From religious icon to ‘our mother from heaven’: The appropriation of the Virgin Mary by Catholic women in Quito

In this article I look at the cult of the Virgin Mary in terms of its practices and its meanings. I did fieldwork in Quito, Ecuador, where I interviewed more than 20 women, aged between 30 and 50, who belong to Catholic groups or are active members of the parish. I found out that these women strongly identify with the Virgin Mary; they view her as a protector and a mother. Furthermore, the Virgin is not regarded as an afflicted figure or victim, but instead as a brave and empowered woman. The image they have of the Virgin contrasts with the Church's views that emphasise her obedience and sexual purity. Thus, I argue that the Virgin has become the property of these Catholic women and an icon of resistance of male-imposed Catholic rules.     

Coniunctio—in bodily and psychic modes: dissociation, devitalization and integration in a case of chronic fatigue syndrome

Three years of analytical psychotherapy with a professional woman in mid-life, suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), is described. Gradual recovery merged into mid-life changes; marriage, along with a new balance of maternal and paternal imagos, enabled her to trust enough to become pregnant— coniunctio in the most primal bodily and psychic modes.
Her life-long, schizoid type pattern, 'the pendulum of closeness and isolation', with its extreme of psycho-physical collapse and devitalization, was replayed in therapy. The analyst's symbolic attitude is emphasized, containing the patient's initial affective explosion and validating the physicality of her condition. Mirroring and steady rhythmic attunement became a new, pre-verbal, source of trust—vitalization; differentiation and separation replaced defensive splitting and dissociation. Then the overwhelmingly powerful bodily/maternal could be counterbalanced by the masculine, and a transitional space emerged for symbolic work.
Both the regressive and the dynamic aspects of CFS are located in the earliest undifferentiated, archetypal, bodily/psychic modes, when the frustration of primary needs evokes the defences of the self. It is argued that our psychodynamic understanding can contribute to the stalemate in seeing chronic fatigue syndrome as either an organic illness or depression, and that a new linking of the somatic and psychic calls for a new professional collaboration.     

An investigation into the counselling-type work of Roman Catholic priests: a survey of one diocese in Northern Ireland

Professional counselling has been criticised as being the preserve of the elite, and neither available nor affordable for the vast majority of society. However, there are other sources of help which people avail themselves of in times of need. One such source has been the local clergyman. This study looked at the helping service provided by Catholic priests working in pastoral situations in a Northern Irish diocese. Based on a questionnaire survey of 32 Catholic priests (25% of the diocese) the study looked first at the types of problems being presented to clergy, and how they responded to them. It examined their training for this work, as well as their attitudes to it, support for Catholic priests in this aspect of their work and also at their referral practices. Findings in respect of problems presented and training were in line with previous research. A wide variety of problems was encountered by Catholic priests where the most common were bereavement, alcohol or substance abuse, marital disharmony, relationship problems and terminal illness. Despite very positive attitudes towards counselling-type work and its importance in their ministry, Catholic priests' initial training in this area was reported as largely irrelevant to their current needs and there was a prevailing view of dissatisfaction. A level of self-confidence was displayed that seemed incongruent with the training in this field. Responses in respect of support and referral were contrary to previous studies. Priests seemed to be engaging in referral and reported high levels of personal but mainly informal support for this work.The findings are discussed in relation to priests continuing to undertake counselling-type work.     

Identifications Annealed,Adhesive and Political: Commentary on Paper by Nina Farhi

Farhi's fascinating paper pays tribute to and extends those segments of Milner's clinical work that Milner hesitated to theorize explicitly herself. Seeking to understand the latter, I trace psychoanalytic politics in general and the history of Milner's relationships with Winnicott, Klein, and Riviere in particular to explore how her dutiful compliance to the rigid taxonomy of psychoanalytic power of her time bore on the trajectory of her becoming an analyst with a mind of her own. It is in accounting for how she struggled to disentangle herself from that web, that we discover how Milner was able to creatively refashion her work with her patient Susan, a process by which Susan was greatly impacted.

