Projective identification and the psychoanalytic dialogue

A survey of several psychoanalytic conceptions of projective identification is followed by a discussion, with case illustrations, of its communicative and defensive function. In this context, special attention is paid to the use of language as an instrument for the destruction of the object--in this case, the analyst--who is simultaneously yearned for and experienced as a threat.     

From monologue to dialogue: a transition in psychoanalytic practice

During the latter part of the twentieth century, psychoanalysts of various stripes espoused the move from free association and neutrality to various forms of intersubjectivity and dialogue. This shift is studied from the vantage point of conversational rules in terms of the shift from monologue to dialogue, using the concepts of semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. Viewing the data of analysis in this manner offers a means of evaluating the contributions of both monologue and dialogue to our understanding of the conduct of an analysis and the kind of information that can be expected to emerge. Exclusive devotion to either stance, it is argued, renders less understanding than would emerge from a balanced use of both.     

From dyad to dialogue: language and the early relationship in American psychoanalytic theory

The centrality of language for a Freudian theory of mind and treatment has not been retained by most post-Freudian theorists. American writers have turned to academic developmental research on mother-child interactions to depict the preoedipal period as preverbal, presymbolic, nonconscious. This view presents the early relationship as developing in linear stages in which visual observational data (e.g., contingent behavior action patterns between two persons) are privileged over aural-oral data of communicational exchanges. An alternative view is presented that redefines the earliest relationship in terms of communicational exchanges, mediation, and dialogue. The claim is that understanding the nature of mediated communication keeps language central to psychoanalysis and reestablishes an intrapsychic dimension in the concept of relationship that is lost when relationship is reduced to behavioral patterns.     

The psychoanalytic process

Analysts differ in how they conceptualize the psychoanalytic process, according to their understanding of the psychoanalytic theory of mental functioning in general and the nature of pathogenesis in particular. Emphasizing that psychoanalysis is a psychology of mental conflict, the authors see the psychoanalytic process in terms of the dynamic interplay between the manifestations of the patient's unconscious and the analyst's interventions. What analysts communicate to analysands serves to destabilize the equilibrium of forces within the mind, leading to the analysands' growing understanding of the nature of their conflicts and how they deal with them. Psychoanalytic process, accordingly, cannot be distinguished or separated from psychoanalytic technique.     

The judicial dialogue

A variety of theoretical positions are emerging to explain the judicial process from such perspectives as hermeneutics, semiotics, critical theory and argumentation/rhetoric. They ask such questions as these: What is the source of judicial authority? How do judges arrive at their decisions? By what logic are decisions to be tested? In this essay I argue that a focus on decisions and their justifications alone masks the broader process in which judges, along with all the other relevant groups, engage in a continuing and evolving dialogue to structure their normative universe through the complementary processes of dialectic and rhetoric. Contemporary concepts of argumentation can serve to analyze this process critically.