Christer Sjödin interviews Jan Stensson

Abstract

The author examines different definitions and applications of the terms “psychic energy” and “libido.” With regard to the “psychic energy” terminology, he shows that its application and usage relate in particular to the perspective of Brenner and not to Freud's definition. He argues that Freud uses the term “psychic energy” as a synonym for “libido,” and not “libido” as a synonym for “psychic energy.” It is demonstrated that in Freud's view, up until 1914, “libido” relates to manifestations of bodily sexual tensions, and subsequently this term applies to the manifestations of sexual energy in the psychic field. The author rejects this change in terminology and also challenges Freud's attempt to use dynamic-economic considerations as an explanatory device for epistemological reasons. Freud's concept of energy is inconsistent with the meaning of energy as defined in the physical sciences, and whereas the metapsychological topographical, dynamic, and structural viewpoints have a solid foundation in the representational world to which the psychoanalytic process affords unique access, this is not true of the economic viewpoint. It is claimed that bodily tensions only exist in the representational world in the form of affects, so that, in the author's opinion, the economic viewpoint should be abandoned in favour of an affective one. In the context of the endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure adduced by Freud, this viewpoint focuses on the relationships between affects and the different elements of the representational world, thereby serving as the subject of metapsychological investigation.     

Metapsychology or metapsychologies? Some comments on Paul Denis's paper ‘The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction’

In this commentary on Paul Denis's paper ‘The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction’, the author defends the idea of a plurality of metapsychologies that must be contrasted with and distinguished from each other while avoiding incompatible translations between models. In this connection he presents various theoretical approaches to aggression and the death drive, and demonstrates the differences between the drive model and the model underlying the theory of internalized object relations. The author holds that the concept of the internal object differs from Freud's notion of the representation (Vorstellung). He also considers that the imago as defined by Paul Denis in fact corresponds to the concept of the internal object. Lastly, he addresses the complex issue of listening to archaic forms of psychic functioning and their non‐discursive presentation within the analytic process, which affects the transference‐countertransference link.     

The clinical revolution of the ‘wise baby’

In an historical context focused on a close examination of the complex relationship between Freud and Ferenczi, the author shows Ferenczi's contribution to the evolution of psychoanalysis. He describes how his ideas and his therapeutic sensitivity anticipated modern clinical thought (for example, Winnicott and Bion), especially the understanding of borderline and narcissistic pathology. The paper considers the following topics: transference and countertransference; early affectivity; the different psychic trauma; phenomena connected with dissociation; the healing factor of the analysis.     

Hallucinations in the psychotic state: Psychoanalysis and the neurosciences compared

In this contribution, which takes account of important findings in neuroscientific as well as psychoanalytic research, the authors explore the meaning of the deep‐going distortions of psychic functioning occurring in hallucinatory phenomena. Neuroscientific studies have established that hallucinations distort the sense of reality owing to a complex alteration in the balance between top‐down and bottom‐up brain circuits. The present authors postulate that hallucinatory phenomena represent the outcome of a psychotic's distorted use of the mind over an extended period of time. In the hallucinatory state the psychotic part of the personality uses the mind to generate auto‐induced sensations and to achieve a particular sort of regressive pleasure. In these cases, therefore, the mind is not used as an organ of knowledge or as an instrument for fostering relationships with others. The hallucinating psychotic decathects psychic (relational) reality and withdraws into a personal, bodily, and sensory space of his own. The opposing realities are not only external and internal but also psychic and sensory. Visual hallucinations could thus be said to originate from seeing with the ‘eyes’ of the mind, and auditory hallucinations from hearing with the mind's ‘ears’. In these conditions, mental functioning is restricted, cutting out the more mature functions, which are thus no longer able to assign real meaning to the surrounding world and to the subject's psychic experience. The findings of the neurosciences facilitate understanding of how, in the psychotic hallucinatory process, the mind can modify the working of a somatic organ such as the brain.     