Following the trail of Farhi's ideas around this process and considering her thoughts around their psychic meanings for both analyst and patient, I explore their clinical implications. I focus on the transferential iterations of these dynamics to consider Farhi's suggestion that an annealed bond needs to be established in the treatment of patients who have, early in life, failed to develop annealed identifications. This opens up questions around how such bonds can malignantly colonize the analyst's mind and psychic reality, raises questions of self-care in the analyst and contributes to prognostically anticipating certain sets of enactments in the course of long-term psychoanalyses.     

Lumen Gentium No. 8, and Subsistit in, Again

Francis A. Sullivan says that the one Church of Christ continues to exist perfectly in the Catholic Church, and is present imperfectly in other churches and ecclesial communities. However, he thinks Lumen Gentium 8 also enables us to say that the many churches, non-Catholic and Catholic, are all in the one Church of Christ, since to say the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church means no more than "continues to exist in" the Catholic Church. In this way, he denies the identity of the one Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. We point out that magisterial documents since Vatican II have consistently refused this proposal, and have instead spoken only of the one Church being present or operative, according to degrees, in non-Catholic churches and communities. We argue that while it is true there is "ecclesial reality" outside the Catholic Church, in that there are elements of truth and sanctification outside of her, the one Church of Christ of which Vatican II expressly speaks is the Church with all the gifts of unity and instruments for salvation with which Christ endowed it. The Catholic Church is not contained in any larger divinely willed and dominically instituted ecclesial reality, and it is without qualification the one Church of Christ and the one Church of Christ is without qualification the Catholic Church.     

Healing as Constitutive of Jesus’ Mission Handed to the Church

After a basic statement of the Catholic doctrine on healing ministry, this article adopts the understanding of the World Council of Churches’ document Healing and Wholeness: The Churches’ Role in Health, adopted in 1990 by the central committee. The document views health, healing, and wholeness not just as medical issues, but as embracing the political, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. Building on the above, this article proposes an integral approach to sacramental healing for the African Catholic Church, arguing that alongside healing of physical ailments and deliverance from evil and malignant forces, healing must include working for social justice and peace for the people.     

The wish for annihilation in ‘love–death’ as collapse of the need for recognition,in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde holds a central position in Western music and culture. It is shown to demonstrate consequences of interruption of developmental processes involving the need for recognition of subjectivity, resulting in the collapse of this need into the wish for annihilation of self and other through ‘love–death’ [Liebestod]. A close reading of the musical language of the opera reveals how this interruption is demonstrated, and the consequent location of identity outside of language, particularly suitable for expression in music. Isolde's dynamics are presented as distinct from that of Tristan, and in contrast to other interpretations of Tristan and Isolde's love as an attack on the Oedipal order, or as a regressive wish for pre‐Oedipal union. Isolde's Act I narrative locates the origin of her desire in the protagonists' mutual gaze at a traumatic moment. In this moment powerful and contrasting emotions converge, evoking thwarted developmental needs, and arousing the fantasy of redemption in love–death. By removing the magical elements, Wagner enables a deeper understanding of the characters' positions in relation to each other, each with his or her own needs for recognition and traumatic experiences. These positions invite mutual identifications resulting in rising tension between affirmation of identity and annihilation, with actual death as the only possible psychic solution. The dynamics described in the opera demonstrate the function of music and opera in conveying meaning which is not verbally expressible.     

Counselling for women: The contribution of feminist theory and practice

Much of the literature on the theory and practice of counselling is gender-blind, the assumption being that the emotional worlds of women and men are the same. This view is challenged, the author reviewing the work of feminist theorists and practitioners. Central to this discourse is the argument that to understand the internal psychic structures of women, her concepts of se& we have to acknowledge the effect of external and oppressive structures on her psychological development. This can assist us in our understanding of how the therapeutic relationship might address women's needs and provide the ‘space’ for her to grow and change.     

