Alfred Lorenzer Research Articles

Through a glass darkly: Using a reflecting team approach in the development of supervisory practice

Foulkes placed working with countertransference and parallel process as central to group supervision. This article offers a model for developing supervisory skills in recognizing and making use of countertransference and parallel process in group supervision. It adds two perspectives: firstly it draws on Alfred Lorenzer’s concept of ‘scenic understanding’, a method of identifying social and cultural triggers from the past that cause patients’ problems in the present but which are outside of conscious awareness. Secondly, it adapts a reflecting team approach developed by Anderson and Prest for use in training supervisors of groups. In the following model of reflecting team supervision it is the therapist’s ‘scenes’, triggered and evoked by a patient or therapy group that are presented. The supervision group responds by offering their associations and emotional responses, and this is observed by a reflecting team. They then change places and the supervision group watches the reflecting team offer their observations and hypotheses. In the final stage of the process, the two groups meet together to share their learning and reflect on the experience. This approach is illustrated with vignettes, and highlights some of the benefits.

The visual matrix method in a study of death and dying: Methodological reflections

The visual matrix method is designed to elicit imagistic and associative contributions established collectively amongst participants in a group setting. In this article, a hard-to-reach area of experience – death and dying – illustrates the production of shared cultural images beyond individual experience. Our dual purpose was to assess the suitability of the method for this challenging topic, and to understand the ways in which death figured in the imagination of the participants. Three theorists, Wilfred Bion, Alfred Lorenzer and Gilles Deleuze, enable us to theorise psychosocial processes of symbolisation beyond cognition.

A oralidade no processo penal a partir da noção de compreensão cênica

O presente trabalho visa a analisar a textualização do processo penal, para verificar como a ela se contrapõe a oralidade, através da noção de compreensão cênica, construída por Winfried Hassemer e Alfred Lorenzer, constatando quais são as suas vantagens em face da compreensão textual. Após, buscar-se-á apurar qual são os efeitos que essas vantagens ocasionam tanto para o princípio do contraditório, quanto para o princípio do dispositivo, reafirmando o processo penal como eminentemente acusatório.

Introduction to Alfred Lorenzer's paper ‘Language, life praxis and scenic understanding in psychoanalytic therapy’

In the contribution reproduced here, which dates from 1983, Alfred Lorenzer develops his conception of psychoanalytic knowledge and of the method whereby it is obtained. It forms part of the more c...

Alienation and Digital Labour—A Depth-Hermeneutic Inquiry into Online Commodification and the Unconscious

At the core of this paper is a psychosocial inquiry into the Marxist concept of alienation and its applications to the field of digital labour. Following a brief review of different theoretical works on alienation, it looks into its recent conceptualisations and applications to the study of online social networking sites. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how to extend and render more complex these recent approaches through in-depth analyses of Facebook posts that exemplify how alienation is experienced, articulated, and expressed online. For this perspective, the article draws on Rahel Jaeggi’s (2005) reassessment of alienation, as well as the depth-hermeneutic method of “scenic understanding” developed by Alfred Lorenzer (e.g. 1970; 1986).

Socialization, Language, and Scenic Understanding. Alfred Lorenzer's Contribution to a Psycho-societal Methodology

El articulo es un recorrido guiado de la propuesta de Alfred LORENZER de una metodologia de analisis cultural hermeneutica profunda que fue lanzada en un medio con una casi completa division entre las ciencias sociales y la psicologia/ psicoanalisis. Presenta los antecedentes en su teoria materialista de la socializacion, lo que combina una reinterpretacion social del pensamiento central en el psicoanalisis clasico – el inconsciente, la pulsion – con una teoria de la adquisicion del lenguaje. Su metodologia se basa en una transformacion de la comprension escenica desde una interpretacion clinica a una interpretacion de texto, que busca entender el significado inconsciente colectivo en un texto, y se presenta con una ilustracion del procedimiento de interpretacion desde la investigacion social. Luego sigue un breve relato sistematico de conceptos e ideas clave – formas de interaccion, engramas, experiencia, simbolizacion, juego del lenguaje, imaginacion utopica – con una mirada a las conexiones de teoria social a la escuela de Frankfurt. El procedimiento de la interpretacion practica basada en una investigacion psicosocial de LORENZER, es resumida brevemente, enfatizando el rol de los argumentos del investigador en descubrir el significado socialmente inconsciente en la interaccion social. Finalmente, una mirada a los problemas epistemologicos contemporaneos. El enfoque de LORENZER para teorizar e investigar al sujeto como una entidad socialmente producida aparece como una alternativa psicosocial a la corriente principal del constructivismo social. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1203229

Learning, Work and Language Games

The article provides an example of psycho-societal analysis of work related learning. Initially a conceptual framework of learning and life experience is established drawing on Alfred LORENZER and Oskar NEGT, and the interactional development of psychoanalysis. A case of learning experience from research into a retraining program for unskilled workers, exposing a very conflictual subjective experience of a traineeship, is presented and commented. The worker's experience is interpreted focusing on the gender aspects of the conflicts, seeing the learning process in the context of a work identity process, which is related to a career shift enforced by labor market transition requiring male workers to retrain for a social work profession which used to be female, and more widely to a reconfiguration of the societal relation between work and gender. The final section discusses the methodological framework for analyzing learning processes by means of interpreting language use. The notion of language game connects the level of unconscious social engagements and level of formal learning and knowledge, and the opportunity for a deeper understanding of professional learning and identity is indicated by reference to one more example. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1203249

