What we look for in poetry

A chain of events was triggered on the nights of April 23 and 24, 1915, in Constantinople, Turkey, that would end, approximately six years later, with death or forced deportation of more than two and a half million Armenians from their historical homeland in Central and Eastern Turkey. During those two nights over two hundred Armenian writers, historians, translators, poets, journalists, editors, and political leaders were arrested in their homes, taken to the central police station, and never seen again.

The shock of the genocide not only nearly destroyed a nation, together with its articulate literary, political, and cultural leaders, but also paralyzed the creative abilities of its survivors. With their writers, poets, and political leaders lost, their symbolic vocabulary shattered, the Armenians have been unable to distill from the genocide a transcendent wisdom and to present to all cultures the fruits of that distillation via new poetry, art, theater, film, literature, and philosophy, hi the words of V. Oshagan, a modern writer on Armenian and American themes

Seventy years after the event, the Genocide has still not been tackled by any author of note. The Armenians have not recovered from the trauma and with nothing forgotten and nothing forgiven, the Genocide is still continuing. As long as the Turk is identified with the principle of evil in the Armenian imagination, and as long as the Turkish government refuses to admit its guilt and make amends to the victims, the Genocide will continue and will prevent the Armenians from producing any work of art from the theme.

Slowly, over the past two decades, powerful works have emerged that convey to the world, through poetry and myth, the true stupefaction of that horrendous time period. Among these works is the 1980 short story, “Uncle Toros,” by the Armenian writer Mooshegh Galshoyan. With insight and intuition, he portrayed the life of one eighty-year-old victim of the genocide. Old Uncle Toros's recurring nightmare of that event, as vividly told by Galshoyan, allows one to enter the Armenian trauma, to step into the unconscious life of a genocide victim. –A. Chutjian     

II Spatial metaphors and somatic communication: the embodiment of multigenerational experiences of helplessness and futility in an obese patient

This paper explores the analysis of an obese woman who came to experience her flesh as a bodying forth of personal and multigenerational family and cultural experiences of helplessness. The paper discusses the ideas and images that formed the basis of how I engaged with these themes as they presented countertransferentially. My thesis is that clinical approaches which draw on spatial metaphors for the psyche offer valuable tools for working with people whose inner world expresses itself somatically because such metaphors can be used to engage simultaneously with the personal, cultural, and ancestral dimensions of these unconscious communications. The paper builds on Jung's view of the psyche as comprised of pockets of inner otherness (complexes), on Redfearn's image of psyche as landscape‐like and on Samuels’ thinking on embodied countertransference and on the political psyche. It also draws on Butler's work on the body as a social phenomenon and on the theme of being a helpless non‐person or nobody as explored in Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead which retells Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of two of the play's ‘bit’ characters.     

The Unconsciously Constructed Virtual Other

Neuroscience has confirmed Freud's assertion of the primacy of unconscious process in relation to conscious experience. However, unconscious process, for many neuroscientists, is viewed as something that is devoid of meaning. This paper suggests that there are different levels of unconscious process. This conceptualization of unconscious process may help to reconcile the psychoanalytic assumption of a meaningful unconscious with the conception that unconscious process is a meaningless code, a belief held by most neuroscientists. To effect this reconciliation we must return to Freud's earlier theory of unconscious process as described in his Interpretation of Dreams. A dream-like unconscious process, employing metaphor, unconsciously organizes our affective experiences while we are awake.     

Analysts in Search of an Author: Voltaire or Artemisia Gentileschi? Commentary on “Field Theory in Psychoanalysis,Part 2: Bionian Field Theory and Contemporary Interpersonal/Relational Psychoanalysis” by Donnel B. Stern

The authors comment on Stern's characterization of differences between interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis and Bionian field theory. The critical points on which a consensus is not, for the time being, readily possible concern the relationship between the external and internal worlds and the various conceptions of unconscious experience. They believe that, before forging a link with the external world (whose role we would be foolish to deny), it is clinically more useful to apprehend this internal world as rigorously and over as wide a range as possible—which they do by radically transforming the external world into a dream of the field. Conversely, in their view we may be reassured but partly misled by the concept of a dialectic between the external and internal worlds that fails to take account of the utter pervasiveness of the unconscious and the fact that it speaks even when seemingly silent—not only negatively in micro- and macroenactments but also positively in waking dream thought, which is an expression of its poetic activity that unceasingly confers meaning on experience.     

