Teaching Psychiatric Patients: A Psychoanalytic Study

This paper attempts to describe some of the challenges of teaching psychiatric patients within a hospital environment. It uses post-Kleinian ideas to look at the unconscious processes at work within the learning/teaching dynamic and observes the psychotic mind's unique approach to learning. The central hypothesis of the paper is that psychoanalytic reflection of educational processes within a psychiatric institution is of clear benefit to both teacher and learner, and can also forestall several of the more problematic or even harmful outcomes of the increasing trend to ‘educate’ the patient.     

Womanhood as Experienced in Childbirth: Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Body

Evaluating data from interviews with 30 first-time mothers predelivery and postdelivery reveals three pertinent themes: fear of bodily damage, immense pride and awe about producing a baby, and circumscribed terms of true womanhood. Data demonstrate an evolving pressure on some women to deliver vaginally without medical intervention or pain medication and to nurse a baby exclusively without formula as a marker of womanhood. Psychoanalytic theorists have explored the unique trajectory of growth from girlhood to womanhood wrestling with the unconscious meanings of pregnancy and motherhood. Not enough focus has been placed on the unconscious meanings of actual childbirth itself. Qualitative data illustrate the current social pressure on women to adhere to an unspoken norm regarding womanhood. This article examines contemporary issues of awe, fear, and performance anxiety reported by childbearing women and evidences a need to augment our understanding of female psychosexual development around unconscious tasks unique to giving birth.     

Adult Attachment Interview and Psychoanalytic Perspective: A Single Case Study

In this single case study we present a female patient diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder and a borderline organization. The interplay between attachment and psychoanalytic perspective will be focused. The analyst describes his impressions of the initial interview with the patient and essential steps during treatment. The patient was interviewed with the Adult Attachment Interview and classified as “insecure preoccupied” with an “unresolved state of mind” concerning loss and abuse. The analyst was asked to comment the AAI's essential characteristics of this patient. We discuss converging and diverging aspects of clinical and attachment interpretation in this single case.     

Voice of the Analyst: The Body/Mind Dialectic Within the Psychoanalytic Subject: Finding the Analyst's Voice

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Thinking Developmentally: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective

This article considers how using a multifaceted developmental framework can help inform the analyst’s clinical choices throughout the course of treatment. The developmental pathway toward achieving a balance between a stable sense of autonomy and individuality and a capacity for relatedness and mutuality is discussed. The building blocks of development—basic trust, the self-other boundary, object constancy, and self-esteem—are outlined, along with ways to clinically assess developmental levels. Clinical material is presented to help illustrate how a sensitivity to the array of developmental data can help the analyst flexibly adapt to the patient’s changing needs and capacities.     

Bullying at Work: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

The paper traces aspects of the history and development of work in this area. It places workplace bullying on a continuum which straddles workplace homicide, violence at work, sexual harassment and the harnessing of the aggressive instincts into effective work. Thought is given to the question of which behaviours should be considered to constitute workplace bullying. A recent example of bullying in restaurant kitchens is examined in more detail. The paper concludes by looking at issues around the responsibility of individuals and organizations to understand and manage bullying at work. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Experience of the Holy: A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis

The title of this paper, The Experience of the Holy is a direct reference to Rudolf Otto's book Das Heilige. The paper begins with Otto because he lays out many of the important issues involved in a psychological investigation of the experience of the holy, especially the question of whether the sacred is a unique object of experience, or a characteristic of our experience of ordinary objects. The paper then discusses three contemporary relational psychoanalysts (D.W. Winnicott, Hans Loewald, and Christopher Bollas), and the ways in which their theorizing illuminates the psychology of the sacred.     

Intersubjective-Systems Theory: A Phenomenological-Contextualist Psychoanalytic Perspective

In this article I outline the essentials of my phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective as it has been applied to a wide range of clinical phenomena, including development and pathogenesis, transference and resistance, forms of unconsciousness, emotional trauma, and therapeutic change. I characterize the therapeutic comportment entailed by these formulations as a kind of emotional dwelling.     

Psychoanalytic Training: The Absence of Thirdness: A Review of Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education by Emanuel Berman

This paper suggests that the concept of “thirdness” has been essential in the evolution of our thinking about the complexity of the clinical process in psychoanalysis. However, the way psychoanalysis has been, and in most places continues to be, taught and organized remains mired in older, binary, and concrete dichotomies—as Emanuel Berman''s recent volume on the subject demonstrates—an “absence of thirdness” that seems to reinforce and enshrine the marginalization of psychoanalysis from the broad quest for the advancement of human knowledge in the western tradition. In the course of developing these ideas, the paper discusses other aspects of Berman's stimulating and, in some respects, controversial, work.     

A Mixed Bag: The Realities of Psychoanalytic Practice

For a variety of reasons, psychoanalytic training is done in somewhat of a vacuum. It teaches a theory and a way of practicing that does not always translate well to day-to-day private practice work. The clinical realities of psychoanalytic practice prove the psychoanalytic method to be one that provides help to a wider audience than classical psychoanalytic training programs might suggest. The psychoanalytic approach offers the analyst many special opportunities to work with and help a wide variety of patients. Analysts who accept both the limitations as well as the wide application and broad benefits of the psychoanalytic approach may have a more fulfilling experience than their training experiences might foster. At the same time, the analyst's level of therapeutic skill, the patient's diagnosis, and many multiple external factors create different limitations in the practice and outcome of psychoanalytic work. Extensive case material is used to show the broad range of patients who are helped by the psychoanalytic method. The clinical material also shows the less than perfect, but often good enough outcomes of these difficult cases with often severely disturbed patients.     

Revisiting the Psychoanalytic Object: Introduction

Senior analysts from different theoretical orientations are invited to express their conceptions of the nature of the psychoanalytic object and its place in their clinical approaches. I provide the rationale for this updated survey on the object, drawing on recent procedural notions of its formation, and on the broader range of patients now seeking help whose difficulties foreground use of the analyst-as-object. Certain common themes among the writers emerge, including concern with the dialectic of the separability and unity of subject and object. Most strongly, the object’s personalized meaning for each writer, as for all analysts, confirms its robustness and generativity as a psychoanalytic concept and entity.     

A Psychoanalytic Contribution to Psychic Vampirism: A Case Vignette

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

身体姿势的心理效应：基于具身视角

具身视角下，姿势可以对心理产生影响。梳理了广受关注的“直立”和“蜷曲”、“扩张”和“收缩”、“水平”和“垂直”等姿势的效应研究成果，并对神经肌肉反馈理论、自我知觉理论、情境认知理论等姿势效应的内在机制进行总结和评价。指出在实验范式、姿势控制、效应稳定性以及深层机制探析等方面存在的局限和未来方向，认为姿势效应的神经机制、时程变化、个体差异及姿势的心理调节功能等将会成为研究热点。