Compromise Formation Research Articles

Conceitos fundamentais dos métodos projetivos

O objetivo deste artigo é colaborar para fortalecer a confiança no uso dos métodos projetivos nos processos de avaliação psicológica. As associações produzidas frente aos estímulos ambíguos são consideradas expressões da personalidade. Tendo a psicanálise como cenário principal, faremos aqui a exposição de alguns conceitos teóricos que colaboram para a interpretação dos materiais projetivos. São examinados três conceitos: a projeção e suas diferentes variações, a elaboração de fantasias e a personificação. Em seguida, são apresentados alguns métodos projetivos, discutindo-se a eficácia projetiva por meio dos desenhos e pinturas.

Discussion of "Psychodynamic therapies with infants and parents: a critical review of treatment methods".

Bjorn Salomonsson does an excellent job critically reviewing a variety of psychodynamic therapies with infants and parents (PTIP), including methods which are less well known to American audiences, particularly those from the French and Scandinavian traditions. Thus, this review article is both a gift and a challenge to American readers and an obvious challenge to an American discussant immersed in (1) conflict and compromise formation theory (or as is better known as American Ego Psychology) and in (2) systematic empirical approaches to psychodynamic concepts and treatment. Can one objectively evaluate theories and methods which rely on assumptions unlike those to which one has been accustomed? These difficulties must be borne in mind and overcome because, perhaps unintentionally, Salomonsson’s contribution is valuable for all psychodynamic clinicians and researchers. This article raises ideas which may help us in our most important task of refining methods to evaluate the nature of the mutative agents in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapies. Salomonsson notes that the psychoanalytic study of the mother–infant dyad, one of the last patient categories to be studied psychoanalytically, began with the work of Selma Fraiberg and Francoise Dolto. Contrasting the American and the European literature, Salomonsson

A Case of Treating Anterior Glottic Web by Laser Mucosal Inversion Technique

Anterior glottic web is an abnormal scar tissue formation between the vocal folds, involving anterior commissure. Scarring procedure caused by damage to mucosal membranes of the vocal folds eventually can lead to glottic web formation, especially after laryngeal surgery involving both vocal folds. The conventional treatments of anterior glottic web have included keel, silicon or tube insertion. However, this presents risks of airway compromise and granulation tissue formation. CO2 laser web lysis has been widely used over the past decades. We introduced a novel, laser mucosal inversion technique for treating anterior glottic web and presented the case with a review of the related literatures. Korean J Otorhinolaryngol-Head Neck Surg 2014;57(10):716-9

Historical transformation and epistemological discontinuity

Starting from recent formulas of EU bureaucracy for subordinating scientific and educational apparatuses to the needs of the capital and to the requests of its political representatives, the article analyses the interconnection between the historical transformation of the ideological state apparatuses (universities, higher education institutions, research institutes etc.) and the epistemological discontinuity provoked by the triumph of technosciences. The hypothesis to be tested is the following: While the crisis of West European-North American capitalism requires an ever tighter submission of ideological state apparatuses, and especially of scientific and academic apparatuses to the needs of the capital, theoretical practices in the humanities and social sciences have come to the point where they entered into an open conflict with the domination of the capital and have, as a consequence, started to subvert their own institutional supports in the ideological apparatuses of the capitalist state. For this purpose, the article reconsiders social sciences as a compromise formation and, eventually, reassesses the historical materialism as a non-Cartesian modern science.

“Strange and Otherwise Unaccountable Actions”

Despite recognizing that gender identity is a complex compromise formation, psychotherapists struggle to tolerate gender variance. We still tend to favor binary gender identities and clear developmental lines, rather than embracing a stance of subversive curiosity about the variability and fluidity of gender in our patients. When gender identity is fluid or ambiguous, countertransferential affective disturbances can arise that meld states of abjection and excitement, challenging theoretical constructs and threatening therapeutic neutrality. Case material from the treatment of a female-to-male trans person is presented from the perspective of the transference-countertransference matrix.

