The Silence of the Body

As a practice meant to release the subject from the narcissism that informs the concerns and preoccupations of her or his ego, psychoanalysis aims at a transformation of the subject comparable to the Buddha's quest for enlightenment. In order to clarify this subtle and difficult dimension of psychoanalytic work, this essay draws upon a clinical example and discusses it in the context of both Freud's and Lacan's ideas about the role of narcissism in the formation of the ego, and the Buddha's doctrine of Anatta, which insists that the concept of the Atman, or self, is based upon an illusory thought.     

Creative Change: The Life and Work of Four Novelists: Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth

Robert Kastenbaum has argued that we need to take a life-span approach to the lives of artists in order to determine what factors affected their creativity. To that end, I briefly review the lives of four writers, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth. Each followed a different pattern: Austen wrote productively until her early death; Forster ceased to write novels after his midlife success; Barbara Pym continued to write until her death from cancer; and Henry Roth restarted his moribund career in his seventies. These differences suggest that creativity is closely connected to life events and the artist's psychological state of mind.     

The ego according to Klein: return to Freud and beyond

This paper explores fundamental dimensions of Melanie Klein's concept of the ego through a detailed study of the writings of Klein and her early colleagues (Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs and Joan Riviere). The study examines three central issues: (a) the basic theoretical framework for Klein's conceptualization of the ego, and specifically how her conceptualization builds on Freud's structural and dual instinct models; (b) the processes involved in the development of the ego and its capacities (including the development from id to ego and from ego to superego); and (c) the view of the ego as an object of phantasy. Through this examination, the study demonstrates that Klein's conceptualization of the ego is firmly grounded both in Freud's formulations about the ego and in his theoretical and metapsychological approach to thinking about the ego. This counters the prevalent view that Klein was only focused on clinical understandings, unconcerned with theory and fuzzy in her abstract thinking. More specifically, it counters the view that Klein did not really have a concept of the ego in any well-structured sense of the term (Britton, 2003; Hinshelwood, 1994; Segal, 2001). The study considers the sources of these misconceived views. Finally, it argues that discarding such views allows us to appreciate better the richness of Klein's thinking, her theoretical affinities to Freud, and the role of theory in the development and justification of psychoanalysis.     

Creativity in Learning Environments: The Case of Two Sixth Grade Art‐Rooms

The four elements of creativity — the person, process, product, and environment — that come together for the purpose of clearly and completely defining creativity, form the structure of the research. Two sixth grade art‐rooms have been chosen as the setting, as a likely place to observe creativity and sixth graders as the sample group. Observations of each child in an art‐room, her/his creative process, product, and the assessment of a 1/20 model of the art‐room made by each student, were analyzed to form a complete picture of creativity. Results showed that the three elements of creativity (person, process, and product) were significantly different from each other. In addition, process and product occurring within the same environment were highly correlated with each other.     

THE ROLE OF AN IMMIGRANT MOTHER IN HER ADOLESCENT’S IDENTITY FORMATION: “WHO AM I?”

Immigration is a complex bio-psycho-social process and the immigrant mother has a truly complex task in lending her ego strength to her adolescent offspring. The normal adolescence’s decathexis of the love object and the consequent search for a new object may not happen smoothly for those adolescents whose mothers are immigrants. The immigration experience may cause the immigrant mother, who lost her motherland, deeper disturbance in self-identity as well as disequilibrium in her psychic structure, which in turn impacts adversely her adolescent’s development. The adolescent’s inadequate early experience with an immigrant mother may result in a deeper disturbance in his separation-individuation process as well as his identification process. An immigrant mother who has not mourned adequately, with a different sociocultural background has to go through a far more complex development of motherhood. The case of an adolescent boy, Jason, demonstrates the impact of immigrant motherhood on his ego development.     

THE BLANK FACE OF LOVE: THE POSSIBILITY OF GOODNESS IN THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL WORK OF IRIS MURDOCH1

This article explores the value of Iris Murdoch's metaphysical ethics for the theologian. Although, in many ways, Murdoch does appeal to the theologian, a subtle form of nihilism underlies her thought insofar as human goodness—in the form of loving attention—is only possible once the individual has overcome his/her ego by staring into the void and accepting the ultimate meaninglessness of reality. As this article demonstrates, Murdoch's replacement of transcendence with void rules out any form of real love or human goodness: only a dualistic exchange of gazes remains possible. Real, selfless love is only possible when the ego understands itself in the context of theological transcendence.     

A Beautiful Mind

It is often difficult to discern the line between creativity and madness. This presents a particular hazard for the analyst, whose failure to recognize real potential can result in undermining the individual's developmental strivings. This dilemma is explored through a case illustration of a woman whose creativity was undermined by a lack of recognition. To vivify the dilemma, the author invites the reader to look through her eyes into the lens offered by the film A Beautiful Mind, which portrays the struggles of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash to maintain his sanity while also testing the limits of his mind and imagination. These illustrations encourage us to consider the dilemma of the gifted individual when excessive tension arises between absorption in one's medium versus needs for recognition.     

