Mehr als Intersubjektivit?t

Erich Fromm (1900?C1980) was one of the forerunners of the intersubjective tradition in psychoanalysis. Trained at the Berlin Institute and emigrated to the US he started in the 1930s to reformulate psychoanalytic theory by focusing on man??s need to be related on reality, on others and on himself and herself. Similar to Sullivan, Fromm looked at man primarily as a social being but in contrast to Sullivan, Fromm much more stressed man??s being molded by societal requirements and by an intersubjectivity that is determined by strivings originating in his social character structure. The impact the respective social character orientation has on the patient??s being related to others and to himself and herself is to be recognized in the analysis of the therapeutic processes between analyst and analysand. In principle sociality plays a much bigger role for changing intrapsychic processes. Because of Fromm??s ??societal?? orientation his approach to psychoanalysis is still of relevance to understand how the intersubjective and intrapsychic is interwoven in each individual. Beyond that his approach enables insights into what is going on psychically in society and how these changes are influential to the individual??s welfare or suffering.     

Social criticism in the process of interpretation (discussion)

Abstract

The author comments on Horst Petri's case presentation and gives reasons why he sees social criticism within the process of interpretation as inappropriate. Firstly he contradicts Petri's view of the severity of his patient's illness. He thinks a supportive therapy was not appropriate and he would have treated her by using conflict centered interpretations. Secondly he assumes that the analyst's social criticism forms an alliance with the analysand which excludes essential issues from the analytic work. And thirdly he reminds us that psychoanalysis doesn't spare a supposedly progressive attitude from criticism. Within the framework of psychoanalytic theory, the relativity of all value judgements forbids the analyst to tie himself down in the way Petri suggests.     

This art of psychoanalysis

It is the art of psychoanalysis in the making, a process inventing itself as it goes, that is the subject of this paper. The author articulates succinctly how he conceives of psychoanalysis, and offers a detailed clinical illustration. He suggests that each analysand unconsciously (and ambivalently) is seeking help in dreaming his 'night terrors' (his undreamt and undreamable dreams) and his 'nightmares' (his dreams that are interrupted when the pain of the emotional experience being dreamt exceeds his capacity for dreaming). Undreamable dreams are understood as manifestations of psychotic and psychically foreclosed aspects of the personality; interrupted dreams are viewed as reflections of neurotic and other non-psychotic parts of the personality. The analyst's task is to generate conditions that may allow the analysand-with the analyst's participation-to dream the patient's previously undreamable and interrupted dreams. A significant part of the analyst's participation in the patient's dreaming takes the form of the analyst's reverie experience. In the course of this conjoint work of dreaming in the analytic setting, the analyst may get to know the analysand sufficiently well for the analyst to be able to say something that is true to what is occurring at an unconscious level in the analytic relationship. The analyst's use of language contributes significantly to the possibility that the patient will be able to make use of what the analyst has said for purposes of dreaming his own experience, thereby dreaming himself more fully into existence.     

Flexibility of the Psychoanalytic Approach in the Treatment of a Suicidal Patient: Stubborn Silences as “Playing Dead”

The author presents the clinical case of a patient in his third analysis who seemed emotionless, did not feel alive, and complained of an uncontrollable urge to gamble, with disastrous financial results. His previous four-session-a-week “orthodox” analysis had left him prey to a sense of emptiness and to intense suicidal urges. He wanted only two weekly sessions, which became three after some analytic work. The author stresses the danger of rigidly following inflexible standards and the consequent activation of a pseudo-compliance in the analysand. A more slowly paced psychoanalysis should not be considered lower in the pecking order than “high-frequency” treatment, the author maintains: It requires great creative subjective involvement on the part of the analyst and close interaction in the context of the analytic couple. The author shows how this analysis involved a series of interactions in which the analyst was called upon to exercise a complex responsiveness, attuned in each instance to the patient's current needs. Finally he focuses on some clinical passages to show how the patient's internal theories represent a glaring assault on common sense and how death was not recognized perceptionally on a realistic level, but was instead replaced with acting out death against himself by keeping himself mentally dead and by suicidal urges.     