Charles Brenner

To avoid certain errors in practice, Charles Brenner offered an holistic substitute for the Freudian structural model of the mind. He used the term compromise formation ambiguously to refer to both actions and states, so as to render unnecessary what he considered artificial, judgmental attitudes embodied in images of psychic structures. He believed that a theory of conflicting structures transforms the phenomenological drama of the patient's actual life-world into an artificial drama of contending intrapsychic parties that may reflect the analyst's values. According to Brenner, the meaning of life, with its desires, fears, and regrets, is structured forever in the first articulation of the family drama, and that is all the structure a practitioner should have in mind. In principle, the ambiguity of the term compromise formation allows for observed continuities in human life, and might have inspired an ambitious theoretician to exploit that option for an account of character, but that aspect of theory moves in a direction opposite to Brenner's practical mission. For the same practical reason Brenner refused to acknowledge gradations of mental operation, such as differences in maturity, or style or level of thinking, so the theory cannot say how change can take place, analytic or otherwise. These lacunae in theory were unblinkingly (if implicitly) accepted in pursuit of Brenner's goal, which was not to polish up theory but to cleanse the analyst's mind of concepts that subtly interfere with the essential nondirectiveness of treatment. His theoretical minimalism and exclusive concern with practical consequences can be recognized as a peculiarly North American attitude to psychoanalysis.

Weeds on the Ruins: Agency, Compromise Formation, and the Quest for Intersubjective Truth

Using Kundera's metaphor of “weeds on the ruins” to examine the impact of organized destruction of memory on the survival of a people, this paper explores the role of symptoms in negotiating a relational “compromise formation” by tracing their evolution as signifiers of previously dissociated intersubjective knowledge. It suggests that recent theorizing on the mutual constitution of agency and intersubjectivity creates the possibility of resurrecting the dramatic tension that characterized dual drive theory by relocating that tension between the desire to know (oneself, the Other) and the destruction of that desire. To do so, the paper contemplates an internally consistent lens for reconciling the terrain of deficit and dissociation with that of conflict by offering a process-oriented view of agency as “drive” that is rooted between subjective and material contexts. Finally, the paper explores the quest for intersubjective truth as offering a means of living beyond the ubiquity of compromise formation.

Defence Mechanisms and Coping Strategies among Caregivers in Palliative Care Units

This article focuses on the relationship between defence mechanisms, coping strategies, palliative attitude, and the well-being of caregivers in palliative care units, who are confronted with death, suffering, and pain. They use many different defence mechanisms; however, studies linking their coping strategies and defence mechanisms are rare. This study uses a quantitative and qualitative design and is based on 18 caregivers (nurses) in 2 palliative care units in Belgium. Defence mechanisms are tested through a semi-structured interview, TAT, and DSQ-60. Coping strategies are evaluated through a semi-structured interview, COPE, and WCQ. To maximize our global approach, coping strategies and defence mechanisms are associated with measures of well-being and palliative attitude. We determined that defence mechanisms and coping strategies should not be seen as obstacles to professional practices. Palliative caregivers are more likely to adopt "mature" and "mental inhibition and compromise formation" defence mechanisms, as well as "emotion-focused" and "problem-focused" coping strategies. Defence mechanisms are more unconscious and constitute appropriate answers in extreme emotional situations. Coping strategies allow for more conscious processes of adaptation to the environment of palliative care units. This study shows positive relationships between different defence mechanisms and coping strategies, palliative attitudes, and caregivers' well-being. Institutions should improve the conditions for group exchange and for caregivers' individual introspection so that caregivers develop adapted capacities to cope with anxiety.

Prolepsis and Parabasis: Jazz and the Novel

In “DissemiNation,” Homi Bhabha argues that the nation form is composed of two distinct and often antithetical temporalities. It is my argument here that the American twentieth century can best be understood as a compromise formation between the temporality of the novel and the temporality of jazz or, more specifically, between prolepsis and parabasis. My essay looks at Paul de Man's and Georg Lukács's assertions that the novel is an essentially proleptic form and argues that the specific form of prolepsis it brings with it from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is out of step with the temporal imperatives of the twentieth century. Turning to the temporality of jazz form, the essay then shows how the novel reshapes its mode of prolepsis to accommodate itself to the changing temporal landscape of the twentieth century. The figure I use for the interaction between jazz temporality and novelistic temporality is parabasis, the punctual interruption of the distinction between the time of narration and the time of the narrative. Building on Samuel Floyd's theorization of jazz temporality, I limn the outlines of jazz's distinct form of parabasis and use de Man's theorization of it to read the exchange between, and imbrication of, jazz and the novel.

Multiculturalism and the Fetishism of Difference.

This paper charts the internal mediations between the duality of human labour under capitalism, the way in which capitalism embodies its ‘others’ through ideologies of race and gender, and the fetishistic forms of ‘difference’ expressed in liberal notions of multicultural citizenship. Such an immanent critique helps to explain one of the central paradoxes of ‘diversity’: how in the very process of recognizing ethnic and cultural differences, multiculturalism also occludes and distorts capitalism’s concrete social relations. The fetishistic ideology of multicultural citizenship should be understood as a ‘compromise formation’ which both distorts social relations and gestures toward an emancipatory potential beyond itself.

