Clinical and psychopathological research on attachment: the contribution of the psychic envelopes model

This paper proposes to put into perspective the attachment model (Bowlby) and that of psychic envelopes (Anzieu) so as to grasp the contribution of attachment theory to the field of psychopathology. Having laid the foundations of the epistemological debate between these two models, relying on a discussion of the stakes inherent in the psychoaffective development approach, the author refers to current forms of psychopathology, which draw massively on the borderline and narcissistic concepts, in order to discuss the sense and benefits of the “skin–ego” model as an alternative and complement to attachment theory. Beyond altering reference models in psychopathology, this debate and related inputs lead to consider therapeutic applications through a combination of the notion of “caregiving group” – a group version of the attachment figure – and the notion of therapeutic offer as a necessary alternative to the ideology of demand.     

Controlling,Avoiding, or Protecting the Object: Three Reactions to the Breakdown of Psychic Retreats

In working psychoanalytically, it is common to encounter patients who need to carefully manage their immediate objects. This is evident in their stories about external life at home, at work, and with friends as well as in how it emerges within the transference. While a frequent theme in many analytic cases, the motives behind this need are varied.

Case material is used to show how these reactions emerge when psychic retreats fail. When unable to find refuge in pathological organizations or psychic retreats, patients are exposed to the worst of paranoid and depressive anxieties with only a fragile foxhole to withdraw into or defend from. In such a precarious psychological state, fantasies of unbearable self and object danger emerge, leading to various forms of acting out, overreliance on projective identification, and perverted images of giving and receiving. These fantasies result in the desire for idealized objects, the drive to resurrect fallen objects, and the need to avoid cruel and attacking objects that have taken over and replaced the sought out ideal.     

Facing the third millennium: An evolutionary crisis

We are witnessing the birth of the first global civilization on our planet earth due to the accelerative progress of science and technology. This is also accompanied by a crisis in health care, pollution and other environmental disasters, a rising wave of violence and crime, stresses due to globalization, and so on. Recently, we formulated “An Action Plan for Human Survival” (Reference 24).

This article explores in depth the challenges in bringing about a peaceful transition to a global civilization. It explores global civilization, environmental crisis and population. It reveals that the stresses generated by globalization and environmental crisis cannot be resolved by dualistic thought, or concepts, or ideals, or intellectual constructions; as these are sterile in bringing mutation in the human psyche. We see that the emergence of global consciousness is not keeping pace with the globalization, and it is feared that globalization may turn out to be abortive and ultimately self‐destructive.

The crisis is not political, or economic, or social. It is evolutionary in character. We have to explore nature's evolutionary impulse. The challenge is to resolve the “crisis of perception,” or to allow the mutation to happen in the mind‐brain system. The only technology for radical transformation or mutation of human psyche is purification or deconditioning of the human psyche. This leads to new relationship between man and man, and between man and environment. It ends all pain, sorrow and travails and ushers a new era of freedom, peace and bliss. This is the key to human survival, progress and fulfillment.     

直觉和分析在不同任务条件下的逃生决策效果

目的：探讨针对简单和复杂逃生任务时, 直觉和分析在不同判断依据条件下的逃生决策效果。方法：采用两个主实验和两个预备实验。实验一和实验二的被试人数分别为：85人和87人。两个主实验均采取2 (思维方式：直觉和分析) × 2 (判断依据：简单和复杂)组间实验设计。主要结果：(1)针对简单逃生任务, 直觉组和分析组在不同判断依据条件下的逃生决策效果差异不明显; (2)针对复杂逃生任务, 在简单判断依据条件下分析决策优于直觉决策; 在复杂判断依据条件下直觉决策优于分析决策。主要结论：直觉性和分析性逃生决策的效果主要与决策任务的复杂程度有关, 而与判断依据的复杂程度关系不大。     

Trauma and healing: from ‘furor sanandi’ to ‘animus sanandi’

In his last period (1928–33), Ferenczi tried to complement the ‘negative’ technical principles first introduced by Freud in the 1910s. He introduced diverse and successive ‘positive instructions’, and specific techniques known as ‘elastic’ of ‘relaxation and neocatharsis’, and also made an unsucessful attempt to introduce ‘mutual analysis’. These techniques are implemented around a series of new technical principles including ‘tact’, ‘empathy’, ‘indulgence’, ‘intense sympathy’. All of these positive technical principles and innovations demonstrate the importance of considering the dimension of ‘healing’ in all analytic experiences and the importance of the analyst's functioning as the ‘healer’. The emphasis on the use of these new technical principles is consistent with the emphasis Ferenczi places upon countertransference and traumatic factors in psychopathogenesis.     

Role‐Induced Bias in Court: An Experimental Analysis

Criminal procedure is organized as a tournament with predefined roles. We show that assuming the role of a defense counsel or a prosecutor leads to role‐induced bias even if participants are asked to predict a court ruling after they have ceased to act in that role and if they expect a substantial financial incentive for being accurate. The bias is not removed either if participants are instructed to predict the court ruling in preparation of plea bargaining. In line with parallel constraint satisfaction models for legal decision making, findings indicate that role‐induced bias is driven by coherence effects, that is, systematic information distortions in support of the favored option. This is mainly achieved by downplaying the importance of conflicting evidence. These distortions seem to stabilize interpretations, and people do not correct for this bias. Implications for legal procedure are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

From geometry to phenomenology

Richard Tieszen [Tieszen, R. (2005). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXX(1), 153–173.] has argued that the group-theoretical approach to modern geometry can be seen as a realization of Edmund Husserl’s view of eidetic intuition. In support of Tieszen’s claim, the present article discusses Husserl’s approach to geometry in 1886–1902. Husserl’s first detailed discussion of the concept of group and invariants under transformations takes place in his notes on Hilbert’s Memoir Ueber die Grundlagen der Geometrie that Hilbert wrote during the winter 1901–1902. Husserl’s interest in the Memoir is a continuation of his long-standing concern about analytic geometry and in particular Riemann and Helmholtz’s approach to geometry. Husserl favored a non-metrical approach to geometry; thus the topological nature of Hilbert’s Memoir must have been intriguing to him. The task of phenomenology is to describe the givenness of this logos, hence Husserl needed to develop the notion of eidetic intuition. The author wishes to thank Academy of Finland for financial assistance that enabled her to work on this article.