Clinical Flexibility in the Psychoanalytic Situation: The Elasticity Principle

Abstract

This paper explores the development of the Elasticity Principle, first introduced by Ferenczi based upon his clinical observations. This important shift away from classical neutrality was inspired by Ferenczi's human approach to psychoanalysis. Learning from his analysands, he not only determined that in order to reduce resistances the analyst should present any interpretations in a tactful, empathetic manner, but also that the analytic work should bend or yield toward the analysand. The paper traces the evolution of the Elasticity Principle to The Grand Experiment, which was Ferenczi's analysis of Elizabeth Severn utilizing provision as an analytic tool. The paper follows the contemporary extensions of the Elasticity Principle in the development of Self Psychology and in the Relational perspective. A clinical example illuminates aspects of the Elasticity Principle in the work with a difficult analysand.     

Field of Vision: Radical Uncertainty and the Analyst's Conduct: Commentary on Paper by Donnel B. Stern

There is a relationship between biography and theory. The analyst's ideas or formulations about his patients—theories really—must be determined, to some degree, by the certain and uncertain impact of his own history. Harry Stack Sullivan brought psychoanalysis squarely into the ambit of the relational/historical world by insisting that the mind is thoroughly and inherently social. In doing so, he staked a claim for the link between history, that is, social experience, and personhood. Our personalities and our theories are social-historical constructions. In relation to this, some differences between the interpersonal/relational and Bionian concepts of field theory are provided. One important difference pertains to the role of the analyst's conduct. Two meanings of conduct—to behave or to organize behavior—are at the center of what distinguishes the interpersonal/relational view of the analyst's position in the field from the Bionian view. For the relational analyst, action in the analytic field, including enactment, is conduct, and conduct is always bidirectional. The analyst, then, is a medium to alter, to reconstruct the self. He does not provide experience, he is experience. The form of an analytic exchange gives shape to the field and its content.     

The analyst's countertransference to the psychoanalytic process1

There is countertransference, not just to individual patients, but to the process of psychoanalysis itself. The analytic process is a contentious topic. Disagreements about its nature can arise from taking it as a unitary concept that should have a single defi nition whereas, in fact, there are several strands to its meaning. The need for the analyst's free associative listening, as a counterpart to the patient's free associations, implies resistance to the analytic process in the analyst as well as the patient. The author gives examples of the self‐analysis that this necessitates. The most important happenings in both the analyst's and the patient's internal worlds lie at the boundary between conscious and unconscious, and the nature of an analyst's interventions depends on how fully what happens at that boundary is articulated in the analyst's consciousness. The therapeutic quality of an analyst's engagement with a patient depends on the freeing and enlivening quality, for the analyst, of the analyst's engagement with his or her countertransference to the analytic process.     

The Freud–Ferenczi controversy in light of Emma Eckstein's circumcisio

Abstract

Emma Eckstein's circumcision trauma has been powerfully suppressed, denied, and dissociated from the history of the origins of psychoanalysis. Even though Freud did not categorize it as a trauma, he was deeply impacted by it in the period when he provided psychoanalysis with his foundation. Despite Freud's intellectual erasure of the trauma that Emma experienced, her “cut” never ceased to unconsciously break through Freud's fantasies and discourse, haunting the psychoanalytic building as a veritable ghost. Sándor Ferenczi became the recipient of what Freud could not consider in his own mind, and his revision of the “Bausteine” (building blocks) of psychoanalysis featured an attempt to heal the split embedded in the foundation of psychoanalysis.     

Of Innocence and Experience: Commentary on Paper by Stuart A. Pizer

In providing the background to a pivotal session, Stuart Pizer reveals his clinical work as an unsupervised neophyte, prior to his own analysis and analytic training. These early therapeutic efforts were flawed, leaving Pizer at times “grimacing with mortification 26 years after the fact.” But they were also extraordinarily helpful to the patient. Schaffer discusses the challenge of supervising similarly talented beginners: how does one teach psychoanalysis without desiccating a treatment? How does one teach a relational approach, with no “basic model” and few rules, to a beginning analyst infused with an unformulated, yet often passionate, sense of what is “curative”? Pizer recognizes that were he to meet the same patient today, he would not conduct the same treatment. Now trained and analyzed, not to mention more cautious and “worldweary,” Pizer would not do what he did then. But what if he were the supervisor then? Schaffer concludes her discussion by asking Pizer how he, now a seasoned analyst, would supervise his early therapist self.     