Post-Marxism as Compromise Formation

Post-Marxism as Compromise Formation

The Violation of Expectancies

ABSTRACT The term “violation of expectancies” is derived from empirical studies of early development by Beebe and Lachmann. It referred, in their lexicon, to the interaction of mother and infant, organized by disruptions and efforts to resolve these breaches. This article expands the term's meaning to include a broad range of disruptive experiences, occurring not only in infancy but throughout the life cycle. The author's premise is that a developmental continuity exists between infant states and adult psychopathological states. This requires that we look in infancy for beginnings of states that we recognize as existing later on. The author provides a detailed review of infancy research, so as to give credence and support to the significance of the concept of violation of expectancy, and how these violations play a dominant role in the thematic and nuanced reverberations of our lives and in the intersubjective context of our experience. The concept of trauma derives from a one-person psychology, and is connected to unconscious fantasy, conflict and compromise formation, whereas “violation of expectancy” is a relational concept, based on mother-child interactions and originating within an intersubjective context. The author provides three case examples of violation of expectancy and their reverberations: The first involves early and repeated disruption in infancy, the second occurs in a relatively intact child, and the third derives from an autobiographical character.

Transference symptom

Transference symptom is a hazy notion in Freud’s writings. The notion is presented here as a particular moment in the crystallization of the transference neurosis. It results from a double cathexis of the analytic frame and the analyst resulting in a symbolic distortion that is represented plastically within the session, as occurs in dreams. The transference symptom proceeds from two different preconscious cathexes, one attached to the reality of the frame, the other to the drive linked to the analyst. A psychic space is thereby opened up for interpreting both the resistance and the unconscious derivatives of infantile conflict. The transference symptom is a compromise formation that includes the analyst and questions the countertransference stance. Three different analytic situations give rise to transference symptoms according to the relative balance between frame and process in the analytic encounter. The concept is compared with enactment.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis in America: Leading Analysts Present Their Work

Contributors. Preface. Introduction. Conflict, compromise formation and structural theory. Treating patients with symptoms -- and symptoms with patience: reflections on shame, dissociation, and eating disorders. In the neighborhood: aspects of a good interpretation and a developmental lag in ego psychology. Heterosexuality as a compromise formation: reflections on the psychoanalytic theory of sexual development. The narcissistic-masochistic character. Mobilizing fundamental modes of development: empathic availability and therapeutic action. Ferrum, ignis, and medicina: return to the crucible. Miscarriages of psychoanalytic treatment with suicidal patients. Between empathy and judgment. Conflict in the middle voice. The self as fantasy: fantasy as theory. Ritual and spontaneity in the psychoanalytic process. On misreading and misleading patients: some reflections on communications, miscommunications, and countertransference enactments. The external observer and the lens of the patient-analyst match. Recent developments in the technical approaches of English-language psychoanalytic schools. The pursuit of the particular:on the psychoanalytic inquiry. A relationship pattern measure: the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme. Psychoanalysts' theories. The analytic third: implications for psychoanalytic theory and technique. Chronic rage from underground: reflections on its structure and treatment. Knowledge and authority: the godfather fantasy. The four psychologies of psychoanalysis and their place in clinical work. Playing one's cards face up in analysis: an approach to the problem of self-disclosure. Narration in the psychoanalytic dialogue: psychoanalytic theories as narratives. The struggle to listen: continuing reflections, lingering paradoxes, and some thoughts on recovery of memory. On reminiscences. Countertransference, conflictual listening, and the analytic object relationship. Some implications of infant observations for psychoanalysis. World horizons: a post-Cartesian alternative to the Freudian unconscious. One psychoanalysis or many? Index.

Freud’s Great Voyage of Discovery

The author discusses some of Freud’s most significant contributions: the psychoanalytic method, called free association by Freud; the discovery that symptoms have a meaning and that every symptom is a compromise formation; the interpretation of dreams; psychic determinism; the central role of infantile sexuality; and sublimation. Included is a brief review of the views of some noteworthy analysts, all of whom agree in ignoring the importance of infantile sexuality and/or in minimizing its importance.

