Destructive Fantasies Research Articles

Repairing the M(other) and the Self Through the Creation of Art: Reading Hilda Doolittle’s HERmione in parallel with Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges through Kleinian Lenses

Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D., began to write prose fiction to surmount her traumas and see the way ahead again. H.D. composed varied autobiographical prose, among which her Madrigal Cycle Novels; Asphodel, HERmione, Paint it Today, and Bid me To live hold a pivotal place. Within the scope of this article, I will analyse HERmione in conjunction with Ravel’s opera L'Enfant et les Sortilèges which became the main subject of Melanie Klein’s paper on ‘infantile anxiety-situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse’. Reading these two writings in tandem will help to clarify the connections that I draw between Klein’s ‘reparation’ concept and H.D.’s writing. The paper, read before the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1929, both elaborates upon Klein’s analysis regarding art production and introduces the term ‘reparation’ for the first time. Klein starts her analysis with Ravel’s opera, which focuses merely on the destructive fantasies of a six-year-old boy. Throughout the paper, Klein emphasises the significance of the reparation process in the handling of destructive fantasies and reads it within the good and bad mother dichotomy. Reading these two works together will shed insight into how- and why- did H.D. feel compelled to create this particular prose, as well as how similar destructive fantasies affected H.D.’s life and decisions paving the way to her being a writer. HERmione, though composed seven years after Asphodel, is a prelude to Asphodel and tells the story of H.D.’s years in Pennsylvania. This altered chronology indicates that there are emotional reasons for H.D. writing out of chronological order. There may be both editorial and psychoanalytical explanations for her choice to write about her adolescent years, 1906–1911, in particular, after writing on her war trauma and stillbirth, which happened around 1915. In this article, I endeavour not only to explain such explicit choices for a deconstructed chronologic linearity, a prominent feature of modernist forms, within a Kleinian psychoanalytic framework but also to analyse how the writing process contributed to H.D.’s own ‘reparation’ process.

The Challenges of Potential Destructiveness in Designing a Therapeutic Framework for Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa

The authors begin by presenting the epistemological foundations that enabled them to design a therapeutic mediation framework aimed at enhancing the treatment of hospitalized anorexic patients. This unique framework utilizes bodily exploration through sound and music vibration. The authors were inspired by a method of dynamic structuring of the body image through clay modeling, created by Gisela Pankow, and by the bodily aspects of the subject’s relationship with the object in transitional phenomena and in playing, as elaborated by Donald W. Winnicott. A detailed account of a clinical experience with a young female patient highlights the way in which the framework helped reveal destructive fantasies linked to scenes of psychic conflict. 1

The consuming temple: Jews, department stores, and the consumer revolution in Germany, 1880-1940

Introduction1. Jerusalem's Terrain: The Department Store and Its Discontents in Imperial Germany2. Dreamworlds in Motion: Circulation, Cosmopolitanism, and the Jewish Question3. Uncanny Encounters: The Thief, the Shopgirl, and the Department Store King4. Beyond the Consuming Temple: Jewish Dissimilation and Consumer Modernity in Provincial Germany5. The Consuming Fire: Fantasies of Destruction in German Politics and CultureConclusionNotesSelected BibliographyIndex -- Cornell University Press

The body as thought and reality

This study discusses the rôle of destruction and destructive fantasies in forming a relationship to the body and in experiencing the reality of the body. The starting points are Freud’s conception of the nature of the drives and Winnicott’s theory on the use of an object. The central assumption is that the destructive impulses and fantasies directed towards the body create and strengthen the experience of the body as a part of the extrapsychic reality. By improving the trust in the continuity of bodily existence, they help to lessen the experience of the body as a subjective object which improves our relationship to our bodily reality.

The life and music of Alexander Scriabin: megalomania revisited

To shed more light on the relationship between the grandiosity of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) and his creative output, and discuss its implications for psychopathology. Scriabin was a highly original composer, who brought innovations to the idiom of music. He firmly believed that music and philosophy were inseparable and that music was only a vehicle for expressing ideas and emotional states. As Scriabin was getting more preoccupied with mysticism and as he was developing a belief that his mission was to save the world through his art, his music became more esoteric. Over the last five years of his life, he composed relatively little, as he was working on a supergrandiose project that he never completed. Scriabin's grandiosity, which had delusional qualities, might have diminished his creativity towards the end of his life and contributed to his destructive fantasies. All along, his social façade was well preserved and he was not noted to exhibit overt psychotic behaviour, suggesting an encapsulated delusional megalomania. The implications of megalomania, especially in creative or otherwise influential individuals, are briefly discussed.