„Fort-da — die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies — ins Leben“

The paper attempts to explore the choreography of this text which is central to psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice. Especially the “Fort-da”-game of his grandson Ernst, in addition to the observation of traumatized people, lead Freud to question the assumptions of drive theory. How can the intrapsychic repetition of trauma and the pain of separation, in essence the repetition compulsion, be compatible with the pleasure principle? Freud’s considerations lead him to the assumption that there is a form of psychic functioning which pre-dates the pleasure principle, is independent from it and seems to have developed even prior to the intention of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure — a state of “beyond the pleasure principle”. Thus the question arises how this can be compatible with drive theory which is centered around the pleasure principle. What is the meaning of Freud’s words when he speaks about a time which pre-dates the pleasure principle and where the difference between wish and wish fulfilment and (drive)conflicts, which characterize our life, do not yet exist? Freud’s reconsideration and correction of drive theory and the introduction of the death drive seem to us an epistemological circle in his reasoning and the assumption of the death drive to be unnecessary. The introduction of the death drive seems rather to have arisen from an inner conflict between drive theory and a narcissism which is not drive-determined and which is reflected in the repetition compulsion. It seems that Freud is not aware of or does not explicitly mention the perspective of a non-drive-determinated narcissism, although we find such a point of view in other Freudian texts. Bela Grunberger’s theory of narcissism enables one to reread this text with a new perspective which has important consequences for psychoanalytic practice. For example, the question as to what it is that enables the patient to get through the painful process of psychoanalysis appears in a new light. In addition we gain new insight and a re-evaluation concerning the meaning and use of a transference interpretation. A clinical case attempts to illustrate this perspective.     

The work of the psychoanalyst in the field of psychosis1

Psychosis questions the foundations of psychoanalytic theory and challenges our ultimate convictions about psychic functioning. Using her clinical practice, the author explores the foundations of representation and underscores the central position of sensoriality in constituting a representation. Psychoanalytical work with a psychotic subject requires a certain sharing of the psychotic experience which puts the analyst in touch with raw material grasped as a fragment of sensoriality that must consequently be shaped and figured so that the subject's representational activity can resume. The author thus uses the Freudian notion of figuration to specify this ‘raw material’ and its sensory texture. She then refers to Aulagnier's pictograms as a way of thinking about sensoriality under the sign of displeasure and pain rather than pleasure. In the light of this theoretical development, the author re‐examines the opening excerpts from her clinical cases to come up with a practice of interpretation as figuration that allows jointly for the shaping of the raw material and the identifying import of this shaping.     

The Possibility of Psychic Conflict in Seneca's De Ira

This paper explores the potential for psychic conflict within Seneca's moral psychology. Some scholars have taken Seneca's explicit claim in De Ira that the soul is unitary to preclude any kind of simultaneous psychic conflict, while other interpreters have suggested that Seneca views all cases of anger as instances of akrasia. I argue that Seneca's account of anger provides the resources for accommodating some types of simultaneous psychic conflict; however, he denies the possibility of psychic conflict between two action-generating impulses, thus rejecting the phenomena of genuine akrasia and enkrateia. Although superficially counterintuitive, Seneca's cognitivist account of anger, according to which anger is complex and requires assent to the propositions that ‘I have been wronged’ and ‘I ought to seek revenge’, renders his denial of akrasia and enkrateia more plausible.     

The seventh servant: The implications of a truth drive in Bions theory of 'O'

Drawing upon Bion's published works on the subjects of truth, dreaming, alpha‐function and transformations in ‘O’, the author independently postulates that there exists a ‘truth instinctual drive’ that subserves a truth principle, the latter of which is associated with the reality principle. Further, he suggests, following Bion's postulation, that ‘alpha‐function’ and dreaming/phantasying constitute unconscious thinking processes and that they mediate the activity of this ‘truth drive’ (quest, pulsion), which the author hypothesizes constitutes another aspect of a larger entity that also includes the epistemophilic component drive. It purportedly seeks and transmits as well as includes what Bion (1965, pp. 147‐9) calls ‘O’, the ‘Absolute Truth, Ultimate Reality, O’ (also associated with infi nity, noumena or things‐in‐themselves, and ‘godhead’) (1970, p. 26). It is further hypothesized that the truth drive functions in collaboration with an ‘unconscious consciousness’ that is associated with the faculty of ‘attention’, which is also known as ‘intuition’. It is responsive to internal psychical reality and constitutes Bion's ‘seventh servant’. O, the ultimate landscape of psychoanalysis, has many dimensions, but the one that seems to interest Bion is that of the emotional experience of the analysand's and the analyst's ‘evolving O’ respectively (1970, p. 52) during the analytic session. The author thus hypothesizes that a sense of truth presents itself to the subject as a quest for truth which has the quality and force of an instinctual drive and constitutes the counterpart to the epistemophilic drive. This ‘truth quest’ or ‘drive’ is hypothesized to be the source of the generation of the emotional truth of one's ongoing experiences, both conscious and unconscious. It is proposed that emotions are beacons of truth in regard to the acceptance of reality. The concepts of an emotional truth drive and a truth principle would help us understand why analysands are able to accept analysts’ interpretations that favor the operation of the reality principle over the pleasure principle—because of what is postulated as their overriding adaptive need for truth. Ultimately, it would seem that Bion's legacy of truth aims at integrating fi nite man with infi nite man.     

