On Paulo Freire's Debt to Psychoanalysis: Authority on the Side of Freedom

Paulo Freire's major work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, owes adebt to psychoanalysis. In particular, as this paper argues,Freire's account of teacher authority needs to be understoodthrough psychoanalytic sensibilities. Paulo Freire maintains thatteacher authority can be ``on the side of freedom.' This is ahighly charged claim given that liberalist traditions generallycast authority as the enemy of freedom. Breaking with liberalunderstandings of authority, Freire's ``authority on the sideof freedom' is a matter of maintaining the delicate psychicbalance that leads neither to domination nor to submission.This paper investigates how such an authoritative balance functions.     

Transformations of early infantile experiences: A 6-month-old in psychoanalysis

The aim of the paper is to study the theoretical and technical tools for psychoanalysis adapted to an infantile analysand's requirements. The author presents the case of a 6-month-old boy with his mother in psychoanalytical sessions four times a week; the analysis was terminated after six weeks. After the fi rst two sessions the disturbances between the infant and the mother disappeared from everyday life but continued with increasing intensity as an emotional storm in the sessions during three weeks up to a 12-day break. During and after the break everyday life continued without disturbances. After the break the emotional storm continued in the sessions but abated and was replaced by playing. The infant's creation of a fort-da game with his pacifi er indicated a transformation of the mental functioning. The analysis could then be terminated. The study of the process indicates good reasons to adapt psychoanalytical concepts to the prerequisite of the infantile personality and to use the concepts of unconscious, infantile repression, substitute formation, return of the infantile repressed, infantile transference, splitting, xKy, reverie and containment as some of the theoretical tools for understanding the infantile personality in a clinical psychoanalytical setting.     

'This is not psychoanalysis': On the stony way of the Danish Psychoanalytical Society

When Freud founded the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), he wanted a network of local groups responsible for psychoanalytic training. The groups would function as ‘headquarters whose business it would be to declare: All this nonsense is nothing to do with analysis; this is not psychoanalysis. Today, with psychoanalytic pluralism, Tuckett (in press) has asked ‘Does anything go? He has pointed out that the psychoanalytic community has been increasingly willing to accept within its ranks apparently very varied approaches to theory and practice, and that this increasing diversity has many negative consequences for psychoanalytic institutions and especially for training schemas. The aim of this paper is to give an example of psychoanalysis that ‘did not go’, and how that led to a shaky start for the new Danish Psychoanalytical Society, with confusing boundary relations between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and no training institute. Beginning with the written psychoanalytical contribution of the three founders of the Danish Society, the paper will try to identify factors that contributed to the ‘shaky start’. The paper will also examine how stones were removed from the path, thus paving the way for the members of the Society to discover ‘competent psychoanalysis’.     

Hans Loewald: A radical conservative

Hans Loewald's work was relatively marginalized in its day and it is little known outside the United States. It is, however, assuming increasing importance in American psychoanalysis. Loewald's attractiveness as a theoretician is due, in no small part, to his rigor and synthetic reach. He is able to accomplish the difficult feat of remaining non-sectarian and systematic at the same time. Indeed, Loewald's work contains an integrative vision that is unusual in today's fragmented psychoanalytic world. This author tries to show how Loewald attempts to reconcile many of the rigid oppositions that often become reified in analytic controversies: structural theory versus relational psychoanalysis, traditionalism versus revisionism, oedipal versus pre-oedipal, modernist versus postmodernist and hermeneutical versus scientific. The article examines how Eros, understood in terms of the psyche's synthetic strivings, plays a major role in Loewald's theory. The author also situates Loewald's position within contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of epistemology. These discussions tend to criticize the objectivism of modern science-and analysis in so far as it models itself on science-and stress countertransference and the subjectivity of the analyst. Loewald's argument, however, runs in the opposite direction. Because of his concern with the autonomy and individuality of the patient, he is concerned with the clinical dangers rising from an overemphasis on the subjectivity of the analyst.     

The affective basis of violence

Violence is a complex matter, and understandingly perhaps, it is the objective, behavioral aspects that are commonly focused on. Here, however, it is the subjective psychological and especially affective substrates of violence that are brought to the fore. Psychoanalytic perspectives provide a way of thinking about these that also sets them in a human-developmental context. In this essay, psychoanalytic ideas about aggression and violence are considered, and what they have to say about the relationship between states of mind and behavior is critically reviewed. There also is an exploration of the ways that some recent findings in developmental science and neuroscience can refine and augment an understanding of these relationships, facilitating the construction of a psychobiological model, which may be placed in a social context. From this biopsychosocial perspective, aggression is seen as a heuristic concept that encapsulates numerous interacting elements that in ordinary development integrate and serve to promote optimal organism survival: By contrast, from this perspective, in humans violence may be understood as a pathological variant of aggression.     

Care,play and lifelong learning

In this paper, links between the concepts of long-term care and lifelong learning are suggested, and notions of care and the author’s construction of the Pedagogic Third will be proposed. The psychoanalysis of children stresses the importance of symbolic play, during which the child uses games to master internal conflicts. Analogous results might emerge from play that engages adult learners. However, where play helps children define roles and accept rule-regulated behaviour, we consider to what extent an adult learner is addressing desires which cannot be satisfied because they are too threatening, or desires which cannot be satisfied in reality and which are represented symbolically in play as an alternative. In order to work through these ideas, we consider a comedic representation of a hospital ward and an extract from the diary of a midwife who was also a long-term patient. The author’s contribution to the conference was a workshop and not the presentation of a paper. As such, this paper has been written in retrospect and is consequently reflective in stance. Much of the work described in this paper is connected to a larger piece of work, a monograph in progress, due to be published in 2019.     

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.     

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.