leading to substitutive formations. The inconsistencies in this relationship are discussed and clarified, and Freud's economic and linguistic attempts at founding repression are subjected to critique; the need of a primal repression as a necessary condition for repression proper is pointed out. In developing Freud's linguistic foundation of repression further, the author presents defense as a semantic displacement. Ideas are excluded from the realm of the concepts that belong to them historically. These presentations become unconscious, that is, repressed, in that they can no longer be identified as "cases" of these conceptual internal contents. At the same time they are displaced into the extensions of concepts whose internal contents do not belong to them originally. It is by virtue of the internal contents of these concepts that the displaced elements as substitutive formations once again attain consciousness, albeit a false one. The author suggests dismissing repression as a specific defense mechanism of its own; to reversing Freud's thesis that repression, as a rule, creates a substitutive formation into its opposite; and recognizing that the mechanisms used to build substitutes, as a rule, create repression.     

Contemporary art and Hanna Segal's thinking on aesthetics

From the point of view of the history of ideas in psychoanalysis, a major shift may be described from Freud's starting point considering art as sublimation of sexual desires on a largely objectal level to later developments emphasizing the presence in art of destructiveness and narcissistic conflicts. Segal's contribution represents a watershed in this evolution. Following Klein, Hanna Segal suggests considering art in relation to depressive anxieties and reparation in such a way that artistic activity may be seen as an attempt 'to restore and re-create the loved object outside and inside the ego' which implies a successful work of mourning accompanied by symbol formation. For Segal, these reparative processes are conveyed through formal beauty which represents the victory of reparation over destruction. Nevertheless, contemporary art demands that we consider the intervention, in art, of more raw and less symbolized/sublimated processes, including acting-out in often primitive, psychotic or perverse ways. Thus this paper unfolds in two directions: on the one hand, it examines the differences and continuities between Freud's and Segal's thinking whilst, on the other, the author presents some alternative ideas which stress the search for truth and new thinking in contemporary art.     

Father and Son: Freud Revisits his Oedipus Complex in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Moses and Monotheism</Emphasis>

In this paper, I propose to understand Freud on his own terms and within his social, intellectual and psychological context. It is my hope that such an understanding will contribute in turn to our understanding of some of the sources of the creative process. Were it not for his fame, Freud's views on religion, history and art, would at best be but a footnote to these subjects. My contention is that Freud's writings on these subjects can contribute more to our understanding of Freud, the person, than they do to some of the subjects he is writing about. Toward this end I will focus on two of Freud's works, written more than 30 years apart, his early Moses of Michelangelo and his late-life work Moses and Monotheism, which reflect the considerable changes in Freud's thinking.     

Frege's puzzle about the cognitive function of truth

The aim of this paper is to give a detailed reconstruction of Frege's solution to his puzzle about the cognitive function of truth, which is this: On the one hand, the concept of truth seems to play an essential role in acquiring knowledge because the transition from the mere hypothetical assumption that p to the acknowledgement of its truth is a crucial step in acquiring the knowledge that p, while, on the other hand, this concept seems to be completely redundant because the sense of the word ‘true’ does not make any essential contribution to the senses of the sentences in which it occurs.     

Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophy of Jewish Liturgy: A Post-Liberal Assessment

This paper represents an attempt to reflect on the significance of liturgy for postliberal Jewish thought. I do this by investigating the work of the eighteenth‐century Jewish enlightenment figure Moses Mendelssohn in the context of the postliberal thought of George Lindbeck. Mendelssohn not only shows how liturgy can be central to postliberal approaches to monotheism, but he also shows how enlightenment notions of a universal rational religion remain necessary and productive for postliberal interpretations of monotheism. In this latter move, Mendelssohn forms a corrective to Lindbeck's postliberalism.     

