The Divine,The Deviant and the Diabolical: A Journey Through An Artist's Paintings During Her Participation in a Creative Process Group: An Evolution of "Developmental Mourning"

Participation in writing and creative process offers a unique window to view the evolution of the mourning process. This study traces how a painter's work as shown to such a group reveals and interacts with her developmental progress as she goes through the mourning process in individual therapy with the author, who is also the leader of the writing and creative process group to which the artist belongs. Through these mutually beneficial exchanges, the patient is able to relinquish her constructed false self-identity for an authentic female identity, as seen in the evolution of her painting over her two-year participation in the writing and creative process group.     

Self-starvation and the performance narrative in competitive sport

ObjectivesTo provide an alternative to medical understanding of disordered eating in sport through an emphasis on personal perspectives.DesignThis study draws on narrative theory to interpretively analyse the life of Holly, a female athlete who engages in severe self-starvation.MethodsMore than 7 hours of life history data was gathered over a period of 8 months through unstructured interviews. Holly's story was analyzed through principles of narrative analysis, with attention afforded to both narrative content and structure.ResultsHolly's life is characterized by a struggle to align her life experiences with a culturally specified “performance narrative” that lauds normative success. When neither her academic nor sporting endeavors are perceived to fulfil the achievement narrative, Holly is thrust into emotional turmoil and begins to conceive of self-starvation as a means to achieve.ConclusionsThe performance narrative spans both academic and sporting cultural domains and it can play a role in athlete disordered eating.     

Simone Weil: The Ethics of Affliction and the Aesthetics of Attention

ABSTRACT

For Simone Weil the invocation of ‘rights’ to address extreme human suffering–what she calls ‘affliction’–is ‘ludicrously inadequate’. Rights, Weil argues, invite a response, whereas what the afflicted require is not dialogue but simply to be heard. For Weil, hearing the ‘cry’ of the afflicted is the basis of all justice. The task of such a hearing is given over to Weil’s concept of attention, which demands an ethics of creative silence. This paper will argue that central to Weil’s ethics of attention, and thus the way she thinks we should show compassion and act justly, is the Kantian aesthetic concept of disinterestedness. I will argue that whilst Weil is influenced by Kant in multiple ways, it is his aesthetics, rather than his normative moral theory, that is most at play in her own ethical theory of attention.     

Virginia Prince: Transgender Pioneer

SUMMARY

This article gives an overview of the life and work of Virginia Prince. It provides a synopsis of her major publications, situates her work in the context of its time and assesses her contribution as a major pioneer of transgendering.     

Part III: Short Papers from the Course

ABSTRACT

At the end of each class, we ask students to write either an annotated bibliographic essay on a psychoanalytic subject of their choosing or a short paper. We include here three examples of the kind of work we receive. The first is an annotated bibliography written by Monica Black, a drama major, who has been “play-acting” since childhood and who is now a serious actress, exploring the question of “Why Perform?” She wrote the paper when she was a sophomore. The second is written by Becca Stine, a junior creative writing major, who, when she saw Waiting for Godot at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, had moving insights about her relation with her sister, insights that were enhanced by the psychoanalytic reading we did in relation to the drama. The third, by first-year neuroscience major Peter Lehman, is an annotated bibliography that seeks to understand how neurobiology and psychoanalysis can best intersect.     

Poetics in the shadow of the other's language: The melancholic discourse of the trilingual poet Amelia Rosselli

In this paper, I propose a psychoanalytic reading of some of the writings of Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet who, at the age of seven, lost her father Carlo, who was persecuted and murdered by Mussolini's regime. History and her history conflate into personal and collective trauma which defies human possibilities to work through and mourn. Rosselli's work testifies to such predicament of the human subject of the 20th century, his/her dislocation, alienation and internal irreconcilable divisions. In particular I examine Diary in three tongues, which is the most autobiographical of her works and a self‐analytic piece, written after the conclusion of her second analysis. In the Diary, Rosselli employs textual strategies which convey the fragmentation and destructuring of language, where her traumatic experience resides as a wound inflicted to the symbolic order. I propose that her writings contain her unconscious memories in an estranged and melancholic language which becomes the crucible to express her impossible mourning, in a complex mixture of Eros and Thanatos which allowed her to survive psychically and to create a very personal experimental poetic discourse which made her a literary figure of international acclaim. My primary engagement will be with Freud's theory of mourning and melancholia and its successive elaboration by Kristeva, who maintains that the melancholic discourse finds its expression in the pre‐verbal and infra‐verbal aspects of language, which she calls ‘semiotics’, in dialectic articulation with its symbolic components. Drawing on literary texts, significant inferences can be made on the psychoanalytic listening to the prosodic aspects of language as the carrier of inchoate forms of representation of that which exceeds language: trauma, raw affects, mnemic traces, that is, the unrepresented and/or unrepresentable.     

