The emergence and unfolding of the psyche

This paper is a short exposition of Freud's concept of the sexual drive. My motivation for going back once more to the first introduction of sexuality understood as drive is the seeming lack of interest in the classical concept in much contemporary psychoanalytical thinking. To my mind, this prevents us from finding satisfactory solutions to such concepts as narcissism, sublimation and even the emergence and unfolding of the ego. Reading for example Winnicott's enchanting account of play, one gets the impression that Winnicott saw playing as something separate from instinctual satisfaction, from sexual fantasying and from physical sensation. Looking at this important activity in the life of young children from the point of view of drive theory, one might argue, that here we see one of the first expressions of sublimation. However, in order to fully understand this, I found it necessary to undertake a re-reading of Freud's theory of the sexual drive.     

The self, the psyche and the world: a phenomenological interpretation

Abstract :  This paper takes as its starting point Jung's definition of the self as the totality of the psyche. However, because the term psyche remains conceptually unclear the concept of the self as totality, origin and goal, even centre, remains vague. With reference to Heidegger's analysis of human being as  Dasein , as well as Jung's writings, it is argued that Jung's concept of psyche is not a synonym for mind but is the world in which we live psychologically. An understanding of the psyche as existentially situated requires us to rethink some features of the self. For instance, the self as origin is thus not a pre-existential integrate of pure potentiality but the original gathering of existence in which, and out of which, personal identity is constituted. The ego emerges out of the self as the development and ownership of aspects of an existence that is already situated and gathered. Relations between the ego and the self are about what is known, or admitted, and its relation with what is already being lived within the gathering that is existence. The self as psyche, origin, and centre are discussed, as well as the meaning of interiority. Epistemological assumptions of object relations theory are critically discussed. The paper also includes critical discussions of recent papers on the self.     

Theatres of the psyche

Fragments of the analytic voyage of a forty year old patient, haunted by the idea of her death since infancy when confronted with the anguish that accompanies the discovery of a potentially death dealing illness. In three years of intensive analytic work, her way of functioning psychically changed dramatically (her flight from imaginative life, total disaffectation of her emotional life, psychic deafness regarding her body and its messages ≡). These discoveries led to my analysand's resuming her psychoanalytic voyage in these words: 'Even if I am destined to die of this cancer, at least I shall have lived'.     

Synchronicity and the meaning-making psyche

This paper contrasts Jung's account of synchronicity as evidence of an objective principle of meaning in Nature with a view that emphasizes human meaning-making. All synchronicities generate indicative signs but only where this becomes a 'living symbol' of a transcendent intentionality at work in a living universe does synchronicity generate the kind of symbolic meaning that led Jung to posit the existence of a Universal Mind. This is regarded as a form of personal, experiential knowledge belonging to the 'imaginal world of meaning' characteristic of the 'primordial mind', as opposed to the 'rational world of knowledge' in which Jung attempted to present his experiences as if they were empirically and publicly verifiable. Whereas rational knowledge depends on a form of meaning in which causal chains and logical links are paramount, imaginal meaning is generated by forms of congruent correspondence-a feature that synchronicity shares with metaphor and symbol-and the creation of narratives by means of retroactive organization of its constituent elements.     

The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity: virtual realities and the emergence of the psyche

Jung's theory of synchronicity is seen as a step in the development of a complete theory of the symbol. In so doing, a number of proposals are made for modelling the symbolic process along lines already in use for modelling a variety of other phenomena, ranging from language to the behaviour of earthquakes. These modelling techniques involve processes of self-organization, and raise issues of scaling in systems including symbolic systems. The proposal is made that symbolic systems obey the same rules of scaling that these other systems obey, and that symbolic systems can therefore be understood as exhibiting the characteristics of a power law distribution-a concept that is explained and developed in the paper. It is finally proposed that synchronicity is an aspect of the symbolic that can be characterized as exhibiting a high degree of 'symbolic density'.     

The Haunting of Hill House: psyche,soma, and destiny

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - Fairy tales and horror stories inhabit the realm of terrible truths, affording opportunities to survive and work through them from the safe distance of...