The Controversial Discussions: Edward Glover and the Origins of "Double-Barrelled Training"

I attempt to rehabilitate Edward Glover's historical reputation, based on unpublished interviews as well as recently found documentary material. This should make one of the defining moments in the history of British psychoanalysis more plausible. Glover was an eloquent heresy-hunter - against Jung, Rank, Klein, Alexander, and others - yet the polemical side of him represents only one aspect of his career. During the Controversial Discussions Glover was taking some of the burden for the way his leader Jones had run the British Society. In moving against Klein, Glover felt he was fulfilling Freud's own wishes, and that he was allied with the recently arrived Viennese contingent. After Glover's resignation in 1944, Jones split the opposition by appointing Anna Freud as Glover's successor as IPA Secretary. Subsequently Adrian Stephen and Donald Winnicott opposed Glover's even being allowed to speak at a psychoanalytic conference in Amsterdam; Anna Freud defended Glover's presence then. Glover's long struggle to be accepted as a member of the Swiss Society only went through in 1949, when Jones ceased being President of the IPA. Glover and Anna Freud regularly corresponded about setting up of the distinction between the "B" and "A" groups within the British Society. Meanwhile Glover, who had since the early 1930s been the de facto founder of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, used his administrative talents there. He successfully founded The British Journal of Delinquency with Miller and Mannheim. Unlike what happened at the British Society, Glover cooperated without problem at the ISTD and the Portman Clinic. Glover was not only an important and successful clinical analyst but also a pioneer in forensic psychiatry. In 1947 he was unofficially approached and asked to take over the Directorship of the New York Psychoanalytic Training Institute. When the proceedings of the Controversial Discussions were published in 1991, various myths had been established about what had happened. That Glover found himself caught in the middle was not only a personal tragedy but also a part of a much larger story.     

Receptivity,or Going on (Not) Being: Commentary on Paper by Robert Grossmark

“The treatment hinged on my being able to live with him in this ongoing non-existence and know it and tolerate it, and expect no more,” writes Dr. Robert Grossmark about himself and his patient, Kyle (pp. 637–638). This is a key sentence, outlining the core of the enlightening analytic work done. I comment on the linkage between living the ongoing nonexistence and going-on-(not)-being, then reflect about the distinction between what I call the “outward” technique, which is everything Grossmark describes about treating Kyle, and the “inward” technique, which is all that occurred within him, in an inner, hidden, powerful, unconscious dialogue with the patient, and which is only hinted at. In this context, with patients like Kyle, who bring to the analyst physical sensations and actions for dreaming, the analyst's corporeality, by which I mean his experience of his body and his capacity to connect it to emotion, thereby lending it meaning, has a critical importance. I bring, in a nutshell, references to several psychoanalytic writers about the subject of corporeality in analytic treatment and use a vignette from an analysis to demonstrate the point.     

Psychiatry,psychoanalysis and sociology in the work of H.S. Sullivan

Abstract

Conci, M. Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Sociology in the Work of H.S. Sullivan. Int Forum Psychoanal 1997;6: 127–135. Stockholm, ISSN 0803-706X.

The author tries to illuminate H.S. Sullivan's complex professional identity. With E. Fromm he shared a basic humanistic orientation, and also the project of creating an interdisciplinary new science of man. This is the perspective he inherited from W.A. White, who tried to make psychoanalysis a major ingredient of psychiatry and social science. Sullivan's pioneer work with schizophrenic patients changed the prognosis of these patients, represented the basis of his interpersonal theory of psychiatry and of his collaboration with Chicago social science. Not only is the epistemological sophistication of his definition of psychiatrywhich includes the biological, intra- psychic, cultural and social dimensions-very relevant today, but so is the work he conducted, through the Washington School of Psychiatry (1936) and the journal Psychiatry (1938), with the aim of creating what he called a “psychiatry of peoples”, leading to world peace and greater social justice. In his view, psychoanalysis was more than a profession: it was a fundamental instrument of personal, cultural and social change.     