Feminist Therapy Pioneer: E. Kitch Childs

ABSTRACT

This article will focus on the life of the late Dr. E. Kitch Childs and her impact on Feminist Therapy. It seeks to celebrate and pay homage to her as one of the pioneers who helped pave the way for women in therapy. Dr. Childs was an African American lesbian woman who stood in the gap for social justice with her intellect, tenacity, and bravery and took the lead as a radical visionary.     

Remembering Herb

Abstract

This paper discusses treatment of an incest survivor who suffered a crippling sense of guilt. The work of discovering and understanding the unconscious fantasies that accompanied the patient's early traumatic experiences led to the alleviation of her misplaced guilt and to more adaptive compromise formations. It is necessary to understand and address the unconscious fantasies attached to the incest, as intellectual awareness of inappropriate guilt does not suffice to diminish it.     

Dance,Knowledge, and Power

Susanne K. Langer contributed an exhaustive account of aesthetics, Feeling and Form, in which she articulated her schema of the virtual and wove together the aesthetic elements of music, visual arts, dance, and literature/theater. This analysis of her work centers on two key concepts within her philosophy: the virtual as the aesthetic effect of the work and the perception of the work through intuition. In this paper, I re-read Langers philosophy through a perspective built on intersections between phenomenology, pragmatism, and post-structuralist theory in order to reveal the relevance of her work to current understandings of how the dancing body produces and conveys meaning. I endeavor to show how her work provides a practical, conceptual system for understanding dance as an a-linguistic form of meaning-making, bodily experience, and knowledge.     

An Analysis of the Effectiveness of the Intervention

SUMMARY

In this chapter, I examine the specific problem Betty had with her children because, in many ways, it represents the problems most of the volunteers had with their children. Her problem was the most extreme among the participants, and she involved the other volunteers in helping her look for a solution. The vignette that follows comes from my field logs, and it is followed with a layered response from Betty's peers. The vignette offers a close look at Betty's problems with her daughters and the dilemma she experienced in relation to coming to work when her children needed her. Betty told her story to Esther, Dolores, and me one morning in the dayroom.     

The vicissitudes of affect in Horney's theory

Abstract

Karen Horney, a Neo-Freudian analyst who immigrated from Germany to the USA, undertook the difficult task of developing a theory that remained concrete psychology without resorting to biology or to metapsychological entelechies. Although her basic construct, as in Freud, is a conflict between nature and culture, nature for her is the naturally endowed real self, which the neurotic abandons bowing to cultural pressures. This process of desertion is teleological and based on imagination, and is also creative. It entails the pursuit of a god-like idealized image of the self shaped according to narrow and despoiled values. Being interpersonal, Horney's theory avoids third-person objectification which creates a false distance; it thus remains (inter)subjective. A theory of interpersonal affect, it is dramatic before being dynamic. It also abandons claims to universality as it does to the “objectivity” of the natural sciences. Horney's focus on alienation brings her close to Hegel and Marx, a neglected fact, and she pioneered feminist and self-help theories. The difficulty in reading Horney is not her abstruseness, since her theory refuses technicism. It resides rather in that resistance created by what Althusser called interpellation: one feels her finger pointed at oneself as one reads.     

Photography: snapshots out of the unconscious

Abstract

This paper looks briefly at the relevance of infant and young child observation courses to work with adults and then goes on to describe how a normal young child aged 2% coped with two quite sudden changes in her life and the psychological mechanisms she used to manage her anxieties. These mechanisms - displacement, use of transitional objects, fantasy and symbolism - might equally be used by adults in later life when faced with uncertainty and change. Links are then made to psychotherapeutic work with adults.     

