Suicide in a middle-born child

A case of suicide in a 17-year-old boy is described. Extracts from an interview with his mother are used to illustrate his violent behavior, delinquency, relationships with his family and peers, efforts to seek treatment, and the clues he gave to his impending suicide. His life-style and subsequent suicidal behavior are related to his middle-born sibling position.     

War of the Ancient Dragon: The Transformation of Violence in Sandplay

A six-year-old boy, nearly expelled from school for bullying, engages an eerily alchemical narrative in sandplay therapy, and through a torturous process, redeems his hostile attitude. “Randy” fights numerous bloody wars, dubbing one “the war of the ancient dragon,” which symbolically relates to his work with fire, ash, and water. He goes through a protracted burning process, and in several sessions tortures human and animal figures in the fire. His work with war, fire, and water allows his violent tendencies to burn themselves out and leads to the resurrection of a new, more related consciousness, indicated in his declaration of himself as “king of the bloodfire.” This account of the boy's process traces the recovery and redemption of the feminine realm out of his violent, arrogant attitude. Randy demonstrates, in a numinous way, how the psyche's ancient language and healing capacity are fully alive in the imagination of a contemporary child. We see how the unconscious offers itself to be brought into consciousness by way of the imaginal realm, and how transformation occurs via the symbolic dynamism at Randy's fingertips.     

The role of a parent's illness in the emotional experience of a child evidence from Klein's Narrative of a child analysis

Abstract

The analysis of Richard, described by Melanie Klein in Narrative of a Child Analysis, gives us some insight into the effect on a child of threats to the health of his parents. His mother was involved in a road accident when Richard was 2; his father collapsed during the time of the analysis when he was 10. This paper links these events with disturbances in Richard's relation to his father and to his mother, as well as with threats to his own integrity, as demonstrated in the analysis. Richard's reversal of roles with his father and mother is discussed, as are Klein's reaction to Richard's report of finding his father ‘ill and nearly fainting’ and Richard's response to her behaviour. The paper draws attention to the way in which a child's reaction to the ill health of one parent can affect relations with both parents, as well as disturbing his sense of himself.     

Self-Coherence and Mutuality in the Analytic Dyad: Commentary on Michael Shoshani (Rosenbaum's) Dare to be Human

Michael Shoshani (Rosenbaum's) book Dare to be Human lays bare Michael's emotional relationship with his patient Daniel. Initially, Michael's early childhood relational behavioral patterns are evoked by Daniel's extreme emotional detachment and rejection of Michael as a person. Both analytic partners experienced extreme boundary violations as children in the form of violent beatings, Michael by his father and Daniel by his mother. Michael's mother was overbearing like Daniel's. Both, highly sensitized to intrusions and perceived slights by the other, remain locked in a doer/done to dynamic until Michael successfully breaks through the enactment by learning to stay with Daniel's distress, contain and regulate his own hurt feelings, and provide more space in the relationship by shifting to four times a week and moving Daniel to the couch. Through this process both analytic partners feel safer with each other, deepen their understanding of their own internal object world, and feel intimately engaged with each other. Daniel's life outside the analysis parallels his success in the analytic relationship.     

The Mother Relationship and Artistic Inhibition in the Lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Erik H. Erikson

In four earlier articles, I focused on the theme of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, and suggested that the melancholic self may experience humor (Capps, 2007a), play (Capps, 2008a), dreams (Capps, 2007c), and art (Capps, 2008b) as restorative resources. I argued that Erik H. Erikson found these resources to be valuable remedies for his own melancholic condition, which had its origins in the fact that he was illegitimate and was raised solely by his mother until he was three years old, when she remarried. In this article, I focus on two themes in Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1964): Leonardo’s relationship with his mother in early childhood and his inhibitions as an artist. I relate these two themes to Erikson’s own early childhood and his failure to achieve his goal as an aspiring artist in his early twenties. The article concludes with a discussion of Erikson’s frustrated aspirations to become an artist and his emphasis, in his psychoanalytic work, on children’s play. Donald Capps is Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary. His books include Men, Religion, and Melancholia (1997), Freud and Freudians on Religion (2001), and Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor     

Wittgenstein and Friendship

In his article “It's a Wonderful Life,” Ronald Hall connects Wittgenstein's last words with Frank Capra's 1946 film. His analysis focuses on the concept of wonder, but he misses one of the most important aspects of both the film and Wittgenstein's last words: the significance of friendship. This is philosophically (and biographically) important because it raises questions about aspect‐seeing, friendship and everyday life. Wittgenstein's final words provide a striking example of the philosophical complexity of his life and work.     

Gaze,dominance and humiliation in the Schreber case1

In this paper the author reviews Freud's study of Schreber's Memoirs and the Memoirs themselves from a perspective of nearly 100 years. He argues that Schreber's illness began as a melancholic depression but quickly developed paranoid features which subsequently escalated into a gross paranoia which nevertheless retained its depressive and hypochondriacal base. Finally the chaotic fragmentation became organized under the dominance of an omnipotent narcissistic organisation which led to a clinical improvement without any relinquishment of his delusional beliefs. As a subsidiary theme he examines the role of gaze in Schreber's object relations and argues that gaze was used to project into his objects, then to scrutinise the object to see if the projections had been received and tolerated, and finally as an expression of dominance. His urgent demand for relief provoked an omnipotence in his objects which he was then able triumphantly to frustrate and which ushered in a struggle over dominance in the course ofwhich Schreber was abused and humiliated. He was unable to find an object who could contain his distress and these factors contributed to the failure to tolerate guilt and to work through his depression.     

