Doing it again: Obsessions

This paper gives three readings of psychoanalysis based on differing understandings of the repetition compulsion as instanced in the case of Freud's rat man. the first reading is an interpretation of Freud's official analytic theory and practice and can be called the ordinary or naive reading. the second reading brackets the natural standpoint assumed by the first reading, hence requiring scare quotes over the word ‘psychoanalysis'. the second reading is constructed from the perspective of the structuralist and quasi-existential orientation of Lacan. the third and final reading is a sketch of the rat man as if seen through the anasemic lens of Nicolas Abraham. the title of this paper - ‘Doing it again' - refers to our ‘numbers' or symptoms, i.e. the compulsive and repetitive ways in which we relate to others and the potential of each of these psychoanalytic approaches to enable us to catch ourselves at it.     

Women's hairstyle and men's behavior: A field experiment

Little research has examined the effect of women's hairstyles on people's behavior. In a field study, male and female passersby, walking alone in the street, were observed while walking behind a female‐confederate who dropped a glove and apparently was unaware of her loss. The confederate had long dark hair arranged in three different hairstyles: one with her hair falling naturally on her shoulders and her back, one with her hair tied in a ponytail, and one with her hair twisted in a bun. Results reported that the hairstyle had no effect on female passersby's helping behavior. However, it was found that the hairstyle influenced male passersby with men helping the confederate more readily when her hair fell naturally on her neck, shoulders and upper back.     

A behavioural interpretation of obsessive-compulsive neurosis

Criticism by family and friends is a powerful means of eliminating socially undesirable habits, but it is liable to fail if the action in question is subject to undelayed reinforcement. The agent then claims that he is under “compulsion” to act as he does. The effect of the criticism is to add a sympathetic component to the compulsive behaviour, and if the agent admits the justice of the criticism, the emotion associated with this sympathetic response is “guilt”. The appropriate treatment is to subject the compulsive habit to negative reinforcement. Successful treatment of a case of trichopilomania is described. The patient, a woman of 40, had been plucking out her eyebrows compulsively for a period of 31 years. She was instructed to arrest at its commencement each movement of her hand to her forehead for the purpose of plucking. Cure was essentially complete in ten days. Three months later the eyebrows were fully grown and, contrary to deductions from psychoanalytic theory, no substitute symptoms had developed. A prediction, drawn from the author's behavioural theory of perception, that an itch in the brows that had always preceded plucking would disappear with the extinction of the compulsive habit, was confirmed.     

SIMONE WEIL'S SPIRITUAL CRITIQUE OF MODERN SCIENCE: AN HISTORICAL‐CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

Simone Weil is widely recognized today as one of the profound religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet while her interpretation of natural science is critical to Weil's overall understanding of religious faith, her writings on science have received little attention compared with her more overtly theological writings. The present essay, which builds on Vance Morgan's Weaving the World: Simone Weil on Science, Necessity, and Love (2005), critically examines Weil's interpretation of the history of science. Weil believed that mathematical science, for the ancient Pythagoreans a mystical expression of the love of God, had in the modern period degenerated into a kind of reification of method that confuses the means of representing nature with nature itself. Beginning with classical (Newtonian) science's representation of nature as a machine, and even more so with the subsequent assimilation of symbolic algebra as the principal language of mathematical physics, modern science according to Weil trades genuine insight into the order of the world for symbolic manipulation yielding mere predictive success and technological domination of nature. I show that Weil's expressed desire to revive a Pythagorean scientific approach, inspired by the “mysterious complicity” in nature between brute necessity and love, must be recast in view of the intrinsically symbolic character of modern mathematical science. I argue further that a genuinely mystical attitude toward nature is nascent within symbolic mathematical science itself.     

Reducing Trichotillomania in a Three-Year-Old Girl

The frequent hair pulling by a three-year-old girl was targeted in the current study. After a baseline period, the child's parents instituted a treatment program which included hugs and praise for periods of not pulling, a loud “No,” for movements toward her hair, and “No,” with holding her arms to her side for 15-20 seconds for pulling. Immediate reductions in hair pulling were obtained. A delayed consequences procedure was instituted in order to reduce hair pulling that did not occur in the parent's presence. Follow-up indicates maintenance f reduced hair pulling for 12 months following the completion of treatment.     

