Freud's Ideas Research Articles

What We Learned from Proust: Psychological and Social Determinants of Snobbery and Prejudice

ABSTRACTProust's original contribution to understanding social exclusion is the focus of this paper. Proust's psycho‐logical novel, In Search of Lost Time is used to show how social exclusion is related to early feelings of exclusion from the parental couple in the family. Proust's addition shows how a child who wins his mother's attention by acting as a victim suffers from both guilt and humiliation which he may resolve by defending another victim or by excluding others if he identifies with the aggressor. This paper shows how excluding others from events, opportunities, and equality under the law can be an attempt to repair the humiliation of having been excluded. This expands Anna Freud's idea about identification with the aggressor. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Howard Shevrin – Pioneering Investigator of Psychoanalytic Science

Howard Shevrin – Pioneering Investigator of Psychoanalytic Science

Baudrillard's Radicalization of Fetishism

Baudrillard's theories developed dramatically over his intellectual career of forty years, and throughout these years he contributed considerably to the thematic of cultural fetishism. Consistent with his conception of the consumer society, he developed the notion of sign-fetishism, and object-fetishism. These are both steps in the radicalization of Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, drawing on freud's idea of fetishism as a perverse structure. The article notes that Baudrillard provided inventories of fetishism at regular intervals in his writings, and that these remained curiously unchanging. He contrasts the structure of fetishism with that of symbolic exchange, a cultural formation which resolves fetishism. His analysis of 9/11 is shown to be a complex combination of elements of the theory of fetishism (without being named as such) with that of symbolic exchange. Although Baudrillard developed the notion of fetishism to great critical effect, he did not theorize it or apply it systematically.

“The Power of Christ Compels You”: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal Psychodrama in The Exorcist

Though made forty years ago, William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1971) remains a shocking film, as scenes of Regan's bodily contortions and convulsions, explicit acts of masturbation, and sexual abuse...

Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysisby GalloRubén, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press, 2010, 408 pp., $32.95 (hardcover).

Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysisby GalloRubén, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press, 2010, 408 pp., $32.95 (hardcover).

Oedipus against Freud: myth and the end(s) of humanism in twentieth-century British literature

Sigmund Freud's interpretation of the Oedipus myth - that subconsciously, every man wants to kill his father in order to obtain his mother's undivided attention - is widely known. Arguing that the pervasiveness of Freud's ideas has unduly influenced scholars studying the works of Modernist writers, Bradley W. Buchanan re-examines the Oedipal narratives of authors such as D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce in order to explore their conflicted attitudes towards the humanism that underpins Freud's views. In the alternatives to the Freudian version of Oedipus offered by twentieth-century authors, Buchanan finds a complex examination of the limits of human understanding. Following the analyses of philosophers such as G.W.F. Hegel and Frederick Nietzsche and anticipating critiques by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, British Modernists saw Oedipus as representative of the embattled humanist project. Closing with the concept of posthumanism as explored by authors such as Zadie Smith, Oedipus Against Freud demonstrates the lasting significance of the Oedipus story.

This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud (review)

