Fear Of Annihilation Research Articles

OSMANLI DÖNEMİNDE MUSEVİ MATBAACILIĞININ TEMEL GELİŞİMİ

The first Jewish printing activities in the Ottoman period started with the initiatives of the Sephardic Jews who had to leave Spain due to the exile. Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews, who were forced to immigrate from Poland and the surrounding areas, wanted to create works of their own religion and culture by continuing their printing activities in Thessaloniki, Edirne, Izmir and Istanbul. Even though the first Jewish printing house was established in 1493 during the Ottoman period, intensive publication of works only occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries. The first Jewish journalistic activities came to the fore in Izmir in 1842. After that, they spread to Istanbul and intensified in both cities. This study aims to deal with Jewish printing activities, which existed in the Ottoman period, within the scope of political and social processes. In the article covering the period between 1493 and 1922, the printing activities of the Jews were examined using the document analysis method. As a result, in spite of intermittent pauses in printing activities during the Ottoman period, it still experienced a successful growth over time. The Ottoman government’s permission for the Jews, as a non-Muslim nation, to conduct printing activities was a socially and commercially important move, especially when Muslims in the region were not using the printing press. The constant presence of religious themes in Jewish works can be attributed to the attempt to preserve their religious identities due to their exile from Spain, being a minority in the places they migrated to, and the fear of annihilation. The fact that they turned to literature and science in the works they published in the following process can be expressed as both the decrease in their sense of threat over time and an effort to assess and utilize the deep-rooted culture they received from Spain.

Archetypes of the pandemic.

This paper attempts to read the psychological and emotional impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic through the archetypal images contained in patients’ dreams. In these dreams, symbols related to the power of nature and to extreme danger are paired with feelings of detachment that seem to point to a traumatic dissociation, due to the archetypal experience that erupts in familiar surroundings. Through the humanization of the ineffable experience, dissociation, which in the beginning of the pandemic showed in high levels of anxiety, panic attacks and depersonalization, can be transformed into the overview needed for the search for meaning. The container for this process of transformation is the analyst, the real, virtual or imagined one, and his or her ability to relate and feel.

The Truth of the Work of Art: Freud and Benjamin on Goethe

Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic account of sibling rivalry, fluctuating between narcissistic identification (love) and fear of annihilation (hate), also applies to Walter Benjamin’s model of true love in his reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This model is found in the utopian novella “The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts,” inserted within Goethe’s novel. By reducing the relationship between the novella and its framing narrative to an opposition between truth and semblance, Benjamin replicates in his reading the specular logic that is love’s obstacle. On the other hand, Freud’s analysis of an episode in Goethe’s autobiography can be said to retroactively operate what Mitchell calls “lateral castration,” for Freud compares the great writer to patients in analysis and thus establishes the necessary seriality that creates “space for one who is the same and different.” Still, and although elements of his own autobiography facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, Freud exempts Goethe’s sisters from the position of rivals. Recognising “the sister” as earliest playmate, and object of hatred and narcissistic identification, like Mitchell does, might be the first step necessary for drawing a model of love for women as peers this side of utopia.

Der lange Weg in die Anerkenntnis des Unverfügbaren

Summary The long way towards acknowledgement of the unavailable. On separation and farewell in two analytical psychotherapies at old age In this second part of the entire report, the first part of which appeared in an earlier issue (4/2019: 381–394), the author once again focusses on conflicts connected with fear of annihilation when facing separation, thereby concentrating on repeated approaches to calm and to overcome the respective inner turmoil. She tries to release herself from her inclination to focus on the analyst’s person and the therapeutical relationship. Instead she attempts to decisively bundle her attention on the contents of the joint work. By doing so she becomes aware of a strong striving for autonomy which thus far had been obscured by early traumatic experiences of separation and an exuberant need for love and closeness. By her own effort she is now able to release the analyst from a longing commitment which, if it were to remain, would set the spiral of repetition in motion again and again. The therapeutically effective support consists in helping her to direct the desire for love – in the sense of a reversal – to where it can be lived meaningfully. For instance, by actively turning it to the community and its social needs, thus filling it with contents aligned with reality. The author finally is able to accept the unavailability of a significant other and the insight that we will not be relieved of the work on the impositions of life.