Change,Vulnerability, Fear,and Taking Risks–An Interview with Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

The author addresses the mythic characters of Ulysses and Penelope as archetypes for herself. She reviews divergent attitudes, beliefs and aspirations of her life by detailing an internal conflict between her identification with Ulysses1 adventuresomeness and her reluctant realization that Penelope can also represent her, however much she rejected her for seeming dull and repetitve

In this process the author notes how she constricted her own creativity when she took on uncritically the patriarchal beliefs about the roles of wives and mothers. Nevertheless she wonders whether present-day women's liberation from archaic notions about women inadvertently sacrifices the optimal development of children because of the rigid demands of the work-place.

Finally she experiences the symbolic reunion of Penelope's and Ulysses' different images within herself, and considers how what each represents can have renewed meaning for her as she moves towards the end of her life.     

The relationship of mother–child interaction and the child's development of symbolic play

The extent to which the mother–child interactive relationship either promotes or limits a child's ability to see options or choices in the environment was investigated. It was predicted that this quality of interaction provided primarily by the mother would relate to the child's cognitive development as reflected in his or her level of symbolic play. The level and frequency of symbolic and nonsymbolic play in 30 children, ages 12 to 47 months, were coded and mothers' options‐promoting and options‐limiting behaviors were identified. Children, across this range of ages, whose mothers created an options‐promoting social context were observed engaging in more symbolic play. Nonsymbolic play, however, was not found to be significantly influenced by the mother's interactive style. A child's symbolic play marks a dynamic developmental achievement for the child, and appears to be related to the social context created by the mother's interactive style. ©2003 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Crossing Boundaries: Commentary on Paper by Sarah Hill

This commentary focuses on two aspects of Hill's presentation. First, it addresses the critical role of repetition compulsion in carrying into analytic enactments the patient's early, unsymbolized traumas. This discussion addresses, furthermore, Hill's reference to her early, preverbal, experience with an African nanny, as this resonated with some of the author's personal experiences. It is suggested that, particularly in American culture, the identities of white children who experience extended care by black nannies must be regarded as multiply determined, race being a critical determinant. How this aspect of white identity is negotiated in a culture bounded by established racial dichotomies is regarded as critical to analytic inquiry, regardless of the racial makeup of the analytic dyad.     

Validation of Self-Report Impairment Measures for Section III Obsessive–Compulsive and Avoidant Personality Disorders

This study examined the validity of newly developed disorder-specific impairment scales (IS), modeled on the Level of Personality Functioning Scale, for obsessive–compulsive (OCPD) and avoidant (AvPD) personality disorders. The IS focused on content validity (items directly reflected the disorder-specific impairments listed in DSM-5 Section III) and severity of impairment. A community sample of 313 adults completed personality inventories indexing the DSM-5 Sections II and III diagnostic criteria for OCPD and AvPD, as well as measures of impairment in the domains of self- and interpersonal functioning. Results indicated that both impairment measures (for AvPD in particular) showed promise in their ability to measure disorder-specific impairment, demonstrating convergent validity with their respective Section II counterparts and discriminant validity with their noncorresponding Section II disorder and with each other. The pattern of relationships between scores on the IS and scores on external measures of personality functioning, however, did not indicate that it is useful to maintain a distinction between impairment in the self- and interpersonal domains, at least for AvPD and OCPD.     

Response to “Poison Cookies” Discussions

This is a response to the discussions of the case presented by this author. Responding to the discussions has allowed the author to pull together her own ideas about the case as well as about the work we do. The author sees Sheldon (Shelly) Bach's view of sadomasochism as a particular type of object relationship as informing her own point of view. Next comes a discussion centering on Steven (Steve) H. Knoblauch's emphasizing the importance of the internal symbolic world of the patient. The author makes the point that understanding the level of differentiation of the internal objects in the patient's representational world is important in thinking about the types and timing of interventions the analyst makes; for example, those which Mary-Joan Gerson describes in her comments. Finally, the author addresses Sue Grand's response, especially her emphasis on the importance of siblings in our patients’ histories and the resulting sibling transferences to the analyst.     