Freud's 'problem': COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE & PSYCHOANALYSIS WORKING TOGETHER ON MEMORY

The first part of this paper discusses the development of Freud's views on memory from the time of the Project up to the formulation of the second topography. Freud's attempts to match his psychological views with an organic model were necessarily inconclusive, but in the process many innovative ideas about memory can be seen to resonate with recent developments in cognitive neuroscience. A brief discussion of perceptual identity, internal perception and Freud's affect theory introduce the central theoretical idea in the second half of the paper, namely that Identification can be seen as a form of memory. Modern memory theory is linked with the superego, following which the author proposes that internal objects might be renamed 'memory-objects' and that these can be understood in terms of the distinction made in cognitive neuroscience between implicit and explicit memory and between different parts of the brain, in particular the amygdala, the basal ganglia and the hippocampus. Klein's 'memory in feeling' and the views of Fairbairn and Ogden in relation to the dynamic nature of internal objects are briefly discussed. The paper ends with a few comments on the aberrations of memory and some implications of the implicit memory-object system.     

Art and emotion in psychoanalysis

Freud's view that art satisfi es psychic needs has been taken to mean that art has its source in the unconscious and that it unifi es pleasure and reality. The author argues that there is a third point that Freud repeatedly emphasizes, which should not be overlooked, that art infl uences our emotions. The author examines what Freud means by this claim, in particular, his reading of Michelangelo's Moses. Freud's focus here on emotions as fundamental to subjective experience, as subject to regulation and as potentially healthy forms of communication serves to supplement and even challenge what he says in his theory of affect. The author concludes by making inferences about a contemporary psychoanalytic theory of affects: that it ought to be inclusive of science (more receptive to neurobiology and less bound to Freud) as well as art (preserving the focus on subjective experience, especially the processing of complex emotions), which is illustrated with the concept of mentalized affectivity.     

Freud's Irma dream and the origins of psychoanalysis

This paper investigates Freud's Irma dream as a response, in part, to the publication of Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895). As such, Freud's dream and associations reveal a great deal regarding the origins of psychoanalysis. The preamble to the dream reflects Freud's concern with the ground rules and boundaries of the psychotherapeutic technique that he was in the process of developing. This paper cites evidence for Freud's concerns regarding the consequences of alterations in these basic tenets. The Irma dream and Freud's associations also convey a deep and apparently unconscious concern within Freud in respect to the concept of transference, which he may have realized on some level had been used to defensively deny disturbing inputs by the therapist into the treatment situation and patient. The dream may be understood also as reflecting a deep sense of concern regarding unrecognized harmful effects of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and Freud's concern that the treatment process might be more destructive than helpful. The curative aspects of psychotherapy are viewed in terms of action-discharge rather than insight. In all, this reanalysis of the Irma dream focuses on Freud's unconscious conflicts, fantasies, and anxieties at a time when he, along with Breuer, presented a burgeoning psychoanalytic treatment modality to the professional world.     

Leonardo's phantasy and the importance of Freud's slip: The role of the analyst's phantasies in applied psychoanalysis and in the analytic relation

In his paper on Leonardo, Freud made a slip. Referring to the bird which, according to one of Leonardo's memories, tossed its tail into the painter's mouth many times when he was a child, Freud replaced 'kite' with 'vulture'. It is widely accepted that this slip doesn't signifi cantly damage the whole of Freud's constructions on the paper, nevertheless, the part of his considerations relating to the meaning of 'vulture' should be discounted. In the author's view, this part of the Leonardo paper is necessary. Thanks to the slip Freud was able to reach a comprehension which otherwise would have been unattainable. Interpretation based on the vulture made possible the confi guration of a mother as 'daughter of the wind', as was the case not only with Leonardo's mother but also with Freud's. Interpretation of Leonardo's phantasy was achieved through Freud's unconscious identifi cation with Leonardo and the slip adequately interpreted becomes the evidence of this. Through identifi cation, Freud succeeded in making sense of Leonardo's memory but also in realising an indirect virile possession of his own 'winged' mother. Freud's position as interpreting subject in his paper on Leonardo also has more general value: the analyst's knowledge about the 'other' has a very important basis in the indirect expression of his unconscious wishes within the fi eld of sense. The author uses clinical material in order to show how the analyst's phantasies play an important role in analytical interpretive work.     

