The Analysis of Preconscious Phenomena and Its Communication

Thoughts and feelings of both patients and analysis may be influenced by perceptions that remain outside of conscious awareness. A preconscious communication exists between patient and analyst. Appreciation of the preconscious elements of communication may enable a better understanding of what may be otherwise experienced as a mysterious occurrence. Transference-countertransference interactions create a place to observe the manifestation of preconscious phenomena. This paper addresses how the analytic method enables the discovery of consciously unrecognized stimuli or selective attention to certain phenomena which have created a sense of the uncanny or surprising. Both intersubjective reflection and more formal, systematic methods, which include logic and reasoning, serve to illuminate these events. The paper discusses and illustrates the role of preconscious communication in the analytic situation and its relation to the analytic process.     

A Specific Developmental Deficit in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: The Example of the Wolf Man

In this paper I suggest that the origins of the “contamination/cleaning” form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) include a developmental history characterized by marked overprotectiveness allied with parental failure to respond to core aspects of the child's personal reality. The combined effect of these parental behaviors is likely to impede the establishment of a mature conception of the boundary between inner and outer worlds. The consequence of such a deficiency is the persistence of the magical form of thinking which is essential to the production of OCD. In addition, the individual is left with a disruption of personality development, the main features of which include timidity and falseness. The Wolf Man provides an example of both the characteristic development history in OCD and its consequences. Treatment based on this theoretical background may provide benefit not predicted by current psychoanalytic pessimism.     

You Can Get Here From There

This paper is a review of my development from psychology intern and research assistant to the psychoanalytic tester and theoretician David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in the 1940s, through my career in psychological testing, my psychoanalytic training in the Western New England Institute, and my working successively at the Austen Riggs Center, Yale Department of Psychiatry, Yale Student Mental Health Center, Cornell Department of Psychiatry, and eventually private practice in New York City. During this period, I rose to the academic rank of Professor and the analytic position of Training Analyst. I have written extensively: first on testing, then more or less in turn on psychoanalytic ego psychology, action language for psychoanalysis, feminist issues, narrative in psychoanalysis, and the contemporary Kleinians of London. This memoir traces the intellectual continuity that characterizes these writings and my continuing development as a psycho-analyst—my first ambition and great love.     

Patients' Motivations and the Analyst's Experience

Although the analyst's way of organizing what he or she hears is influenced by assumptions about human motivation, the analyst's experience in the room with a patient is quite removed from any theories about motivation he or she might hold. So compelling is the clinical interaction that it may only be retrospectively that it is possible to observe how one's theory of motivation influences one's work. Several years ago, on the day before I began working on this paper, I took verbatim notes on the last three sessions of a holiday shortened week to see whether I could discern what assumptions about motivation I was making. I would not describe my theory of motivation as it appears at the end of the essay the way I did at the time I wrote this essay. Today, I would try to integrate drive theory with object relations more explicitly.     

Motivation: Sic Transit Gloria?

Sic transit gloria—so passes away the glory once accorded to motivation as a central focus of psychoanalytic theory and practice. How and why? That is the subject of this paper. I will track the ups and downs of motivation historically and its current replacement by the attention correctly afforded to relationships across a spectrum of contemporary theories. I will then take up my proposal of five motivational systems embedded in an intersubjective context and consider critiques of the proposal from different vantage points. Despite waning interest, motivation remains an intrinsic component of psychoanalysis.     

Object Relations,Affects, and Drives: Toward a New Synthesis

This paper summarizes my efforts to develop a contemporary psychoanalytic theory of drives, integrating this theory with contemporary affect theory and with psychoanalytic object relations theory. It proposes, in essence, that affects are the primary motivations of behavior, that they include a fundamental communicative function in the infant/caregiver relationship, and that it is the integration of, respectively, positive and negative affects that will crystallize libido and aggression as supraordinate motivational systems or drives. At the same time, insofar as peak affect states organize the internalization of the relationship between self and objects in the form of affect-invested self and object representations, affects are also contributing fundamentally to the organization of an internalized world of object relations, eventually consolidated in the tripartite structure of the mind.

This proposed interrelationship of affects, self- and object representations, and drives rejects the assumption of incompatibility of drive theory and object relations theory and provides potential bridging functions with the neurobiology of affects.     

The Experience of Abandonment and Adoption,as a Child and as a Parent,in a Psychological Motivational Perspective

Abstract

The publication of the relationship between Sabina Spielrein and Carl Jung in 1980 gave rise to a veritable cottage industry of mythomania at the expense of historical truth. The fictions grafted upon the historical facts have conjured up a sensational aura of scandal and gossip about the protagonists. The arch fiction is that Spielrein and Jung had a sexual relationship during her analysis by Jung. At the very least, based on documents published by the author, this opinion can no longer be maintained beyond reasonable doubt. After 1905, Spielrein was no longer Jung's patient but continued as Jung's medical student, whereupon Jung sought her out as friend. In addition, it was Spielrein herself who fell passionately in love with Jung, and analysed this relationship as a case of mutual oedipal dynamics. The author further pursues the oedipal analysis of and links it to (1) love as reality and transference, (2) the reality of Jewish and Gentile relationships in Europe, and (3) mutual ethnic transferences between Spielrein and Jung. Jung, who was also passionately drawn to Spielrein, displaced his marital problems owing to a “Don Juan complex” to concocted problems in treatment, deceiving both himself and Freud out of the dread of social consequences.     

Black holes: Some notes on time,symbolization, and perversion in the psychodynamics of addiction

Abstract

The existence of man is distinguished by its split state: man stands in the middle of life yet still has an awareness of his own death. He has to compensate whatever is missing in him naturally at the societal level, created as culture, and at the individual level through creativity. Rank investigated the human ‘creative drive’, the anthropological aspiration to express oneself in creative works, and to overcome the fear of death with its help. Freud admired poets and artists, whose achievements he could not psychoanalytically access, but he considered science superior to the harmless and naïve arts. There are two anthropological radicals: premature birth and the consciousness of death. Freud's massive fear of death made it difficult for him to acknowledge the problem of death appropriately. In Rank's concept, the development of human creativity contributes towards the fear of death being alleviated so that the knowledge of death can be integrated into life; creativity belongs to the fundamental opportunities of man that may enable him to find a way through neurosis. Failure is as much a part of life as is creativity: those who do not experience and accept life in its tragic dimension are denied creativity. Only a creative person who accepts his partial failure finds the strength to continue to be creative without his imperfect work leading to the ritual repetition of the same thing again and again, that is, getting stuck in recidivism.     

Book Review

Abstract

Case vignettes are offered to illustrate five principles of self psychological treatment the author believes are generally accepted by self psychologists. A sixth principle is included, contributed by self psychologists informed by intersubjectivity. They are:

1. The centrality of the empathic vantage point for analytic observation. This requires a shift in the listening stance from observing from the outside to observing from the inside. The analyst attempts to listen from within the context of the analysand's subjective reality in order to understand his experience.

2. Alterations in the sense of self must be recognized and understood.

3. When ruptures occur between patient and analyst (selfobject bond), such ruptures are analyzed.

4. From a technical point of view, the careful exploration of both the state of the selfobject bond, and the meanings to the patient of the analytic activity needs to be carefully examined and understood by both patient and analyst.

5. Defensive activities are thought to be undertaken in the service of psychological survival.

6. A deeply entrenched defensive structure may appear as a resistance to progress in treatment. Such pathological structures of accommodation function to dismantle progress in self delineation.