The Exalted Self: Derek Freeman' Quest for the Perfect Identity

From about 1960, anthropologist Derek Freeman was shadowed by a reputation that he was a "difficult man" who suffered from a mysterious psychological disorder. Until his last breath, he denied imputations of a disorder, styled them "defamatory," and unequivocally affirmed his complete mental health and self-control. In this article, I use correspondence, archival documents, and published information to propose that Freeman's deficit was the narcissist personality disorder. His most conspicuous personality traits are shown to be consistent with or expressive of this disorder. His signature achievement, the ostensible "refutation" of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, is consistent with the proposed diagnosis.     

Let my people go! Sayyid Qutb and the vocation of Moses

Moses is a great figure of moral and social liberation. His role in the Muslim tradition has been as multifaceted as in Judaism and Christianity. This essay attempts to explore his importance in the ideology of radical Islam by exploring Sayyid Qutb's responses to a number of the Moses scenes of the Qur'an in his work Fi zilal al‐qur'an. Qutb's treatment reveals aspects of the ideological structure that informs his writing, his love of Egypt and his spirituality. It shows, also, how he had a vision of Islam that went far beyond the boundaries of a nation state and regarded Nasser as a betrayer of this vision. He saw the Egyptians suffering under him as they had suffered under Pharoah.     

The body and sublimation in a violent male offender

A case study of a violent young man called Stan is presented to understand the nature and function of his violence as he negotiated his way through anxieties about heterosexuality and passivity stimulated by his adolescence. Stan’s early history and the clinical material are used to illustrate Armando Ferrari’s concept of the Concrete Original Object. As his psychotherapy progressed he utilised his talent for drawing to sublimate his violent activity into violent images, which, in turn, enabled him to reflect on his anxieties. Stan’s violence subsided and he was able to engage in a vocation and develop a long-term relationship with a woman.     

Fear of breakdown and the unlived life

Winnicott's Fear of breakdown is an unfinished work that requires that the reader be not only a reader, but also a writer of this work which often gestures toward meaning as opposed to presenting fully developed ideas. The author's understanding of the often confusing, sometimes opaque, argument of Winnicott's paper is as follows. In infancy there occurs a breakdown in the mother–infant tie that forces the infant to take on, by himself, emotional events that he is unable to manage. He short‐circuits his experience of primitive agony by generating defense organizations that are psychotic in nature, i.e. they substitute self‐created inner reality for external reality, thus foreclosing his actually experiencing critical life events. By not experiencing the breakdown of the mother–infant tie when it occurred in infancy, the individual creates a psychological state in which he lives in fear of a breakdown that has already happened, but which he did not experience. The author extends Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that the driving force of the patient's need to find the source of his fear is his feeling that parts of himself are missing and that he must find them if he is to become whole. What remains of his life feels to him like a life that is mostly an unlived life.     

On Editing Luther's Writings on Scripture

Much of Martin Luther's prodigious output consisted of exposition and editing Scripture. While a series in English cannot do justice to his greatest achievement, his Bible in German, much can be learned from his prefaces and commentaries, which are selected in volume 6 of The Annotated Luther. Luther's attitude to interpreting Scripture evolved in a constant dialogue with his theology of justification. While he held to the absolute authority of Scripture, his approach was pre‐critical but not uncritical. His exposition constantly balanced the consolation of grace and warnings against complacent trusting in our own works. His relentless emphasis on seeing Christ everywhere in the Bible, praised in past generations, poses problems today insofar as it determined his stance against Judaism.     

Interviews on Freud and Jung on Freud and Jung with Henry A. Murray in 1965

Henry Murray became one of the legendary figures in the history of American psychology. Not only was he a leading pioneer in the field of personality theory, but he created (with Christiana Morgan) the Thematic Apperception test. He also took a leading role in making psychological profiles for the American government's Office of Strategic Services during World War II. For years Murray headed the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and also worked on the writings of Herman Melville for almost half of his long life. Murray took a wholly independent path from Freudian and Jungian organizations, yet his memories of contact with Freud and Jung are worth recording. These interviews with Murray were conducted in 1965. To take only one example, the circumstances of Jung's getting his honorary degree from Harvard in 1936 are elucidated, as well as Freud's inquiry to Murray about why he himself had missed out on that occasion. A postcript to the interview, illustrating Murray's capacities as a writer, concerns his spirited response to the Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann's inquiry about Roazen's account of the 1936 honorary degree in his 1975 Freud and His Followers.     

