‘You were not born here,so you are classless,you are free!’ Social class and cultural complex in analysis

The unconscious impact of differences in culture and social class is discussed from the perspective of an analyst practising in London whose ‘foreign accent’ prevents patients from placing her within the social stratifications by which they feel confined. Because she is seen by them as an analyst from both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the British psycho‐social fabric and cultural complex, this opens a space in the transference that enables fuller exploration of the impact of the British social class system on patients’ experience of themselves and their world. The paper considers this impact as a trans‐generational trauma of living in a society of sharp socio‐economic divisions based on material property. This is illustrated with the example of a patient who, at the point of moving towards the career to which he aspired, was unable to separate a sense of personal identity from the social class he so desperately wanted to leave behind and walk the long avenue of individuation. The dearth of literature on the subject of class is considered, and the paper concludes that not enough attention is given to class identification in training.     

Unconscious fantasy (or phantasy) as clinical concept

A clinical phenomenology of the concept ‘unconscious fantasy’ attempts to describe it from a ‘bottom‐up’ perspective, that is, from the immediate experience of the analyst working in session. Articles of psychoanalytic authors from different persuasions are reviewed, which taken as a whole would shed some light on how the concept of unconscious fantasy takes shape in the analyst's mind during the session with the patient. A clinical phenomenology in three steps is described. Each step is illustrated by clinical material. Current controversies around the concept of unconscious fantasy (or phantasy) are still trapped in the discussion about if and how they are really unconscious. The strategy to describe from a ‘bottom‐up’ perspective the process of how the analyst's mind embraces the idea that an emerging phenomenon in the relationship with the patient can be defined as ‘unconscious fantasy’, allows us to elude the question as to whether or not we believe that unconscious fantasies exist at all, since we are neither required to assert or deny such a prior existence in order to describe the process of elaboration which, in the end, does formulate a fantasy as fantasy.     

Embodying analysis: the body and the therapeutic process

This paper considers the transfer of somatic effects from patient to analyst, which gives rise to embodied countertransference, functioning as an organ of primitive communication. By means of processes of projective identification, the analyst experiences somatic disturbances within himself or herself that are connected to the split‐off complexes of the analysand. The analysty’s own attempt at mind‐body integration ushers the patient towards a progressive understanding and acceptance of his or her inner suffering. Such experiences of psychic contagion between patient and analyst are related to Jung’s ‘psychology of the transference’ and the idea of the ‘subtle body’ as an unconscious shared area. The re‐attribution of meaning to pre‐verbal psychic experiences within the ‘embodied reverie’ of the analyst enables the analytic dyad to reach the archetypal energies and structuring power of the collective unconscious. A detailed case example is presented of how the emergence of the vitalizing connection between the psyche and the soma, severed through traumatic early relations with parents or carers, allows the instinctual impulse of the Self to manifest, thereby reactivating the process of individuation.     

THE REBIRTH OF THE IDOLS: THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND THE NIETZSCHEAN UNCONSCIOUS3

The author explores how psychoanalysis mutates in its passing from the privacies of the session to the public spaces of academia, shifting away from enquiry into unfolding unconscious psychic processes guided by its method, and from the clinically based notions Freud and his diverse followers constructed, here called the ‘Freudian unconscious’. In postmodern intellectual contexts Freud's work fuels a ‘Nietzschean unconscious’, issuing from public lecterns in the protagonistic, self‐creating feats of a ‘psychoanalytic discourse’. The ideology of such mutation ishere traced from Nietzsche on to Heidegger and Kojave, and then to Lacan and Laplanche. It reflects the might of the ‘death of evidences’ and the Romantic penchant for the limit‐experience and the primacy accorded to the creative imagination. Discourse as revelation rests on a ‘paradox of the enunciation’ whereby the subject (author) of the statement is taken to be identical to the subject (matter) of the statement. Banishing the boundaries of illusion and evidence, and of self‐overcoming and insight, academic ‘psychoanalytic discourse’creates a ‘return of the idols’ in ‘theoretical’ narcissistic identification.     

