Anna Freud's Analysis by Her Father: The Assault on the Self

Sigmund Freud's analysis of his daughter, Anna, continues to create many troubling questions: For example, in terms of his own theory did Freud envisage the transference reactions of his daughter in her analysis with him? How are we to understand Anna Freud as a well-trained analyst in terms of the inevitable limitations of her analytic experience with her father? Menaker explores the ethical effects of this analysis in regard to fundamental problems in psychoanalytic theory and therapy.     

Differentiating Two Kinds of Neutrality

Neutrality is a most important concept, yet a controversial one. Theorists of different analytic schools have defined it in their own terms, leaving behind them a legacy of disparate and often contradictory formulations. In this paper, the author reviews briefly some of these ideas about neutrality. Then, from a contemporary interpersonal/relational perspective, the author takes a new look at the idea of neutrality. The author points out how unacknowledged discrepancies among these ideas get in the way of understanding and so complicate analytic discourse, and argues that useful work with this concept requires that analysts differentiate between two aspects of neutrality, specifically operational neutrality and intentional neutrality. The theoretical discussion is followed by a case vignette illustrating the clinical usefulness of this differentiation.     

Winnicott and Derrida: development of logic-of-play

In this essay I develop the logic of play from the writings of the British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The logic of play serves as both a conceptual framework for theoretical clinical thinking and a space of experiencing in which the therapeutic situation is located and to which it aspires. I argue that both Winnicott and Derrida proposed a playful turn in Western thinking by their attitude towards oppositions, viewing them not as complementary or contradictory, but as 'peacefully-coexisting'. Derrida criticizes the dichotomous structure of Western thought, proposing playful movement as an alternative that does not constitute itself as a mastering construction. I will show that Winnicott, too, proposes playful logic through which he thinks and acts in the therapeutic situation. The therapeutic encounter is understood as a playful space in which analyst and analysand continuously coexist, instead of facing each other as exclusionary oppositions. I therefore propose the logic of play as the basis for the therapeutic encounter. The playful turn, then, is crucial for the thought and praxis expressed by the concept of two-person psychology. I suggest the term playful psychoanalysis to characterize the present perspective of psychoanalysis in the light of the playful turn. I will first present Derrida's playful thought, go on to Winnicott's playful revolutionism, and conclude with an analysis of Winicott's clinical material in the light of the logic of play.     

The social unconscious in persons,groups and societies,volume 1: Mainly theory,edited by Earl Hopper and Heim Weinberg

This paper looks at some instances of young children learning in a school setting, and suggests that ‘emotional learning’ is an integral part of the apparently ‘cognitive’ learning that takes place in school. The paper uses object relations psychoanalysis in order to explore some of the more-or-less hidden emotional states of mind that accompany difficulties and successes with school learning. Three extracts are presented from observations of young children coming to terms with reading and writing. Each of these is then discussed, with the aim of showing how learning always takes place in a dynamic, relational emotional context. From the theoretical perspective outlined in this article, all learning involves unconscious ‘object relating’. Things to be learnt about, and people requiring learning, or assisting with it, are the bearers of the learner's vivid unconscious ‘transferences’. Such transferences colour the learner's emotional experience of the people and things around him or her, constituting a dynamic, internally experienced, ‘emotional context’ for learning. While this emotional context may be partly subjective, it is also more or less affected by others' feeling states, pulling the learner into a shared learning environment which is emotionally complex and inter-subjective.     

Dreams,psychoanalysis and virtuality: the ancient mind in the modern world

The modern psyche is being shaped by the technological revolution involving the development of a virtual electronic environment in replacement of the natural world. Through the lens of the dream, as it has been valued and devalued in various cultures (including psychoanalysis), we can explore changes in the status of inner life. Psychoanalysis at first celebrated, now ignores dreams. This development runs parallel to the high value of dreams in pre‐industrial cultures and their demotion in contemporary post‐industrial Western culture. Despite official disregard for dreams, dreams as the original virtual experience, serve as the basic model from nature for the electronic virtual world displayed on the external screen. Also, dreams reappear in a technological transformation as film, video, TV and computer imagery. The ancient importance of dreams has been transferred to the powerful influence of life on the external screen. But dreams as dreams are like “the canary in the mind,” warning of a continuing demotion of inner life in modern “post‐human” culture. A rebellious re‐engagement with dreams, in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis, is advocated.     

A virtual training institute in Eastern Europe

This is a short outline of the development of psychoanalysis and of analytic training in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Han Groen Prakken Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe was founded by the IPA and the EPF in 2002 to organize and coordinate this. The activity of such an unusual training institute, virtual and time-limited up to the birth of new IPA study groups, is described with the problems it has had to face, from shuttle analysis to research of this unusual training, from initial outreach activity to formation of new analytic groups, from unavoidable plurality of analytic approaches of an international staff to the need for systematic teaching, from criteria for selection of candidates in such a large area with many languages, cultures and histories, to the integration of new analysts and groups in the international analytic community. These problems are part of the challenge implicit in the globalization, with its unavoidable push to enlarge to the whole humanity the psychoanalytic theory and praxis. Such an experience is now used in Latin America, but may also soon have its application in other continents. Freedom of mind is a basic need of all humans and psychoanalysis still has much to say about this.     

