Recent theoretical convergences in psychoanalysis and their epistemological importance

In this paper, the author starts by examining the recent occurrence of an increasing receptivity and critical exchange between different schools of psychoanalytical thought. Among its consequences have been convergences in the understanding of countertransference, especially through the hypotheses of projective identification and countertransferential enactment. The prevalence of these hypotheses points towards the fact that the community of analysts is bringing about an informal and convergent clinical research conducted by a wide and heterogeneous range of its members. The importance and epistemological relevance of this kind of 'informal clinical research' for the construction of psychoanalytical knowledge is emphasised. This process in psychoanalysis is compared with the evolution of knowledge in other scientific areas, highlighting their similarities and their differences. The author shows how Freud's 'mystic writing-pad'model can be expanded to represent the object of psychoanalytical investigation and to bring a better understanding of the reason why the hypotheses of projective identification and countertransferential enactment occupy such a central position in psychoanalysis. In addition, consideration is given to how this kind of research can help in the difficult task of finding criteria for the evaluation of different psychoanalytical concepts. Finally, the author demonstrates how, using this approach, some of the important divergences in contemporary psychoanalysis can be viewed from a new perspective.     

On fascination and fear of annihilation

In this paper fascination phenomenologically is described as a state of radically being captured by an imposing object. What is left of the impoverished and paralysed subject clings to the exclusive fascinating object. Fascination is the eye of the storm of extreme ambivalence towards an exclusive object: being the only remaining object it is necessary for living in an object world, but at the same time it is threatening to life by absorbing the subject totally. So the subject is sucked in by a yet frightening object. From a metapsychological point of view fascination is understood as the congealed result of excessive projective identification and a strong confusional state connected with it: the subject empties itself so much in the object that it comes to stand for the subject. The fascinating object embodies in a condensed way – as a special form of a bizarre object – split off unconscious threatening material. So fascination is linked to the Kleinian theory of anxiety. Two clinical vignettes illustrate how states of fascination can be understood as an ultimate defence against unconscious menacing material welling up. The hypothesis is developed that fascination points to a revelation of fundamental psychic truth that promptly cramps the subject because the reintegration of it is felt as annihilating. In the vignettes this takes the form of a ‘transformation in hallucinosis’. Fascination is at the same time ‘the moment of truth’ and possibly a serious obstruction of the analytic process. This unconscious truth seems to concern primitive ‘superego violence’. The challenge consists in thawing the frozen fascinating object by linking it to other material.     

Chilled to the bone: embodied countertransference and unspoken traumatic memories

Starting from a deeply challenging experience of early embodied countertransference in a first encounter with a new patient, the author explores the issues it raised. Such moments highlight projective identification as well as what Stone (2006) has described as ‘embodied resonance in the countertransference’. In these powerful experiences linear time and subject boundaries are altered, and this leads to central questions about analytic work. As well as discussing the uncanny experience at the very beginning of an analytic encounter and its challenges for the analytic field, the author considers ‘the time horizon of analytic process’ (Hogenson 2007 ), the relationship between ‘moments of complexity and analytic boundaries’ (Cambray 2011 ) and the role of mirror neurons in intersubjective experience.     

A place within the heart: finding a home with parental objects

For adopted and Looked After children with compromised early experiences, there can be troubling phantasies and anxieties associated with parental objects. These internal object relations can seriously restrict the development of secure intimate relationships with new parental figures. Adoptive parents and foster carers bear the brunt of the associated difficulties. Clinical work with the child, parents/carers, family, or network, may help processes of containment, differentiation, working through, mourning, and integration. This paper is based on thinking derived from clinical work with children who are adopted or Looked After, and with adoptive parental couples, carers, and networks. The primary focus is on how the child needs to find a ‘psychic home’ in the minds of others for their damaged internal parental objects, and the emotional capacities required in adoptive parents to provide this. I describe some of the complexities for adoptive parents and others in providing what is needed to enable the child to experience their internal parental objects in a fuller way. This process can allow the child to introject, identify with, and re-imagine their internal parental objects, and through this develop a more realistic relationship to their adoptive parents and to their birth parents. It promotes trust, freedom, and emotional depth in the relationship with parental figures.     