Some Recollections of Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

The following excerpts are taken from several hours of conversation with Virginia Satir in which Virginia shares her personal reminiscences of herdevelopment as a therapist and the intellectual environment that stimulated some of her most creative work. She reflects on her association with Gregory Bateson and other prominent theorists in the field. In deceptively concise language, she puts forth her own seminal ideas on the complex nature of change and the processes that underlie family therapy and group therapy.     

The psychological science of Gustave Flaubert

Abstract

Flaubert claimed mastery in matters of style in the French language as well as in the psychological sciences. Mastery in both areas is on clear display in the writing of Madame Bovary. Our heroine presents as a new kind of personality, namely as someone who depends greatly on sensory experience in order to maintain her emotional equilibrium. So, when under stress, she can only find some kind of soothing comfort in her perfumes, silks, and cashmeres. This dynamic pattern leaves her at a disadvantage when tasked with higher level life requirements – such as the payment of bills, the very thing that, in the end, causes her ruin. Dynamically, failures of memory and the resulting fragmentation of experience leave her with a precarious sense of self. For our heroine, there is little ability to link present experience to the past and therefore no possibility of metaphoric or symbolic thinking; in other words, she is condemned to repeat. Flaubert felt that Madame Bovary would only have original value as the sum of his psychological understandings. Further, he hoped his psychological work, often hidden under the form, would be deeply felt by the reader, as it was by him.     

The Amazing Life and Times of Oliva Espín

ABSTRACT

Oliva Espín is a prolific feminist and multicultural writer and psychologist who has significantly contributed to feminist therapy throughout her career. This biographical article highlights her many contributions to feminism, feminist psychology, and humankind.     

“You can Talk in Espagñol!”: An Ethnographic case Study of an African-American Emergent Bilingual and Biliterate Identity

Abstract

This ethnographic case study explores the dynamic and fluid development of one African-American student’s bilingual/biliterate identity through her enrollment in a Spanish-English Dual Language Education program. We integrate the frameworks of identity in interaction and monoglossic and raciolinguistic language ideologies to understand how this student approaches her Spanish language and literacy development from kindergarten to grade 5. The study documents the fluid nature of the focal student, Tamara’s, identity as she journeyed from a Spanish enthusiast in kindergarten who embraced her emerging bilingualism/biliteracy to a student who seemed to question her identity as Spanish literate person. Specifically, we examine her affective response to developing bilingualism and biliteracy. We identify three paradoxical influences, or double-binds, in how she was differently positioned across multiple interactions as a bilingual African-American student.     

The Triadic Concept in the Work of Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

For Virginia Salir the primary family triad is the major source of learning during the developmental years. In spite of the difficulties inherent in its structure, the triad holds the potential of being a great source of strength and nurture for the individuals involved. The various ways in which Virginia has used the triadic concept in her work are discussed.     

Male and female internal images in a case of frigidity

Abstract

This is the case of a young woman suffering from a narcissistic personality disturbance with Oedipal aspects. The development of the analytic treatment is stressed through the analysis of her dreams. The analytic setting provided an appropriate mirroring Self-object. Thereby the patient has had the opportunity to express her own defective female grandiose Self, which was at the base of her disturbances.     

An Overview of the Historical and Empirical Antecedents in the Development of the Codependency Concept

SUMMARY

This paper offers a general overview of the historical and previous empirical studies leading up to the contemporary conceptualization of codependency theory. In addition the author includes a seemingly lone research attempt to examine a major personality trait universally attributed to codependents-their hypothesized diminished capacity for intimacy.

The current concept of codependency was used to understand the non-alcoholic spouse's behaviors and psycho-pathology in relation to his or her alcoholic spouse. This so-called diagnostic entity has been broaded to include, in addition, non-alcoholic relationships where the codependent selects a mate incapable of engaging intimate relationship. Therefore a pathological interactional syndrome develops locking the codependent into certain self-defecting behaviours which are psychogenetically connected to, and resonate with, the codependent's dysfunctional family of origin. This paper docuses primarily on women, or codependents, who are married to alcoholics.     

Don't Cry

SUMMARY

This author provides a subjective view of her own inner responses to a challenging couple. Issues of bi-culturalism, narcississm and feminism create a countertransferential trap for the therapist who courageously chronicles her emotional oddyssey with the pair in the case example.