Psychoanalysis, Socialization and Society—The Psychoanalytical Thought and Interpretation of Alfred Lorenzer

Alfed LORENZER pertenece a aquellos pocos psicoanalistas que entendieron al psicoanalisis no solo en la terapia clinica, el pensamiento clinico y la investigacion sino tambien como una ciencia social. En la perspectiva de LORENZER el individuo fundamentalmente no puede ser quitado de su contexto social. El escenario terapeutico del psicoanalisis hasta ahora es una empresa artificial, un experimento psicologico de un cierto tipo. LORENZER entendio la sociedad no solo como un medio afuera del individuo, tal cual es estudiado en varios paradigmas psicologicos. En el sentido de LORENZER, la sociedad penetra y media las estructuras profundas del individuo. El describe este proceso como una socializacion del individuo. En el siguiente ensayo, discuto la perspectiva de la investigacion de LORENZER en los campos de la relacion madre-hijo, del aprendizaje infantil del lenguaje, de las relaciones de trabajo y de actitudes religiosas e ideologicas. Mi interes de investigacion aborda la mediacion compleja de las formas de interaccion familiares y sociales. El centro del analisis es el concepto de inconsciente, que ha sido desarrollado por LORENZER en una relacion cercana a Sigmund FREUD. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1203176

Special issue on Alfred Lorenzer: Introduction

Alfred Lorenzer, a major figure in post-World War II German intellectual debate, is little known in the Anglophone world. As well as supplying biographical details, this short Introduction to the special issue on Lorenzer's work sketches the nature of his debt to Frankfurt School critical theory, highlights his attempt to place psychoanalysis on a materialist footing, and provides an overview of the issue's contents.

Alfred Lorenzer and the depth-hermeneutic method

This article aims to introduce an Anglophone audience to the work of Alfred Lorenzer. It has three main components: it outlines some of Lorenzer's central concepts (the scenic, interaction forms, engrams, symbolisation and desymoblisation, language games and scenic understanding); explores the dialectical relations through which, for Lorenzer, unconscious, bodily and social processes are mutually constituted; and sketches some of the principles informing the depth-hermeneutic method, the tradition of social, cultural and social psychological research to which his ideas gave rise. Throughout, Lorenzer is viewed as seeking to put psychoanalysis on a materialist footing and concerned to assert its critical potential.

Psychosocial research analysis and scenic understanding

In this paper two researchers who position themselves within an emergent psychosocial current in the UK apply the concept of scenic understanding to a segment of film footage of an interaction (part of an empirical qualitative research project) to explore what Alfred Lorenzer's theory can add to our existing methodological resources. The film footage shows the creation of a poem by Darren, a 16-year-old offender, and Bob, a local poet employed in a project investigating the rehabilitative potential of one-to-one creative writing sessions. The authors contrast the transcript of this encounter with a ‘scenic composition’, a device they developed to communicate to a research readership the scenic experience of watching a filmed interaction. This contrast forms the basis for bringing together a series of post-Kleinian ideas about modes of knowing (syncretistic perception, reverie, transitional space) with Lorenzer's scenic understanding. Using the idea of provocations in the text, the authors focus on the researcher's emotional experience to explore the psychosocial character of the meanings that emerge concerning Darren's claim, ‘I’m not clever’, and how these meanings are communicated amongst Darren, Bob and the researcher. Through the lens of symbolised and unsymbolised emotional experience, play and triangular space, the authors consider Darren's ambivalent relationship to the creative writing activity and conclude with a short discussion of the conceptualisation of unconscious processes suitable to a psychosocial data analytic methodology.

‘Symbolic interaction forms’ versus ‘clichés’: On the function and impact of religious symbolizations in the evangelical milieu

The article illustrates Alfred Lorenzer's theory of socialization and symbolization and its usefulness for understanding the psycho-societal emergence of meaning. Using the example of Christian evangelicalism, the article describes the process by which experiences, events, and interactions are symbolized. In this specific case, a rigidified form of symbolization, with its ensuing ideological effects, strips meaning of its playful, tentative qualities and turns it into a dogma or compulsive force. Following Lorenzer, it is argued that this process calls on a ‘cliched’ structure of ‘authentic’ and ‘secure’ identities.

The research relationship, enactments and ‘counter-transference’ analysis: On the significance of scenic understanding

This article explores Alfred Lorenzer's notion of scenic understanding through a conflict that beset a data-interpretation panel, part of a study evaluating a programme of psychodynamic therapy for drug-addicted young people. A second interpretation panel, formed in the wake of the first group's collapse, came to understand this conflict as a ‘counter-transference’ to the latent meaning present in the case on which the first panel had been working. This insight, in turn, gave rise to a new understanding of the case itself, in particular the possibility that the interviewee had made less progress in her therapy than appeared to be so.

Helgoland on Amager

Using "the deep hermeneutic procedure" of Alfred Lorenzer, an attempt is made to achieve a scenic understanding of a sports environment at Helgoland, Copenhagen. Author participation in the interplay of experience and movement and the spontaneous feeling and associations which are obtained, are record for the bodily experience of swimming in the waters of the sound. The scenic context and the bodily experience are described.