Reviewed by: This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud Eve Zimmerman This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud. By Margherita Long. Stanford University Press, 2009. 200200 pages. Hardcover $50.00. Margherita Long's study of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro is a welcome addition to the body of work on this author in English. As a devoted reader of Tanizaki since graduate school, I have often felt that the historicist/biographical approach to his writings falls short of the mark. We need more help in understanding the dedicated masochism of Tanizaki's works and the part played by women in those visions. The notion that woman is simply other—mistress, mother, whore or a little bit of all three—becomes clichéd to the point of tedium. Why do we continue to read Tanizaki, and with such anticipation and pleasure? Long's answer to this question is complex, offering rigorous textual readings and demonstrating a strong command of her sources. She reads psychoanalytically and without apology. Early in the book she tackles the question of the relevance of psychoanalysis to Japan and answers in the affirmative. She asserts that Tanizaki's discoveries not only anticipate or replicate Freud's, but that they critique modern subjectivity itself. Long avoids most of Tanizaki's canonical works even as she writes a study of him; her method is to unearth the less-studied works, including fiction, essays, and discussions, and to observe how Tanizaki's texts interact with other central texts in Japan's modern history. In chapter 1, for example, [End Page 364] she gives a reading of In Praise of Shadows (In'ei Raisan) and its purported "return to the East." Long uses Freud's idea of moral masochism to unlock Tanizaki's project. Rather than stand as a defiant assertion of Eastern aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows delineates the process by which an internalized superego in the form of a stern Western father figure makes a weaker Japan suffer. Long locates this suffering in the racial humiliation implied by shadowy rooms, grimy objects, and women's dark skin. This is not to say that Tanizaki resists this masochism, but he is the only culturalist writer of the 1930s to expose its mechanism. Long's range of sources in this discussion is dizzying, from Slavoj Žižek to Komori Yoichi to Jacques Lacan and back again, and at times I wished for less, not more. Nevertheless, Long makes an original contribution to our understanding of Tanizaki's writing: she effectively argues that it is a critique, albeit a nuanced one, of modernity itself. My favorite chapter in the book is chapter 3, "Toward a Mother-Love Worthy of the Name: The Language of Abjection in Arrowroot, Nakagami, and Irigaray." Using Luce Irigaray's observations on the mother's body, Long compares Tanizaki's position toward the maternal realm with the attitude of the much younger Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). Long argues against Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection because it debases the mother, thus perpetuating the process by which "mother" is erased from the symbolic order. Following Irigaray, Long proposes an alternate role of mother as the element that breaks into the semiotic order through "a relational ethics of skins, membranes, petals, leaves, and finally mucous" (p. 70). In a reading of Tanizaki's novella Yoshinokuzu (Arrowroot, 1931), Long locates "Tanizaki's determination to write a different relation to maternal origin" (p. 83). Here, she productively uses Japanese literature to shift our understanding of psychoanalytic concepts. And herein lies the real strength of the book: instead of moving from West to East in terms of epistemic paradigms, Long makes a move in the opposite direction. Through Tanizaki's reinstatement of the mother, Long also reconsiders an important feminist thinker whose work has at times been criticized for being essentialist and utopian. Equally instructive is Long's explanation for a truism about Nakagami's work: despite Nakagami's consciousness of the brutal oppression of burakumin—the "polluted" and thus feared class of outcasts—by majority Japanese, his texts are dotted with scenes of the violent subjugation of women. Although Nakagami recognizes the importance of the mother in his...

La pensée et le langage par le corps dans la schizophrénie

Connections between body and psyche are regularly studied in the field of psychosis. One of the reasons of that recurrence is the fact that schizophrenic psychosis deconstructs the discursive system and exposes its bodily roots. In the first part of this paper, we remind several authors (Dolto, Pankow, Aulagnier, Golse, Delion, Piaget, Stern i.e.), whose works are showing how the mind develops on the basis of sense – and bodily experiences. In the second part, we examine the specificity of the schizophrenia as regression to the autoerotism and we mention Freud's idea of the “organ's language”. The organ's language represents the use of bodily symbols into the discourse; those symbols have to be interpreted like dreams. Finally, two clinical examples illustrate those elements. We examine the idea that, even if the nosographic category “schizophrenia” has not necessarily to be defended, there is perhaps a common clinical feature defined by the place of the body in the discourse.

From Freud’s dream‐work to Bion’s work of dreaming: The changing conception of dreaming in psychoanalytic theory

Bion moved psychoanalytic theory from Freud's theory of dream‐work to a concept of dreaming in which dreaming is the central aspect of all emotional functioning. In this paper, I first review historical, theoretical, and clinical aspects of dreaming as seen by Freud and Bion. I then propose two interconnected ideas that I believe reflect Bion’s split from Freud regarding the understanding of dreaming. Bion believed that all dreams are psychological works in progress and at one point suggested that all dreams contain elements that are akin to visual hallucinations. I explore and elaborate Bion’s ideas that all dreams contain aspects of emotional experience that are too disturbing to be dreamt, and that, in analysis, the patient brings a dream with the hope of receiving the analyst’s help in completing the unconscious work that was entirely or partially too disturbing for the patient to dream on his own. Freud views dreams as mental phenomena with which to understand how the mind functions, but believes that dreams are solely the ‘guardians of sleep,’ and not, in themselves, vehicles for unconscious psychological work and growth until they are interpreted by the analyst. Bion extends Freud's ideas, but also departs from Freud and re‐conceives of dreaming as synonymous with unconscious emotional thinking – a process that continues both while we are awake and while we are asleep. From another somewhat puzzling perspective, he views dreams solely as manifestations of what the dreamer is unable to think.

