Dreaming up the patient in supervision: from the concrete to the symbolic*

This paper discusses the importance of parallel processes within the therapeutic and the supervisory context of therapy with an eight-year-old boy diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. During the first months of the therapy, through powerful projective identification, the therapist found herself in the ‘clothes’ of the ‘dead mother’. She was unable to think and feel in the sessions. Deadness could not be symbolised – it was enacted in the sessions. The therapeutic encounter had to start elsewhere: the supervisor’s reverie brought to life the patient’s material in the context of the supervision, allowing thinking to occur, first within the supervisory relationship and only then in the therapeutic relationship. In the context of supervision, the encounter of two mentally alive people could contain anxieties, metabolise them and open the way to mental connections. This encounter facilitated the development of creative thinking of both the therapist and the young patient in the consulting room, which allowed the child to become the subject of his existence and to evolve.     

Doctrine of Scripture in Lutheran Theology—Its Missional Thrust: A Response to Lamin Sanneh's Hein‐Fry Lecture 20081

Abstract : In this article, I argue that Lutheran doctrine of Scripture is rooted in a christological centre, a centre that is coherent with Lamin Sanneh's thesis that the missionary experience must encompass both the work of the missionary who comes from ‘outside’ and, more especially, the reflections of the ‘indigenous’ peoples on Scripture in its witness to God's coming in Jesus Christ. This essential mutuality of ‘receiving’ and ‘giving’ in reading Scripture christologically undercuts imperial biblical hermeneutical practices that privilege certain cultures, languages, ethnic, racial, and class groupings as bearers of the gospel of Jesus Christ.     

THE ELUSIVENESS OF MASCULINITY: PRIMORDIAL VULNERABILITY,LACK, AND THE CHALLENGES OF MALE DEVELOPMENT

Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive—an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.     

Introduction: The role of shame in psychoanalytic theory and practice

Introducing three papers by Leon Wurmser, Claude Janin and John Steiner the author gives an overview of the development of the concept of shame in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Different aspects of the phenomenon of shame are being discussed including its relation to guilt, object relations and identity as well as the role of gaze when emerging from a psychic retreat.     

Kinetics of interstitial segregation in Cottrell atmospheres and grain boundaries

Trapping of interstitial (e.g. carbon) atoms is driven by the reduction in energy in the system. Diffusion of interstitials, together with their trapping in dislocation cores and/or grain boundaries, is studied by the thermodynamic extremal principle. In addition to the total Gibbs energy, a well-established formulation of the total dissipation is applied. Dimension-free evolution equations are derived, whose solution is well approximated by an easy to handle kinetic equation. Cottrell’s power law can be verified in the initial stage.     

Misuse of Psychologist Influence

Summary

In no other area of professional ethics must psychologists rely on their own judgment than in the area of multiple relationships. Yet ironically, because of the wide variety of types and possible outcomes in dual relationships and boundary crossings, psychologists are given less guidance in this area of ethical decision-making than in any other. As a result, psychologists' emotional conflicts and personal needs are more likely to interfere with their judgment in this area. This article will review important dynamics of multiple relationships and boundary violations, while also providing a model for assisting psychologists in avoiding exploitive or harmful dual relationships.     

THE CENTRALITY OF INCARNATION

What we urgently need at the beginning of the twenty‐first century is a christological vision that can shape and inform a new and powerful way of helping humankind to interpret their place within the universe. A christological vision that is unintelligible and uninteresting can have a profoundly deleterious soteriological implication: the orbit of God's saving grace will not be wide enough to encompass the universal place of humankind. Arthur Peacocke's move is clear and to the point: Only when the foundations and universal scope of God's grace are fully established for all of creation, only then can the importance of God's specific work in Jesus the Christ be established.     

Sándor,Gizella, Elma: A biographical journey1

In recent years, particularly with the publication of the Freud‐Ferenczi correspondence, it has become clear that the rich theoretical dialogue between Freud and Ferenczi, a dialogue that may be seen as constitutive for psychoanalytic discourse in recent decades, was intensely intertwined with their complex personal relationship. Two women‐Gizella Pálos, who eventually became Ferenczi's wife, and her daughter Elma, who was both Ferenczi's and Freud's analysand, and with whom Ferenczi fell in love‐played a crucial role in shaping the Freud‐Ferenczi relationship. Their own voices, however, have so far been barely heard. This paper is a preliminary report of a biographical research project which aims to complete the puzzle, by getting to know better Gizella, Elma and their family, with the help of numerous original sources, many of them unpublished till now. The emerging picture tends to confirm Ferenczi's initial view of Elma as a person of depth and integrity, rather than Freud's view of her as fundamentally disturbed; countertransference‐love, it is suggested, may have facilitated fuller perception rather than clouding it. The question of the impact of Elma's ‘confusion of tongues’ with Ferenczi and with Freud on her subsequent life is also discussed.     

Verdi's Rigoletto: The dialectic interplay of the psychic positions in seemingly 'mindless' violence

In this paper the author demonstrates the interplay of the psychic positions (paranoid-schizoid and depressive, alongside more primitive mental states) as they may appear in experiences of overwhelming anxieties relating to fragmentation and disintegration. These are examined in relation to the appearance of what has been described in the literature as 'mindless' violence. The vehicle for this demonstration is Verdi's opera Rigoletto , which the author examines using Fonagy and Target's model for the understanding of mindless violence. The opera is 'read' as a case study of the protagonist, using the drama as a reflection of Rigoletto's internal object representations. The author attempts to extend Fonagy and Target's model to include primitive mental states, in order to understand 'mindless' violence as a result of collapse of the dialectical relationship of the psychic positions, leading to the violent act as a desperate attempt at re-establishing a sense of self. From this perspective, the moment of the violent act may be seen as use of an autistic object and as supplying of autistic shape. The violence is ultimately directed against the already fragmenting self, especially cherished parts of it, however it may enable acknowledgement of repudiated, unmentalised emotions previously experienced as a void.