Editorial

Abstract

This paper will examine the current crisis in psychoanalysis in terms of the profession's decline, the apparent lack of patients, the ongoing debate over what constitutes psychoanalysis versus other therapies, and the lack of clinical focus in those debates. The concept of analytic contact will be introduced, and clinical material is used to showcase this concept as a bridge from the circular political debates to a more meaningful examination of what is psychoanalytic. In addition, case material will explore how patients tend to fight off the establishment of analytic contact in favor of safer, less threatening modes of relating. The author suggests that most patients fight off analytic contact and try to shift the treatment into something less analytic. It is up to the analyst to detect this, interpret it, and notice any countertransference collusion that may occur. Although the state of psychoanalysis as a profession is less than stellar in the eyes of the public, and the profession is apt to sabotage itself with endless debates about what constitutes true analytic work, the end is not necessary near. This paper proposes analytic contact to be the more useful focus of research and productive area of clinical exploration. If the decline of our field is to turn around, it will be on the clinical battlefront, not in terms of the theorizing among disagreeing groups of territorial analysts afraid of losing their political high-ground. The concept of analytic contact assumes that a deep exploration of intrapsychic phenomena, conflicts, and defenses, all within the realm of the transference, is the best clinical method of helping the mentally troubled individual. This genuine chance of change is best administered by a trained psychoanalyst. This simple idea is something the profession has contaminated with its often pointless arguments over frequency, analyzability, couch, and so forth. The clinical material will show that what happens in the room between analyst and patient is what best defines the true psychoanalytic treatment.     

Psychoanalysis and Human Values

Psychoanalysis can contribute quite a lot to the question of values and to a theory of ethics. While the first part of this presentation is focused on the impact psychoanalysis continues to exert on present day ethical theory, the second part discusses Erich Fromm's particular approach to psychoanalysis. Fromm was the first to reformulate in his psychoanalytic approach the idea of an ethic of the virtues. With his theory of character (and of social character) he made values an integral part of psychoanalytic theory. Hence, what matters most morally from a psychoanalytic stance is the quality of character orientation. Despite the fact that - in Fromm's own socio-psychoanalytic approach - man's character is the product of adaptation to the environment, morality for him is dictated by economic and social requirements - whatever common sense may tell us to the contrary. For Fromm there is an intrinsic primary tendency to growth in all human beings. Thus, morally good is whatever furthers the growth of our own powers by which we relate to the outside world and to ourselves in a loving, "sane" and creative way. The last section reflects some implications of Fromm's approach to understanding values as an integral part of psychoanalytic theory, and finally discusses whether the search for truth and human values is as obsolete as postmodern thinking claims.     

Lacan1

Jacques Lacan belonged to the second generation of French psychoanalysts which, thanks to the arrival in France of Rudolf Loewenstein, was the first to benefit from a training analysis of sufficient quality and duration. Lacan left the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953, following a controversy over the short sessions he gave his patients. For Lacan, the anxiety of being absorbed by the object is the principal anxiety from which the anxieties of separation, castration or fragmentation are derived, which may explain why he did not keep his patients for a sufficient length of time. Lacan transformed his difficulty into an advocated technique, which he justified by making a critique of the classical technique. He founded his own international psychoanalytic association, in which selection only occurs when the analyst is already at a very advanced stage in his career (‘the authorization of an analyst can only come from himself’). We are indebted to Lacan for having drawn the attention of analysts to the role of language, and especially of words with a double meaning, in the genesis of interpretation, but his theory of language, founded on the assimilation of psychoanalysis to structural linguistics and anthropology, has collapsed. Many of Lacan's other theoretical contributions, such as the renewed interest in the après‐coup, the place of mirror relations in narcissism, the distinction between what he calls jouissance and the orgasm, or between the ‘real’ and reality, have been gradually integrated by analysts who accept neither his technique nor his laxity in training.     