The Spiritual Lifeline:

The Spiritual Lifeline Exercise provides a means for a life review surrounding the elderly person's spiritual past and future. This vehicle directs the participant to consider his or her thoughts and feelings associated with the intersections of significant life cvents and spiritual or religious happenings from timcs past. Moreover, the participant is encouraged to take spiritual action in his or her future. The exercise cultivates the discovery and discussion of psychosocial wisdom (ego integrity) and thus is useful in a variety of settings where elderly people meet with each other, with clergy, or with geriatric personnel. Gerontology students also gain insights into their own lives and thc lives of elderly persons by their own participation in the exercise.     

The Development of Motor Creativity in Elementary School Children and Its Retention

ABSTRACT

This article presents a follow-up study regarding whether motor creativity, developed in 3rd-grade children nine 9 years ago with the implementation of a special physical education program, has been retained. It was found that the experimental group continued to show statistically significant superiority in motor creativity. These follow-up findings can be considered far more important than the original ones, because they reveal that if motor creativity is developed in a child, it remains active for a long time, potentially the rest of his or her life, with all the subsequent advantages.     

The Influence of Openness to Experience on Perceived Employee Creativity: The Moderating Roles of Individual Trust

In this paper, we explain the influence of co‐worker trust on the effect of employees' openness to experience on their perceptions of their own creativity. We surveyed 199 working professionals in Ireland and found that openness to experience was positively associated with both employees' perceptions of their radical creativity and incremental creativity. In addition, the relationship between openness to experience and incremental creativity was negatively moderated by cognition‐based trust in his or her co‐worker. In conclusion, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings and highlight directions for future research.     

Creativity and Cultural Production: A Study of Contemporary Western Popular Music Songwriting

The contemporary Western popular music industry tends to work within a paradigm of creativity that runs counter to current academic research. This research into creativity can be categorized as falling along a continuum from individual to contextual responsibility and ranges across a number of disciplines including psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and communication and media studies. However, it is the contention of this article that it is the systems model of creativity in particular, partially coupled with the similarly complex approach to cultural production presented by Pierre Bourdieu, which provides the most useful working platform to investigate the idea of creativity. Through the use of an ethnographic research methodology, this article investigates the systems model of creativity as it applies to contemporary Western popular music songwriting. It concludes that a contemporary Western songwriter's ability to make choices, and therefore be creative, is both circumscribed and facilitated by his or her knowledge of the domain of contemporary Western popular music and his or her access to, and knowledge of, the field that holds this knowledge that allows the conclusion, at the more philosophical level, that these ideas can also be presented as an account of the interdependence of agency and structure within the workings of the creative system.     

Analysis of the creation of 'emptiness', of 'nothingness', in certain types of psychosis

Some psychotic patients manage to create nothingness and emptiness thanks to the amount of work their ego accomplishes. That is the paradox we find in schizophrenic patients, their ego is simultaneously weak and powerful. When we analyse how this nothingness/emptiness is created, we enter into a strange world in which the patient's ego is, in part, defective and fragmented; his or her thinking apparatus, capacity for perceiving and feeling are under attack. Yet this same ego can call on intellectual ability, imagination and tremendous energy in order to create a highly complex structure, thanks to which the psychotic individual manages to create a kind of para-organization of space by splitting 'nothingness' (the space between representations) and 'density' (a compact magma made up of many different highly-condensed representations). Both nothingness and density may give the impression that the patient is 'nowhere to be found' and therefore impossible to analyse. In this paper, I shall describe these mechanisms as they appear in the clinical material of a female psychotic patient.     

Eve and Adam--is a partnership between the male and female actually possible?

Whereas the girl can pattern the formation of her post-oedipal gender-typical selfrepresentation on the model of her mother, the boy must give up the maternal object and turn to the father. The author believes that the reorientation consumes energy which the boy lacks when forming his ego structures, his frustration tolerance, his capacity for relationships. This deficit model is invoked to explain the commonly deplored typically male behavioral and attitudinal characteristics.     

Negro Responses to Certain Intelligence Test Items

Fifty-eight female undergraduate students were administered the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), Figural form B, and the Washington Sentence Completion Test in order to investigate the hypothesis of a positive relationship between creativity and ego development. A Spearman rank order correlation coefficient was computed for ego development and each TTCT creativity factor (fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration), as well as a total composite creativity score. All creativity scores correlated with ego development at the .01 level, except for originality, which correlated at the .05 level. Results were discussed in terms of Maslow's theories concerning highly developed persons, and possible preconscious aspects of the creative process. Conclusions were drawn, and recommendations for further research were made.     

The Development of the Concept of Concrete Subjectivity from Kant to Neo-Kantianism

One long-running conundrum in Husserlian phenomenology revolves around the question of the identity of what Husserl calls the transcendental ego, a mysterious figure that he identifies as the subject of a genuinely transcendental phenomenology. In dialogue with both Husserl and his assistant and collaborator Eugen Fink (as well as recent commentary), I attempt in this article to give a solid account of the identity of this transcendental ego, and in particular to explain the connection between this figure and the empirical ego of the individual phenomenologist. I make particular reference to Fink's depiction of a "personal union" between these two egos in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation and to certain unclear hints in Husserl's 1923/1924 lectures on First Philosophy. Ultimately, I develop my own account of such a union, which explains the transcendental ego as a certain mode in which the phenomenologist might investigate his own experiences. On this basis, I argue, the status of phenomenology as a transcendental discipline can be understood without subjecting that discipline to certain criticisms that have been levelled against it.     

