Working with Italian patients in Munich – The case of Penelope1

Abstract

With their book Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile (1989), L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg (1984) opened up a new clinical field, which had been neglected for a long time in the psychoanalytic community, although Freud’s multilinguistic competence had greatly contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis. With their book The Babel of the unconscious, Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri were able to confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to help multilingual patients to integrate the different aspects of their self which are bound to their mother tongue and to their foreign tongue(s), and thus to allow them to develop a new identity. The author, who has been a psychoanalyst in Munich since 1999, works every day with his Italian patients in this new clinical field, that is in their common mother tongue and at the two levels of their old Italian and their new German identity. Through the detailed presentation of a clinical case, he furthermore shows how, on the one hand, the migration creates a new space in which therapy actually becomes possible, and on the other hand, not only therapy, but also the kind of relationship developed by the patients to their “new country” plays a decisive role in the whole process. Such a frame proved to be particularly good for the emergence, revisitation, and reelaboration of the transgenerational trauma around which the case of Penelope is centered. The author further assumes that the theme of “migration and identity” is becoming more and more important in our globalized world, with clinical consequences whose elaboration requires a specific cultural and technical preparation.     

Buddhism,Christianity, and psychotherapy: A three-way conversation in the mid-twentieth century

Abstract

This article explores the scope of ‘religion-psy dialogue’ in the mid-twentieth century, via a case study from Japan: Kosawa Heisaku, a Buddhist psychoanalyst based in Tokyo. By putting this case study in brief comparative perspective, with the conversation that took place in 1965 between Paul Tillich and Carl Rogers, the article discusses both the promise and the pitfalls of the modern and contemporary world of ‘religion-psy dialogue’, alongside the means by which specialists in a variety of fields might investigate and hold it to account.     

Blurring boundaries and advancing interreligious understanding by engaging textual ‘others’ in a women’s interfaith book group

This article casts analytical light on how Jewish, Christian and Muslim women develop understanding of religious identities by engaging with multidimensional textual ‘others’ in the Daughters of Abraham interfaith book groups. It focuses on a group discussion of a rabbi’s memoir about her religious journey. Drawing on ethnographic material and Talal Asad’s analysis of the relationship between text and reader, I examine how narratives outside primary religious texts influence ideas about Jewish, Christian and Muslim identities. I argue that the Daughters members’ appropriation of literary voices advances their engagement with religious diversity by developing understanding of religious self and others. Moreover, members’ navigation of inter- and intra-religious relations during discussions of texts blur boundaries for inclusion into this interfaith encounter. This examination raises questions about issues of identity, power dynamics and interfaith relations. Importantly, it provides novel insight into the understudied areas of women’s interreligious encounter and shared reading practices.     

Beyond the International Relations framework: an essay in descriptive global ethics

Discussions of global ethics—about the types of ethical claim made on individuals and groups, not only states, by individuals and groups around the world—have had to move beyond the categories inherited in the International Relations discipline. Many important positions are not captured by a framework developed for discussion of inter-state relations. The blindspots seem to reflect an outmoded expectation that (i) giving low normative weight to national boundaries correlates strongly with (ii) giving more normative weight to people beyond one's national boundaries, and vice versa; in other words that these two dimensions in practice reduce to one. The paper develops an enriched categorisation. We need to recognise the separate importance of the two dimensions, and thus distinguish various types of ‘cosmopolitan’ position, including many varieties of libertarian position which give neither national boundaries nor pan-human obligations much (if any) importance.     

Argumentation: The Mixed Game

The paper introduces a new model of argumentation, the Mixed Game Model, that no longer separates rule-governed competence from actual performance but starts from human beings and their ability of competence-in-performance. Human beings are able to orientate themselves in ever-changing surroundings and to negotiate diverging views in argumentative action games. Argumentation is thus described as a mixed game played by human beings according to principles of probability. These principles include constitutive, regulative and executive principles. Constitutive Principles focus on the basic components of the game, that is, action, dialogue, and coherence as the interplay of different communicative means. Regulative Principles mediate between correlated human abilities and interests. Executive Principles guide the sequencing of action according to cognitive strategies. The mixed game no longer rests on pre-established harmony but describes performance as a non-equilibrial process of negotiation that mediates between order and disorder and is based on the integration of various parameters such as rationality, reason, persuasion and emotion. How the model works is exemplified by an analysis of part of a debate in the European Parliament.     

