The present and absent object—on thinking and the capacity to symbolize

In this paper, Bion's different theories on the development of thinking will be introduced: on the one hand, his theory of thoughts as resulting from tolerance for the absence of the object, and on the other hand, dream thoughts and thoughts as resulting from the presence of the object, originally through the mother's containing function. The effects of failures in this development will be discussed; among other things, a hypertrophy of the apparatus of projective identification at the expense of thinking capacities. Briefly, a comparison will be made between a facilitating relation between container and contained and the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive position, which Bion describes as a prerequisite for open symbolizing processes. Bion's theories and concepts will be supplemented by Winnicott's theories on the “creative illusion” and the breast/the mother as a “subjective object” as a precondition for the symbolizing capacity that later develops in the “potential space”. Very briefly, a comparison is made between Winnicott's term “the subjective object” and Segal's term “symbolic equation”. Clinical vignettes are interpolated.     

Seven Sermons for Bringing the Dead Father Back to Life

This article tries to show how VII Sermones ad Mortuos were for Jung a pivotal text, leading him to a radical self-transformation. By venturing to allow the unknown to occur, Jung permitted the emergence of an organizing principle and also the evolution within himself of what was to come: a man, an oeuvre, a therapeutic method. This turning point, representing an epistemological fracture, is a crucial moment in Jung's life: the letting go of a paternal imago which imprisoned him, paved the way for a decisive transition to the symbolic function.     

Narcissism, hypochondria and the problem of alternative theories

This paper is an experiment in conceptual integration and clinical theory testing. Its argument is that narcissism and sexual object love develop from a single source and continue to interact during childhood development and adult life (Freud) and that drives in their oedipal and other formations are not merely disintegration products of narcissism (Kohut). Material from two analyses, supplemented by material from two others, indicate that narcissistic injury was a significant factor in the neuroses of these patients but that aggressive and libidinal conflicts were also decisive such that their hypochondriac symptoms were compositions of their interacting causality. As a result these neuroses are negative instances of Kohut's theory of narcissism. The hypochondriac symptoms as they emerged could not have had the structure and dynamics they actually had nor could the analytic process these patients underwent have achieved the far-reaching and durable amelioration of these symptoms that occurred. On the positive side, these analyses are but two inductive instances that support Freud's theory. However, one major difficulty of the faddishness of psychoanalytic theorizing is that much of worth is lost from general theories that turn out not to be supportable. The clinical material from these two cases which disprove basic elements of self-psychology metapsychology also require adjustments to classical theory that integrate the contributions of self-psychology to psychoanalytic clinical theory.