Seeing,mirroring, desiring: The impact of the analyst’s pregnant body on the patient’s body image

The paper explores the impact of the analyst’s pregnant body on the course of two analyses, a young man, and a young woman, specifically focusing on how each patient’s visual perception and affective experience of being with the analyst’s pregnant body affected their own body image and subjective experience of their body. The pre‐verbal or ‘subsymbolic’ material evoked in the analyses contributed to a greater understanding of the patients’ developmental experiences in infancy and adolescence, which had resulted in both carrying a profoundly distorted body image into adulthood. The analyst’s pregnancy offered a therapeutic window in which a shift in the patient’s body image could be initiated. Clinical material is presented in detail with reference to the psychoanalytic literature on the pregnant analyst, and that of the development of the body image, particularly focusing on the role of visual communication and the face. The author proposes a theory of psychic change, drawing on Bucci’s multiple code theory, in which the patients’ unconscious or ‘subsymbolic’ awareness of her pregnancy, which were manifest in their bodily responses, feeling states and dreams, as well as in the analyst s countertransference, could gradually be verbalized and understood within the transference. Thus visual perception, or ‘external seeing’, could gradually become ‘internal seeing’, or insight into unconscious phantasies, leading to a shift in the patients internal object world towards a less persecutory state and more realistic appraisal of their body image.     

Between memory and destiny: Repetition1

This essay focuses mainly on the topic of repetition (agieren)—on its metapsychological, clinical, and technical conceptions. It contains a core problem, that is, the question of the represented, the nonrepresented, and the unrepresentable in the psyche. This problem, in turn, brings to light the dialectical relation between drive and object and its specific articulation with the traumatic. The author attributes special significance to its clinical expression as ‘destiny’. He points out a shift in the theory of the cure from recollection and the unveiling of unconscious desire, to the possibility of understanding ‘pure’ repetition, which would constitute the very essence of the drive. The author highlights three types of repetition, namely, ‘representative’ (oedipal) repetition, the repetition of the ‘nonrepresented’ (narcissistic), which may gain representation, and that of the ‘unrepresentable’ (sensory impressions, ‘lived experiences from primal times,’‘prelinguistic signifiers,’‘ungovernable mnemic traces’). The concept‐the metaphor‐drive embryo brings the author close to the question of the archaic in psychoanalysis, where the repetition in the act would express itself. ‘Another unconscious’ would zealously conceal the entombed (verschüttet) that we are not yet able to describe‐the ‘innermost’ rather than the ‘buried’ (untergegangen) or the ‘annihilated’ (zugrunde gegangen)‐through a mechanism whose way of expression is repetition in the act. With ‘Constructions in analysis’ as its starting point, this paper suggests a different technical implementation from that of the Freudian construction; its main material is what emerges in the present of the transference as the repetition of ‘something’ lacking as history. The memory of the analytic process offers a historical diachrony whereby a temporality freed from repetition and utterly unique might unfold in the analysis. This diachrony would no longer be the historical reconstruction of material truth, but the construction of something new. The author briefly introduces some aspects of his conception of the psyche and of therapeutic work in terms of what he has designated as psychic zones. These zones are associated with various modes of becoming unconscious, and they coexist with different degrees of prevalence according to the psychopathology. Yet each of them will emerge with unique features in different moments of every analysis, determining both the analyst's positions and the very conditions of the analytic field. The zone of the death drive and of repetition is at the center of this essay. ‘Pure’ repetition expresses a time halted by the constant reiteration of an atemporal present. In this case, the ‘royal road’ for the expression of ‘that’ unconscious will be the act. The analyst's presence and his own drive wager will be pivotal to provide a last attempt at binding that will allow the creation of the lost ‘psychic fabric’ and the construction, in a conjectural way, of some sort of ‘history’ that may unravel the entombed (verschüttet) elements that, in these patients' case, come to the surface in the act. The analysand's ‘pure’ repetition touches, resonates with something of the new unconscious of the analyst. All of this leads the author to underline once again the value of the analyst's self‐analysis and reanalysis in searching for connections and especially in differentiating between what belongs to the analyst and what belongs to the analysand. A certain degree of unbinding ensures the preservation of something ungraspable that protects one from the other's appropriation.     