What Happens When Someone Acts Compulsively?

The standard philosophical view is that compulsive behaviors are caused by “irresistible” desires. Gary Watson famously argued that this view conflates compulsion with weakness of the will, and proposed differentiating weakness and compulsion by appealing to the normal strength-of-will of members of the community. This extrinsic distinction leaves no room for phenomenological differences between weakness and compulsion. Evidence from clinical psychology shows, however, that compulsion is associated with certain phenomenological features that are absent in cases of weakness. I therefore reject the irresistible desire account. Instead, I propose that psychological compulsions “wear down” an individual’s normal faculty of self-control, i.e., the will. The recurrent inhibition of the behavior by the will overexerts this faculty, causing the psychological stress noted by psychologists. This stress raises the cost of resistance until it is unbearable. The subject abandons resistance and therefore performs the behavior.     

Antigone,Empire, and the Legacy of Oedipus: Thinking African Decolonization through the Rearticulation of Kinship Rules

In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought (Butler 2000). In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oy?wùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oy?wùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world.     

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.     

Impediments to the development of attachment

The function of the mother's reverie, as described by Bion, is viewed as a psychological parallel, following birth, to the physical function of the placenta.

Clinical material from psychotherapy with a 3 1/2-year-old girl illustrates that, as long as she maintained the delusion of being attached to her mother's body by a physical placenta, she was hindered from learning to experience herself as a separate individual and from developing normal feelings of attachment and grief over loss.

She was referred soon after her parents' separation when she showed a lack of reaction to the loss of her father. The material suggests that at the time of separation from her father she regressed to an earlier stage where there had already been a failure to work through infantile separation and individuation from her mother

The material reveals stages of her emergence from an illusory state of union, into one in which she could increasingly tolerate her separate existence. There followed an enrichment of her psychological means of communication through the use of imagination and symbolic play. She also became more receptive to her therapist's communications and could increasingly use psychological support to share and face inner pain.     

The Therapist,the Patient,and the Therapeutic Setting: Mutual Construction of the Setting as a Therapeutic Factor

The author examines several types of therapeutic action intrinsic to Davies's clinical work. Among these actions was Davies's eventual and careful willingness to ask her patient to hold affective states that the patient had previously been unable to hold; to discover a way to speak to her patient about her own struggles with the patient while risking, and actually knowing, that, inevitably, some of the patient's discovery of what the analyst feels will resonate with painful past experience; to create another countertransference space in which Davies found a way to become a different kind of bad or disappointing object to the patient than the patient's earlier disappointment with parental figures, though one that proved much more helpful and bearable than her previous experience; and eventually, though implicitly, to accept the aggressive and harsh ways in which the patient was already experiencing newness in the context of repetitive disappointment. In each of these types of action, the opportunity for mourning figures prominently.     

The Paradise Lost? Mythological Aspects of Modern Sport

Sport, in modern times, finds its roots in the mythological sources of ancient Greece, where it was born as a sacred game to be performed in the honour of Zeus in Olympia or of other gods elsewhere during the Panhellenic games. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and until the 1970s sport was mythogenic (Barthes 1975). But is sport still mythogenic in the twenty-first century? Our analysis attempts to answer two questions: (i) what has been the influence of doping and sponsorship on contemporary sport; and (ii) how (if at all) have both influenced the symbolic contemporary forms of the sportsman/woman myth. We argue that modern sport has become increasingly dependent upon the industrial and entertainment worlds, thus losing along the way the imprinting of symbolic innocence that the myth conferred in the recent past. Moreover, the contemporary perception of sportsmen/women by the general public has changed in so far as it concerns the symbolic aspect of the performer. If their function as social link appears to be intact, sportsmen seem to have lost the classical Olympic symbolism that was generally accepted among spectators until a few decades ago. It does not appear that the mythical aura of sport has been lost but rather the symbols that it has previously carried. Popular admiration is nowadays more concentrated on the sportsman's capacity to acquire fame and fortune by means that appear to be in everybody's reach, including doping. Consequently, the commoner identifies him/her self with the sportsman/woman but does not see him/her any longer as a hero carrying classical moral values.     

