Hamlet and psychoanalytic experience

Hamlet draws us into its rendered world, enabling us to experience it with depth, awareness, and resonance, in a mode we recognize as aesthetic. By way of Shakespeare's play--primarily the first act--and a detailed case study, aesthetic and psychoanalytic experience are compared, to suggest that, for our own analytic discourse, we revalue Freud's unease that his case studies read like short stories.     

Spontaneity: a psychoanalytic inquiry

Abstract

This paper examines the experience of consulting to experiential groups and endeavours to draw some conclusions about this significant element in training.     

Hamlet: plea for a measure of normality

The author first considers issues in psychoanalytic interpretations of literary characters, especially the question of treating the character as fiction (the aesthetic illusion) or as a real person. The position he adopts is to interpret Hamlet as a potential person, created by Shakespeare and an expression of Shakespeare’s actual – and intuitive – view of man.

With a synopsis of the tragedy and the context of its creation as background, the author then reflects on questions concerning the play. How does Shakespeare present the characters? Is Hamlet’s madness pretended or real? Which conflicts does he handle in the course of the play? Has Oedipal dynamics a role as motivational factor in his mind?

Hamlet is irrational, impulsive, emotional, inhibited, brooding, suspicious, revengeful, condemning and much more. But, in the view of the author, he is all this in a human, ‘normal’ way. There is nothing convincingly pathological or constricted in his character. ‘Un-normal’ is his intelligence and his wit. Hamlet – an intelligent, reflected, resourceful prince in late Renaissance – who has wrestle with a madhouse of political intrigues, family murders and deceitful friends.

Hamlet in Shakespeare’s text – a fairly normal person in quite a mad world.     

Pronouns and progress: a psychoanalytic primer

Psychoanalytic psychotherapists have the role responsibility to hover evenly over everything that is said--and not said--in the analytic situation. Pronouns may be worthy of special attention. Just as children demonstrate a predictable course in the acquisition and mastery of pronouns, it may be that the analytic patient also shows a predictable sequence in the deployment of pronouns over the course of a successful treatment. The analytic patient will move from a focus on "They," to joining the analyst in "We," before ultimately separating to become an "I." A third person focus in the opening phase, may, with familiarity, move to second person intimacy, ultimately yielding to first person agency. These grammatical markers occur in the opening, middle and termination/follow-up phases of a successful psychoanalytic treatment, during which the pre-morbid introjects are identified, chewed up, and, eventually nudged aside by the healthier therapeutic-introject, from which a new or renewed identity may emerge. Analysis of the Grimm's fairy tale "The Wolf and the Kids" illustrations the importance of metabolizing old introjects.     

Mourning and psychosis: a psychoanalytic perspective

The author attempts to develop some of the basic models and concepts relating to mourning processes in psychotic patients on the assumption that situations of loss and mourning are key moments for psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and therapeutic approaches in general. Secondly, he reminds us that 'mourning processes in psychotics' are not always 'psychotic mourning processes', that is to say, that they do not necessarily occur within, or give rise to, a psychotic clinical picture. These ideas are illustrated by a number of sessions and vignettes concerning two psychotic patients in psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic treatment. In theoretical terms, it seems vitally important in this context to combine a relationship-based approach within a framework of special psychoanalytic psychopathology with an updated view of processes of mourning and affective loss. A fundamental requirement at clinical level is to determine the role to be played by psychoanalytically based treatments in combined, integrated or global therapies when working with psychotic patients. For this purpose, the paper ends by outlining a set of principles and objectives for such treatments.     

Interpreting psychoanalytic interpretation: a fourfold perspective

Following an overview of psychoanalytic interpretation in theory, practice, and historical context, as well as the question of whether interpretations have scientific validity, the author holds that hermeneutics, the philosophical and psychological study of interpretation, provides a rich understanding of recent developments in self psychology, inter-subjective and relational perspectives, attachment theory, and psycho-spiritual views on psychoanalytic process. He then offers four distinct hermeneutical vantage points regarding interpretation in the psychoanalytic context, including (1) Freud's adaptation of the Aristotelian view of interpretation as the uncovering of a set of predetermined meanings and structures; (2) the phenomenological view of interpretation as the laying bare of "the things themselves," that is, removing the coverings of objectification and concretization imposed by social norms and the conscious ego; (3) the dialogical existential view of interpretation as an ongoing relational process; and (4) the transformational understanding in which interpretation evokes a "presence" that transforms both patient and analyst. He concludes by contending that these perspectives are not mutually exclusive ways of conducting an analysis, but rather that all occur within the analyst's suspended attention, the caregiving and holding essential to good therapeutic outcomes, and the mutuality of the psychoanalytic dialogue.     

The sexual couple: a psychoanalytic exploration

Even an originally revolutionary movement like psychoanalysis can become conservative and can take refuge, at last, in reactionary acquiescence. Many revolutionary minds, fighters of yesterday, are tired and now rest their cause on dogmas and preconceived ideas. The progress of science does not tolerate such refuge. The shape of psychoanalysis around the year 2000 of our era will be very different from the concept of the New York Psychoanalytical Society of 1945. No prophetic gift is needed to predict that it will be much more occupied with the total human personality than with the sexual components. The picture of psychoanalysis in the year 2000 will, I am sure, be nearer to that which neo-psychoanalysis sketches then to that of libido theory. It will be recognized then that the crude sex-drive cannot have the power attributed to it by Freud and that early mixtures of sexual and non-sexual urges are clearly to be observed in those very phenomena which impress us as "purely" sexual." (Reik, 1945).     

Toward a psychoanalytic iconography

In describing the principles of psychoanalytic iconography, I follow a historical approach, pointing out that the rudiments of such an interpretive mode are present in Freud's works on Leonardo and on the Moses of Michelangelo and reach a classical expression in Kris's paper on Messerschmidt. Some recent scholarly studies of works of art rest on the incorporation of psychoanalysis into contemporary views of the nature of man, thus permitting a level of analysis of art not previously attained. The interface between a psychoanalytic understanding of the artist's life and preoccupations and the unconscious content present in the work itself continues to offer an opportunity for refining the analytic tool as an instrument for understanding aesthetic response and creativity.     

The poet as prophet: a psychoanalytic perspective

The poet spins a public fantasy, created from his own private daydreams and speaking to the unconscious fantasies of his audience. He presents a socially acceptable form of expression of forbidden wishes and conflicts. A process of mutual exculpation is set up between the poet and his audience. For a special group the work of the poet may also make possible the alleviation of pathogenic anxieties. An examination of the play, The Beard, indicates how an artist may intuit and articulate changes in sexual morality. The poet rebels against the constraints of society, thereby helping his audience to rebel without guilt. He may be the herald of a changing morality, and even more, his art may become an instrument for such change.