On being dropped and picked up: adopted children and their internal objects

The field of adoption has changed over the past years from one where there were babies available for many adoptive couples to one where increasingly the children who are needing adoption are those who have already suffered deprivations and difficulties in their families of origin, with disrupted attachments and a consequent traumatizing effect of their early history on their internal worlds. Professionals working with these children, who have in effect been 'dropped', face the difficult task not only of placing them appropriately but of supporting their adoptive families. With the new experience of a secure base the original trauma may be reworked, and the new framework tested by these damaged and consequently often damaging children as they replay their feelings of being unwanted and unwantable. In describing once-weekly work with a 6-year-old adopted boy, I suggest that the primary disillusion of his neonatal experience caused an internal catastrophe which was then reworked in his adoptive placement. This child did not experience what Winnicott (1971) called 'gradual disillusion' in terms of his belief that he creates the needed breast, and thus integration of love and hate of the primary object, but remained in a state of hyper-vigilance because of the deficits in his internal world. These deficits have been able partially to be addressed in psychotherapy treatment.     

THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COGNITIVE ORIENTATION

The essence of the story of King Oedipus forms a cornerstone of psychoanalysis since Freud. Oedipality means the painful experience of the child who is left outside the mutual relationship between the parents and the child's wish to kill one parent and marry the other one. The life-long oedipal attitude and relationship develop in dyadic and triadic relationships. An example is given of a boy whose dyadic relationships are threatened by triads, and whose triads are threatened by integrated oedipality. Only after the oedipal situation is worked through does it become possible to live and love in reality, and to maintain manifold relationships. This development is also reflected in thinking, which only slowly develops into multidimensional levels of symbolization and thought. Prior to this development, we continue to “marry dyads” and “kill triads” and remain driven by dyadic and triadic wishes in all fields of our life.     

Countertransference—Transference seen from the Point of View of Child Psychoanalysis

This paper explores the ‘point of interaction’, that interface where the psyches of the patient and analyst meet. The author examines what is activated in the analytic pair at the point of interaction, with a particular focus on the mental activity of the patient and analyst. This exploration of the mental activity of the patient and analyst is from a theoretical position that combines contemporary Freudian and Kleinian perspectives on the therapeutic process. The author concludes that the capacity for mutuality in both the patient and analyst rests upon a part of the mind that is connected to a certain aspect of the Oedipus complex. Finally, the point of interaction is also discussed as a place where there is a potential meeting of minds around divergent methods and applications of psychoanalytic treatment. Clinical material is presented to illustrate these points.     

Are waves of relational assumptions eroding traditional analysis?

The author designates as ‘traditional’ those elements of psychoanalytic presumption and practice that have, in the wake of Fordham's legacy, helped to inform analytical psychology and expand our capacity to integrate the shadow. It is argued that this element of the broad spectrum of Jungian practice is in danger of erosion by the underlying assumptions of the relational approach, which is fast becoming the new establishment. If the maps of the traditional landscape of symbolic reference (primal scene, Oedipus et al.) are disregarded, analysts are left with only their own self‐appointed authority with which to orientate themselves. This self‐centric epistemological basis of the relationalists leads to a revision of ‘analytic attitude’ that may be therapeutic but is not essentially analytic. This theme is linked to the perennial challenge of balancing differentiation and merger and traced back, through Chasseguet‐Smirgel, to its roots in Genesis. An endeavour is made to illustrate this within the Journal convention of clinically based discussion through a commentary on Colman's (2013) avowedly relational treatment of the case material presented in his recent Journal paper ‘Reflections on knowledge and experience’ and through an assessment of Jessica Benjamin's (2004) relational critique of Ron Britton's (1989) transference embodied approach.     

The Orsino complex: Men who love themselves as love objects

Abstract

The Duke Orsino, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, is cited as the archetypal embodiment of a psychological complex which, it is argued, may affect many men in modern patriarchal societies. This condition named the ‘Orsino complex’ is characterized by the subject's experience of being in love with himself as a love object. It is the consequence of the subject's very early experience of his mother's dual psychological reactions to him as a male child. The first of these, and the more significant, I have called maternal phallic projection, while the second I term maternal withdrawal. I also consider the influence of the father upon this complex.

While this paper remains speculative in its present form—that is, its central thesis is based on fictional and not on clinical material—it might, I hope, assist all of us working psychodynamically in understanding further some of the severe problems that male clients present in their relationships with women, as well as directing further research into the complexities of gender identity in contemporary society.     