Prototype awareness enhancing and monitoring device for trichotillomania

Trichotillomania is an impairing condition that involves repetitive hair pulling. Habit reversal therapy is helpful for many persons with this disorder. Unfortunately, habit reversal therapy is not helpful for everyone and maintenance of gains is often problematic. Successful habit reversal therapy requires the individual to be aware of hair pulling and handling. Unfortunately, most people with trichotillomania report that much of their plucking occurs outside of awareness. Monitoring of trichotillomania behaviors is also problematic. The present project involved a pilot study of a prototype awareness enhancing and monitoring device aimed at increasing the effectiveness of habit reversal therapy. The device included a watch, bracelet, magnetic necklace, and a pager that was hard-wired for remote activation of a vibrating alert when hair pulling behaviors occurred. Following structured diagnostic assessment, three female participants were randomly assigned to be initially observed for varied lengths of time without the device followed by observation with the device in place. The results indicated a marked reduction in trichotillomania behaviors when the device was in place. Semi-structured interviews revealed that the device was very effective in enhancing awareness and monitoring of trichotillomania related behaviors and enthusiastic acceptance of the device was provided by all participants.     

Subjected Subjects? On Judith Butler's Paradox of Interpellation

Judith Butler's theory of the constitution of subjectivity conceptualizes the subject as a performative materialization of its social environment. In her theory Butler utilizes Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, and she critiques the constitutive paradoxes to which its tautological framing leads. Although there is no pre‐existing subject, as it is constituted in the turn to the interpellative hail, Butler nonetheless theorizes a guilt and compulsion acting on an “individual” that compels his or her turn to answer the hail. There is a price to pay for subjectivity in Butler's schema: the reprimand of the interpellative law that punishes at the same time as it constitutes. But a return to Althusser's text finds that he does not rely so much on coercion and guilt in his explanation of the subject's answer to the hail. Althusser can instead be read as suggesting that we are already an instantiation and enactment of power‐ideology and, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, are already the principle of our own “subjection.” This contests the notion that we are in any way compelled to submit to an external, punitive force to become subjects. As subjects, we are always‐already the embodiment of the field of society‐power‐ideology.     

The compulsion to confess and the compulsion to judge in the analytic situation

In this paper the author shows that human beings have two quasi‐instinctual primitive tendencies – namely, the compulsion to confess and the compulsion to judge (to condemn or to absolve). These compulsions are originally unconscious and become conscious during the course of the analytic process. The compulsion to judge is a natural consequence of the compulsion to confess. These two tendencies are intensified by the analytic situation. The patient has a compulsion to confess to the analyst and to himself, and likewise the analyst has a compulsion to confess to himself and to the patient. The patient therefore has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge the analyst as good or bad while, on the other hand, the analyst has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge the patient as good or bad. The task of analysis is to make both patient and analyst conscious of their compulsions to confess and to judge (to condemn or to absolve). The compulsion to judge in the analyst, particularly if unconscious, may give rise to mistakes in diagnosis, technique, treatment, and the assessment of analysability. The requirement of analytic neutrality in the analyst constantly conflicts with his compulsion to judge. If we are profoundly involved in our patient's dramatic conflict, we are bound to pass a judgement (condemnation or absolution); however, when we judge, we are not neutral and therefore become incapable of intellectual consciousness of the patient's conflict. Conversely, if we do not judge, we are neutral, but are then relatively uninvolved in the patient's conflict and are hence virtually unable to achieve emotional consciousness. The author attempts to show that neutrality cannot and must not be a preconstituted attitude in the analyst, but can and must be a point of arrival following a profound, intensely felt existential experience based on an attitude of non‐condemnation and non‐absolution.