A matter of time: actual time and the production of the past

In psychoanalytic theory, space metaphors are frequently used to describe the psychic apparatus. As for time, it is traditionally invoked under the heading of timelessness of the unconscious, more aptly described as the resistance of the repressed to wearing away with time. This paper examines how the insertion of time into psychic events and structural differentiation form a single process. After looking into the parallelism between phenomenological and psychoanalytic views of time and differentiation, the author draws a distinction between two time categories: chronological versus actual. A clinical example is presented.     

The dialectic of Australian Catholic education

Australian Catholic schools are enjoying extensive popularity, with schools in general experiencing maximum enrolment capacities. The irony in this phenomenon is that Catholics are being attracted to non‐Catholic schools, and many non‐Catholics are seeking enrolment in Catholic schools. Moreover, the vast majority of Catholics in Catholic schools (parents, students, teachers) are not practising and those that do often hold a plurality of views in faith and morals that are inconsistent with Church teaching. Given this reality, the aims of the Australian Catholic school need to be re‐examined.     

ALTRUISM AND CHRISTIAN LOVE

Abstract. Sociobiological theories have had little impact on Christian concepts of neighbor love. Since sociobiological theories of altruism depict love as a form of egoistic interest in enhancing one's general fitness, they are often thought to contradict Christian theories of love. However, altruism as defined by sociobiology has more affinity with Roman Catholic views of Christian love as caritas than Protestant views of extreme agape. Sociobiological views of altruism may provide more updated models for defining the orders and priorities of love, which has been an important aspect of Roman Catholic ethics. The family's role in mediating between kin altruism and wider love for the community is investigated.     

Research Note: Assessing the Determinants of the Contemporary Social Attitudes of Roman Catholics in Britain: Abortion and Homosexuality

This research note examines the determinants of British Catholics’ social attitudes using a nationally representative survey undertaken in 2010. It examines attitudes towards abortion and homosexuality, issues where the Church has clear moral teachings and has recently intervened in national debates, but where significant proportions of Catholics currently hold dissenting views. Noteworthy findings are the consistent role played by sex, age, and religious commitment in underpinning attitudes towards social issues, while party political support only affects attitudes towards homosexuality. Men, older people, and those who attend religious services more frequently represent the sections of the Catholic community which are particularly likely to hold traditionalist views that accord with official Church teaching.     

Life-threatening illness in the analyst

The literature on practicing throughout a life-threatening illness is reviewed and important differences about attitudes toward self-disclosure are understood by noting a division between two perspectives on transference: "one-body" and "two-body" views. The analyst's use of self-disclosure is informed by the prominence given the interpretation of transference as against that given the patient's needs in the collaborative relatedness supporting the therapeutic alliance. Themes and illustrative clinical vignettes are presented from the author's own experience practicing during such an illness. Three phases of working during illness are delineated, each somewhat different regarding the analyst's state, and hence patients' needs and reactions. Recommendations are made regarding conditions that make it possible to work effectively during a life-threatening illness. The analyst needs help from his or her own analyst to make the clinically and sometimes ethically appropriate decisions about practice; while this is important in instances in which the analyst recovers, it is essential should the analyst become terminal and face more certain death.     

Letting them go - The short-term treatment of an adolescent at risk

This paper is based on my experience of working in an outpatient centre for adolescents at risk in a North London borough. The paper focuses on the pressures encountered when adolescent patients want to stop treatment prematurely, and on the risks of re-enactment in the transference. Clinical material is presented from the treatment of an adolescent girl who resorted to cutting herself when she had to face new developmental stages. Her unresolved Oedipal anxieties as well as possible meanings of the nature of her self-destructive behaviour are explored. Finally I attempt to explore how my struggles with letting her go contributed to her psychic development, which has continued since the end of the therapy.     

Object loss, renewed mourning, and psychic change in Jane Austen's Persuasion

Austen's extraordinary realism in depicting the dynamic internal processes which follow on the heroine's loss in Persuasion becomes clear in the light of a psychoanalytic understanding of mourning. Persuasion dramatizes the effects of a mother's death in adolescence as these come into play at the time of the heroine's separation from her fiancée and her later mourning. The thesis of this paper is that, despite falling in love with the brilliant hero, an unfinished mourning and an unconscious identification with her dead mother helped to persuade the heroine Anne Elliot to break her engagement, to create a 'final parting' as her mother had done to her in dying. The heroine's internal monologues show that she has projected some of the darker feelings of mourning, her anger and resentment, on to the hero and that she reopens a complex mourning process, partly through the displacement of affect, showing how traumatic effects of loss can be worked through in deferred action, effecting positive psychic change.     