La violence et son devenir chez l’enfant témoin de violences conjugales

Violence is inherent to human beings, it is even essential for the creation of a link with the other one, in the process of the psychological birth of the subject. The family is the place of prohibition of incest and murder where the child can learn how to manage his destructive impulses, but it is sometimes the place of his overflowing. At this point, it is about the destruction of the subject and the psychopathology of the link. Domestic violence prevails when the law of the strongest, exercised by one of the members of the family, replaces the common law of the exchange which is the basic foundation of the family as well as of the society. Child witness to marital violence attends with helplessness and thus with passivity, marital alarming scenes. It affects his psychic construction because these acting-outs meet his own destructive fantasies. Consequently, the anguishes are inescapable, but they differ according to the psychological maturity of the child, that is to say according to whether the scenes occur before, during, or after the oedipian stage. The future of the anguish will join or not to a trauma, in front of a situation that cannot be assimilated. “Identification with the aggressor” appears as the most frequent mechanism of defense, and will have long-term effects sometimes as generational repetitions, as we will show it in a clinical illustration revealing all the devastating impact of marital violence.

The Atonement–Forgiveness Dyad: Identification With the Aggressed

In an effort to assuage the dystonicities of guilt and anxiety, the atoner forms an identification with his victim. Such an identification is, for the most part, unconscious and, to follow Racker's categorization, is either a concordant or a complementary one, with each pattern generating a distinct atonement narrative. Atonement is synonymous with neither reparation nor guilt, although each of them contributes to its formation and vicissitudes. Prominent in relational scenarios within the work of atonement is the search for a punitive “bad-enough object,” an external, self-recruited gratifier of the internal need for punishment. Later atonement scenarios are often thematically linked to earlier fantasies of destruction of the maternal breast (in Kleinian theory) or to the unfolding of the classical Oedipal tragedy. Atonement and forgiveness are constructed between the people involved, rather than being granted by one or attained by the other. Atonement wishes shape a number of partial identificatory processes that, when activated, form the ambience of the atoner–forgiver dyad. These include elements of repair, reconciliation, and repentance. The plotlines of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov reflect Dostoyevsky's emerging understanding of the atonement process, from an earlier focus on Raskolnikovian self-torment to an Alexian (Karamazov) vision of reparative benevolence. Revenge and atonement are closely linked, with atonement often representing revenge against the self, taken on behalf of a complementarily-identified-with victim. This article provides some clinical manifestations of atonement, representing a continuum of greater or lesser psychopathology.

The Gothic Text (review)

Reviewed by: The Gothic Text Robert Miles Marshall Brown . The Gothic Text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 312pp. US$48. ISBN 978-0-8047-3912-2. The Gothic Text is trained on a single, bewildering consequence of modernity: the astonishing fact of "mind." The modern historicizing school of Gothic criticism has tended to marginalize Immanuel Kant as a peripheral figure who could have had little impact on, and therefore relevance to, the ideological material narrated by the Gothic. In direct opposition to this critical tendency, Marshall Brown meditates on a fundamental consequence of Kantian philosophy: the defamiliarization [End Page 181] of mind. Although British empiricism had the capacity to render the mind passing strange, especially as it drove a sceptical wedge between sense data and things, it rested on a camera obscura model of mental functioning that reinforced naturalism. Thus, while one might question the relationship between the image cast on the mind's tabula rasa, and its source, the unintended consequence of the metaphor was to reinforce a model in which, as Richard Rorty puts it, "all the knowing gets done" under "the gaze of the unblinking Eye of the Mind" (cited in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992], 55). Even for sceptics, the mind was a box in which sense data impinged on a receptive consciousness. By contrast, Kantian philosophy closed the shutter on the world of things. It ushered in a form of radical subjectivity in which the mind shadowboxed with itself, disconnected from anything graspable through "common sense." For Brown, the Gothic is the literary form that arose in astonished contemplation of this fact. Brown begins his revisionist reading with three theses, each carefully designed to pick apart the critical consensus: Romantic Gothic fiction is not exciting ; Gothic novels are not Ghost Stories ; Gothic novels are not women's writing. Pace Henry Tilney, the Gothic is not designed to set one's hair on end, but is a ludic thought-experiment: the "gothic exists in a state of suspense—of questing and questioning—that we have come to call the fantastic" (9). For Brown, as for Todorov, the Gothic belongs in an uncertain halfway house, a stage in metaphysical history in which the mind stood mutely wondering before the Kantian rupture. As thought-experiments they have almost nothing to do with the gender politics attributed to the Gothic by a long tradition of feminist criticism. Indeed, the negative of the third thesis is just another expression of the parochialism that Brown sets out to dismantle. The Gothic is not circumscribed by gender, nation, or language, but is a pan-European form, stretching from the Urals to the Western plains, flowering along the trade and immigration routes that spread the Kantian revolution. In his short second chapter, "Fantasia: Kant and the Demons of the Night," Brown lays down the true cornerstone of his book: "The greatness of the gothic—inseparable from the seeming frivolity of all its greatest exemplars—is not that it plays with terror and the limits of reason, but rather, precisely, that it plays with these things, that is, that it imagines them" (14). In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick advanced the influential thesis that live burial was the Gothic's master trope, its organizing grammar, or structure, where terror turned on one of two modalities: the dread of being cut off from others, whether literally, in a box, or figuratively, through the impediments of mind or language; and the dread of being invaded, of [End Page 182] not being able to keep contaminants out, whether rapacious banditti or destructive fantasies. In the live burial trope, barriers remain shut when we want them open, but stay open when we want them closed. Brown appears to sketch a similar dynamic when he argues that the Gothic imagines and plays with the limits of reason. He angles towards a "transcendental aesthetic" of a sublime beyond human psychology, which is to say, beyond Burke and his proto-Freudian reading of terror as the overturning of the ego. In explaining this transcendental aesthetic, Brown is teasingly cryptic. At the centre of this...