The Dependent Origination of Whiteness

The Buddhist teachings on dependent origination describe how the process of rebirth—also known as becoming—is caused by a deluded consciousness feeding on a person’s body and mind, as well as on external objects of craving and aversion. The process of racial formation that turns European American bodies into white people who feed off of the land, labor, and life force of people of color can be seen as an example of dependent origination. This article argues that whiteness is a deeply rooted existential experience in the bodies and minds of European Americans that serves as a firewall against perpetrator guilt and trauma; it also explains why the threat white people perceive in demographic shifts triggers an existential fear of annihilation. The Buddhist teachings in this article correspond with the concepts of racial formation and racial project articulated by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and the concept of the possessive investment in whiteness articulated by George Lipsitz. The article then uses the Buddhist antiracist lens formed from these connections to analyze past and present white supremacist behavior in the United States, as well as past and present antiracist behavior in the United States, paying particular attention to Martin Luther King’s involvement in the Chicago Freedom Movement. Although not the primary focus of this article, connections are also made between the Buddhist elements of this analysis and clinical trauma therapy in order to ground this discussion in a secular, empirical, trauma-informed context.

On fascination and fear of annihilation

Translations of summaryIn this paper fascination phenomenologically is described as a state of radically being captured by an imposing object. What is left of the impoverished and paralysed subject clings to the exclusive fascinating object. Fascination is the eye of the storm of extreme ambivalence towards an exclusive object: being the only remaining object it is necessary for living in an object world, but at the same time it is threatening to life by absorbing the subject totally. So the subject is sucked in by a yet frightening object. From a metapsychological point of view fascination is understood as the congealed result of excessive projective identification and a strong confusional state connected with it: the subject empties itself so much in the object that it comes to stand for the subject. The fascinating object embodies in a condensed way – as a special form of a bizarre object – split off unconscious threatening material. So fascination is linked to the Kleinian theory of anxiety. Two clinical vignettes illustrate how states of fascination can be understood as an ultimate defence against unconscious menacing material welling up. The hypothesis is developed that fascination points to a revelation of fundamental psychic truth that promptly cramps the subject because the reintegration of it is felt as annihilating. In the vignettes this takes the form of a ‘transformation in hallucinosis’. Fascination is at the same time ‘the moment of truth’ and possibly a serious obstruction of the analytic process. This unconscious truth seems to concern primitive ‘superego violence’. The challenge consists in thawing the frozen fascinating object by linking it to other material.

Hawking’s fear of an alien invasion may explain the Fermi Paradox

ABSTRACTThe fear of annihilation by an advanced civilization may not be limited to Earth, and it may help explain the silence of the cosmos.

In fugam vacui– Avoiding the Void in Baroque Thought

The era of the Baroque witnessed a fierce debate over the interpretation of some experiments about the vacuum. It was riddled with fear of annihilation. My focus will not lie on the development of ...

Nadzieja podstawowa a poczucie sensu życia i lęk przed śmiercią u młodzieży akademickiej

Celem prezentowanych badań była weryfikacja zależności między nadzieją podstawową a poczuciem sensu życia i lękiem przed śmiercią u młodzieży akademickiej. Zastosowano trzy metody do pomiaru zmiennych: Kwestionariusz Nadziei Podstawowej (BHI-12) Jerzego Trzebińskiego i Mariusza Zięby, Skalę Sensu Życia (PLT) J. C. Crumbaugha oraz Kwestionariusz Lęku Przed Śmiercią i Umieraniem (FVTS) Randolfa Ochsmanna.Uzyskane rezultaty badań potwierdzają postawione hipotezy o istnieniu związków pomiędzy poziomem nadziei podstawowej a poczuciem sensu życia i lękiem przed śmiercią: im wyższa nadzieja podstawowa, tym wyższe poczucie sensu życia oraz im wyższy poziom nadziei podstawowej, tym mniejszy lęk przed śmiercią. Lęk przed śmiercią w okresie podejmowania samodzielnego życia wyraża się przede wszystkim w obawie przed unicestwieniem, utratą własnego „ja” oraz w lęku przed utratą bliskich osób