Race and sex in a lifetime

Abstract: The Jungian analysts who participated in the writing of this paper 1 explicitly or implicitly address issues of social and political stasis, retrogression and change via their particular usages of the concept of the transcendent function. Singer proposes that the transcendent function is a term that is usually applied to individuals in whom symbolic material appears that suggests the reconciling of opposites, leading to psycho‐spiritual growth. He also looks at the notion of the transcendent function as it can appear in a similar way in the collective psyche. In addition, he gives attention to the opposite phenomenon—what might be called the descendent function—as it appears in the collective psyche and its leadership, wherein symbolic material can create the division of groups of people into opposites, mobilizing destructive rather than transformative experience. Meador states that Jung designated the mediating process of assimilating unconscious images and ideas into consciousness as the transcendent function. Just as this synthesizing process can produce insight in the individual, it can also be applied to changes in collective society. Embedded collective assumptions tend to shift when opposites collide, as they did, for example, in the turmoils of the 1960s. Her contribution focuses on the recent revolution in racial and sexual attitudes as the product of a collective struggle between certain ingrained social mores from the past and conflicting new points of view. Samuels’ conclusion is that the concept of the transcendent function has little value with respect to political problems. His contribution focuses on: (i) The limitations of using ideas (such as the transcendent function) derived from analysis with individuals in furtherance of an understanding of social and political phenomena. (ii) The specific problem of a lack of credible psycho‐political models for social progress and regress—he argues that the transcendent function is not useful in this regard. (iii) The question of political aggression, violence and conflict in society is explored from the standpoint of the transcendent function so as to investigate its possible role in the management of political conflict. Samuels severely criticizes what he terms ‘triangulation’ and ‘hyper‐reflection’ on the part of analysts who engage with political debates and issues. (iv) Leadership is examined from the standpoint of the transcendent function which, again, does not seem pertinent. Rather, new discoveries in family psychology about the role of the father have greater possibilities as a basis for new thinking about leadership.     

‘SEEKE TRUE RELIGION. OH,WHERE?’

We precipitately express opinions about religion without reflecting critically on our conception of it, and may blame it for conduct that the religious traditions themselves judge unbecoming. A distinction can be drawn between the raw, natural self of the untrained person and the well‐tempered demeanour of a spiritually developed person. Such a distinction drives the appropriation of religious beliefs and can survive their demise. ‘Religious belief’ is not to be conflated with Abrahamic notions of ‘belief in God’ and ‘faith’. There are other versions of transcendence and other psycho‐dramas. One possible form of transcendence is available within the moral life of human beings.     

On Minimizing Guessing Effects on Multiple‐Choice Items: Superiority of a two solutions and three distractors item format to a one solution and five distractors item format

Multiple‐choice response formats are troublesome, as an item is often scored as solved simply because the examinee may be lucky at guessing the correct option. Instead of pertinent Item Response Theory models, which take guessing effects into account, this paper considers a psycho‐technological approach to re‐conceptualizing multiple‐choice response formats. The free‐response format is compared with two different multiple‐choice formats: a traditional format with a single correct response option and five distractors (‘1 of 6’), and another with five response options, three of them being distractors and two of them being correct (‘2 of 5’). For the latter format, an item is scored as mastered only if both correct response options and none of the distractors are marked. After the exclusion of a few items, the Rasch model analyses revealed appropriate fit for 188 items altogether. The resulting item‐difficulty parameters were used for comparison. The multiple‐choice format ‘1 of 6’ differs significantly from the multiple‐choice format ‘2 of 5’, while the latter does not differ significantly from the free‐response format. The lower difficulty of items ‘1 of 6’ suggests guessing effects.     

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.     

AFFECT IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY: DISCUSSION OF ANDRÉ GREEN'S “ON DISCRIMINATING AND NOT DISCRIMINATING BETWEEN AFFECT AND REPRESENTATION”1

André Green's 1999 programmatic essay on affect and representation, an attempt to extend Freud's model of the neuroses (where affect and representation have different vicissitudes) to non‐neurotic cases is submitted to critical reading. Green wishes to restore the importance of representation; to use the second topographical theory, where id, psychical impulse and object‐cathexis replace the unconscious and the ideational representation in order to conceptualise borderline disturbance, and to show how ultimately the ‘non‐discrimination’ affect‐representation obtains in non‐neurotic cases as well. The author, interested in the question posed in Green's essay as to what we have to sell our borderline patients, addresses the various reasons why this project fails. Among the problematic points are the paradox of Green's model of unconscious affect, that does not allow the analyst to generate meaning with borderline patients, the view of ‘representation’ as replacing presence and perception of the object that does not allow the analyst to be a nonabsent object, and the inabilty to conceptualise affect‐representatives and to work out the definition of affect as ‘the anticipation of a meeting with the other's body’ which does not allow the analyst to function as an ‘anticipatory object’ or ‘an object of affect’.     

Bearing the unbearable: ancestral transmission through dreams and moving metaphors in the analtyic field

Abstract: This paper explores how untold and unresolved intergenerational trauma may be transmitted through unconscious channels of communication, manifesting in the dreams of descendants. Unwitting carriers for that which was too horrific for their ancestors to bear, descendants may enter analysis through an unconscious need to uncover past secrets, piece together ancestral histories before the keys to comprehending their terrible inheritance die with their forebears. They seek the relational containment of the analytic relationship to provide psychological conditions to bear the unbearable, know the unknowable, speak the unspeakable and redeem the unredeemable. In the case of ‘Rachael’, initial dreams gave rise to what Hobson (1984) called ‘moving metaphors of self’ in the analytic field. Dream imagery, projective and introjective processes in the transference‐countertransference dynamics gradually revealed an unknown ancestral history. I clarify the back and forth process from dream to waking dream thoughts to moving metaphors and differentiate the moving metaphor from a living symbol. I argue that the containment of the analytic relationship nested within the security of the analytic space is a necessary precondition for such healing processes to occur.     