Comparing Causality in Freudian Reasoning and Critical Realism

This article initially discusses reasons why Freud researchers turn to critical realism since this is what led me to compare causality in the two traditions in the first place. Three arguments on causality follow. First, it is argued that Freud's analyses of unconscious processes merit closer attention by critical realists, focusing on the relation between causal unconscious processes and rationality, and causal unconscious processes and social change. It may be objected that this does not concern the discussion of causality proper, to which I would reply that what we consider to be causally efficacious ultimately is relevant to our conception of causality. The second argument, which is the centrepiece, outlines Freud's conception of causality, his idea of overdetermination (complication of causes) and his treatment of motives and reasons as causes. His notions of causality are compared to those of critical realism. Freud's idea of retroactive causality is discussed in relation to delayed causality in critical realism and the idea of disembedded space-time components. Finally, Freud's concept of determinism and the related concepts of repetition and chance are discussed and compared to ubiquity determinism in critical realism and the distinctions between causal and non-causal correlations and necessary and accidental sequences of events. While the first argument concerns presuppositions for the discussion of causality in psychoanalysis and its relevance for critical realism, the third concerns implications and/or applications of the two views on causality. It is my contention that the second argument needs to be placed in context of the other two in order for the two conceptions of causality to be understood adequately and most revealingly compared.

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Guntrip's Concept of the Regressed Ego

This paper explores what is perhaps the most important contribution of Harry Guntrip to psychoanalysis: namely his concept of the "regressed ego." In the course of his psychoanalytic work, he found certain concepts to be problematic. Therefore, while he valued some of Freud's ideas, he challenged his emphasis upon the importance of the instincts. Guntrip then drew extensively on the more object relational approach of Fairbairn and Winnicott. Nevertheless, although Guntrip believed that all these figures described important dimensions of psychological experience, he felt that they failed to acknowledge that layer which he called the "regressed ego." In his analysis of the "regressed ego," Guntrip made a valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory and practice. However, because he thought that with this idea he had discovered the underlying cause of most psychological disturbances, he engaged in a form of reductionism and therefore undermined the value of his observations about this layer of psychological experience.

Dépressions sévères : psychanalyse

The indication for psychoanalysis in severe depression is not clear. And yet, demands for this type of intervention are increasing, despite the absence of any form of consensus on the subject. Freud considered depression as a failure of analytical efforts and, based on this observation, revised his theory, in particular to include the notions of narcissism and the death drive. Many analysts have been reluctant to follow his teachings on this last point and provide depressed patients with analytical-type therapies aimed at restoring narcissism. Melanie Klein pushed Freud's ideas about depression even further and brought such therapies back to the heart of analytical practice. Jacques Lacan took the debate to another level by proposing an overhaul of the principles on which analysis has been based. Today, while following certain precautionary rules, true psychoanalyses can be proposed to patients with severe depression, whether of the bipolar, recurring or even neurotic type that can reach this level of severity.