The use of the analyst as an autistic shape

In this paper I describe through detailed clinical material the challenges posed by patients who employ entangled autistic defenses. I discuss the complicated nature of treating a patient who employed entangled autistic defenses and utilized my voice in an effort to preserve an undifferentiated state of dual unity. My patient's pursuit of dual unity took a very concrete form in her attempt to mitigate the terror of separateness. This concreteness was expressed via the patient's urgent request that I read letters she wrote to me between sessions. This type of autistic defense placed great strain on my ability to think analytically and I also became increasingly concrete in my response to the patient. Crucial to the analyst's regaining a space in which to think and a sense of separateness is the ability to contact the ground floor of her separate bodily experience. This is just the beginning step in the analyst separating herself from the powerful press to join the patient in a state of dual unity. Interpretation in action (Ogden, 1994) was an effective way to convey the importance of creating and tolerating internal space in myself and begin to create internal space in the patient. Previously such space had been closed down in order to manage primitive fears of annihilation. When a patient is absorbed in an entangling autistic retreat words do not reach the patient on a symbolic level but rather are experienced primarily as an assault on the need for dual unity with the analyst. The patient's need to be wrapped in a sensation based world of dual unity is preferable to a world of spoken words that carry the danger of delineating psychic separateness. In essence there is no self to speak words, only a whirl of an amorphous sensation self lacking definition. I believe with certain kinds of patients it may be necessary to first lose and then work to regain one's analytic mind, as I have powerfully described in the case of Linda. Linda's profound loss of connection to the ground floor of her experience could only begin to be addressed when I worked to extricate myself from ‘our magic carpet ride’ of dual unity, contacting the reality of my bodily experience, and begin to tolerate the terror I felt regarding my separateness from Linda. I also describe the confusing vacillation between entangled and encapsulated defenses in patients like Linda as previously identified by Cohen and Jay (1996). Ultimately, this kind of slow difficult analytic work began to help Linda develop a capacity to think and provided an alternative to the deadened world of her autistic protections.

DRAMOJE GIMTOJI KALBA

Straipsnyje analizuojama anglofoniskosios Kanados rasytojos Betty Quan drama Gimtoji kalba (Mother Tongue), siekiant panagrinėti kalbos ir tapatumo, siuo atveju motinos tapatumo santykį ir issiaiskinti, kaip motinos subjektyvumo tapsme dalyvauja, kokias funkcijas atlieka vaikų auginimo (mothering) kalba gyvenant motinai svetimoje kalbinėje aplinkoje. Pjesėje kuriamas motinos tapatumas analizuojamas pasitelkiant lycių studijų specialistės Irene Gedalof feministine migracijos teoriją ir psichoanalitines Julijos Borossa’os gimtosios kalbos bei Cathy Caruth traumos teorijas. Teigiama, kad motinos užsispyres kinų kalbos vartojimas anglų kalbos sąskaita yra teigiama praktika, padedanti issaugoti asmenybės vientisumą, taciau dėl asmeninės ir kultūrinės traumos virsta destruktyvia jėga, kliudancia tolesniam motinos subjektyvumo vystymuisi. Daroma isvada, kad sioje pjesėje atskleidžiamas svarbus issūkis užsienyje vaikus auginancioms motinoms – gebėjimas sukurti bendrą tapatumą su vaikais, jiems perduoti dalį savo kultūrinio ir kalbinio tapatumo, bet kartu susikurti naują migracinį daugiakalbį tapatumą, kuris būtų atviras vaikų gyvenamai kultūrai, priimtų ją, ismoktų jos kalbą, sugebėtų suvokti toje kultūroje gyvenancių vaikų poreikius ir juos patenkinti. The article explores maternal subjectivity of a migrant mother as portrayed in the play Mother Tongue by the Canadian playwright of Chinese origin Betty Quan. It argues that by reproducing home through embodied practices, such as speaking Cantonese to the exclusion of English to her children, the mother works against the dissolution of her identity, but due to the cultural and personal trauma, becomes fixated on that identity essentially belonging in the past and is only able to face the challenges of the present (such as acknowledging the needs of her growing children), when the set ways of family dynamics is disrupted. The development of her mother’s subjectivity is considered using theoretical models developed by gender and migration theorist Irene Gedalof and psychoanalyst Julia Borossa. Gedalof claims that the repetition of the same cultural rituals performed by migrant mothers is not an act of reproducing sameness, but rather a dynamic process that creates difference and produces rather than reproduces identities. Borossa argues that the mother tongue is always already lost to all humans. For her, becoming a fully formed subject involves accepting the loss of the childhood language and acquiescing to speaking a different language – be it a foreign language or the native tongue that has developed since childhood. It follows, that a fully developed migrant mother should be able to accept that she as a mother and her mother tongue can never coincide and resign to speaking a foreign language to her children whilst keeping her native tongue as memory-trace. In the case of the mother in Quan’s play, her fear of annihilation by her children’s voices in foreign English originates from her not having come to terms with the separation from her mother tongue, which is symbolically contained in her infantile fixation on and identification with the traumatic past together with the language of the past. However, the end of the play opens up a window of hope. In conclusion, the biggest challenge for a migrant mother in Mother Tongue is developing a common identity with her children who feel foreign to her. The play suggests that this can be achieved by passing on the mother’s cultural identity onto the children through ritualistic practices of which speaking the mother tongue is an important component, but also opening up to the children’s cultural difference by learning the language of their socialisation and the dominant culture thus establishing a more mature and empowered maternal subjectivity and capacity for more adequate mothering.