The basic traumatic situation in the analytical relationship1

The author attempts to develop a concept of psychic trauma which would comply with the nucleus of this Freudian notion, that is, an excess of excitations that cannot be processed by the mental apparatus, but which would also consider the functions and the crucial role of objects in the constitution of the psychism and in traumatic conditions, as well as taking into account the methodological positioning according to which the analytical relationship is the sole possible locus of observation, inference and intervention by the psychoanalyst. He considers as a basic or minimal traumatic psychoanalytical situation that in which a magnitude or quality of emotions exceeds the capacity for containment of the psychoanalytical pair, to the point of generating a period or area of dementalisation in the psyche of one or both of the participants, of requiring analytical work on the matter and promoting a signifi cant positive or negative change in the relationship. Availing himself of Bion's theory about the alpha function and the metapsychological conceptions of Freud and Green concerning psychic representations, he presents two theoretical formulations relating to this traumatic situation, utilising them according to the ‘altered focus’ model proposed by Bion. He presents three clinical examples to illustrate the concept and the relevant theoretical formulations.     

Fonagy and Freud. Psychological versus psychic reality

Peter Fonagy and Mary Target present their Playing with reality theory as a developmental theory centred on the concept of psychic reality. This paper compares Fonagy and Target's use of the concept of psychic reality with Freud's original concept. It is argued that the concept of psychic reality has been redefined from delineating a psychic reality stemming from the unconscious to denoting a kind of conscious or preconscious psychological reality characterized by an experience of equality between the internal and the external worlds. The theoretical discussion is illustrated by being applied to eating disorder pathology, which by Fonagy and colleagues is described as associated with thought processes characterized by psychic reality.     

Traumatic effects of political repression in Chile: A clinical experience1

The author examines psychic trauma resulting from human rights violations in Chile. Starting from trauma theories developed by authors such as Ferenczi, Winnicott and Stolorow, she posits the relevance of the subject's emotionally signifi cant environment in the production of the traumatic experience. She describes the characteristics of the therapeutic process on the basis of a clinical case. She emphasizes the need to recognize the damage that may be produced within the reliable link between patient and analyst, pointing out the risk of retraumatization if analysts distance themselves and apply ‘technique’ rigorously, leaving out their own subjective assessments. Therapists must maintain their focus on the conjunction of the patient's intersubjective context and inner psychic world both when exploring the origin of the trauma and when insight is produced. The author posits repetition in the transference as an attempt at reparation, at fi nding the expected response from the analyst that will help patients assemble the fragments of their history and achieve, as Winnicott would put it, a feeling of continuity in the experience of being.     

THE FATHER,THE FATHER FUNCTION,THE FATHER PRINCIPLE: SOME CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC DEVELOPMENTS

The author discusses Freud's thinking on the role of the father, as well as that of later French theoreticians. To illustrate his remarks, he draws on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1912–1987), a Brazilian poet whose work often dealt with themes of the father, the family, and his own paternal relationship. The author also discusses the psychic formation of the father principle and how this may be evident in the clinical analytic setting, even when the analyst's approach privileges field theory, intersubjectivity, or other concepts emphasizing the relationship between analyst and patient.     

