Psychoanalysis: The Sacred and the Profane

Colleagues from a variety of perspectives have written about the propensity to enshrine psychoanalytic theory. The meaning of the word “enshrine” is to cherish as sacred an idea or philosophy and protect it from change. In other words, the way we view psychoanalysis, our theories of mind and technique, become holy writ and we have divided the world of theory into the sacred and the profane. This is the kiss of death for theory, which must constantly evolve and change, but comforting for the analyst who believes he is on the side of the right, the sacred. In this paper I will discuss how our propensity to enshrine theory has had a debilitating effect on the development of psychoanalysis and, in particular, as a treatment for the most vulnerable people who seek our help. I also address the idea that movement away from enshrined positions allows us to construct different versions of reality. In this context, the notion of “action at a distance” is presented along with the attendant idea of psychoanalytic entanglement.     

The Intersect of Psychoanalysis and Totalitarianism

This conjunction is fraught with danger, with difficulties, and with irreconcilables. I discuss three examples: (a) very briefly, the Soviet Union, where psychoanalysis, established before the October Revolution, came finally to be abolished, as incompatible with Soviet-enforced psychological theory; (b) somewhat more, Nazi Germany, where psychoanalysis struggled to survive in a truncated and grossly distorted form, as a Nazi-sponsored “Aryanized” depth-psychology stripped of Freud’s name and of its necessary conditions of safety and confidentiality; and (c) in considerable detail, my personal experiences on behalf of the International Psychoanalytical Association, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, dealing, after the overthrow of the military junta that had ruled in the 1970s, with the psychoanalytic aftermath, the complete breakdown of the analytic society’s functioning consequent to the shielding of a government torturer during the dictatorship years.     

Turn of Fortune in Psychoanalysis: The 1924 Rank Debates and the Origins of Hermeneutic Psychoanalysis

The history of psychoanalysis can be characterized by conflicts that besides their personal content meant a closure and an opening in the development of the theorecial and practical (self )understanding of the discipline. The 1923-24 conflict that resulted in the separation of Rank from the movement and showed the first signs of uneasiness against the mainstream of psychoanalysis in Ferenczi's approach is relatively less known. However, its theoretical, or more general: discoursive impact on psychoanalysis was enormous.The debate took place among the top leaders of the movement, Rank and Ferenczi on one side, Jones, Abraham, Sachs on the other. In the center of the discussion there were two books, The Trauma of Birth by Rank and the The Development of Psychoanalysis by Ferenczi and Rank. With the help of documents I try to show that Freud first supported his Vienna-Budapest friends, later changed over to the other camp. As a general effect, I suggest that this debate resulted in the withdrawal from the earlier more hermeneutic-dialogical, therapy centered psychoanalysis toward a medical, objective, systematic and metapsychology oriented discipline. Besides the general theoretical change the power centers of psychoanalysis shifted toward West, Vienna and Budapest was substituted first by Berlin, later by London and New York.     

The Politics of Relational Psychoanalysis

Given the foundational premises of relational psychoanalysis, the lack of attention to the social and political world on the part of analytic writers who identify with this orientation is curious. Perhaps relational psychoanalysis itself, particularly in its democratizing impulses (e.g., emphasis on mutuality, concern with questions of authority and self-disclosure), has become a replacement for politics, an effort to provide for patients (and analysts) in the consulting room an experience of a world that no longer seems attainable outside it. The analytic situation thus created would represent a recasting of the world as analysts wish it could be, projected into therapeutic space.

This development in the analytic field is part of a more general cultural shift away from a belief in the possibility of social transformation and a redirection of energies into ameliorative projects. This discouragement dispirits the work of those relational writers who do engage a political aspect in their thinking. The author argues that the recovery of a sense of political efficacy would vitalize analysts' endeavors inside and outside the therapy office and could help to balance the overinvestment of the clinical dimension of psychoanalysis that has accompanied the ascendance of the relational perspective.     

The Operationalistic and Hermeneutic Status of Psychoanalysis

Hermeneutic and anti-hermeneutic sides in the debate about psychoanalysis are entangled in an epistemological and methodological antinomy, here exemplified by Grünbaum's and Spence's paradigmatic views. Both contain a partial element of truth, which they assert dialectically one against the other (§§ 1 and 2). This antinomy disappears only by reconciling an operationalist approach with man's ability to suspend the effectiveness of the‘laws’ applied to him (§ 3). The hermeneutic way in which the technical-operational criterion of truth works in psychoanalysis demands that clinical and extra-clinical testing methods work synergically, through a fruitful self-correcting strategy, grounded on the very psychoanalytic object: the unconscious (§ 4). This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Psychoanalysis Traumatized: The Legacy of the Holocaust

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. It was founded and flourished in central European centers that would be destroyed by the Nazis. A core group of refugees who lived through persecution and exile were instrumental in rebuilding their movement on alien shores. They had no opportunity to mourn the loss of their culture or their leader, Freud, whose death was overshadowed by the cataclysmic upheaval around them. Though its trauma has been dissociated, it is represented in psychoanalytic ideas and enacted in institutions within the context of delayed or incomplete mourning. For example, authoritarianism in psychoanalytic institutions will be explored as a reliving of the trauma of both fascism and exile, and not merely typical group psychology. Further evidence of the impact of dissociated trauma includes the astonishing scotoma for actual events in treatment of Holocaust survivors; the extreme privileging of infantile fantasy over reality, and attention to childhood neurosis at the expense of adult catastrophic events.