‘Translation’ and ‘transformation’ in the analytic situation: Freud – Bion – Laplanche

Following a short introduction to the core theses of Jean Laplanche’s theory of a ‘general seduction’ the author presents the resultant clinical position of the analyst. In the same way that an adult sends ‘enigmatic messages’ to the child, it is the analyst’s task to reopen this primal situation so that the patient can find new ‘translations’ for these messages. Laplanche distinguishes between the function of the analytic frame – which represents and supports attachment – and the ‘sexual’– which is the repressed and constitutes the unconscious. Only the focus on this unconscious facilitates the deconstruction of ‘incorrect’ translations. Accordingly, the analyst, says Laplanche, should not take part in construction – this is a self‐construction of the patient – but only in reconstruction. The author compares this clinical model with Freud’s notions and the ‘transformation processes’ through the alpha function as described by Bion. She illustrates Laplanche’s model and the interpretation strategy with case material.     

Mainstream body‐character breach films and subjectivization

The authors analyze a unique cinematic corpus – ‘body‐character breach films’ (one character, initially played by a certain actor, occupies the body of another character) – demonstrating Lacan's notion of traversing the fantasy, both on the level of the films’ diegesis and that of spectatorship. Breaching the alliance between actors and their characters perturbs the viewer's fantasy of wholeness enabled by this very alliance. Consequently, a change in subject/spectatorial position in relation to the lack in the Other is induced, enhanced through the visualization of various scenarios of unconscious fantasies (mostly incest). These are meant to unsettle the spectator into an awareness of how a conscious fantasy conceals another unconscious fundamental fantasy, thereby encouraging a change in spectatorial position (from ‘perverse’/fetishistic to ‘neurotic’). Conflating this change with Lacan's notion of traversing the fantasy, the authors contend that mainstream cinema has the capacity to induce a process of subjectivization (assuming responsibility for one's own desire). This process is contingent on four conditions: identification with the protagonist's fantasy to conceal the lack in the Other; dissolution of this fantasy, initiated by the body‐character breach; rhetorical strategies (the coding of unconscious scenarios cinematically); and an ethical dimension (encouraging the subject/spectator to follow her/his desire).     

Emotional Communication and the Unconscious in the Analytic Setting

ABSTRACT

One type of unconscious communication is conceptualized as a form of emotional communication, the channel of communication that conveys information about a person’s emotional state through the nonsymbolic expression of feelings and is experienced as feeling in the receiver. Some of the analyst’s feelings are attuned responses to the patient’s unconscious communications; others are disjunctive and related only to the analyst’s unconscious. Attuned feelings can be identified by their congruence—similarities, consistencies, and analogies—with the patient’s verbal material, which reveals the meaning that the analyst’s feeling has within the patient’s subjectivity. Attuned feelings also have a meaning within the analyst’s subjectivity. Two cases are discussed, one in which the analyst experiences the patient’s unconscious communication within the symbolism of one of her own childhood memories. The other illustrates the risk of confusing disjunctive feelings emanating from the analyst’s own unconscious with unconscious communication from the patient.     

CHARACTER,PSYCHOANALYTIC IDENTIFICATION,AND NUMERICAL IDENTITY

Identification figures prominently in moral psychological explanations. I argue that in identification the subject has an ‘identity‐thought’, which is a thought about her numerical identity with the figure she identifies with. In Freud's psychoanalytic psychology character is founded on unconscious identification with parental figures. Moral philosophers have drawn on psychoanalysis to explain how undesirable or disadvantageous character dispositions are resistant to insight through being unconscious. According to Richard Wollheim's analysis of Freud's theory, identification is the subject's disposition to imagine, unconsciously, her bodily merging with the figure she identifies with. I argue that this explanation of identification is not adequate. Human character is held to be capable of change when self‐reflection brings unconscious identifications to conscious self‐knowledge. I argue that for self‐knowledge these identifications must be an intelligible part of the subject's self‐conception, and that Wollheim's ‘merging phantasy’ is not intelligible to the subject in this way. By contrast, the subject's thought that she is numerically identical to the figure she identifies with does provide an intelligible starting‐point for reflecting on this identification. This psychoanalytic account provides a clear conception of identification with which to investigate puzzle cases in the moral psychology of character.     