Perverse thought

Based on Bion's work on the 'psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality', the author hypothesises the existence of a special type of thought disorder known as 'perverse thought'. First the author presents an overview of the major contributions to the concept of perversion that have a bearing on 'perverse thought'. These include Freud's splitting and disavowal concepts, Klein's projective identification concept, Bion's - K link and Meltzer's transference perversion. Then, by means of a case study and some vignettes, the author illustrates how this thought disorder is configured within the analytic process. The author focuses on three main aspects of this pathology: the specific modality of projective identification in a perverse scheme, the lie and some important clinical events that reveal an attack against knowledge through the formation of the - K link. Perverse thought is an important resistance mechanism in the analytic process. Its clarification is essential, given that its main objective is to attack the knowledge process, and therefore truth, in order to pervert the analytic relationship.     

Hagiography and Monotheism in History: Doctrinal encounters between Zoroastrianism,Judaism and Christianity 1

Issues of hagiography and monotheism were central to the historical development of Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity (and subsequently Islam). Overlapping geo graphical locales and cultural heritages, especially during the rule of ancient Iranian dynasties and within Iranian territory, seem to have facilitated and reinforced common solutions that linked devotees across confessional lines through shared communal notions and doctrinal tenets. The hagiographical lives and preachings of Zarathushtra, or Zoroaster, and biblical figures from Moses to Jesus consciously came to parallel each other ex post facto and were regarded as representing different aspects of monotheism. The Zoroastrian dualistic worldview did not exclude monotheism, although it did postulate a separate source of evil. Variations notwith standing, for members of each faith, the spiritual entity venerated by their founder was believed to be God--a condition acknowledged by the other confessional groups as well. Uniting a community of believers around themselves in the veneration of a singular deity eventually transformed Zarathushtra, Moses and Jesus (and later Muhammad) into prophets. Religious founders, the historically created and cross-culturally shaped images of such founders and an intercommunally emergent notion that their words represented communion with the divinity forged and strengthened the shared links between hagiography and monotheism among Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and, in time, Muslims.     

Nietzsche on Honesty and the Will to Truth

ABSTRACT

Nietzsche values intellectual honesty, but is dubious about what he calls the will to truth. This is puzzling since intellectual honesty is a component of the will to truth. In this paper, I show that this puzzle tells us something important about how Nietzsche conceives of our pursuit of truth. For Nietzsche, those who pursue truth occupy unstable ground, since being honest about the ultimate reasons for that pursuit would mean that truth could no longer satisfy the important human needs it satisfies at present. We can pursue truth, or be honest about what in us is served by such a pursuit, but not both. Nietzsche aims to show that understanding and owning up to this instability is the sort of affirmation of human life to which we ought to aspire, and is the price we pay for being free from otherworldly morality.     

A reconsideration of Freud's essays on sexuality and their clinical implications

This paper considers some of the concisely presented material of the second of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905a), on "Infantile Sexuality." The author puts forward the view that infantile sexuality may be thought of not simply as an immature stage that must be passed through, but also as a pool of psychic experiences upon which mature personality organization can continually draw, in dynamic oscillation among different mental positions. The link between infantile sexuality and the structuring of the psychic apparatus, discussed in the first and third of the Three Essays ("The Sexual Aberrations" and "The Transformations of Puberty"), raises questions that are still open to further research.     

Freud's struggle with misogyny: homosexuality and guilt in the dream of Irma's injection.

The highly condensed dream element trimethylamin is central to the dream of Irma's injection. After a brief review of the medical literature on timethylamine (TMA), it is suggested that two important meanings of this chemical and its properties lie in its disguised reference to disparaging views of women, as well as to Freud's homosexual connection to Wilhelm Fliess. Freud's misogynistic and homosexual impulses were stimulated by Fliess's recent surgical error committed while operating on Freud's patient Emma Eckstein. Evidence is presented that the collaboration between Freud and Fliess in performing an aggressive act toward a woman was for Freud an enactment of a childhood situation in which he and his nephew John had ganged up on John's sister Pauline. The later relationship between Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein is seen as an additional reenactment of this childhood triangle. An examination of Freud's associations to and analysis of the Irma dream, as well as some of his later relationships with women, indicates that guilt and the wish to make reparation were also prominent themes in Freud's inner life.