Our Moral Universe

The application of psychoanalysis to social issues began with Freud's late writing. Understanding of racial and religious prejudice offers a social science application of psychoanalysis, but also has important implications for clinical practice. This paper supports and illustrates Dorothy Holmes' contention that examination of race and ethnicity in clinical work are important even when these issues are not apparent in patients' manifest content. It describes resistance to these factors in psychoanalysis and society.     

The limits of psychoanalytic insight

Psychoanalysis has the intellectual power to decipher the inner structure of subjectivity, thus distinguishing itself from neighbouring human sciences. In doing so psychoanalysis is able to show the damages a society does to its individuals. Present-day psychoanalytic practice and thinking however runs counter to these inherent possibilities. The interaction of unresolvable neurotic phenomena and ideological bias in individual psychoanalysts reflect the increasing subsumption of psychoanalysis under the dominating interests of society--a dependency, which characterizes the actual psychoanalytic practice and theories in our time as basically affirmative.     

Making the Punishment Fit the Crime and the Criminal: Attributions of Dangerousness as a Mediator of Liability1

This research examines how individuals use information regarding characteristics of crimes (e. g., crime severity) and characteristics of the offender (e. g, prior criminal record) to form an impression of the criminal as dangerous to society, and to make liability judgments. Two studies presented college students and community members with crime scenarios and asked for ratings of crime severity, likelihood of recidivism, perceived dangerousness of the offender, and liability. Type of crime, severity. and likelihood of recidivism significantly predicted both liability and perceived dangerousness. Further more, in crimes against people only, the effects of severity and recidivism on liability were partially mediated by individuals' perceptions of the offender as criminally dangerous. The discussion examines the implications of these findings for attribution theory and sentencing in the criminal‐justice system.     

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN SCANDINAVIA: PART ONE

During recent years, the neurosciences have entered into a dialogue with psychoanalysis, which has opened new perspectives for their integration. Despite these developments, reservations remain concerning the reducing effects of the neurosciences by overtly or covertly hiding the core elements of psychoanalysis. However, Freud made an explicit parallel between psychoanalysis and physics in their relationship with the unknown reality, and in their task of filling in gaps in knowledge. Freud's epistemological view implies that the relationship with the unknown reality unites rather than separates psychoanalysis from other sciences. On the other hand, in the clinical realm, Freud emphasized the autonomy of psychoanalysis. Instead of offering causal explanations, the value of the neurosciences to psychoanalysis depends on how well the knowledge derived from them can be integrated in psychoanalysis and given a clinical meaning. The primacy of clinical relevance also pertains to the findings of empirical outcome research.     

From avant-garde to specialism: psychoanalysis in America.

Psychoanalysis in America functioned first largely as an avant-garde phenomenon. Later psychoanalysis became a specialty within a bureaucratic society. Both roles help explain the importance and the limitations of freud's impact on American culture.     

Report on the XI IFPS Forum,New York: Marriott Hotel,Brooklyn, May 4-7, 2000

The forming and early development of the Swedish Society for Holistic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis is described. The influence of the personal background of those who formed the society, the general zeitgeist in which the society unfolded and the specific circumstances in the field of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Sweden at the actual time is paid attention to. The significance of Dr. Harold Kelman as a supervisor and teacher during the forming years is underlined. The forming of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) is mentioned as an important matrix for the growth of the society.     

Deterrence and Incapacitation: An Interrupted Time‐Series Analysis of California's Three‐Strikes Law1

Using uniform crime statistics, this research investigates the impact of California's three‐strikes law on instrumental, violent, minor, and drug‐related crimes over the first 5 years of the law's implementation. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models reveal little immediate impact of the law, but significant effects on instrumental crime over time, suggesting an incapacitation effect. After correcting for autocorrelation distortions, less restrictive multiple regression models that test simultaneously for immediate and gradual intervention effects disclose immediate (deterrent) effects on instrumental and minor crimes and arrests, and long‐term (incapacitation) effects on these and violent crimes as well. Drug‐related crimes appear impervious to the three‐strikes law under any analytic model, suggesting the unresponsiveness of such crimes to increasingly severe legal sanctions.     

恶“德”——一种特殊的道德现象

人类竭尽所能 ,在最大的限度上去减少各种罪恶 ,其中 ,包括恶“德”的手段在内。为了更好地运用恶“德”这种手段 ,加强对它的研究和运用是十分必要的。     

Thoughts on medication and psychoanalysis: a lay analyst's view

The issues involved in split analytic treatments-where a second person manages the patient's medication-are discussed from the point of view of a developmentalist and lay analyst. Case material is presented to illustrate the interplay of medication with other elements of the psychoanalytic situation. Medication and its effects, it is argued, should be accorded no special status apart from other interventions and enactments in an analysis. Some see medication and psychoanalysis as parallel processes, two separate and unintegrated theoretical systems, and recommend shifting back and forth between models of the mind or becoming "bilingual"; against this view, it is argued that anything the analyst does will affect the patient's thoughts, fantasies, and even physiology in individual ways, and only attention to analytic material can reveal what an intervention means in a specific case. Success in split treatment depends on a collaborative therapeutic alliance among patient, analyst, and consultant. Because there is as yet no theory that bridges psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology, analysts must talk of these matters as incompletely synthesized and regard them as part of the challenges that make psychoanalysis the exciting, impossible profession it is.     