Consciousness and Criterion: On Block's Case for Unconscious Seeing

Block ( 2012 ) highlights two experimental studies of neglect patients which, he contends, provide ‘dramatic evidence’ for unconscious seeing. In Block's hands this is the highly non‐trivial thesis that seeing of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur outside of phenomenal consciousness. Block's case for it provides an excellent opportunity to consider a large body of research on clinical syndromes widely held to evidence unconscious perception. I begin by considering in detail the two studies of neglect to which Block appeals. I show why their interpretation as evidence of unconscious seeing faces a series of local difficulties. I then explain how, even bracketing these issues, a long‐standing but overlooked problem concerning our criterion for consciousness problematizes the appeal to both studies. I explain why this problem is especially pressing for Block given his view that phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness. I further show that it is epidemic—not only affecting all report‐based studies of unconscious seeing in neglect, but also analogous studies of the condition most often alleged to show unconscious seeing, namely blindsight.     

Do Dead Warriors Continue Their Struggle in a Higher Region? The Transgenerational Perspective

Freud's surprising formulation (sensibly supplemented by Strachey) in “The Ego and the Id” (1923, p. 39), of dead warriors' continuation of their struggle in a higher region (referring to Wilhelm von Kaulbach's painting The Battle of the Huns), connotatively has the theme of pathology transcending and telescoping the generations. In a case study, the concealed external reality of a woman's father (his involvement in atrocities during World War II, his conviction without serving his sentence) had an eminently pathogenic and pathoplastic influence on her and resulted in a “borrowed unconscious sense of guilt” becoming an encapsulated part of her personality. A shared reflection on contemporary history from the perpetrators' perspective was possible only after a long latency and proved to be indispensable for reanalysis a decade later, particularly under the aspect of superego splitting. Pathology transcending generations confronts us with the technical problem of removing the contamination of borrowed and not borrowed unconscious senses of guilt, not borrowed under the aspect of the patient's personal history, which is characterized by a presumed oedipal triumph after her mother's early death.     

Nina Farhi: Leaning on an Annealed Identification: Commentary on Paper by Nina Farhi

In my response to Nina Farhi's paper, I begin my discussion with the concept of a placental space that Farhi develops to represent the psychotic's internal experience of living in a fusion with the Other. Farhi's new concept of an annealed identification provides a useful addition to the psychoanalytic literature to describe the living conditions of a psychotic who is severely entrenched in an unyielding maternal bond. Basing her conceptualizations on Milner's psychotic patient Susan, Farhi also focuses on Milner's discovery that no repressed unconscious existed for her patient Susan. I suggest in my response that Freud's nearly forgotten idea of primal repression and Lacan's idea of maternal jouissance would shed additional light onto the psychotic experience and expand Farhi's notion of an annealed identification with the maternal figure. In addition, I argue for an inclusion of the Third whose presence is so powerfully lacking in the case discussion and in the patient's life.     

Dissociation,the Analyst's Vulnerability,and the Body: Review of Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys by Philip M. Bromberg

This review praises Bromberg's rich and evocative new book for its clinical and theoretical usefulness and elaborates on three broad themes: the analyst's personal role in traumatic enactments, dissociative/addictive uses of the body, and the distinction between life-threatening and developmental trauma. Extending Bromberg's formulations, the author argues that in successful work with trauma survivors, the analyst must be actually (temporarily) traumatized as actual, personal vulnerabilities of the analyst are necessarily engaged. The analyst's vulnerability serves as an internal contact point, opening up a process of unconscious empathy with the patient and providing crucial validation of the patient's experience. The review also explores how bodily processes are used to further dissociation with eating disordered patients and how they become the source of treatment difficulties. When the patient's states of desire have been “detoured” into the body (where they are ruthlessly controlled or attacked) as well as into the relationship with food (where they are temporarily gratified), they are not as available to be mobilized in the analytic relationship. The review also questions Bromberg's assumption that the underlying dissociative mechanisms are the same for life-threatening trauma (or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) and developmental (or relational) trauma.     