Sadism,Penetration, and the Negotiation of Desire: Commentary on Paper by Csillag

The author takes up Csillag’s idea of sadism as the wish to penetrate in the context of a patient who withholds from his analyst. With such a patient, the analyst has to bear the strain stemming from a lack of both satisfaction and recognition–the feeling of not having an impact. The defenses against sadism are examined along with the absence of intentionality in both clinical cases presented, an absence that places sadism in the realm of something that is unconscious or preconscious. Alternative views are offered on the enactment between Csillag and her patient with a focus on the unspoken negotiation of desire and (drawing on Fairbairn) the analyst’s attempt to breach her patient’s closed system of internal objects.     

Inhibiting the mentalizing capacities

This paper describes a phobic patient who inhibited her capacity to mentalize defensively in situations when emotionally overwhelmed. When provoked by anxiety, she used the ‘silencing-method’, not reflecting on her internal world or her relationships. In order to avoid painful thinking, she stopped mentalizing and used practical or physical activities as a psychic retreat from an unpleasant reality. In psychoanalysis, she developed a growing tolerance to conceiving her own mental states However, even after several years of analysis, inhibiting her mentalizing capacities remained her defensive strategy. This paper suggests that phobia could be understood as an intolerance of conceiving mental states, preventing integration of psychic trauma. Improvement of the mentalizing capacities through psychoanalysis makes phobic symptoms fade.     

Comments on the Ikonen & Rechardt paper on the origin of shame

Psychoanalysis is concerned with the unconscious; it weaves fleeting connections with it, and studies its effect on the conscious mind. This is the only method which allows us to reach the unconscious, making use of the technique of dream interpretation and free association. The various effects of unconscious impulses take the form of psychic and somatic symptoms and of impulsive behavior. The psychoanalytic method should enable the analysand to make contact with the veiled meanings of the repressed self, above all with its strivings. Simultaneously, the origins of poorly-functioning psychic structures are also revealed. Psychoanalysis also needs to examine the varying potential of the patient to benefit from analytical work and arrive at a better understanding of his or her unconscious mind. We have seen, as Freud did in his time, that the benefit derived from analytical understanding, i.e., interpretation, is by no means self-evident. In the mental structures of patients, we encounter aspects which reject the integrating effect of the analytical understanding. This finding, the so-called negative therapeutic reaction, and the more detailed psychoanalytical study of its contents and the psychic functions and structures involved, has made psychoanalysis every year more and more challenging and interesting.     

A plea for a broader concept of Nachträglichkeit

The broader conceptualization of Nachtr?glichkeit proposed by the author can play an active part in the process of assigning new meaning retroactively (usually through interpretation)--and even giving a meaning, for the first time (usually through construction)--to what the analysand says and cannot say. It gives us a conceptual frame of unconscious psychic temporality with which to explore how psychoanalysis produces psychic change. Winnicott's "Fear of Breakdown" (1974) is paradigmatic of this broader conceptualization of Nachtr?glichkeit (see Faimberg 1998). A clinical example is presented (Kardiner 1977) to illustrate why the author believes that her proposal remains true to Freud's (1937) conception of psychic temporality and construction.     

Transformation in Counselling

The view is put forward that counselling appears to be undergoing a transformation which renders the old distinction between counselling and therapy no longer meaningful or practical. This transformation reflects the psychic backdrop of our times; it has come about because the needs of people seeking help, as well as the needs of those counselling, have altered and developed. Increasingly, clients are acknowledging the need for radical change which involves exploration of all levels of their being. This transformative work, a moving across inner barriers and coming into wholeness, necessarily involves active awareness of spirit. Thus it is no longer possible to be a client-centred counsellor without being willing to address the spiritual dimension ofhuman-beingness.