Heroic Leaders as White‐Collar Criminals: An Empirical Study

In an empirical study of 179 white‐collar criminals, we identify a subset of 28 who may be called having a ‘heroic’ status, having received official recognition for contributions to society and fame prior to their being exposed and convicted as white‐collar criminals. We argue that these people are close to the classical picture of the white‐collar criminal, which implies that they are more likely not to be suspected of crimes. They are older, richer, and more powerful than the regular criminals. They also commit crimes assuming the roles of leaders in the crime. Most importantly, it seems as if the combination of heroic status and executive positions induces people to commit large‐scale opportunistic crimes late in their lives. The apparent onset of criminal behaviour late in life may be triggered by latent narcissistic traits. Our study contributes to a differentiated view on the profile of white‐collar criminals and derailed leadership. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Power of the Spoken Word in Life,Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis—A Contribution to Interpersonal Psychoanalysis

Starting with a 1890 essay by Freud, the author goes in search of an interpersonal psychology native to Freud's psychoanalytic method and to in psychoanalysis and the interpersonal method in psychiatry. This derives from the basic interpersonal nature of the human situation in the lives of individuals and social groups. Psychiatry, the healing of the soul, and psychotherapy, therapy of the soul, are examined from the perspective of the communication model, based on the essential interpersonal function of language and the spoken word: persons addressing speeches to themselves and to others in relations, between family members, others in society, and the professionals who serve them. The communicational model is also applied in examining psychiatric disorders and psychiatric diagnoses, as well as psychodynamic formulas, which leads to a reformulation of the psychoanalytic therapy as a process. A plea is entered to define psychoanalysis as an interpersonal discipline, in analogy to Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry.     

The Search for Integration or How to Work as a Pluralist Psychoanalyst

In my professional path, I strove for the integration of my identity as a psychiatrist and as a psychoanalyst, in the frame of pluralism, which exists in modern psychoanalysis. Having been trained in a Kleinian approach, I will explore the painful breach experienced during my parallel trainings as a psychoanalyst and as a dynamic psychiatrist. I worked for five years as a psychoanalyst and a researcher in Germany and was involved to a large extent with the psychoanalytic world, which increased my self-definition as a pluralist. On my return to Chile, I discovered the need for political changes in the psychoanalytic society and curricular modifications in my training institute to recover psychoanalysis from its academic isolation. Finally, I will analyze the extant connections between the ideology of pluralism in psychoanalysis and its application in clinics. I will show that the exploration of the inference processes of the psychoanalyst inside a session—the psychoanalyst's mind at work—demonstrates that the analyst in fact functions as an artisan thinker. This means that pluralism—that is, the use of more than one theoretical frame and of different levels of abstraction and explicitness—is the way the majority of psychoanalysts “naturally” work. What probably differs is the self-consciousness, scope, and rank of pluralism.     

Habermas, Freud and rationality. Psychoanalysis as a focus of the theory of communicative interaction

In his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) Jürgen Habermas attempted to base the critique of society on a universalized pragmatics. Heim attempts to derive a new metatheory of psychoanalysis from the theory of communicative action. In doing so he concentrates on the actual models of interpretation in psychoanalysis (Lacan, Marcuse, Lorenzer).     

Der Weg der Psychoanalyse nach Japan

The establishment of psychoanalysis in Japan was a consequence of opening the country to the influence of the western world by the Meiji restitution of 1868. Thus western psychological thought was also spread to Japan. On this basis, psychoanalysis developed through personal contacts and experiences of individuals and infiltrated into intellectual circles and finally into psychiatry. The establishment of two psychoanalytical societies, one for analysts and one where also lay people had access led to a specific and unique organizational structure. The ??Japanese way?? of psychoanalysis is on the one hand characterized by the confrontation with Buddhism and on the other by specific applications which reflect a certain reserve in the Japanese society to the ??standard procedure?? of psychoanalytic therapy. In this way psychoanalysis in Japan implants a diversity into the international discourse which opposes the current trend towards general homogenization.     