'A father is being beaten': constructions in the analysis of some male patients

I will suggest that the phantasy of 'a father is being beaten' and its transformations emerges for certain male patients as a result of the work of analysis and becomes a potential appropriation of the (symbolic) father. The symbolic beating of the father takes place at the threshold between an anal-sadistic organization and the oedipal situation. The phantasy of the 'father being beaten' does not necessarily mean that it is the father who is explicitly being beaten. It is a construction derived from the free associations and dreams, in the analytic encounter, reached through the work of interpretation. Detailed material of sessions of the five times a week analysis of one of my patients will be presented. This will be contrasted with material from four other analyses of male patients where the 'father being beaten' phantasy was not achieved. The common feature in all these other configurations is a foreclosure in the relationship to the father and a lack of an internalization of the paternal function as a symbolic capacity. It is my suggestion that this absence of the father in its symbolic function is then sexualized in a fusion between life and death drives. A final contrasting example is derived from Karl Abraham's classic paper detailing the analysis of a patient where one can interpret a dream as expressing 'a father is being beaten' phantasy; however the dream's repetitive nature and its links with a current dream in the analysis points out to a lack of differentiation between the sexes and an anal-sadistic organization.     

The Œdipus complex, crystallizer of the debate between psychoanalysis and anthropology

The way that anthropologists understand the Oedipus complex, in particular, is a good example of how they understand psychoanalysis in general. Indeed, it has crystallized a set of reactions marked by ignorance, misunderstanding, distortion and screening out and at the same time has provoked suspicion among anthropologists as to psychoanalysis, according to the preconceptions of the various schools of thought and authors implied, and this from the very first contacts up to nowadays. In what way did the psychoanalysts contribute to this and what representation did they, in turn, elaborate of anthropology? The purpose of this paper is to expose the epistemological and historical conditions of the emergence of this debate, and then to develop it by following chronology up to the 1950s and 1960s, while differentiating three major cultural areas, Great Britain, the USA and France, in order to get a clearer picture. From that point on, we will try to diversify our inquiry and to formulate some interpretative hypotheses. In particular, we think that a traumatic event may have inaugurated and organized the history of the relationship between the two disciplines, producing a situation of acculturation with multiple impacts, if we identify them with two cultures coming into contact: what is at stake here is Totem and Taboo in which Freud carries through the first major psychoanalytical approach of the interpretation of ethnographic facts, that leads him to transplant the universality of the Oedipus complex to the very root of the first social institutions and to pinpoint the presence of unconscious processes in their genesis.     

Beyond IQ: A latent state-trait analysis of general intelligence, dynamic decision making, and implicit learning

The present study investigated cognitive performance measures beyond IQ. In particular, we investigated the psychometric properties of dynamic decision making variables and implicit learning variables and their relation with general intelligence and professional success. N = 173 employees from different companies and occupational groups completed two standard intelligence tests, two dynamic decision making tasks, and two implicit learning tasks at two measurement occasions each. We used structural equation models to test latent state-trait measurement models and the relation between constructs. The results suggest that dynamic decision making and implicit learning are substantially related with general intelligence. Furthermore, general intelligence is the best predictor for income, social status, and educational attainment. Dynamic decision making can predict supervisor ratings even beyond general intelligence.     

Emergent complexity: What uphill analysis or downhill invention cannot do

In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generate complexity. The discussion focuses on the emergence of collective behavior in dynamical systems when they are poised near a critical point of a phase transition, either by tuning or by self-organization. We then present the rationale for our proposal that the brain is naturally poised near criticality and review recent results as well as the implications of this view of the functioning brain.     

Is Structure Dependence an Innate Constraint? New Experimental Evidence From Children's Complex‐Question Production

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987) , when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as Is the boy who smoking is crazy? because they have innate knowledge of structure dependence and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid such errors, on the basis of surface distributional properties of the input ( Lewis & Elman, 2001 ; Reali & Christiansen, 2005 ). Two new elicited production studies revealed that (a) children occasionally produce structure‐dependence errors and (b) the pattern of children's auxiliary‐doubling errors (Is the boy who is smoking is crazy?) suggests a sensitivity to surface co‐occurrence patterns in the input. This article concludes that current data do not provide any support for the claim that structure dependence is an innate constraint, and that it is possible that children form a structure‐dependent grammar on the basis of exposure to input that exhibits this property.