Archetypes and Spirits: A Jungian Analysis of Puerto Rican Espiritismo

In this paper a comparison is made between Jung's approach to healing with a traditional healing system practised in Puerto Rico, called ‘Espiritismo’. Jungian psychology and ‘Espiritismo’ have several strong similarities in their conception of the therapeutic process, similarities which suggest that the healing process itself has generic properties which can be found in several therapeutic systems. In addition, by analysing Jung's development as a healer, it is possible to draw parallels between his development as a psychotherapist and the process of becoming a spiritist healer. In both healing systems, a transpersonal dimension is recognized as an integral element in the healing process. In ‘Espiritismo’, the suffering individual has to confront the spirit world; in analytical psychotherapy the patient has to confront the collective unconscious. This parallel was explicitly recognized by Jung in his autobiography when he compared the collective unconscious with the land of the dead. For Jung, knowledge of the figures of the unconscious enormously facilitates the individuation process; in ‘Espiritismo’ it is necessary to know the spirit world and to establish a relationship with the spirits. In Jungian psychology, healing is a process of ‘exorcizing’ some types of complexes or integrating others to consciousness. On the other hand, spiritist healers ‘exorcize’ ignorant spirits in order to heal a client or help him/her to identify spirit guides. In both systems, healing is essentially a process of establishing a dialogue with a transpersonal dimension (archetypes or spirits). Healing in ‘Espiritismo’ and Jungian psychology is a process of transcending the limited perspective of the ego (the ‘material world’) in order to experience a much broader reality (spiritual world or collective unconscious). Both systems emphasize the need to work with resources beyond the boundaries of the ego and to connect with forces that belong to a different reality.     

Opening to the otherwise: The discipline of listening and the necessity of free‐association for psychoanalytic praxis

It is argued that only free‐association methodically opens the discourse of self‐consciousness (the representations available to reflective awareness) to the voicing of the repressed. The method is key to Freud's originality and the sine qua non of any genuinely psychoanalytic process. Clinical procedures which do not prioritize a steadfast and ongoing commitment to this method (instead emphasizing either interpretative formulations, as decisive acts that appear to fix and finalize the meaning of a particular lived experience, or the vicissitudes of transference‐countertransference in the immediate treatment situation) all too readily entrap the treatment, limiting its capacity to divulge the power of unconscious processes. Influenced by Laplanche, Freud's 1920 principles of lifefulness and deathfulness (the binding and unbinding of psychic energy in representations) facilitate an understanding of the unique significance of free‐associative discourse in opening the representational textuality of self‐consciousness to the voicing of that which is otherwise than representationality and reason. The ‘otherwise’ is intimated as the returning force of the repressed, as the ‘unfathomable navel’ of ‘thing‐presentations,’ experienced and expressed within the text of awareness, yet not translatable into the law and order of its logical and rhetorical reflections. Free‐associative discourse thus affects self‐consciousness in a way that is radically different from other creative procedures (‘psychosynthetic’ or integratively interpretive). In this respect, the status of free‐associative praxis as necessary for a genuinely psychoanalytic process is justified.     

Unconscious phantasy: Some historical and conceptual dimensions

This paper seeks firstly to grasp both conceptually and historically the different phenomenologies that are captured by the term ‘Unconscious Phantasy’. The term is shown to refer to a number of distinct though overlapping conceptual domains. These include: phantasy as scene, phantasy as representation of drive, phantasy as representation of wish as its fulfilment, phantasy as split off activity of the mind functioning under the aegis of the pleasure principle; phantasy as representation of the minds own activities (which Wollheim calls’ the way “the mind represents its own activities to itself’’). Lastly unconscious phantasy is understood as being the basic foundation of all mental life, including drives, impulses, all anxiety situations and defences. Having mapped out this territory through following the development of the concept in the work of Freud and Klein, the author draws on the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim who, the author contends, has made a fundamental contribution to our conceptual understanding of unconscious phantasy. In the last section of the paper, the author draws a distinction between what he terms ‘objects’ (namely psychic objects) and what he terms ‘facts’. It is suggested that this distinction, though implicit in much of our work, benefits from being made explicit and that in so doing an important dimension of analytic work is illuminated. We aim to help the patient to discover what he is like, to understand the ways in which he conceives and misconceives himself, to unravel the fact‐ness of himself and his world from its ‘object qualities’, to differentiate between unconscious phantasy and reality.