投射性认同的三次转向：内涵演变与概念比较

投射性认同发端自Freud的投射概念, 后由Klein正式提出, 经过Bion, Resenfeld, Grotstein等人的发展, 已经成为精神分析的核心概念之一。其内涵演变经历了从单向投射到双向互动, 从内心幻想到现实交流, 从母婴关系到咨访关系的三次重要转向。投射性认同较投射而言是一种更成熟复杂的防御机制, 与移情的差异则体现在起因、内容和结果等方面。近年来, 神经精神分析的兴起与镜像神经元的发现为理解投射性认同的发生机制提供了神经生物学的基础。     

Choosing job-related personality traits: Developing valid personality-oriented job analysis

Although personality assessment has proven utility in pre-employment testing, little is known about how one should choose the personality traits that are most job-related. We developed a Personality-oriented Job Analysis (POJA) process for choosing job-related personality traits. We evaluated this process using 15 expert raters and approximately 330 medical students who each completed six different “jobs” in which their performance was evaluated. There was consistency across experts in POJA ratings of the job-relevance of personality traits. Also, POJA ratings of the personality traits correlated with the actual criterion-validity of the traits. Traits that received the highest POJA ratings tended to predict job performance. To our knowledge, this is the first published work to present evidence of the criterion-validity of POJA.     

From acting to communicating: The analysis of a boy with a pathological organization1

The author presents the analysis of an 8 year‐old boy prematurely born after a high‐risk pregnancy, then hospitalized for two weeks. He was never breastfed and presented vomiting, intense activity and inadequate behaviour as symptoms. His highly dysfunctional family is composed of a non‐productive father and a homely, though aggressive, mother. The patient displayed a rigid defensive structure with perverse aspects and a cruel superego. His constant interest in magical characters frequently disguises an avoidance of reality. By means of transference interpretations, a trustworthy link with the analyst now allows him his own mental space, where hidden psychotic states come to light. In the clinical material, this boy's skills for insight mingle with oscillations from severely defensive states to integration and vice versa. The analytic relationship in this often hostile scenario has become strong. The analysis is hampered by constant demands from family and school‐both expect the analyst to prevent his frequent acting out. Whereas some perverse polymorphism is part of childhood and may persist throughout life, it is likely that the patient's pathological organization may yield to reality and facilitate reparation, relinquishing the world of make‐believe as well as the intense projective mental functioning.     

Vicissitudes in adult life resulting from traumatic experiences in adolescence1

The author deals with the diffi culties in combining the concepts of trauma and phantasy. He evaluates Freudian observations relating to chance and trauma. He considers traumatic effects of chance in relation to the rupture of a narcissistic phantasy of invulnerability. The narrating of traumatic events may awaken in the analyst tendencies to repeat the aggression of these traumatic events towards the subject. The accusatory interpretation can be one of the means by which this repetition is established. The author explores a type of trauma which is essentially related to the disturbance of the structure which contains the ideals of the subject. This disturbance is a consequence of disillusionment resulting from the loss of an object who was the depository of these ideals. Trauma generates a state of mourning for lost ideals. The author describes traumatic events which occurred in a patient's life at puberty; paradoxical behaviours in the patient's parents caused the patient to have new traumas. The reluctance to explore the derivatives of the unconscious, and to investigate possible meaning in symbols, was a central problem in this patient's analysis. The author discusses disturbances in symbolization, and he examines the subject of projective identifi cations that were received by patients from their primary objects.     

Changes over time in the black–white difference on mental tests: Evidence from the children of the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

Data for three Peabody achievement tests and for the Peabody picture vocabulary test administered to children of women in the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that the black–white difference did not diminish for this sample of children born from the mid 1970s through the mid 1990s. This finding persists after entering covariates for the child's age and family background variables. It is robust across alternative samples and specifications of the model. The analysis supplements other evidence that shows no narrowing of the black–white difference in academic achievement tests since the late 1980s and is inconsistent with recent evidence that narrowing occurred in IQ standardizations during the same period. A hypothesis for reconciling this inconsistency is proposed.     

管理情境中人格测验的社会评价性研究

在现代的人事测量中,人格测验被广泛地用来挑选“人-职匹配”的员工并对员工的绩效作出预测。但是一般而言,人格测验的中性导致其测试结果与工作绩效并无显著性相关。因为,除了能力等中性因素之外,能够预测员工工作状况的是诚实、忠诚、尽责等与社会评价指标有关的心理特性,如开朗、乐观、大度和积极向上、具有创造潜能的人格特征。因此,开发具有社会评价性意义的人格测验对人事工作特别是绩效预测有着重要的作用。