Infantile anorexia,co‐excitation and co‐mastery in the parent/baby cathexis: The contribution of Sigmund and Anna Freud

Recent epidemiological studies show that 2% of babies in ordinary paediatric clinics suffer from infantile anorexia. In the first part of this paper we present a case study from our hospital clinical activity. Our framework combines clinical psychoanalytic sessions and perinatal videos. In the second part, we will focus on the concepts of instinct and excitation proposed by Sigmund Freud and the concept of mastery proposed by Anna Freud. In the third part, we will examine these concepts in the light of the case study. The fourth part is devoted to clinical recommendations from our hospital psychoanalytic practice. In conclusion, unlike other clinical settings, the psychoanalytic setting allows for the elaboration of the parental hatred included in the libidinal cathexis. Our psychoanalytic setting (sessions/videos) makes it possible to decontaminate parental intrapsychic elements overloaded with excitement, saturated with hate elements, and rendered sterile by the instinct for mastery. An initial part of the treatment process involves working through the intersubjective elements observed in the video.     

Just a joke. Psychogenesis of humor in alcohol advertisements

This article asks what psychic functions humorous alcohol advertisements employ and how they are connected to the wider cultural meanings of alcohol. The material comprises 27 advertisements televised in Europe in 2013. The material is primarily examined using Freud’s ideas regarding the psychogenesis of jokes. Freud’s conceptions of humor provide in-depth point of views to understand how the advertisements address the viewer’s mind. We recognized three psychic processes: the pleasure of nonsense, recognition of the familiar, and liquidation of criticism. We argue that these are essential psychic activities which characterize the more or less unconscious functioning and content of humorous alcohol advertisements. The article suggests that the humorous strategies recall the infantile pleasure connected to playing with language. The humor in alcohol advertisements may also liquidate the critical attitudes toward drinking, enforce the process of denial of addiction and prohibit the reality-based reflection of alcohol use.     

The Rod of Discipline: Masochism, Sadism, and the Judeo-Christian Religion

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the scenario where a person, often a child, is being beaten by a parent, an authority figure, or even God, is often found. This essay searches for an explanation for this phenomenon by combining Sigmund Freud's thoughts on the masochism of the Oedipus complex and Martin Bergmann's belief that Western religion was impacted by the sadism of the Laius and Jocasta Complexes. The paper argues that, within the section of the Judeo-Christian tradition that sanctions the physical abuse of children, sadism and masochism find the perfect marriage.     

A Review of “The Relational Origins of Prejudice: A Convergence of Psychoanalytic and Social Cognitive Perspectives”

Abstract

Key concepts in social welfare and clinical social work - concepts such as person-in-environment, women's rights, prevention and outreach-had as precedents the pioneering theory and practice of Europe's free psychoanalytic clinics of the 1920s. Sex-Pol, a Viennese community-based clinical network created in 1927 by Wilhelm Reich, perhaps the most overtly political of the first psychoanalysts, was motivated by reformist social goals he shared with Sigmund Freud. This historical study of Sex-Pol draws on Reich's own words to explore his use of the term “social work” where clinical work is predicated on an activist ideology of human liberation.     

Freud–Ferenczi correspondence,revisited

Abstract

The article gives an overview of what Freud and Ferenczi had to say in their correspondence about their own relationship, and how they dealt with problems that arose between them. It includes a list of short selected quotes from the correspondence.     