The Ghost Matrix

This article will discuss the challenges of psychodynamic work in health care organizations, through exploring shifts around the idea of death faced in western societies—and relating them to unconscious cultures and defences erected against the fear of death and fear of annihilation in medical organizations. It will also present the vicissitudes of an inpatient group analytic group conducted in the cardiology ward of a general hospital in Brazil, and introduce discussion on the presence of a ‘ghost matrix’ in these traumatized, regressed and haunted settings.

Israeli existential anxiety: cultural trauma and the constitution of national character

The present paper extends recent studies of national character – suggesting that the Israeli case revolves around a set of deep cultural codes which constitute various empirical manifestations. Broadening on this re-emerging paradigm, the study provides a specific case study of a major trait of Israeli national character, namely existential anxiety and fear of annihilation. It does so while advancing the idea that cultural trauma sets a context for Israeli national character. The analysis shows that Israelis constantly reference persistent and endemic existential fears of annihilation. They do so while tying together four levels: the mythological predicament, historical evidence, contemporary threats and future risks.

An Exploration of the Concept of the Social Unconscious and its Application to Clinical Understanding

The social unconscious is an idea primarily linked to group analysis. This article argues that the unconscious is socially constructed and it is essential that we recognize the power of social forces on our psyche. While Freud’s concept of the super-ego implies the existence of a socially constructed aspect of the unconscious, I propose that if the unconscious is inherently social then the anxieties we experience and defend against are based on our need to belong rather than our fear of annihilation. Tracing these ideas through three individual case examples, I demonstrate that the cultural and societal roots of the unconscious are crucial to our understanding of the workings of individuals and of the groups to which they belong.

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Niagara:

Abstract Working from Crèvecoeur's two accounts of visits to the Niagara peninsula, together with the two maps accompanying those narratives, this essay argues that Crèvecoeur never visited the area during the years he claims, 1785 and 1789. Although the narratives thus reflect the centuries-old convention of the traveler/explorer as liar, more significantly they reveal Crèvecoeur's substantial reworking of the received eighteenth-century response to the natural sublime. Both the 1785 Letter to his son and the longer retelling of his supposed 1789 visit in A Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York predictably record an initial, expected reaction to the Falls as involving astonishment, horror, and fear of annihilation, but each subsequently carries the experiencing subject beyond this to a rather different conclusion. Anticipating the Romantic period's transformation of the terrifying sublime into a transcendent experience of the beautiful, both the Letter and the Journey transport the subject to a higher state of perception wherein “our feelings are harmonized into placid contemplation.”