The unconscious and consciousness of the memory: A contribution from neuroscience

Abstract

By integrating data from general psychology and perinatal clinical psychology with neuroscience and psychoanalysis, the author discusses the relations between memory and consciousness, the aim being a unitary definition of the concept of unconscious. Nobody has a brain that can be the same as any other person's: the biology of memory lies in neural networks that have been constructed in the brain of that specific person by their experience. From the fetal stage, each brain progressively learns its own individual functions during its relational neuropsychic development. The author underlines how the continuous emotional biological work of the brain, together with a person's entire relational life, produces the construction of the whole functional and individual mindbrain. The whole construction is memory and this is unconscious; indeed it may be the true unconscious. From the continuous silent work of the mindbrain of a person, some forms of conscious level may emerge in his individual's subjectivity: some functioning of mindbrain makes what an individual person can consciously remember. The unconscious is only what appears in some form in an analyst's consciousness, at some specific moment in his relationship with a patient, and which the analyst translates into some form of his verbal interpretation.     

Between memory and destiny: Repetition1

This essay focuses mainly on the topic of repetition (agieren)—on its metapsychological, clinical, and technical conceptions. It contains a core problem, that is, the question of the represented, the nonrepresented, and the unrepresentable in the psyche. This problem, in turn, brings to light the dialectical relation between drive and object and its specific articulation with the traumatic. The author attributes special significance to its clinical expression as ‘destiny’. He points out a shift in the theory of the cure from recollection and the unveiling of unconscious desire, to the possibility of understanding ‘pure’ repetition, which would constitute the very essence of the drive. The author highlights three types of repetition, namely, ‘representative’ (oedipal) repetition, the repetition of the ‘nonrepresented’ (narcissistic), which may gain representation, and that of the ‘unrepresentable’ (sensory impressions, ‘lived experiences from primal times,’‘prelinguistic signifiers,’‘ungovernable mnemic traces’). The concept‐the metaphor‐drive embryo brings the author close to the question of the archaic in psychoanalysis, where the repetition in the act would express itself. ‘Another unconscious’ would zealously conceal the entombed (verschüttet) that we are not yet able to describe‐the ‘innermost’ rather than the ‘buried’ (untergegangen) or the ‘annihilated’ (zugrunde gegangen)‐through a mechanism whose way of expression is repetition in the act. With ‘Constructions in analysis’ as its starting point, this paper suggests a different technical implementation from that of the Freudian construction; its main material is what emerges in the present of the transference as the repetition of ‘something’ lacking as history. The memory of the analytic process offers a historical diachrony whereby a temporality freed from repetition and utterly unique might unfold in the analysis. This diachrony would no longer be the historical reconstruction of material truth, but the construction of something new. The author briefly introduces some aspects of his conception of the psyche and of therapeutic work in terms of what he has designated as psychic zones. These zones are associated with various modes of becoming unconscious, and they coexist with different degrees of prevalence according to the psychopathology. Yet each of them will emerge with unique features in different moments of every analysis, determining both the analyst's positions and the very conditions of the analytic field. The zone of the death drive and of repetition is at the center of this essay. ‘Pure’ repetition expresses a time halted by the constant reiteration of an atemporal present. In this case, the ‘royal road’ for the expression of ‘that’ unconscious will be the act. The analyst's presence and his own drive wager will be pivotal to provide a last attempt at binding that will allow the creation of the lost ‘psychic fabric’ and the construction, in a conjectural way, of some sort of ‘history’ that may unravel the entombed (verschüttet) elements that, in these patients' case, come to the surface in the act. The analysand's ‘pure’ repetition touches, resonates with something of the new unconscious of the analyst. All of this leads the author to underline once again the value of the analyst's self‐analysis and reanalysis in searching for connections and especially in differentiating between what belongs to the analyst and what belongs to the analysand. A certain degree of unbinding ensures the preservation of something ungraspable that protects one from the other's appropriation.     

