Metapsychology or metapsychologies? Some comments on Paul Denis's paper ‘The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction’

In this commentary on Paul Denis's paper ‘The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction’, the author defends the idea of a plurality of metapsychologies that must be contrasted with and distinguished from each other while avoiding incompatible translations between models. In this connection he presents various theoretical approaches to aggression and the death drive, and demonstrates the differences between the drive model and the model underlying the theory of internalized object relations. The author holds that the concept of the internal object differs from Freud's notion of the representation (Vorstellung). He also considers that the imago as defined by Paul Denis in fact corresponds to the concept of the internal object. Lastly, he addresses the complex issue of listening to archaic forms of psychic functioning and their non‐discursive presentation within the analytic process, which affects the transference‐countertransference link.     

Hamlet: plea for a measure of normality

The author first considers issues in psychoanalytic interpretations of literary characters, especially the question of treating the character as fiction (the aesthetic illusion) or as a real person. The position he adopts is to interpret Hamlet as a potential person, created by Shakespeare and an expression of Shakespeare’s actual – and intuitive – view of man.

With a synopsis of the tragedy and the context of its creation as background, the author then reflects on questions concerning the play. How does Shakespeare present the characters? Is Hamlet’s madness pretended or real? Which conflicts does he handle in the course of the play? Has Oedipal dynamics a role as motivational factor in his mind?

Hamlet is irrational, impulsive, emotional, inhibited, brooding, suspicious, revengeful, condemning and much more. But, in the view of the author, he is all this in a human, ‘normal’ way. There is nothing convincingly pathological or constricted in his character. ‘Un-normal’ is his intelligence and his wit. Hamlet – an intelligent, reflected, resourceful prince in late Renaissance – who has wrestle with a madhouse of political intrigues, family murders and deceitful friends.

Hamlet in Shakespeare’s text – a fairly normal person in quite a mad world.     

THE INTERPLAY OF DEDUCTIVE AND INDUCTIVE REASONING IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIZING

Deductive and inductive reasoning both played an essential part in Freud's construction of psychoanalysis. In this paper, the author explores the happy marriage of empiricism and rationalism in Freud's use of deductive reasoning in the construction of psychoanalytic theory. To do this, the author considers three major amendments Freud made to his theory: (i) infant and childhood sexuality, (ii) the structural theory, and (iii) the theory of signal anxiety. Ultimately, the author argues for, and presents Freud as a proponent of, the epistemological position that he calls critical realism.     

Knowledge and quality-management activities’ influences on technology communication and innovation with African foreign investment experience

We examined how psychic distance moderates the association of South Korean chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) knowledge and quality management with their predisposition to invest in African technology and innovation markets. Participants were current and prospective South Korean African business investment senior managers (n = 64; 20 females; mean years in management = 19.4) or not (n = 187; 97 females, mean years in management = 15.9). Hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyse the relationships. Only quality management was significantly related to technology commercialisation capabilities and innovation performance among managers with African investment experience. However, both quality and knowledge management were significantly related to the outcomes among managers without African investment experience. The effect of psychic distance might be explained by risk averseness, in that those without experience of African investment might be with more risk avoidant than those with such experience.     

A transitory homosexual passion in the course of an analytic treatment1

Do homosexualities express a sexual confl ict originating in bisexuality or must we look for their deep determinism in the narcissistic confl ict and its vicissitudes? Two clinical sequences from the treatment of a borderline patient, which occurred during years seven and eight of treatment, a period characterised by intense drive turbulence and the unexpected occurrence of a transitory homosexual passion, will enable the reader to follow the psychical movements and evolution of the work of representation. The fi rst sequence throws light on the links between her sudden involvement in this homosexual passion and the traumatic dangers of a breakdown of her ego's capacity for representation, linked to a reactivation in the transference of early and later traumatic traces whose reverberation in the transfero/countertransference dynamic was the source of a painful transference that was responsible for this lateral transference movement. The second sequence shows the links between the strengthening of her capacity for representation, thanks to the working through of the oedipal confl ict in its two aspects, and her renunciation of this passion. The roots of this transitory homosexual passion in the deep fl aws of her psychical functioning raise metapsychological questions concerning, in particular, the dynamic of the ‘double’(‘twin’) and narcissism.     

Murder: A psychotherapeutic investigation

This paper suggests that it is theoretically necessary and clinically useful to make a distinction between two types of psychic encapsulation within the broader literature. The proposed distinction, as it relates to these psychic structural manifestations, is illustrated here as applied to anorexia. The author suggests that psychic encapsulation is commonly encountered in work with anorexics, and that each type seems to imply a somewhat different therapeutic course. The distinction is made between anorexic patients who appear to display evidence of autistic/autistoid encapsulation as opposed to those who seem to manifest non-autistoid/later traumatic encapsulation – termed secondary adjunctive encapsulation in this paper. Defensive encapsulations are associated with pathological organisations of the personality – both within and beyond these structures, they exert an organising power over central mental processes. Psychic encapsulation and pathological organisations are defensive structural developments – the result of psychic trauma. Clinical material from three cases is presented to illustrate the arguments.     

Representante-representativo,représentant-représentation,ideational representative: Which one is a Freudian concept? On the translation of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz in Spanish,French and English1

The Freudian expression Vorstellungsrepräsentanz ( Freud, 1915b, 1915c ), which is rendered in the Standard Edition as ideational representative, is commonly translated in Spanish as representante-representativo and in French as représentant-représentation, among other renderings. An interdisciplinary conceptual inquiry, which applies linguistic semantics to the evaluation of the available Spanish and French renderings, concludes that this compound expression should be translated in these languages as representante ideativo and représentant idéatif, respectively, renderings which happen to correspond to Strachey’s translation into English in the SE. In contrast to most Spanish and French translations, this proposal conforms to the semantic principle of compositionality. On the one hand, it provides a suitable translation of the two parts of the compound. Thus it renders Vorstellung as idea, with the classical meaning of image or mental representation, which can be traced back to Hume’s empiricist philosophy, and it renders Repräsentanz as representative, with the meaning of delegate. On the other hand, its linguistic form preserves the attributive meaning relationship which exists between both concepts in the original German expression. Against the background of these semantic considerations, a theoretical question concerning Freudian metapsychology is discussed: the drive has a psychic representative, but is there a (mental) representation of the drive?