Der Tod Im Denken Max Schelers

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Heidegger und der Tod

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Zwischen Tod und Urszene

Are there psychoanalytic ideas about what it means to be fully and creatively alive? Thoughts about this are prompted by Winnicott’s account of living by compliance or by creative apperception. A necessary aspect of independent, creative aliveness is a capacity to be interested in what disturbs our usual thought processes. Clinical examples show the truth of this for therapists in the clinical situation and it applies to life in general as well. Being fully alive involves a particular use of memory so as to move actively up and down one’s life experiences between past and present and also the ability to extend this imaginatively into the future, including particularly the experience of one’s own death which is ultimately and inescapably ‘uncanny’. Such freedom of internal movement makes it possible to see the present as a point of encounter between the past and the future. The past is bounded by the primal scene and the future by death, which represent the beginning and end of time. The present is thus also an encounter between time and timelessness. To tell a dream in an analytical session is to bring the timelessness of the unconscious into a time-bound framework. A clinical example shows how a sense of this crossover between time and timelessness helped a patient use his dream experience to develop a greater sense of aliveness. Vermeer’s painting of ‘The Kitchen Maid’ pouring milk is analysed as a visual representation of the intersection of time and timelessness. A case in a clinical seminar is described, which produced a disorienting sense of timelessness in the seminar group. The seminar leader then needed to help the discussion stay poised at a crossing-point between timelessness and time. A discussion of the myth of Orpheus considers Orpheus’ compulsion to look back at Eurydice as a failure of aliveness because he could not dream Eurydice at the intersection between the timelessness of the underworld and the linear temporality of everyday existence.     

Tod und Leben bei den Kpelle in Liberia

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Der Stellvertreter

Based on the analytic work on colleagues the author investigates a writer’s block of German psychoanalysts when writing about their patients. In the process of their own therapeutic analysis, an inhibition of association in these psychoanalysts comes to the fore by them falling into the professional role and talking about their patients. The accounts of these colleagues on their own patients function as a doubled imago revealing the unconscious conflicts of the patients as well as acting as a proxy of the psychoanalysts’ impulses, affects and foreclosed memories in their own analysis. The inhibition of thinking, leading to a writer’s block, is the result of the correspondence of the trauma of the patient with the trauma of the analyst when the transference-countertransference relationship evokes annihilation anxieties in the psychoanalyst. Therefore the writer’s block of these psychoanalysts is rooted in their professional work and is the result of the internalization of precarious emotional contents of their patients. The author examines the role of institutionalized psychoanalysis in developing a professional writer’s block, and the results of the paper highlight the need of an emotionally supporting professional environment for the psychoanalyst during his training and his practice work.     

Der Foto-Hand-Test

Projective psychological techniques might be useful for measuring forensically relevant constructs in the context of a multimodal assessment strategy but are often considered to be deficient concerning reliability and validity. The Photo Hand Test (FHT), a German version of the Hand Test, is a diagnostic tool aimed at measuring aggressive dispositions. It uses photographs of hand gestures which test persons are required to interpret. The answers are coded and an acting-out score is computed from diverse categories.A study on the reliability and validity of the FHT protocols from 98 offenders and a comparison group of 55 non-offenders was carried out. Internal consistency coefficients of the FHT scores were low and unsatisfactory. Offenders had higher acting-out scores than non-offenders, they did not give more aggression-prone interpretations but more interpretations coded as aggression-inhibiting. Correlations of the FHT scores with self-report scales from the Antisocial Personality Questionnaire did not show the expected patterns; however, they did suggest effects of a hostility bias: persons who interpreted many hand gestures as aggression-prone did not describe themselves as highly aggressive or impulsive but were more distrustful and paranoid. This indicates a projection mechanism different from the one postulated by the FHT authors.The results suggest that FHT measures should be interpreted with caution in forensic evaluations.     

Der Elektroskriptograph

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Der Goodenough-Test

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Der Arztbrief

The right of inspection in the hospital documents, the hospital discharge report for example, is often refused to patients in in-patient psychotherapeutic treatment (psychiatry, psychosomatic and psychotherapeutic medicine) with reference to the protection of the patients themselves, their doctors or relatives. Within a systemic therapy approach patients of an acute psychosomatic care unit in a hospital the patients could inspect the report of their hospital treatment including all ?objective” and ?subjective” data of their hospital stay. The conversation with patients and their relatives about this report and modifications of the details and addresses of the report in case of patients’ objections is considered as a psychotherapeutic tool (narrative of doctor and patient) in order to improve the transparency of the diagnostic and therapeutic process and the insights in the psychosomatic mechanisms of the patient’s disease. We discuss our organisation of cocreating the hospital discharge report and our experiences with this type of patient-doctor-communication.     

Der Fall Penelope

With their book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile (1989) León and Rebeca Grinberg (1984) opened up a new clinical field, which had been neglected for a long time in the psychoanalytic community, although Freud’s plurilinguistic competence had greatly contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis. With their book The Babel of the Unconscious (1993; German edition in preparation) Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri could confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to help plurilingual patients to integrate the different aspects of their self which are bound to their mother tongue and to their foreign tongue(s) and to thus allow them to develop a new identity. The author, who works as a psychoanalyst in Munich since 1999, works every day with his Italian patients in this new clinical field, i.e., in their common mother tongue and at the two levels of their old Italian and their new German identity. Through the detailed presentation of a clinical case he furthermore shows how on the one hand migration creates a new space in which therapy actually becomes possible, and on the other hand how not only therapy but the kind of relationship developed by the patients to their “new country” plays a decisive role in the whole process. Such a frame proved to be particularly good for the emergence, revisitation and reelaboration of a transgenerational trauma, around which the case of Penelope is also centered. The author further assumes that the theme “migration and identity” is becoming more and more important in our globalized world with clinical consequences whose elaboration requires a specific cultural and technical preparation.