TRANSFERENCE BEFORE TRANSFERENCE

This paper is predominantly a clinical presentation that describes the transmigration of one patient's transference to another, with the analyst functioning as a sort of transponder. It involves an apparently accidental episode in which there was an unconscious intersection between two patients. The author's aim is to show how transference from one case may affect transference in another, a phenomenon the author calls transference before transference. The author believes that this idea may serve as a tool for understanding the unconscious work that takes place in the clinical situation. In a clinical example, the analyst finds himself caught up in an enactment involving two patients in which he becomes the medium of what happens in session.     

Joseph Heller's Jewish War Novel Catch-22

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. It was a massive bestseller that sold over 10 million copies, and it introduced a new phrase into the English language for an unsolvable conundrum or paradox. Catch-22 was groundbreaking because it was the first broadly successful American novel that offered a post-modern, satirical take on the Second World War. Ostensibly the novel had nothing whatsoever Jewish about it beyond the ethnicity of its author. Instead it was about the Assyrian/Armenian protagonist, Yossarian, a USAAF bombardier in the European theatre. As I will argue, while outwardly the novel aims to represent the war and the protagonist, Yossarian, as American rather than Jewish, the work is, in fact, packed with signs that it is about a Jewish airman confronting the Holocaust. Heller's attempt to hide this was part of a tradition established by Jewish authors in the post-war years who sought to distance themselves from their ethnicity in order to speak to “universal” themes of rebellion. However, to overlook the “Jewish” semiotics of Catch-22 is to miss many of its major themes. I am thus offering a reading of the novel that will delineate what it tells us about the post-war Jewish life in America.     

The Dawning of a Thought and the Role of Play and Trauma

A critical scrutiny of Freud's case the Rat Man elucidates the implications of the built-in contradictions that Freud made while evolving the psychoanalytic method. By comparing the published case of the Rat Man with Freud's private notes we get access to two different perspectives. Wishing to mould a clinical situation that would confirm his theories and uphold the image of the psychoanalyst as an authority figure, Freud was partly blind to some irrational distortions in how he perceived the interaction between the patient and himself. Contradictory explicit and unconscious “theories” and the emergence of a more modern understanding of transference, which includes inter-subjective dimensions, are expounded.     

Some Reflections on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Motivation: Toward a Theory of Entelechy

The psychoanalytic theory of motivation needs to be recast in a vitalistic holistic (holographic) language that liberates it from its constraints to the drives and expresses that it constitutes an indivisible function of being- and continuing to being-alive. In the development of his thesis the author retraces the history of Freud's acquaintance with the idea and points out that Freud required a theory of unconscious motivation or intentionality to account for the creation of unconscious phantasies–and ultimately for psychic determinism. Psychic determinism became the template for the concept of psychic responsibility.

The author attempts to place the concept of motivation into the more all-inclusive and more vitalistic notion of entelechy so as to express its more holographic and numinous nature. A discussion of the relationship between motivation and its associated entities is made. These include volition, will, intentionality, agency, and autochthony. It is pointed out that motivation can be considered to be holographic in so far as one can consider the whole individual to be motivated, but along side this consideration one sees motivation within each portion of the psychic apparatus and also with each internal object. A case history is presented which demonstrates abulia (absence of motivation).     

Grigor of Tatev: Treatise against the Tajiks

Written in 1397, at the University of Tatev, the ‘Treatise against the Tajiks’ is an extensive section in Grigor of Tatev's Book of Questions. It is so far the only known text in medieval Armenian literature that deals with Islam on an academic level. An Aristotelian and a Nominalist, Grigor organizes his critique under sixteen ‘questions’ and discusses each in a highly scholastic style. The ‘Tajiks’ are Persian by nationality, non‐Sunnites and judging from the esoteric nature of the beliefs and doctrines ascribed to them, they belong to a sub‐Shi'ite sect. As in medieval Armenian sects—who were known for their Islamic sympathies—the teachings of the Prophet are traced to the heresies of Arius and Cerinthus. The Prophet is presented as a particularly positive figure. Rejecting rationalism in religion, but insisting on the role of reason to maintain doctrinal and practical consistency, and in an ecumenical spirit, Grigor seeks common points between basic Islamic doctrines and Christian sacraments.