Letter From Stockholm

Some of the ideas of Sigmund Freud were preceded in a literary form by the Swedish writer August Strindberg in the late 19th century. Psychoanalysis itself was introduced in Sweden about a decade into the 20th century by two rivalling pioneers, the doctors Emanuel af Geijerstam and Poul Bjerre. After a slow start, the Danish‐Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society and the Finnish‐Swedish Psychoanalytical Society were formed in 1934 in Stockholm. The same year, Ericastiftelsen [The Erica Foundation], a psychotherapeutic clinic for children, was founded by Hanna Bratt. Five years later, in 1939, also in Stockholm, the organization that was to become St. Lukasstiftelsen [The Saint Luke's Foundation] was founded. It has been, and still is, an association that has trained psychodynamic psychotherapists, with a focus on existential, religious and philosophical questions. Today, St. Luke's tries to be up‐dated from an academic standpoint. During the Second World War, several important psychoanalysts came to Sweden, for example René de Monchy, Lajos and Edith Székely, and Stefi Pedersen. Ola Andersson's doctoral dissertation (“Studies in the Prehistory of Psychoanalysis”, 1962) and the historian Gunnar Brandell's essay (“Freud, a Man of His Century”, 1961) have had an international impact. In the last two decades, an authorized and carefully edited translation of Freud's collected works has been published by Natur och Kultur, and the history of psychoanalysis in Sweden has been written at the University of Gothenburg. As a result of a recent interest in the work of Jacques Lacan, and French psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature, the journal Psykoanalytisk Tid/Skrift was founded in 2002, in Gothenburg. Since 2011 the journal is called Arche. The largest organized group of psychoanalysts in Sweden today is the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association (SPAF), which has around 225 members. Since 2008, it no longer has the right to license psychotherapists, a situation which reflects the position of psychoanalysis outside the mainstream of psychiatric health services and academic psychology. Despite the criticism of Freud's thinking from biologically and cognitively oriented theoretical standpoints, the interest in psychoanalysis endures.     

Constructing an Aesthetic Weltanschauung: Freud,James, and Ricoeur

I will investigate in this paper what kind of Weltanschauung Freud suggests. Although Freud argues in the lecture XXXV, The Question of a Weltanschauung (1933), that psychoanalysis is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own, I think that he has a certain Weltanschauung, i.e., the aesthetic worldview, which involves his scientific, psychoanalytic, and artistic principles. Furthermore, I will explicate that Freud's aesthetic worldview is ultimately related to the Weltanschauungen of William James and Paul Ricoeur. I will focus particularly on their terms, sympathetic and poetic, which are the crucial elements that constitute the aesthetic Weltanschauung. Finally, I will briefly present my intention in drawing this aesthetic Weltanschauung. I will conclude that throughout the aesthetic Weltanschauung we may accept that everything is precious, pertinent, and worthy to be viewed as a part and a whole, and as home (Heim).     

Racial fantasies and the primal scene of miscegenation

The primal scene, theorized by Freud in his case history of the Wolf Man, is a fantasy scenario thoroughly embedded in social relations. While pursuing his analysis of oedipal structures in the Wolf Man's case history, Freud overlooked social relations, downplaying the importance of racial and class difference in the Wolf Man's sexual etiology. In this essay, I trace the circulation of two fantasy structures: 'the primal scene of miscegenation' and 'A black man is being beaten,' both of which structure desire in both Freud 's era and our own. I interpret Fanon's work on racial subjectivity alongside Freud 's theory of fantasy to elucidate the interconnected nature of racial and sexual difference in both Freud and Fanon's theories. The racial fantasies proposed in this essay have application to clinical settings, where they may structure transference and countertransference.     

The way of authenticity and the quest for personal integrity1,2

The author reviews the respective conceptions of authenticity proposed by the existentialist philosophers, Fredrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, each of whom situate it in the inherent difficulty of resisting the herd instinct in one's interpersonal relationships, then sets out to show how, despite the absence of authenticity as a technical term in the psychoanalytic lexicon, the technical principles of psychoanalysis enumerated by Freud are compatible with the views of both Nietzsche and Heidegger. The author then gives examples of other psychoanalytic authors who similarly embrace the spirit of authentic relating in their conception of the clinical situation, including the work of D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Jacques Lacan. The author concludes that in the psychoanalytic context the imposition and experience of suffering are invaluable components of authenticity and therapeutic change.     