Citations of Murray Sidman's work in JEAB: Evidence of a long and large contribution

We examined citations of Murray Sidman's publications in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior from the journal's inception in 1958 through May 2020. On average, he was cited 35.6 times per year. The rate of citation did not change substantially across time and the cumulative citation count was 2,212. His 10 publications cited most often deal with behavior-analytic research methods, stimulus equivalence, and unsignaled free-operant (or Sidman) avoidance. Our data provide clear evidence of the breadth and depth of Sidman's influence on the experimental analysis of behavior across 7 decades. His contributions were both exceptional and praiseworthy and his legacy will long endure.     

Conscious inhibitions: Freud,anti-Semitism,and Hobbesian imagination

This work aims to portray the effects of Freud’s anxiety about anti-Semitic violence on his political theory and metapsychology. Taking as its entry point Freud’s reorientation of anti-Semitism as aggressive action, I argue that Freud’s fear of the violent mob can be located in three interconnected dimensions of his work, all deeply informed by Hobbesian imagination. First, Freud accepted a Hobbesian vision of social antagonism into his political theory; second, he formulated a deeper, more efficient defence mechanism against mob violence with his notion of psychical guilt; third, Freud’s fears penetrated his metapsychology. Suffering from anti-Semitism, Freud was not only quick to accept a Hobbesian perspective – he also reconstructed it to a degree that radically changed its meaning. Freud’s third and most pervasive manoeuvre destabilized one of Hobbes’s fundamental theoretical tenets by suggesting that the Hobbesian State of Nature is inherently a non-human reality.     

Thinking about and working with depressed mothers in the early months of their infant's life

This paper illustrates how my work has developed over the years and informed my thinking about, and work with, depressed mothers. It also describes the work of the Parent Infant Foundation in Sydney where pregnant women and mothers with infants and toddlers are seen in groups and individually through home visits. The relevance of the support of a peer group when doing such difficult work is described. The paper draws on a central theme: the depressed mother, returning to her own infant beginnings through pregnancy and birth, confronts a dead mother-dead infant dyad. Trauma from the mother's own infancy is seen to have created an internal, autistic, deadened, psychic space. It is argued that behind this deadness lies the primeval pain of abandonment and loss. The associated rage, previously repressed but now awakened by her alive infant and his powerful primitive demands, invade the mother's psyche. The internal deadness freezes her alive processes as mother to her baby. Unbearable pain is awakened - and she may be in terror and unable to move, or she may experience herself as drowning in something catastrophic. SUMMARY This paper illustrates how my work has developed over the     

Richard Wagner: Grandiosity,Entitlement, and its Metastases

Richard Wagner was a genius. About this there is little doubt among musicians and musicologists. It is also a judgment with which Wagner, himself, would have readily concurred. There was also little doubt among those who knew him that he was a scoundrel. As a genius, he felt entitled. The two-dimensionality of his character stands in sharp contrast to the complex, three-dimensional characters that populate his operas. However, his evil characters are all Jews, and his anti-Semitism reigned supreme in his life and art. His creativity died with him, but his grandiosity, entitlement, and anti-Semitism metastasized to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and found a welcome home with Adolf Hitler. In this article, I describe Wagner’s early life, his near-death experience shortly after he was born, his recollections of his cold mother, his unclear paternity, and his self-aggrandizing autobiography in which he depicted himself as having had the childhood and parents that he felt would have befit the extraordinarily creative person he considered himself to be. Nevertheless, his impact on the musical world was revolutionary.     

Between listening and expression

This paper sets out to conceptualize what goes on in the analyst's mind as he listens—and expresses something—to the patient. Bion's ideas of approaching the patient's O, without memory and desire, are discussed. An alternate, more permissive, attitude to desire is suggested. This is based on the idea that containment, instead of denoting a dyadic interaction between mother and child, is a process which links the child to a begetting couple, thus a triad. Containing the patient corresponds, in the unconscious, to thinking about a sexual couple in a mutually beneficent interaction. Since the patient's anxiety, in his unconscious, parallels a frightening primal scene, containment is viewed as a continuous translation of a primitive primal scene into a mature act of love. A specific kind of genital desire is thus necessary for containment. This finds expression in the analyst's resonance with the patient. Clinical material from an analysis with a 7-year old boy is provided.     

What is an “appropriate” migrant? Impact of the adoption of meritocratic worldviews by potential newcomers on their perceived ability to integrate into a Western society

The acceptance of migrant populations and the definition of an “appropriate” migrant are controversial issues in many countries. The present research focuses on the ideological determinants of how newcomers are evaluated by a host population in a Western country with a strongly rooted meritocratic ideology. We carried out two studies to examine how the expression of meritocratic beliefs by a male potential migrant affects the way he is evaluated by the host population. We measured the host population's perception of the potential migrant's ability to integrate into society, his tendency to adopt the host country's culture, and the general desirability of his world vision for all newcomers. We also noted the host population's judgments of the target's agency and communality. The results showed that a potential newcomer who expresses a strong (vs. weak) belief in a just world (Study 1) or an internal (vs. external) locus of control (Study 2) is evaluated more favorably by the host population. In addition, judgments of the target's integration capacity were only mediated by his perceived agency. We discuss these results in the light of work on the meritocratic ideology and intercultural relations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.