Psychoanalyzing Historicists?: The Enigmatic Popper

The paper shows how Karl Popper’s critique of ‘historicism’ is permeated by psychoanalytic discourse regardless of his critique that psychoanalysis is one of the exemplars of pseudoscience. Early on, when he was formulating his philosophy of science, Popper had an apparently stringent criterion, viz. falsifiablity, and painstaking analysis. The central argument of this paper is that despite his representation of psychoanalysis as the principal illustration of the category he dubs as ‘pseudoscience’, Popper’s analysis has been infused with psychoanalysis when it comes to his social and political philosophy. Besides, not only was his interpretation of the proponents of ‘historicism’ and the ‘closed’ society mediated by the very concepts of a field which he indicted as pseudoscientific but also he frequently slipped into vacuous and unverifiable accusations forgetting the jurisdiction he formerly accorded to empirical adequacy and logical consistency when examining and assessing theories.     

“Why do (don't) you ask?” transference and the desire (not) to know

One of the criterial distinctions of psychoanalysis is its renunciation of indoctrination through suggestion. In spite of the fact that psychoanalysis is both an organized body of knowledge and a disciplined form of interpersonal influence, it regards an analyst who tells the analysand what to think or do as essentially doing harm by substituting a new form of prejudice and alienation for the preexisting form he is attacking. Even though an analyst regards his knowledge of psychoanalytic theory as adequate at a general level, this "truth" is not an adequate mode of discourse with an individual. Why not? It is a fact that analysands often do not accept an analyst's idea. However, the fundamental problematic of clinical psychoanalysis comes precisely at the point that the analysand would accept the analyst's idea, involving the distinction between a properly psychoanalytic cure and a transference cure. Psychoanalytic theory itself holds that unreflective incorporation of another's idea about oneself comes at the expense of autonomous and spontaneous self-revelation. Despite its resolute pursuit of new truths, the aim of psychoanalysis is less concerned with attaining specific ideas about unrecognized conflicts than it is with achieving a general attitude--that self-understanding requires a capacity to admit dubious and unwanted ideas and feelings that symptoms, dreams, and free associations bring to light. This "psychoanalytic" attitude permits a new type of discourse in which the person recognizes himself or herself through expression, rather than parrotting the analyst's (or others') words, or continuing rigidly to hide the truth of desire for oneself. In the long run, psychoanalysis offers to correct a primary misunderstanding: that one can acquire a comprehensively true image of oneself. As Barratt (1988) emphasizes, this transformation is tantamount to a change in personal epistemology for the analysand and a change in epistemological theory for the culture as a whole. In our culture, most analysts and lay people alike take for granted that the ego is an agent that is to be integrated and strengthened in order to direct one's life. Likewise, the unconscious is commonly regarded as a type of savage alter ego that must be mastered by the ego. According to Lacan's critique, the ego is a snare and a delusion for the patient, however highly commended by society it may be, because its very essence is to furnish the illusion of enduring self-knowledge.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Fromm’s understanding of the Buddhist philosophical theory and psychoanalysis: From the phenomenal ego to the authentic being1

Abstract

Erich Fromm was one of the first psychoanalytic thinkers who was genuinely interested in Asian philosophies. In the first part of this article, I will show Fromm’s imago of Buddhism as a radical, nontheistic, and ethical philosophy “without God.” I will argue that Fromm made an important difference between the phenomenal ego and being that proves crucial for his understanding of psychoanalysis and his critique of modern society. I will also explore Fromm’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and show the similarities and differences between them.     

„Es waren ja fast alle weggegangen“

The complex and partly disputed history of German psychoanalysis during the Third Reich has been thoroughly investigated to date. There are various stages of historical analysis which are distinguished by differing discourses that are presented as part of this work. The first stage of historical analysis was characterized by conflicts within the German psychoanalytical societies and marked by two antagonistic narratives about the transformation of German psychoanalysis during the Third Reich. This study investigated which discourses on the history of German psychoanalysis were integrated into the professional biographies of the first generation of post-war psychoanalysts. In this study 23 narrative interviews were conducted with psychoanalysts who where born before 1st January 1937 focusing on the professional biography and the results were analyzed. The interviewees stressed the ‘damage’ to German psychoanalysis in general and on their training in particular. The ‘damage’ was described as an uncontrollable result of National Socialism and the structural and theoretical changes that were connected to it whereby its effects continued to impact on post-war psychoanalysis. Especially the discourses of the first stage of historical analysis appear to have been integrated into professional biographies and are still having an impact on the interpretation of history for the post-war generation to this day. The history of psychoanalysis is presented as a narrative of ‘rescue’ or ‘liquidation’ of psychoanalysis during the Third Reich depending on the professional identity of the psychoanalysts.     

Growing Up in Conflict: The Personal and the Political

This article is an autobiographical account of conflicts, both personal and political, that I experienced growing up in South Africa in a context of racism and civil conflict. It speaks to how these conflicts shaped my work as an analyst and as a person. In regard to specific issues that were fore-fronted, these included an interest in the ugly emotions, trauma and dissociation in both victims and perpetrators, the application of psychoanalysis in war zones, the issue of voice, the effects of emigration and the diaspora, the centrality of context, and the dynamics of racism.