Elements of analytic style: Bion's clinical seminars

The author finds that the idea of analytic style better describes significant aspects of the way he practices psychoanalysis than does the notion of analytic technique. The latter is comprised to a large extent of principles of practice developed by previous generations of analysts. By contrast, the concept of analytic style, though it presupposes the analyst's thorough knowledge of analytic theory and technique, emphasizes (1) the analyst's use of his unique personality as reflected in his individual ways of thinking, listening, and speaking, his own particular use of metaphor, humor, irony, and so on; (2) the analyst's drawing on his personal experience, for example, as an analyst, an analysand, a parent, a child, a spouse, a teacher, and a student; (3) the analyst's capacity to think in a way that draws on, but is independent of, the ideas of his colleagues, his teachers, his analyst, and his analytic ancestors; and (4) the responsibility of the analyst to invent psychoanalysis freshly for each patient. Close readings of three of Bion's 'Clinical seminars' are presented in order to articulate some of the elements of Bion's analytic style. Bion's style is not presented as a model for others to emulate or, worse yet, imitate; rather, it is described in an effort to help the reader consider from a different vantage point (provided by the concept of analytic style) the way in which he, the reader, practices psychoanalysis.     

Seeking an Analytic Identity

Abstract

Rothstein has stimulated all analysts to rethink how we can better commit ourselves to our analytic work. In this paper I focus on factors in analysts' personalities and experiences in their training and practice that contribute to or distract from establishing an analytic identity.

First, I explore analysts' background and motivation. In admissions to psychoanalytic institutes we look for candidates who can see psychoanalysis as an intellectual puzzle to be solved and an emotional involvement to be experienced. We look for earlv conflicts that the candidate can sublimate in the service of analytic functioning. We assume that the capacity to sublimate is only partial and that analysts in their development continue to recognize conflicts in transference—countertransference reactions.

Second, I give some examples of experiences from analysts' training that stimulate the formation of their analytic identities. These include transient identifications and counter-identifications with the training analyst, supervisor, seminar leader, and favorite analytic authors.

Third, I discuss more external factors that influence the development of analytic identity. These include the climate in training and continuing education at the institute. How much does the institute support its members in immersion in psychoanalysis? Economic factors continue to he an important factor in determining individual choice in this immersion.

Finally, I review studies on the effectiveness of psychoanalysis. Dedicated analysts with considerable experience believe that analysis works despite some limitations. Part of high motivation to continue analytic work includes understanding how analytic results differ from the simpler solutions achieved by nonanalytic therapies.     

Istituto Erich Fromm di Psicoanalisi Neofreudiana: Report on how the Institute has taken up Fromm's psychoanalytic teachings and on the terms in which it conceives Fromm's contribution to psychoanalysis

The Institute intends to contribute to the formation of a Frommian research tradition and to its development in Italy. During his lifetime Fromm carried out a daily clinical work on which he based all his theories. The Institute is interested in collecting this wealth of clinical experience through study and research. On the subject of technique, written and recorded documents consist of valuable notes, which are found in various books, and of posthumous works and recorded seminars and interviews. After a brief historical note on the Institute, the Frommian perspective is presented at length with a view to understanding how psychoanalysis reacts to the radical humanism. Emphasis is placed on the idea that Fromm's thought orientation is not an organised school of psychoanalysis but an open and critical contribution. This view offers an explanation of Fromm's abstention to codify a psychoanalytic technique to be applied in a standardised way. Although this report regards above all the clinical psychoanalysis, we must remember great thinkers such as Meister Eckhart and Spinoza, who inspired Fromm's perspective and gave strength to it.     

Fromm’s understanding of the Buddhist philosophical theory and psychoanalysis: From the phenomenal ego to the authentic being1

Abstract

Erich Fromm was one of the first psychoanalytic thinkers who was genuinely interested in Asian philosophies. In the first part of this article, I will show Fromm’s imago of Buddhism as a radical, nontheistic, and ethical philosophy “without God.” I will argue that Fromm made an important difference between the phenomenal ego and being that proves crucial for his understanding of psychoanalysis and his critique of modern society. I will also explore Fromm’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and show the similarities and differences between them.