Some reflections on the influence of Chinese thought on Jung and his psychological theory

Jung claimed that Richard Wilhelm, whose masterful translations of Chinese wisdom literature into a European language (German) and thence into Western consciousness have brought Chinese modes of thinking to so many, was one of the most important influences on his own life and work. The contacts between the two men, which took place from the early 1920's until Wilhelm's death in 1930, were few but intense and for Jung decisive in several ways. Wilhelm's translations of the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower opened new avenues for Jung that had far-reaching consequences on his research and writing after 1930. The latter opened the door to the study of alchemy as a key to the archetypal process of individuation as rooted in the collective unconscious. 'Synchronicity' is a term that grew out of his contact with Chinese thought, in particular with the I Ching. From his contact with Chinese thought, additionally, he received confirmation of the view, independently arrived at, that adult psychological development is not linear but rather circular and spiral-like. The letters between Jung and Wilhelm illuminate the great importance Jung ascribed to Wilhelm's contribution toward bridging East and West and the potential value of Chinese philosophy for psychotherapy.     

Philosophy for Children and the Reconstruction of Philosophy

In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and explore how they are reconfigured in the notion of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), the mainstay of the collection of novels and discussion plans known as Philosophy for Children. After considering the ontology and epistemology of dialogue, I argue that narrative has replaced exposition in our understanding of philosophical discourse and that CPI represents a narrative context in which truth comes to represent the best story, in a discursive location in which there are always multiple stories. Finally, I raise the issue of children's philosophical voice. Can children philosophize, and if they can, do they do so in a voice different from adults'? If so, what are the distinctive features of that voice? I assert that it is children's historical marginalization in the Western construction of rationality that now – as that rationality undergoes its crisis – makes of them, like women and other “natives,” privileged strangers to the tradition, who are, through CPI, enabled to enter it through dialogue and narrative.     

The Face of Truth

I attempt to explain Plato's choice of dialogue through an analysis of what he regarded as the conditions of knowledge acquisition. I see the main contribution of the paper in exposing the way in which time and pain are, for Plato, conditions of knowledge acquisition. Plato endorsed the "learning through suffering," or pathei mathos , convention, central to Greek drama, and did so not through theory but through the praxis some of the dialogues employ. This addition of experiential components to the more cognitively oriented definitions of knowledge that Socrates uses complicates what these works may say about human knowledge. I analyze these tensions and the bearing they may have on the question of Plato's choice of dialogue, that is, on his rhetoric in practice. The requirements for actual persuasion, as Plato specifies them in the Seventh Letter, , are only partially met by the fictional scenes of argumentation and knowledge conveying that Plato presents. However, such scenes permit transcending some of the limitations of written, systematic, nonpersonal discourse. The presentation of such interactions to a real reader through dialogue turns into a mode of writing that is closer to meeting the demands of actual communication of knowledge – at least knowledge regarding what Plato envisaged as being the highest sort of epistemic communication     

Embodied AI, Creation, and Cog

This is a reply to comments on my paper Cog, a Humanoid Robot, and the Questions of the Image of God ; one was written by Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell, and another one by Helmut Reich. I will start with the suggested analogy of the relationship between God and us and the one between us and the humanoid robot Cog and will show why this analogy is not helpful for the dialogue between theology and artificial intelligence (AI). Such a dialogue can succeed only if both our fascination for humanoids and our fear of them are equally accepted. Any avoidance of these emotions, as well as any rejection of the possibility that Cog might one day be humanlike, destroy the dialogue. The interpretation of both scientific theories and religious metaphors as stories replaces seemingly "rational" arguments with the confession of the respective commitments to a body of stories and opens up a space for exchange and friendship between AI-researchers and theologians—an option that usually remains closed.