Metamorphosis and the aesthetics of loss: I. Mourning Daphne--the Apollo and Daphne paintings of Nicolas Poussin

The myth of Apollo and Daphne, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is viewed through the self‐referential eye of the seicento painter, Nicolas Poussin. Collectively, the tree‐metaphoric myths are argued to metaphorically represent, mourn, and negate unbearable realities, including the developmental challenges of adolescence and adulthood – in particular, loss. Examined in the context of their aesthetic precedents and a close reading of Ovid ’s text, the two Apollo and Daphne paintings that bracket Poussin’s oeuvre are interpreted as conveying the conflict and ambiguity inherent to Ovid, as well as connotations more personal to the artist. The poetic and aesthetic reworking of the regressive, magical experience of metamorphosis restores it to the symbolic world of metaphor: for reparation, remembrance, and return.     

The role of the patient's remembered history and unconscious past in the evolution of Betty Joseph's 'Here and now' clinical technique (1959-1989)

The author historicizes one aspect of Betty Joseph's ongoing technical contributions in terms of its originating London kleinian context. Early on she drew upon both the patient's remembered history and unconscious past, linking these experiences in past-to-present transference interpretations in order to effect psychic change. In evolving the technique of 'here and now' analysis, Joseph came to emphasize a communicative definition of projective and introjective identification as well as the significance of enactments while marginalizing the use of part-object anatomical interpretative language. She gradually set aside directly linking the patient's past with the present, compelled now by making direct contact with her patients. She now tracked how difficult patients acted in and responded to interpretations from moment to moment. The author maintains that the explicit and implicit conceptual work of Wilfred Bion as well as Joseph's continuous group workshop for analysts led to an increased understanding of the patient's projective impact on the analyst's countertransference responses, and thereby increased the analyst's capacity with 'difficult to treat' narcissistic spectrum patients described by her colleague, Herbert Rosenfeld. In recent work, while Joseph continues to elucidate what patients recall about their early past, she formats her understanding in terms of a direct analysis of the structure of the patient's projected internal object relations in the transference. The analyst works with the patient's communications and enactments, with a greater emphasis on a more 'inside-to-outside' understanding of transference in contrast to the earlier 'past-to-present' work associated with both Freud and Klein. This investigation concludes with one example of Betty Joseph's significant impact on contemporary kleinian technique by taking up some of Michael Feldman's work. Now the analyst listens to the 'past presented,' the patient's projected internal world, as well as tracks how the patient hears and subtly mishears interpretations for defensive, equilibrium-maintaining purposes, as the analyst attempts to effect psychic change by widening the ego's perceiving functions.     

Finding everland: Flight fantasies and the desire to transcend mortality

Fantasies and dreams of flight are ubiquitous across cultures and throughout history and often linked to immortality. A perspective derived from terror management theory holds that flight fantasies are appealing because they suggest transcendence of the limitations of creatureliness and mortality. Five studies established the link between mortality concerns and flight fantasy. In Study 1, participants showed greater desire to fly after contemplating death compared to a control topic. In Study 2, participants showed greater desire to fly, but not to engage in other supernatural acts, after contemplating death compared to a control topic. In Studies 3 and 4, participants who engaged in flight fantasy did not subsequently demonstrate defensive reactions to a death reminder observed in nonflight conditions. Study 5 showed that flight fantasy, but not other pleasurable or empowering fantasies, decreased death thought accessibility after mortality salience, and this effect was uniquely mediated by a feeling of freedom from bodily limits.     

Gifts,talismans and tokens in analysis: symbolic enactments or sinister acts?

Analysis is nuanced with many non-verbal cues and interactions. This is vividly illustrated when gifts are presented to the analyst. Their physical presence transcends the symbolic frame of analysis because, although their meaning may be metaphorical, their presence is real. Unlike other material objects and pictures, the gift may seem to invite the analyst to receive it personally. It may apparently demand some form of action. A gift may be consciously given as a token, or it may be magically invested as a talisman. On the surface, it might appear to be an expression of love; it may be a communication of a wish for acceptance; but it may have more 'sinister', unconscious intent. It may embody the wish to expel unwanted affect, ward off evil or control the analyst. Therefore disposal, that is the resolution and settling of the object, is significant. The case with which this paper is illustrated traces the meaning of a series of gifts in a single analysis. It is hoped that this will enhance a wider understanding of this common analytic phenomenon.