‘An unpublished letter by Sigmund Freud on the Shakespeare authorship question’

This article provides the text of the English translation of Sigmund Freud’s previously unpublished 1935 letter to Percy Allen, the only known letter in which Freud expresses his unqualified support for the theory that ‘William Shakespeare’ was the pen name of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550–1604). The article summarizes the literature on Freud’s authorship views, showing that scholars who disagree with Freud on this matter have minimized his opinion by pathologizing it, or emphasizing Freud’s reservations about the matter. The prevailing theory as to who wrote Shakespeare, on close examination, turns out to be based primarily on circular thinking, confirmation bias, tradition, authority, groupthink, and enforcement of a taboo against the presentation or objective consideration of conflicting evidence. In addition, it originated before we had a better understanding of the high frequency of anonymous, pseudonymous, and allonymous literature in Elizabethan England. The reputations enjoyed by leading Shakespeare scholars lead nonspecialists to assume that these experts can be trusted to tell us who wrote Shakespeare. Unfortunately, Shakespeare scholars falsely claim absolute certainty that they know that ‘Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.’ Freud’s dissenting opinion has been supported by increasing evidence since 1935.     

Fruits of Health; Roots of Despair: William James, Medical Materialism and the Evaluation of Religious Experience

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James introduces the term “medical materialism” to describe the fallacious attempt by some scientists to argue against the value of spiritual ideas. Two literary case studies will be considered for purposes of better understanding James’ idea. What’s more, it will be shown that, in addition to James’ three criteria for the appropriate evaluation of religious experience, there is another factor not made explicit, namely that of hopefulness. This factor serves to distinguish ordinary from pathological morbid-mindedness, the latter of which has no religious significance.Tadd Ruetenik teaches philosophy at Penn State Altoona. He received his Ph.D. from the English and Philosophy program at Purdue University. Correspondence to Tadd Ruetenik, tlr18@psu.edu.     

The incidence of Freudian self‐analysis in the construction of the psychoanalytic theory of anxiety

The value and function of self‐analysis has been a contentious issue in several studies dedicated to the Freudian legacy. For some writers, Freud's experience of self‐analysis is rightly considered to be the master key to an understanding of the origins of the fundamentals of psychoanalysis. For others, the exaggerated importance attributed to the process merely led to the construction of a foundational myth. Nevertheless, if it is recognized to be a process in which Freud, in collaboration with Fliess, analysed personal aspects, working hypotheses and psychopathological debates, a reconsideration of self‐analysis may contribute new elements to our understanding of the paths that were taken in the elaboration of the theory and practice of pyschoanalysis. Starting from this premise, the present work will consider the systematic examination that Freud conducted of his own phobia in the course of his self‐analysis to be a process of great relevance to the elaboration of the early psychoanlytic conceptualizations of anxiety, in that in the course of this process the possible role of sexuality, fantasy, memory and unconscious determinism in the etiology of anxiety became part of the discussion.     

Images of the disciplining of psychology, 1890–1940

Over the course of psychology’s first several decades, the language used to convey the subject matter gradually shifted from being free and literary to being strictly constrained and disciplined by increasingly focused theoretical demands. The project described here, “Disciplining Psychology,” aimed to depict this transformation by generating images of the faces of three highly influential psychologists—William James, Sigmund Freud, and B. F. Skinner. Each image is composed of the words used in one of each individual’s most important books. The tightening of the disciplinary vocabulary is revealed in the differences among the three arrays of words themselves, but I have also striven to reflect it in the aesthetic aspects of each image. The method used here could easily be extended to a wider array of authors, texts, and psychological topics.     

The return of the repressed. On Robert N. Bellah,Norman O. Brown,and religion in human evolution

As much as Robert Bellah’s final work, Religion in Human Evolution, has been studied and dissected, no critic underlined the importance of psychoanalysis for its main argument and its theoretical framework. The paper shows the influence exerted by a controversial interpreter of Freud, Norman O. Brown, on Bellah’s ideas, intellectual profile, and writing style in the late-1960s and early 1970s. While in search for a new intellectual voice, Bellah was struck by Brown’s work and began to make intensive use of his book, Love’s Body, both in his teaching and in his research of the early 1970s, during his so-called “symbolic realism” period. While Bellah abandoned Brown’s ideas and style in the mid-1970s, some of the basic intuitions he had during that period still survived as one of the major theoretical intuitions of Religion and Human Evolution.     