Bourdieu's Disavowal of Lacan: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Concepts of “Habitus” and “Symbolic Capital”

Although Bourdieu is often seen as “a theorist who will have no truck with Freudian psychoanalytic theory,” he seemed to recognize in the last decade of his life (1930-2002) that psychoanalysis was intrinsic to his own project.2 The pressure of the Freudian tradition was first revealed in his writing by the recurrence of the words “unconscious” – used both as adjective and as noun – and “misrecognition” (meconaissance), a concept that received its most powerful formulation in the writing of Lacan.3 Bourdieu’s oeuvre accumulated a growing and ever more elaborate psychoanalytic vocabulary. His writing includes the following terms, all of them mainly associated with the Freudian tradition: projection, reality principle, libido, ego-splitting, negation (denegation), compromise formation, anamnesis, return of the repressed, and collective phantasy; in his “Autoanalyse” (published in German in 2002 and in French in 2004), he uses the phrases “disavowal, in the Freudian sense” and “community of the unconscious.”4 But Bourdieu’s relationship to this tradition was not untroubled. The conditions in which Freudian concepts appear in Bourdieu’s work can be understood partly in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of Verneinung or (de)negation. In his earliest studies of hysterics, Freud already recognized a particular kind of resistance to the deepest layers of repressed material in which the patient disavows memories “even in reproducing them.”5 Freud specified the process of Verneinung in a later paper: “the content of the repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated”; denegation involves “already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed.” The “intellectual function is separated from the affective process.” This allows the ideational aspect of the repression to be undone, accepted intellectually by the subject, and named, while at the same time the condemning affective judgment is retained. The subject still refuses to recognize the denegated object as an intrinsic part of herself.6 In some writings, especially the earlier ones, Bourdieu rejects psychoanalysis outright. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, for example, psychoanalysis is reduced to a

Fobia: um sintoma marcado pelo real

O artigo pretende introduzir o questionamento acerca dos sintomas marcados pelo real, a partir da análise do sintoma fóbico do caso clínico de Freud, o “Pequeno Hans”. Por um lado, o sintoma como formação de compromisso (Freud), e como formação do inconsciente (Lacan), vem no lugar de algo que não pode ser sabido pelo sujeito, isto que é recalcado e endereçado ao Outro. Por outro, a fobia traz a particularidade de ser marcada por um real, carente de interdição paterna, sem visar um deciframento por parte do sujeito.

Frida Kahlo and Object Choice: A Daughter the Rest of Her Life

I argue that the entry into the triangular “oedipal” situation for girls does not necessitate a change in object, as Freud proposed, but an addition of object. My argument rests on different strands in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking: an appreciation of the complexity of internal objects, a reconsideration of the concept of bisexuality, an understanding of the role of multiple identifications in gender identity and object choice, and a reexamination of the triangular situation for girls. I focus on the life of Frida Kahlo—as revealed in biographies, journals, and art—to elucidate the layering of internal object choices. I conclude that object choice—heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual—represents a composite or compromise formation.

A Consuming Dish

In the seventeenth century, plays satirizing the representatives of law rose to prominence in England. This article, written in response to the article by Paul Raffield in this issue, concentrates on some questions about the telos of the genre. It emphasizes the circular structure of satire: satire criticizing the courts seems only capable of erecting another court that is subject to parallel flaws. Satire denigrates but also imitates jurisdiction, it might even be considered its secret accomplice despite the habitual idealizations of early modern theater, for many dramatists couldn’t help but supplement the powers that be. At best, satirical drama may be seen as a “compromise formation” between opposing forces in society, positing and undermining all of them simultaneously.

Creating an Intersubjective Reality: Commentary on Paper by Arnold Rothstein

The author discusses Arnold Rothstein's paper “Compromise Formation Theory: An Intersubjective Dimension” and challenges his definition of intersubjectivity. She offers a perspective in which the import of intersubjectivity theory is less to dissolve the notion of objectivity than to grasp processes of mutual engagement, regulation, and recognition. While it is true that the recognition that the analyst is also a subject and therefore does not have exclusive knowledge is an important shift in the psychoanalytic paradigm, the author suggests that the intersubjective is far more encompassing than this. Intersubjective theory emphasizes the active creation of consensus or conflict about reality rather than merely the recognition that the analyst's perspective on reality is subjective. This cocreation produces a different emotional experience of connection, not merely a change in the quality of insight. Finally, Rothstein's case illustrates how he responds to the need for recognition and regulation. He shows us how focusing on the procedural allowed him to make an intersubjective shift, not simply an intrapsychic interpretation of compromise formation.