Curing and Healing: What the Gospel Story of the Haemorrhaging Woman Can Teach Nurses

Journal of Religion and Health - “Curing” and “healing” are terms frequently used in health care, yet what is actually meant by each? This article asserts that curing...     

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.     

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.     

The Contemporary Woman:

The life situation of the contemporary woman is examined in historical context in relation to her roles as loved one, as wcoonrtkaecrt wanitdh apsa rmenottsh oerr . otShheer afdreu9 tu se nantldy t auo sw lasc kups rwolieth m iondaedlesq. uSahtee is hurried by peer pressures into adult sexuality and into jobs in the fast track. Social workers, with their intimate knowledge of women, are in a position to work as change agents. Implications for therapy are discussed around such concepts as: ethical issues, life history concepts, role models teachings, and loneliness and transference.     

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.     

Psychoanalysis and the university: a difficult relationship

A critique of present-day isolation of psychoanalytic institutes and of their lack of emphasis on research and scientific development is followed with concrete proposals for reorienting psychoanalytic education toward university settings, with the ultimate purpose of bringing together psychoanalytic theory and scientific contributions with the contemporary contributions of neurobiological science and the humanities. Efforts already under way in this direction and practical recommendations for further steps to integrate psychoanalytic education and research within university settings are outlined.