THE FATHER,THE FATHER FUNCTION,THE FATHER PRINCIPLE: SOME CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC DEVELOPMENTS

The author discusses Freud's thinking on the role of the father, as well as that of later French theoreticians. To illustrate his remarks, he draws on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1912–1987), a Brazilian poet whose work often dealt with themes of the father, the family, and his own paternal relationship. The author also discusses the psychic formation of the father principle and how this may be evident in the clinical analytic setting, even when the analyst's approach privileges field theory, intersubjectivity, or other concepts emphasizing the relationship between analyst and patient.     

Revisiting the destiny compulsion

This paper is an attempt to deal with some questions raised by the so‐called ‘compulsion of destiny’ constellation. In presenting the standpoints of Freud and of psychoanalysts who after him were concerned with this problematic, the author takes the view that several aspects of the configuration merit further discussion. Accordingly, the dynamics of repetition compulsion, the complexity of the projective strategy, the coexistence of passive and omnipotent trends are considered. Concerning compulsive repetitions the dimension of drive intrication is underlined, thus moderating the understanding of this clinical entity as mainly related to death drive trends. Projection is understood as serving complex psychic demands. The coexistence of passive and omnipotent trends is envisaged, as manifested in phantasies of submission / participation of patients to a force that exceeds human limitations. For certain cases the consonance of somatic and psychic experiences is noted. Finally, elements from the material of two cases are presented which pertain to the problematic of the compulsion of destiny in which random events are submitted to heavy psychic necessities.     

Variations on the concept of traumatism: Traumatism,traumatic, trauma1

In this paper, the author outlines Freud's fundamental hypotheses concerning the concept of traumatism, then goes on to differentiate three notions (French being a particularly apposite language for such a venture): ‘traumatism’, ‘traumatic’ (in a substantive sense) and ‘trauma’. These three terms correspond to the three turning points in Freud's theory with respect to the concept of traumatism (1895‐97, 1920, 1938). The author evokes also the developments that are due to Ferenczi, particularly in his later writings (1928‐33), where he defi ned and discussed the question of ‘trauma’ in contemporary clinical practice; the author goes on to explore the different variations on this theme as regards mental functioning. He then defi nes, from a metapsychological point of view, the differences between ‘traumatisms’ that have been ‘worked over by secondary processes’, organised and governed by the pleasure‐unpleasure principle (‘traumatism’) and ‘early’ or ‘primary traumatisms’, which interfere with the process of binding the instinctual drives (‘trauma’); states of mind infl uenced by a traumatic imprint (‘traumatic’) are looked upon as belonging to both categories of the above mentioned traumatisms. The author illustrates his hypotheses with a clinical example.     

Can this be evil? Evilness seen as intention or drive

This article was originally read as an introductory plenary paper at the German-Nordic Clinical Conference, September 2015 in Berlin. The heading of the conference was ‘On Cruelty and Destructiveness’. The paper takes as its starting point the composite figure of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It discusses the meaning of intentionality, or the lack of a conscious intention of being evil, in comparison to evil deeds caused by uninhibited drive satisfaction. Evilness is put into a social and a psycho-developmental context. Examples of contemporary atrocities are discussed, leading up to a formulation of a multi-factorial explanatory model of evil, taken from Michael Stones book ‘The Anatomy of Evil’.     

Freud's metapsychological speculations1

In this paper, the author seeks to analyse the nature and function of metapsychological theory in Freudian psychoanalysis. He shows that Freudian psychoanalytic theory is composed of an empirical part‐the psychology of clinical facts‐and a speculative part‐metapsychology. Freud considers this latter part as being a speculative superstructure of value that is only heuristic, capable of being supplanted by other superstructures of the same type. The author sustains the idea that this metapsychology is the fruit of speculative method, whose foundations were elaborated by philosophers and epistemologists before Freud, including Immanuel Kant and Ernst Mach. He concludes with considerations regarding the future of metapsychological theorisation, presenting criticisms of Freudian metapsychology offered by both philosophers and psychoanalysts, and pointing to the perspective opened by Donald W. Winnicott of a psychoanalysis without metapsychology.     