Psychotic withdrawal and the overthrow of psychic reality1

The author attempts to distinguish between the world of fantasy and the imagination (which fuels our capacity to ‘dream’) from a withdrawal into fantasy. In this withdrawal, the foundations of which are laid in childhood, a dissociation from psychic reality starts and from it the delusional world arises and constitutes the adult illness. During therapies of adult patients who have experienced a psychotic state, it is often possible to reconstruct the state of infantile withdrawal and understand how their dissociation from reality was ignored or unknowingly encouraged by their parents. Children destined to develop psychosis enter into the dissociated world not just as a defence against anguish or loneliness, but also for the pleasure of experiencing a delusional self‐suffi ciency and a gratifying omnipotence in which anything is possible. Mental workings that take place in the withdrawal do not follow the rules governing normal psychic functioning. Those fantasies cannot be either repressed or ‘dreamed’ in order to be transformed into thoughts. These psychopathological structures, which develop early and autonomously, have to be understood during analytical therapy in their origins and ‘deconstructed’ in order to help the patient to escape from their dominion. By means of clinical examples, the author tries to shed light on the possible ways of reaching patients in their psychotic shelters, thereby helping them to re‐emerge into a psychic reality.     

On the reception of the concept of the death drive in Germany: expressing and resisting an ‘evil principle’?

With Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud attempted ‘to describe and to account for the facts of daily observation in our field of study’ (1920, p. 7), in particular concerning destructive clinical phenomena that confront us in the analytic situation: traumatic neuroses, melancholic states, negative‐therapeutic reactions, masochism, repetition compulsion and so on. The author demonstrates in the first section how Freud's own resistance – later self‐diagnosed – to recognizing these unwelcome facts was expressed in the terminological and conceptual ambiguities of the death drive hypothesis then introduced, ambiguities that to some extent continue to impede the reception of its clinical usefulness to this day. As soon as Freud had demonstrated the connection with clinical practice more directly in The Ego and the Id (1923), some contemporaries adopted it as a helpful clinical concept, while others believed that they could (and must) refute it. The second part outlines its reception in the 1920s and 1930s, which was part of an international discussion that was, of course, initially conducted mainly in German. The beginnings of an important further development of the death drive hypothesis are described in a separate section because it originated from Melanie Klein's earliest experiences in analysing children in Berlin in the early to mid‐1920s. She referred at that time to an ‘evil principle’, and in 1932 published her view of the death drive hypothesis, which was further developed in subsequent decades by her and her followers in London. In this period, conditions changed dramatically: in Germany Freud's books (among others) were burnt, crimes against humanity were instigated and psychoanalysis ceased to exist in this country. Almost all the analysts who published on the death drive had to emigrate. From then on, entirely different discourses took place in the various regions. In Germany, the death drive hypothesis was (largely) disregarded or rejected for decades after the Holocaust. Frank demonstrates how the uncritical recourse in relevant works to this day to an article by Brun in 1953 that considered the death drive to have been comprehensively refuted on the basis of (apparently) comprehensive literature research can be understood as a symptom. Pursuing some reflections by Beland (1988) and Cycon (1995), the author expounds her thesis that in Germany the clinical usefulness of the death drive hypothesis could not be considered as long as destructive impulses were still an immediate social reality. According to the author's observations, in stating that there had been a ‘definite reaction formation against death drive hypotheses’, Brun had unintentionally made an accurate diagnosis. It was not until the realization of inevitable perpetrator identifications (‘Hitler in us’) in this country became (more widely) possible that a concern with the death drive hypothesis could also resume. In the final section, the author takes up one line of this development and traces how some German analysts in the 1980s came into contact with Kleinian developments that had since occurred and how these found and find their way into their analytic working. She closes by asking whether it might be appropriate to consider Melanie Klein's concept of an evil principle – along with the pleasure and reality principles – as a less ambiguous one for the phenomena under consideration.     

Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy: Classical Style

In this essay, the core concepts of psychoanalysis are set forth as the context for the application of classical psychoanalytic theory to the practice of couple therapy. Infantile sexuality and aggression are shown to have a powerful role in the interpersonal lives of family members. The repetition compulsion structures marital interaction and intergenerational dynamics. The intrapsychic emphasis of classical ego-psychology is viewed in the interpersonal arena, and the author suggests adding to the Oedipus and Narcissus myths a myth that resonates with this shift in emphasis. In introducing the “Pygmalion–Galatea process,” the author captures the universal attempt to change the psychic dynamics of the other or others. This ultimately mutual process begins with the infant's mirroring of its caretakers—which includes language acquisition. Much of human interaction is fueled by subsequent attempts to create others in our own images of them and by their reactive compliance or resistance to that dynamic. Three case illustrations are presented to show how these phenomena manifest themselves in marital interaction and in dreams.     

