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.     

An individual approach to psychotherapy with psychotic patients

In this paper I attempt to explore particular aspects of the therapeutic process, especially the unusual way in which the therapy of this 11-year-old girl, referred for possible or potential anorexia nervosa, came to a sudden end. The oedipal configuration provides a useful theoretical framework in which to consider the course and vicissitudes of treatment. The restoration of a link between the child and her father allowed a distance to be created between mother and daughter. The meaning of this is considered both in terms of external events and clinically within the transference relationship.     

Countertransference and the female triangular situation3

This paper represents an attempt toward reconciling contemporary changes in psychoanalytic understandings of female development, particularly in respect to separation issues, with their clinical applications to female patients. Psychoanalytic thinking typically has categorized separation conflicts as pre‐oedipal, but the authors suggest that these are an integral part of the triangular situation of the girl. The authors argue that an allegiance to erroneous theory and/or individual blind spots have led to the infantilization, pre‐oedipalization or cultural stereotyping of females, which constrains the effectiveness of their analyses. The authors present a selected review of the literature on gender‐based countertransference biases in both male and female analysts, with reference to female ‘oedipal’ material. Analytic case material of two women is presented which demonstrates how theoretical misperceptions and countertransferences to triangular separation conflicts can produce an impediment to progression in analysis.     

Unintentional movements induced by sequential transient perturbations in a multi-joint positional task

We explored the phenomenon of unintentional movements of a multi-joint effector produced by multiple transient changes in the external force. The subjects performed a position-holding task against a constant bias force produced by a robot and were instructed not to intervene voluntarily with arm movements produced by changes in the robot force. The robot produced a smooth force increase leading to hand movement from the trunk, followed by a dwell time. Then, the force dropped to its initial value leading to hand movement toward the initial position but with an undershot. Such perturbation episodes were repeated four times in a row. The accumulated perturbation and undershoot distances kept increasing without saturation within the sequence of four perturbation episode. The limb apparent stiffness before dwell time increased over sequential perturbations while apparent stiffness after dwell time decreased. We interpret the results as consequences of a drift of the hand referent coordinate (RC) caused by a hypothesized RC-back-coupling mechanism and a coupled drift of the apparent stiffness. The results show that RC-back-coupling continues to lead to unintentional movements over repeated perturbations and is accompanied by a relatively slow re-setting process.     

Love and melancholia in the analysis of women by women

This paper suggests that in the analysis of women by women a melancholic core may be encountered at the centre of the transference/countertransference situation that is an expression of the loss of the primary maternal object that has never been mourned. The attachment to the primary, lost object may be preserved in a melancholic, invisible way, and the longing that it is connected to might only reach representation in the après coup of the analytic process. The links between this primary love, melancholia and the unrepresentable in the analysis of women will be explored. These analyses powerfully evoke the relationship to the somatic. The internalization of the body of the mother, which is a requirement in the development of a woman, can take on frightening, fragmented, part‐object qualities. An example of a five times a week analysis is discussed.     

Missing what was true: Problems of seeing and knowing in Henry James's The wings of the dove

The author examines a central theme in this late novel by Henry James in relation to current psychoanalytic ideas that link the Oedipus complex with the child's developing perception of reality (both psychic and external), specifi cally through the experience of seeing and being seen. Britton visualises the oedipal triangle as a psychic structure through which the child may achieve recognition not only of its parents' sexual relationship, from which it is excluded, but also of itself being observed by one parent while the child is with the other. Thus, it both observes and is observed. The differing perspectives achieved‐of subjectivity and objectivity‐ promote the perception of objective reality, as the world of relationships grows and becomes more complex. James captures with great subtlety and penetration the experience of three characters living out a symbolic oedipal relationship in which the truth is evaded or perverted. A young couple in love exploit the situation of a dying heiress whose vulnerability is intensifi ed by her reluctance to acknowledge the truth about their relationship. At the same time, she shrinks from the gaze of others and consigns herself to isolation and ultimate despair. The author presents three signifi cant scenes in which seeing and being seen are central to the development. In each, the dying woman is forced to face, if momentarily, her exclusion from the sexual relationship. Increasingly this connects with her approaching death‐but also with the anguished recognition that the couple have cruelly befriended her only to betray her. It is suggested that James's late style and novelistic technique require the reader to tolerate confusion and uncertainty. As the perspective shifts from one protagonist to another, we ourselves are in danger of ‘missing what is true’ in this characteristic Jamesian scenario, where relationships are gradually perverted by manipulation, evasion and lies. In psychoanalytic theory, this would represent a failure to work through the oedipal situation, where the struggle of the child to face reality is met by a parental relationship that is too weak or too perverse to contain the pain and confl ict.     

Feature and Configuration in Face Processing: Japanese Are More Configural Than Americans

Previous work suggests that Asians allocate more attention to configuration information than Caucasian Americans do. Yet this cultural variation has been found only with stimuli such as natural scenes and objects that require both feature‐ and configuration‐based processing. Here, we show that the cultural variation also exists in face perception—a domain that is typically viewed as configural in nature. When asked to identify a prototypic face for a set of disparate exemplars, Japanese were more likely than Caucasian Americans to use overall resemblance rather than feature matching. Moreover, in a speeded identity‐matching task, Japanese were more accurate than Americans in identifying the spatial configuration of features (e.g., eyes). Together, these findings underscore the robustness of culture’s influences on cognition.     

Infantile bisexuality and the 'complete oedipal complex': Freudian views on heterosexuality and homosexuality

In the psychoanalytical discussion of what is 'mature' sexuality we speak of the 'genital' stage and the 'resolution' of the oedipal complex in the form of identification with the parent of the same sex and a heterosexually-directed object choice. A close reading of Freud's texts about sexuality shows that such a normative view cannot be corroborated by his viewpoint. He suggests that infantile sexuality is bisexually orientated, the final object choice due to repression of either homosexual or heterosexual desires. As Freud puts it, genital heterosexuality occurs out of necessity for procreation. In order to enrich the present psychoanalytical discussion about homosexuality and bisexuality the author returns to Freud's theories in this context.