After pluralism: Towards a new,integrated psychoanalytic paradigm1

After a restatement of the isolationism of psychoanalysis from allied disciplines, and an examination of some of the reasons for the diversity of schools of thought and the fragmentation of psychoanalytic knowledge, the author suggests the need to adopt principles of correspondence or external coherence along with those of hermeneutic coherence to validate psychoanalytic hypotheses. Recent developments in neurocognitive science have come to the aid of psychoanalysis in this period of crisis, resulting in the proposition of integrating both areas to form a new paradigm for the construction of the theory of the mind. This emerging paradigm tries to integrate clinical knowledge with neurocognitive science, fi ndings from studies on the process and outcome of psychotherapy, research into the early mother‐infant relationship, and developmental psychopathology. The author examines theoretical‐ technical models based on the concept of drives and of relationships in the light of interdisciplinary fi ndings. He concludes that the relational model has a broad empirical base, except when the concept of drives is discredited. Interdisciplinary fi ndings have led to the positing of the replacement of the Freudian model of drives with a model of motivational systems centred on affective processes. He draws certain conclusions which have a bearing on the technique of psychoanalytic treatment. These arise from the adoption of the new integrated paradigm.     

Why aggression?2

On the basis of a formalised view of metapsychology, the author briefly considers the problems inherent in the Freudian notion of a death drive or aggressive drive and then goes on to develop a new theoretical conception of aggression. Aggression is understood as an affect, action or affective action and, in relation to these, as an expression of the intensity with which a drive'whether it be the sexual drive with its libidinal cathexes or the self‐preservative drive with its lethic cathexes'seeks to attain its object. In this context the author regards the regulation of closeness and distance with respect to the ‘psychogeometric locus’ of the relevant drive object as being of central importance. She contends that neurotic personalities suffer from specific distortions in the perception of the psychogeometric locus of their drive objects, which may give rise to an intensification of the drive tendencies prevailing in these individuals at any given time so that these tendencies take on an aggressive character. The author presents two clinical vignettes to show how her approach allows aggression and its occurrence to be conceptualised without resorting to the idea of a primary aggressive drive, and draws attention to the resulting technical consequences for interpretation.     

On excess,trauma and helplessness: Repetitions and transformations

Freud's work establishes a link between an excessive amount of excitation, the infant's experience of helplessness, and trauma. The idea of excess emphasises a quantitative element, not reducible to the field of representation. In this paper I explore the notions of excess and closure in relation to two clinical examples. A patient who lived through experiences of excess and flooding is contrasted with another patient whose experience of excess is expressed through withdrawal. The complex process of elaboration and working through in their analyses takes place by bringing together affect, representation, sensorial and somatic experiences, dreams, associations and enactments as they are gathered and given meaning après coup through analytic work. Two concepts were central to the understanding of what took place in the analyses: excorporation and figurability. The paper emphasizes the place of temporality in creating a triadic space in an analysis as it relates the here and now with the there and then in the work of après‐coup. The paper also traces the roots of this modern approach that relates the analyst's work of regression, time, and the creation of a triadic space to Freud's metapsychology.     

Mechanics of the animate.

Behavior is treated as basic physics. Dimensions are identified and their transformations from physical specification to axes in behavioral space are suggested. Responses are treated as action patterns arrayed along a continuum of activation energy. Behavior is seen as movement along a trajectory through this behavior space. Incentives or reinforcers are attractors in behavior space, at the centers of basins of lowered potential. Trajectories impinging on such basins may be captured; repeated capture will warp the trajectory toward a geodesic, a process called conditioning. Conditioning is enhanced by contiguity, the proximity between the measured behavior and the incentive at the end of the trajectory, and by contingency, the depth of the trajectory below the average level of the potential energy landscape. Motivation is seen as the potential of an organism for motion under the forces impinging on it. Degree of motivation is characterized by the depth of the potential field, with low motivation corresponding to a flat field and a flat gradient of activation energy. Drives are the forces of incentives propagated through behavior space. Different laws for the attenuation of drive with behavioral distance are discussed, as is the dynamics of action. The basic postulate of behavior mechanics is incentive-tracking in behavior space, the energy for which is provided by decreases in potential. The relation of temporal gradients to response differentiation and temporal discrimination is analyzed. Various two-body problems are sketched to illustrate the application of these ideas to association, choice, scalar timing, self-control, and freedom.