‘To return,to eat,to tell the story ’: Primo Levi's lessons on living and dying in the aftermath of trauma

This article invites Primo Levi, the internationally esteemed citizen of Turin, Italy and survivor of the Auschwitz to instruct post 9/11 psychoanalysis in five lessons on living and dying in the aftermath of severe trauma. Relying on excerpts from Levi's writings, the author invites Levi to speak to the reader words of warning concerning contemporary psychoanalysis' benign omnipotence in embracing overly simplistic theories of cure, resiliency and psychic repatriation of the human spirit in the aftermath of severe trauma.     

Murder: A psychotherapeutic investigation

This paper suggests that it is theoretically necessary and clinically useful to make a distinction between two types of psychic encapsulation within the broader literature. The proposed distinction, as it relates to these psychic structural manifestations, is illustrated here as applied to anorexia. The author suggests that psychic encapsulation is commonly encountered in work with anorexics, and that each type seems to imply a somewhat different therapeutic course. The distinction is made between anorexic patients who appear to display evidence of autistic/autistoid encapsulation as opposed to those who seem to manifest non-autistoid/later traumatic encapsulation – termed secondary adjunctive encapsulation in this paper. Defensive encapsulations are associated with pathological organisations of the personality – both within and beyond these structures, they exert an organising power over central mental processes. Psychic encapsulation and pathological organisations are defensive structural developments – the result of psychic trauma. Clinical material from three cases is presented to illustrate the arguments.     

Pentheus rather than Oedipus: On perversion,survival and analytic ‘presencing’1

Following an introductory review of the main developments in the psychoanalytic thinking on perversion, the author focuses on her own understanding of perversion and its treatment, based on the psychoanalytic treatment of patients with severe sexual perversions. This paper uses the term ‘autotomy’ (borrowed from the fi eld of biology) to describe perversion formation as an ‘autotomous’ defence solution involving massive dissociative splitting in the service of psychic survival within a violent, traumatic early childhood situation; thus, a compulsively enacted ‘desire for ritualised trauma’ ensues. The specifi c nature of the perverse scenario embodies the specifi c experiential core quality of the traumatic situation. It is an actual repetition in the present of the imprint of a past destructive experience which is pre‐arranged and stage‐managed; it thus encounters haunting scenes of dread or psychic annihilation while, at the same time, controlling, sanitising and disavowing them. Hence, the world of severe perversion is no longer oedipal, but rather the world of Pentheus, Euripides's most tragic hero‐a world dominated by a mixture of a mother's madness, devourment, destruction and rituals of desire. According to this view, the (diffi cult) psychoanalytic treatment of perversion focuses on patient‐analyst interconnectedness‐brought about by the analyst's ‘givenness to being present’ or ‘presencing’‐at a deep, primary level of contact and impact (the emphasis being on the ontological dimension of experience). This evolving therapeutic entity creates and actualises a new, alternative experiential‐emotional reality within the pervert's alienated world, eventually generating a change in the perverse essence. The author illustrate this approach with three clinical vignettes.     

Variations on the concept of traumatism: Traumatism,traumatic, trauma1

In this paper, the author outlines Freud's fundamental hypotheses concerning the concept of traumatism, then goes on to differentiate three notions (French being a particularly apposite language for such a venture): ‘traumatism’, ‘traumatic’ (in a substantive sense) and ‘trauma’. These three terms correspond to the three turning points in Freud's theory with respect to the concept of traumatism (1895‐97, 1920, 1938). The author evokes also the developments that are due to Ferenczi, particularly in his later writings (1928‐33), where he defi ned and discussed the question of ‘trauma’ in contemporary clinical practice; the author goes on to explore the different variations on this theme as regards mental functioning. He then defi nes, from a metapsychological point of view, the differences between ‘traumatisms’ that have been ‘worked over by secondary processes’, organised and governed by the pleasure‐unpleasure principle (‘traumatism’) and ‘early’ or ‘primary traumatisms’, which interfere with the process of binding the instinctual drives (‘trauma’); states of mind infl uenced by a traumatic imprint (‘traumatic’) are looked upon as belonging to both categories of the above mentioned traumatisms. The author illustrates his hypotheses with a clinical example.