Preface

Preface Liz Constable and Naomi Janowitz Years after the death of his beloved daughter Sophie, Freud showed Hilda Doolittle a charm that he wore on his watchband, stating as he pointed to it, "She is here" (Doolittle 1956, 77). It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic example of a lost object that is not lost. In Freud's poignant gesture, the deceased person, now transformed, has become part of the mourner's life. The charm (object permanence) is juxtaposed with the timepiece (the passing of time). As the essays in this special issue of American Imago argue, Freud's gesture is emblematic of the interrelatedness of psychic and social responses to loss. Although Freud initially posited an apparently firm distinction between mourning and melancholia, this premise is called into question not only by his own later work, and that of other psychoanalysts, but especially by contemporary approaches to the workings of remembering and forgetting. Freud could baldly ask Marie Bonaparte, "Why should a thing that emanates from man endure on that account, when everything in the universe must perish?" (qtd. in von Unwerth 2005, 177). This might seem an odd question coming from the man who worked while seated at his desk surrounded by his collection of antiquities, lost objects that had been recovered from the ground. Yet Freud insists to Bonaparte that it would be incorrect to exempt humans from being part of the natural world and its unending change. In the natural world, he points out, birth and death are facts of life, and this finitude endows the world with beauty: "A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely" (1916, 306). His example seems contrived, since no matter how much we may enjoy a flower, we know that in the next season new flowers will grow to replace the ones that die. We do not value them as individuals. But the force of Freud's claim is to make [End Page 269] mourning part of the natural cycle, the unfolding of beauty against the relentless passing of time. In both "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) and "On Transience," written for inclusion in a 1916 volume of patriotic and memorial essays relating to World War I,1 mourning is portrayed as a stage of normal human development, but also as a riddle. Much like the Greek myth of Tithonus, who was cursed by being granted eternal life but denied eternal youth, Freud reminds us that "limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment" (1916, 305). An end to mourning is predicated by Freud's model of the mind. Each human psyche begins in a state of narcissism, then looks out into the world, finding objects to love and attach to by means of that self-love. When confronted with loss, a person will withdraw his or her attachment to the object and then find a new object to cathect, as one "flower" replaces another. Once an individual's self-love has recovered from the blow, it will eventually reach out again to the outside world. In his initial formulations, Freud optimistically presents mourning as a "temporary disruption" that will be overcome. Reality forces the mourner to relinquish the object, and life then goes on simply by virtue of the passing of time. Freud even claims that it is possible not only to rebuild affection for what is precious but also to put it "perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before" (1916, 307). However, this course of development is not followed by everyone. Some individuals experience loss in a way that totally absorbs them and they fall prey to melancholia. This state is marked by "a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings" (1917, 244). This remains today a vivid description of the enigma embedded in Freud's idea of "the shadow of the object" falling on the ego. At one level, Freud suggests that in melancholia precious...

O ingresso da psicanálise no sistema de saúde pública na Argentina

After 1955, there was in Argentina a social and cultural renewal, in which psychoanalysis ceased to be a private practice, limited to the wealthy residents of Buenos Aires. Freudian ideas arrived to new institutional settings, where they suffered several transformations allowing them to enlarge its public. For example, the use that was made, in certain public institutions, of some techniques based on psychoanalysis, such as group psychotherapy, involved a remarkable multiplication of the number of patients that were treated. At the same time, this practice stemming from psychoanalysis was no longer an exclusive right of the members of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, for it could be carried out by physicians and psychologists beyond its ranks. Thus, an alternative space for analytic training and treatment was created, and the official association begun to lose its monopole over the legitimate uses of psychoanalysis. In this paper we focus in the case of the Psychopathology Service of Lanus Hospital, directed by Mauricio Goldenberg Between 1956 and 1972. It is a good example of this process of expansion and transformation of a plebeian psychoanalysis. The methodology that has been used is a classical one in the field of history, which is based on the analysis of texts and documents referring to the period of study.

‘IN PURSUIT OF THE NAZI MIND?’ THE DEPLOYMENT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE ALLIED STRUGGLE AGAINST GERMANY

This paper discusses how psychoanalytic ideas were brought to bear in the Allied struggle against the Third Reich and explores some of the claims that were made about this endeavour. It shows how a variety of studies of Fascist psychopathology, centered on the concept of superego, were mobilized in military intelligence, postwar planning and policy recommendations for "denazification." Freud's ideas were sometimes championed by particular army doctors and government planners; at other times they were combined with, or displaced by, competing, psychiatric and psychological forms of treatment and diverse studies of the Fascist "personality." This is illustrated through a discussion of the treatment and interpretation of the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, after his arrival in Britain in 1941.

A Prescription for Training

After showing how Freud's and Sullivan's ideas about psychoanalytic training contain a neglected Utopian dimension, the author introduces readers to the crucial role that a good knowledge of the history of psychoanalysis and of its linguistic, cultural, and social roots should play in the training of candidates. To Sullivan's and Mitchell's legacies belong also the promotion of group work among candidates and the realization of a real international dialogue.

Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (review)

Reviewed by: Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis Elizabeth Bromley George Makari . Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008. viii + 613 pp. Ill. $32.50 (978-0-06-134661-3). It seems true, as the book jacket claims, that Revolution in Mind is the first book "ever to fully account for the making of psychoanalysis." George Makari's impressive new book vibrantly renders the intellectual environment of late-nineteenth-century Europe, exhaustively traces psychoanalysis's development through World War II, and generously enlivens an enormous cast of thinkers who fundamentally shaped the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Makari's history includes the warts of Freud's science: the politicking, jockeying, and hand waving that plagued the effort are recounted in rich detail. Yet, through comprehensive historical detective work, Makari demonstrates why psychoanalysis was an astounding advance and an unparalleled watershed in the science of the mind and brain. This is neither a biography of Freud nor a good introduction to psychoanalytic thought, since Makari only indirectly explains Freud's ideas by detailing their development. Instead, Revolution in Mind is a history of a scientific discovery. The development of psychoanalysis as a science is finally and fully recounted: a brilliant synthesis of previously incommensurate ideas; the development of initial hypotheses and their dialectical refinement; theoretical advances in fits and starts; and an increasingly persuasive accumulation of evidence. The social portion of science is also detailed: the attacks from the mainstream aging lions; the backdoor politics enacted to maintain cohesiveness among colleagues; the uneven link between theory and practice; and the rising tide that lifted all boats. Makari demonstrates that, by prioritizing hypothesis testing and standards for data collection, Freud created an avalanche of investigation in psychological science. He deftly describes how Carl Jung, Eugen Bleuler, and other colleagues in Zurich devised experimental techniques with which to test tenets of Freud's model of the mind. Experimentation in the clinic also led to theoretical developments. Freud initially used dreams as the primary source of data about the unconscious, but dream interpretation proved a haphazard data collection tool. It took decades for psychoanalysts to recognize that the relationship between analyst and analysand could be a reliable representation of unconscious processes. Makari says, "Freud had pushed aside the complex hermeneutics of dream interpretation and replaced it with the analysis of transference. From the evidentiary point of view, this move was a winner, and Freud knew it" (p. 332). [End Page 214] Revolution in Mind is also a useful corrective, because it confronts certain totalizing myths about Freud. Freud was not an intellectual autocrat. Freud did struggle to maintain some theoretical unity among colleagues of immense diversity, and at times he squelched debate. His ideas were not inherently misogynistic. Instead, they were interpreted by some as blatantly revolutionary and libertine and by others as progressive and friendly to women. Overall, the critiques of psychoanalysis do not appear to have changed much in a century. Auguste Comte's curse haunted early analysts: psychological knowledge "could never be objective," Comte claimed, because a mind looking at itself would surely produce "as many theories as there are observers" (p. 11). Lacking rigorous laboratory techniques for gathering data, psychoanalysts argued over fundamental truths. One analyst's conclusions could easily be impugned as only "marked by the author's neurosis" (p. 170). Freud recognized that theoretical innovation emerged from introspection (e.g., following his father's death, during his own self-analysis) as often as it did from experimentation. And, as early psychoanalysts gleefully appropriated Freud's ideas to issue scathing cultural critiques, psychoanalysis as a social theory conflicted with psychoanalysis as a clinically relevant theory of the mind. For these reasons and others, psychoanalysts had difficulty maintaining a position in academic medical circles. Makari accomplishes a remarkable feat: he thoroughly explores the nuances of progress and retrenchment in this intellectual and scientific movement. His history does not shy away from the complexity of its subject. Revolution in Mind fills a significant gap, and it is a must read for scholars interested in the history of ideas about the mind or brain. [End Page 215] Elizabeth Bromley University of California, Los Angeles Copyright © 2009...

Generalized memory associativity in a network model for the neuroses

We review concepts introduced in earlier work, where a neural network mechanism describes some mental processes in neurotic pathology and psychoanalytic working-through, as associative memory functioning, according to the findings of Freud. We developed a complex network model, where modules corresponding to sensorial and symbolic memories interact, representing unconscious and conscious mental processes. The model illustrates Freud's idea that consciousness is related to symbolic and linguistic memory activity in the brain. We have introduced a generalization of the Boltzmann machine to model memory associativity. Model behavior is illustrated with simulations and some of its properties are analyzed with methods from statistical mechanics.

Engendering a Therapeutic Ethos: Modernity, Masculinity & Nervousness

AbstractThis article considers discourses of “nervousness” as an important historical dimension of the “therapeutic turn”. By tracing an emerging therapeutic sensibility through Australian medical literature and the popular print media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it provides an Antipodean perspective on the discursive and cultural terrain receptive to Freudian ideas and psychology, which were central to the ascendancy of a psychotherapeutic ethos. Through a particular focus on concerns about “nervous men”, the article explores how perceived problems of “nervousness” destabilized masculine ideals and helped engender a greater concern with personal distress, factors significant for the florescence of therapeutic culture.