A Fluctuating Capacity to Mentalize: Affect Scripts and Self-State Systems as (not so) “Strange Attractors”: A Discussion of Margy Sperry's “Putting our Heads Together: Mentalizing Systems”

Margy Sperry identified the potential for interpersonal and intersubjective dimensions of experience to explain observed fluctuations of a capacity for mentalization and reflective function, and she illustrated this with a pertinent case that contained an enactment. Additional exploration of her premise and the case reveals the potential to understand some aspects of a more universal fluctuating capacity for mentalization as a function of unconscious or implicit affect scripts (in this case, containing shame) as well as the related naturalistic shifting of self-states in a clinical dyad. Persistent childhood styles of thinking such as psychic equivalence, pretend, and teleological modes (Fonagy et al., 2003) may predict some fluctuation as the capacity for mentalization is achieved. Additional factors to consider might also be shifting self-states and activation of related toxic affects and the secondary protective modes of behavior that help to create the safety of distance in the context of deep narcissistic wounding (Lansky, 1992) and fears of annihilation (Hurvich, 2003;Kohut, 1971) in both patient and therapist.

Fear of annihilation in subjects at risk of psychosis: A pilot study

Most reports on people at risk of psychosis focus on differences in baseline measures between those who go on to develop psychosis and those who remain non-psychotic. Due to the clinical status of subjects in these studies, the aim of the present study is to illuminate clinically important and under-researched characteristics of the group of subjects at risk of psychosis as a whole. This article reports on a cross-sectional study, comparing the level of annihilation anxiety in subjects at risk of psychosis with two control groups: healthy controls and schizophrenia patients. The level of annihilation anxiety is assessed with the Hurvich Experience Inventory-50. The study shows that subjects at risk of psychosis experience annihilation anxiety significantly more than do healthy controls, and at least as much as psychotic patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. This signals the need for immediate clinical intervention in this population. The high level of annihilation anxiety is likely to interfere with the working alliance, thus clinicians should provide an ambience of safety and transparency. In addition, interventions for subjects at risk of psychosis should aim to reduce the level of anxiety, e.g. through psychotherapy. The study warrants further investigations of clinically important characteristics of the group of subjects at risk of psychosis as a whole

The price of figs: Witnessing and the Polis.

People now seem to live in an age of trauma. Hardly a day goes by when either by direct or indirect experience people are not engaged with war, terrorism, natural and environmental disasters, devastating human error, and mass misery. These particular traumas certainly differ from the traumas of childhood such as emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. They also differ from the existential trauma of meaninglessness and mortality. No doubt, there is some overlap among the childhood, existential, and real-world traumas, perhaps in the fear of annihilation and disintegration and in the development of dissociative processes. Moreover, psychological distress and physical disturbance, incoherence, and decreased reflective functions are part of what can often develop. But differences exist, and they may have to do with the sequelae of what happens to victims and those who suffer and how they come to think and feel about their lives. This article is about a man who experienced the extreme trauma caused by the terrorism of September 11, 2001, and his search for recovery by way of psychotherapy. Language: en

The ‘autistic’ level of the Oedipus complex

In this paper, the author describes some of the tripartite constellations occurring in the material of children on the autistic spectrum. These could be thought of as constituting a primitive, ‘autistic’ level of the Oedipus complex where the fundamental anxieties are existential ones. It is suggested that these fears of annihilation are experienced on a bodily level, and that this physical aspect appears to be a distinguishing feature of the experience of the Oedipal constellation in children with autism. The clinical illustrations concern the experience of bodily mutilation within the feeding relationship; Oedipal aspects of sense perception; the nature of the link between masculine and feminine elements making up the psychic skin; and the balance between the child, the mother, and the mother' internal figures. Some implications for cognitive development are discussed.

Supervision with Esther Bick 1973 – 1974

The author revisits her experience of supervision with Esther Bick, which took place over 30 years ago. The patient discussed was a seven-year-old boy whose disturbance dated from the very beginning of his life. His difficulties had severe implications for the development of his capacity to feel emotionally contained and for the development of a capacity to think. The supervision and the therapy with this child remain alive in the therapist's mind, in part because of Esther Bick's unique and original understanding of the patient's distress and disturbance and its relation to the concrete experience of primitive anxiety, fear of annihilation and death. Esther Bick's teaching has become the backbone of the therapist's clinical understanding.