Some limitations of analysis

Abstract :  This paper ¹ considers some of the difficulties that exist in reconciling the 'treatment' and the 'cultural' aspects of analytic ideas and practice; the extent, for example, to which analysis is both ordinary, and extra-ordinary in more than one way. The implications for this for the place of analysis and analytical psychotherapy in the mental health services is considered along with the ways in which there is a diversity of views about the importance of maintaining the presence of analytic ideas and analytic practice in hospitals and clinics. Some of the limitations of analysis are discussed where analytic ideas and methods move away from their application to patients and patients' material into the wider world.     

Temporality and the Lyotardian Sublime: Kant between Husserl and Freud

ABSTRACT

While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a “temporal crisis” that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes “experience” in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's “unconscious affect,” this “crisis” only becomes visible in contrast to a figure of subjective temporalization the model of which, I argue, is broadly Husserlian. Approaching the sublime as a temporal crisis thus allows not only for a clearer view of the import of Lyotard's late work on the affect with regard to subjectivity, knowledge, and experience; it also reveals what that work continues to owe to a certain phenomenological analysis.     

Engaging with the unknown: How Judaism enabled Freud's psychological discoveries

A large literature has formed around the question of how Freud's Jewishness and/or Judaism influenced his psychological discoveries and development of psychoanalytic theory and methods. The article organizes the literature into several core theses but brings new clarity and insight by applying two essential criteria to demonstrate an impact of Judaism on Freud's thinking: direct content and historical timing. First, there should be evidence that Freud incorporated actual content from Jewish sources, and second, this incorporation must have occurred during the most crucial period of Freud's early discovery, conceptualization, and development of psychoanalysis, roughly 1893–1910. Thus, for example, Bakan's well-known theory that Freud studied Kabbala is completely negated by the absence of any evidence in the required time period. Part I reviews the literature on the influence of Freud's ethnic/cultural Jewish identity. Part II introduces the Judaic sacred literature, explores Freud's education in Judaism and Hebrew, and presents evidence that Freud had the motive, means, and resources to discover and draw from the “Dream Segment” of the Talmud—along with the traditional Judaic methods and techniques of textual exegesis. Freud then applied these same Judaic word-centered interpretive methods—used for revealing an invisible God—to revealing an invisible Unconscious in four successive books in 1900, 1901, and 1905.     

'A serious venture': John Rodker (1894-1955) and the Imago Publishing Company (1939-60)

John Rodker (1894-1955) was the founder of the British publishing house--the Imago Publishing Company--which undertook the republication of the complete works of Sigmund Freud in German just before World War II. Rodker, himself a writer as well as a publisher, was initially tempted by a psychoanalytic career; numerous obstacles, however, lay in his path. War, along with the complicated management of the royalties from Freud's writings, compromised the progress of what seemed to him to be 'a serious venture'. Besides Rodker, we meet numerous actors of the psychoanalytic movement: Anna Freud, Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, James Strachey, all of whom had worked for the dissemination of Freud's writings. This paper shows how the English language gradually became the 'official norm' for psychoanalysts. According to the editors of the Standard Edition, at that time 'nothing new [was] being written' in German or in French. The failure of the Gesammelte Werke project signalled the end of an era in which psychoanalysis was mainly written about in German.     

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.     

Life and death in Freudian metapsychology: A reappraisal of the second instinctual dualism1

In this paper we re‐examine the second instinctual dualism hypothesis introduced by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. We suggest that the life instinct hypothesis as something opposed to the death instinct does not seem to fit into this theory easily. On the other hand, death instinct turns out to be an internal necessity of Freudian metapsychological theory from the beginning of Freud ’s metapsychological writing. We shall argue, based on the ideas formulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in later metapsychological texts, that Freud could not wholly justify the existence of an opposition and a symmetry between the two classes of instincts. Even though up to his last works Freud held on to this instinctual dualism, again and again his arguments lead to the idea that the life instincts should be regarded, ultimately, as death instincts.