Marcel Duchamp: On the fruitful use of narcissism and destructiveness in contemporary art

Considering Marcel Duchamp's work, this paper raises the question as to the nature of the subjective experience proposed by contemporary art to today's audience. Approaching art through the concept of sublimation, Freud maintains a fundamentally optimistic and positive view, putting forward its libidinal and sexual aspects, the pursuit of pleasure, beauty, and omnipotence. Following the path opened by Freud through the concept of the ‘uncanny’, most post‐Freudian authors have proposed a ‘blacker’ image of artistic endeavour, allowing the expression of aggression. From a perspective which is neither that of an art historian nor a moralist, the author proposes the idea that certain propositions of contemporary art may allow the viewer to live narcissistic and destructive fantasies, via culturally sanctioned and socially acceptable means. The recognition of the fertile use of destruction as a condition of the emergence of the new, on the one hand, as well as the legitimacy of the expression through art of the most primitive fantasies and the right to non‐communication, on the other, are postulated as constructs for a non‐normative, non‐judgemental psychoanalytic approach to the cultural world.

The Creativity of Destructive Fantasies

Destructive fantasies are made unconscious in our culture compared to the lively symbolic exchange of such fantasies in Papua New Guinea. In groups unconscious destruction works as a dangerous force and can destroy the cohesion of the group, therefore they are kept anxiously unconscious. When they can be verbalized they become creative for the process of individuation of each group member. This paradox is described and theoretically discussed for the process of individuation within a cohesive group-analytic situation. Links to the concept of the anti-group and to a group-analytic theory of psychological development are made in the context of group-analytic research in a foreign culture.

The Dialectics of Instinct: Commentary on 'the Creativity of Destructive Fantasies' by Werner Knauss

The Dialectics of Instinct: Commentary on 'the Creativity of Destructive Fantasies' by Werner Knauss

The Dialectics of Instinct: Commentary on `The Creativity of Destructive Fantasies' by Werner Knauss

The Dialectics of Instinct: Commentary on `The Creativity of Destructive Fantasies' by Werner Knauss

The Dialectics of Instinct: Commentary on `the Creativity of Destructive Fantasies' by Werner Knauss

The Dialectics of Instinct: Commentary on `the Creativity of Destructive Fantasies' by Werner Knauss

A dark talent: silence in analysis.

This paper is presented jointly by two analysts who have worked with patients whose silence stretched over years. They taxed our professional selves and our therapeutic repertoire of responses and techniques to the limit. Partly in response to these experiences, each analyst found herself needing to talk with another who could verify disturbing countertransference reactions from the standpoint of similar experience. The patients' (largely silent) attacks on analysis and their inability to use it conventionally constellated the need in us to talk, in an effort to relieve projected anxiety. Our conversations provided some containment of the destructive fantasies which we found developing in response to lack of verbal interaction with our patients. Unlike patients who project into an analyst in the unconscious hope of finding containment, silent patients project the need for containment, which they then disavow, leaving the analyst carrying the need, and feeling helpless, baffled and undermined in their therapeutic identity (Colman, private communication). In keeping with the theme of this conference, we found that our collaboration about what chronic analytic silence may mean helped to counteract its destructive effect on the analyst-patient relationship.

Treating Suicidelike Behavior in a Preschooler

This book records the case of Alexi, a very emotionally disturbed boy, seen from age three years and four months as a patient at the clinic where the author is a child psychiatrist. Alexi attends a preschool program where he has often behaved disruptively and aggressively and had withdrawn episodes. Trad, understandably quite concerned by Alexi's self-destructive fantasies and behavior, worries about Alexi's safety should he become more preoccupied with his destructive fantasies. Moreover, Alexi comes from a chaotic, unstable, disrupted, abusive environment, peopled with insensitive, psychologically immature, aggressive and depriving relatives. Recognizing that Alexi's parents were probably deprived, not very well—nurtured individuals during their own childhoods, Trad clearly assesses their difficulties and inabilities to parent adequately. Showing that events affecting Alexi and his family are probably multifaceted, and that Alexi's behavior is obviously multi-determined, Trad wisely elects not only to work with Alexi, but also to involve his parents

Destructive fantasies in certain learning difficulties.

Destructive fantasies in certain learning difficulties.