Form creation in rat: an ego-psychological approach to creativity.

The recent ego-psychological approach to form in art is utilized to understand the significance of form creation to artistic creativity in general. Two kinds of form in art are discussed--"good form" and "perfect form". The first is explained as the means used by the artist's ego to facilitate the expression and communication of latent meanings; the second, as the means used by the artist's ego to order disparate mental elements and to reconcile those opposite wishes, ideas, and emotions, whose opposite valences may endanger the integrity and cohesion of the self. In line with the assumptions presented in the paper, creativity and neurosis are described as two different methods used by the ego to solve the same underlying problems.     

Freud's Views and the Contemporary Application of Hypnosis: Enhancing Therapy Within a Psychoanalytic Framework

Freud's theoretical writings on hypnosis are reviewed and reasons for his abandoning of this clinical tool are suggested. Clinical hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness which has its own felt reality and does not bypass the ego. In fact, many of the essential characteristics of hypnosis are ego functions. Functions such as focused or free-floating attention, deep absorption, enhanced memory, imagery, ego-receptivity, ego-activity, defenses, and the capacity for self-observation all remain intact in hypnosis. This view is contrasted with Freud's early uses of hypnosis which were not informed by his later psychoanalytic discoveries. Clinical material is presented which illustrates how the conversion from a psychoanalytic psychotherapy to a hypnoanalysis resolved a therapeutic impasse and allowed for a productive treatment. Fromm's view of hypnosis, as a special form of adaptive regression in the service of the ego is clinically illustrated. It is postulated that the altered state of hypnosis facilitates an increased ego mobility. It is the psychic mobility of hypnosis which facilitates the vacillation between primary and secondary process thinking; the experiencing ego and the observing ego, and conscious and unconscious experience. It is largely the ego-mobility and available memory in hypnosis that account for its advantages as compared to non-hypnotic treatment. Relational and self-psychological components of hypnosis are also proposed.     

The fall of fantasies: a Lacanian reading of lack

The purpose of this article is to explain to a non-Lacanian audience the broad philosophical foundations of Lacanian theory, particularly the relationship that Lacan draws between the human subject's ontological lack and his or her creative capacities. In an effort to explain Lacan's distaste for psychoanalytic approaches aimed at strengthening the ego, the article outlines the manner in which Lacan connects ego-driven fantasies to the constriction of the subject's psychic world. Lacan suggests that narcissistic fantasies are misleadingly seductive because they-in occluding the internal rifts and antagonisms of the subject's being-alleviate his or her anxieties about the contingent basis of existence. However, the illusory sense of plenitude and self-presence that such fantasies provide prevents the subject from effectively discerning the "truth" of his or her desire, thereby holding him or her captive in socially conventional psychic paradigms. In consequence, it is only the fall of the subject's most cherished fantasies that empowers him or her to pursue a degree of subjective singularity. The article also considers the clinical implications of Lacan's theory of lack, including the ways in which the analyst's lack enhances the patient's capacity to claim an increasingly autonomous and multidimensional mode of encountering the world.     

Beyond the logic of Lemma: the oneness of life and its environment,the oneness of within and without

In this paper the ‘analyst as a citizen in the world’ is understood as the analyst interconnecting and harmonising with his or her environment, including not only society, but also nature and the universe. In this sense, Buddhism teaches the Oneness of Life and its Environment, and links are made between Mahayana Buddhism and Jung's understanding of the Self and individuation. The Logic of Lemma in the Flower Ornament Sutra indicates that all phenomena in the world can merge with each other without losing individuality; ten stages are described from the Lotus Sutra and links are made with the development in respect to the ego; Kenji Miyazawa and his work are given as examples to illustrate this. Causality and synchronicity are explored in terms of the interaction between the individual and the environment, and three examples are given where sometimes individual, egoic, causality is more of a feature and sometimes synchronicity has a greater prominence. The paper ends with an examination of tree drawings, made over a period of 50 years by junior high school students, which indicates the way that these individuals have portrayed themselves and their relation to their environment.     

The weariness of the hero: depression and the self in a civilization in transition

According to the World Health Organization, depression is currently the leading cause of disability, which is of great concern worldwide; however there is much dispute about depression and its causes. This article raises the hypothesis that depression could be related to an increase or inflation of ego‐consciousness, which, in turn, is inseparable from the development of modernity. The ‘hero’, symbol of this historical process of self‐consciousness and autonomy, stands now wearied and disoriented. The paper outlines how, in this cultural scene, certain ideas from Carl Jung's and James Hillman's depth psychologies may be useful in addressing the issue: the rediscovery of figures of the other through the analysis of the unconscious (Jung) and associating with others in groups imbued with communal sense (Hillman) could help the depressed individual to mitigate his or her inflated ego‐consciousness. These are two complementary ways of experiencing the conglomerate nature of the self, thus promoting the process of individuation.