Psychoanalysis and the Body–Mind Problem

In this paper I have tried to clarify some of the differences between on the one hand ordinary doubts and uncertainties that are part and parcel of the psychoanalytic process, and on the other hand the sort of doubt that Socrates called 'aporia', that is, philosophical and conceptual. I have described one point at which philosophical doubt may creep into psychoanalytic thinking on body/mind issues. I presented a psychoanalytical model of the mind, based largely on Bion and Anzieu, in which mind is seen to be emergent from a body–mind nexus, to which we may, under pressure, regress. I elaborated this by reference to an example of my own somatisation, and to Anzieu's theory of a skin ego. Finally I made some comparisons between philosophical solutions to anxieties arising both in the mind/body area and in general epistemology, and psychoanalytic approaches to similar anxieties in life.     

Psychoanalysis in the university: A full‐time vision1

Psychoanalysis may be unique among scholarly disciplines and professions in having grown as an educational enterprise in a private part‐time setting, outside the university. Freud would have liked it to be otherwise, but in Central Europe, when it was created, university placement was not possible. In America, after World War II, the concept of the medical school department of psychiatry psychoanalytic institute was established in some psychoanalytic training centers but it could only partly overcome the educational and research inadequacies of traditional psychoanalytic training. The possibilities for a true university‐based full‐time training structure are explored.     

Catharsis: Psychoanalysis and the theatre

The notion of catharsis, in relation to tragedy, was introduced by Aristotle in his work Poetics. Over the centuries, Aristotle's innovative and enigmatic reference to this process has been widely commented on and given rise to intense controversy. In 1895, Freud and Breuer reconsidered this notion in their Studies on Hysteria, where they present the so-called cathartic therapeutic method. It is not, however, this aspect of psychoanalytical theory that the author of this article seeks to elucidate: drawing on a detailed study of the references to tragic catharsis in the work of Freud and Lacan, the author proposes to examine their implications for psychoanalytic treatment.With specific reference to Freud's article Psychopathic characters on the stage (1905) and Lacan's commentary on Sophocles' Antigone (1960), the author argues that catharsis is to be understood not so much as a mechanism of discharge linked to abreaction, but rather as the actual analytic process itself during which the Subject is 'unveiled' and thus faced with the enigma of his own desire.     

Psychoanalysis and academia: Psychoanalysis at the crossroads between exact and human sciences

Abstract

It is proposed that the mental health crisis in “developed” societies is largely due to the fact that psychology is heavily based upon an exact science model academically, and upon a medical model clinically. Indeed, these models favor an apperception of mental pathologies as essential entities with a biological etiology, and this reification facilitates a process of nonimplication of the sufferer as concerns his condition. The progress in brain sciences holds the promise of acknowledging psychology as an autonomous discipline, properly describing mental logics, which are constrained, but not determined, by brain characteristics; moreover, mental logical operations mandatorily need content from the contingent history of the subject's life to become instantiated. Psychology, then, is at the interface between an exact science and a human science epistemology. Consequently, we need psychologists and clinicians in the field of mental health who can apply a particularized approach to mental distress, who can deal with the personal feeling of nonmastery, who can base their clinical thinking on the patient's story, and who thereby systematically stay away from any essentializing temptation, while simultaneously being aware that the theoretical framework they operate from is embedded in a continuous scientific dialogue. Psychoanalysis is at that crossroads.     

Turn of Fortune in Psychoanalysis: The 1924 Rank Debates and the Origins of Hermeneutic Psychoanalysis

The history of psychoanalysis can be characterized by conflicts that besides their personal content meant a closure and an opening in the development of the theorecial and practical (self )understanding of the discipline. The 1923-24 conflict that resulted in the separation of Rank from the movement and showed the first signs of uneasiness against the mainstream of psychoanalysis in Ferenczi's approach is relatively less known. However, its theoretical, or more general: discoursive impact on psychoanalysis was enormous.The debate took place among the top leaders of the movement, Rank and Ferenczi on one side, Jones, Abraham, Sachs on the other. In the center of the discussion there were two books, The Trauma of Birth by Rank and the The Development of Psychoanalysis by Ferenczi and Rank. With the help of documents I try to show that Freud first supported his Vienna-Budapest friends, later changed over to the other camp. As a general effect, I suggest that this debate resulted in the withdrawal from the earlier more hermeneutic-dialogical, therapy centered psychoanalysis toward a medical, objective, systematic and metapsychology oriented discipline. Besides the general theoretical change the power centers of psychoanalysis shifted toward West, Vienna and Budapest was substituted first by Berlin, later by London and New York.     

Psychoanalysis in the Workplace: An Introduction

This symposium provides an orientation for psychoanalytic clinicians to the world of psychoanalytically oriented organizational consulting, executive coaching, and related applications of psychoanalysis in the workplace. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have played a significant role in the development of organizational consulting and executive coaching, and many clinicians today express interest in transferring their skills from clinical settings to organizations and corporations. This introduction emphasizes the psychoanalytic clinical skill of ongoing reflection on relational processes and experiences, but it also recognizes that consulting requires additional and highly specific knowledge, skill, talent, and training.     

Psychoanalysis: The Sacred and the Profane

Colleagues from a variety of perspectives have written about the propensity to enshrine psychoanalytic theory. The meaning of the word “enshrine” is to cherish as sacred an idea or philosophy and protect it from change. In other words, the way we view psychoanalysis, our theories of mind and technique, become holy writ and we have divided the world of theory into the sacred and the profane. This is the kiss of death for theory, which must constantly evolve and change, but comforting for the analyst who believes he is on the side of the right, the sacred. In this paper I will discuss how our propensity to enshrine theory has had a debilitating effect on the development of psychoanalysis and, in particular, as a treatment for the most vulnerable people who seek our help. I also address the idea that movement away from enshrined positions allows us to construct different versions of reality. In this context, the notion of “action at a distance” is presented along with the attendant idea of psychoanalytic entanglement.     

Sleeping Dogs: Psychoanalysis and the Socio-Political

Psychoanalysis deals with what unconsciously mediates our relationship to reality. Our “ordinary clinical terms” (Holmes, this issue) include the press of drives and its fantasy derivatives, the history of early attachment and object relations, lifetime and intergenerational legacies; these are the elements that we assume shape psychic reality. As a discipline we are less likely to interrogate the profound and ongoing ways in which we are spellbound by ideology and are less likely to address racism, homophobia, misogyny, and privilege as central. What I hope to address in this discussion is why considering the socio-political is actually quite complicated for psychoanalysis.     

Psychoanalysis Traumatized: The Legacy of the Holocaust

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. It was founded and flourished in central European centers that would be destroyed by the Nazis. A core group of refugees who lived through persecution and exile were instrumental in rebuilding their movement on alien shores. They had no opportunity to mourn the loss of their culture or their leader, Freud, whose death was overshadowed by the cataclysmic upheaval around them. Though its trauma has been dissociated, it is represented in psychoanalytic ideas and enacted in institutions within the context of delayed or incomplete mourning. For example, authoritarianism in psychoanalytic institutions will be explored as a reliving of the trauma of both fascism and exile, and not merely typical group psychology. Further evidence of the impact of dissociated trauma includes the astonishing scotoma for actual events in treatment of Holocaust survivors; the extreme privileging of infantile fantasy over reality, and attention to childhood neurosis at the expense of adult catastrophic events.