Future Of Psychoanalysis Research Articles

Link and "Ren Lun", transitional and "Zhong Yong": a discussion of "Fairbairn, Pichón Rivière, and the future of psychoanalysis in China" by David E. Scharff

Professor David Scharff's lecture, "Fairbairn, Pichón Rivière, and the future of psychoanalysis in China" (2021) provoked me to think about the similarities between some of the theories of psychoanalysis and Confucianism, and on the basis of this similarity and connection, then to explain and apply this to a case study, and finally to point out a possible major direction for the future of psychoanalysis in China. It is by linking psychoanalysis with Confucianism, in a "transitional" way similar to the Confucian "Zhong Yong" in psychoanalytic therapy, that the relationship between the patient and the family and society is put back in a "good enough" link.

Looking back into the future of psychoanalysis: A second chance

AbstractDuring the twentieth century took place a “battle of paradigms” involving all disciplines that inform Psychiatry and Psychology. Basically, the dispute was about the respective contribution of science and hermeneutics in disciplinary paradigms. Psychoanalysis has not been absent from this battle; it is still debated whether psychoanalysis should be considered a scientific discipline or a hermeneutic discipline. In this paper, the author reviews his 40‐year career as a university professor of psychiatry and as a psychoanalyst, during which he has been a committed observer and active participant of psychoanalytic and psychiatric disputes. He reflects on how he lived this gap in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, and how he sees the future of Psychoanalysis under the light of new emerging epistemological frameworks.

The monsters within and the monsters without: Gender dissidents and the future of psychoanalysis

This paper is a response to writer, philosopher, and trans activist Paul Preciado’s 2019 presentation to 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. There, Preciado wittily alluded to Kafka’s 1917 short story, “Report to an Academy.” In the story, an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human, presents to an academy the story of how he achieved his transformation into an acceptable, educated European (but he is ready to pull his pants down as needed to show a bullet wound commemorating his capture). Thus, Preciado exhibited himself as a transsexual specimen like Kafka’s ape, who ironically claimed that he was as “human” as anyone in the audience. To push the metaphor further, I will invoke Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis and argue that psychoanalysis needs to undergo a mutation whose first sign might well be a sex change.

Consent for publication and the future of psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT The future development of psychoanalysis relies on our ongoing ability to make readily available our most recent clinical discussions and related theoretical developments. However, to publish ethically, we must also be aware of the ‘unboundaried’ nature of the current digital world, and the implication that what we write will be widely accessible, including being accessible to those patients we are writing about. The upshot of this is the need to seek informed and signed consent from those patients we write about and offer to provide them with a draft of what we write. This contribution considers the difficulties in seeking informed consent, and offers some suggestions for dealing with these difficulties.

Response to Otto Kernberg

ABSTRACT It gives me great pleasure to respond to Otto Kernberg’s commentary on my “New Project for a Scientific Psychology” (2020). It is gratifying to receive praise from a psychoanalyst of his stature. Many other leading colleagues are still ideologically opposed to neuropsychoanalysis, which is nothing short of tragic for the future of psychoanalysis. Hopefully this commentary will persuade some of them to rethink their positions. In my response, however, I will focus on the few areas of disagreement between Kernberg and me.

The structure of neuropsychoanalytic explanations

ABSTRACT The “mechanism approach” to scientific explanation is to explain a phenomenon by showing how it is generated through the interactions among its constituents; that is, the explanation elucidates the internal causal structures of what is to be explained. The paper argues that the mechanism approach to explanation may function as a framework for constructing neuropsychoanalytic explanations. One important virtue of the mechanism approach is that it helps us see how different levels, such as the neuroscientific and psychoanalytic levels, are integrated with each other. It is argued that the mechanism approach does not entail reductionism or do away with meaning and understanding. Based on the preceding discussion, the paper touches briefly upon some challenges facing neuropsychoanalysis, such as its supposed clinical irrelevance, the relation between neuropsychoanalysis and psychology, and the future of psychoanalysis in view of the continuously growing knowledge about mind–brain processes.

A new paradigm for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

This article seeks to propose a reflection on the immediate future of psychoanalysis. Winnicott's Third Way, in England, and Lebovici, in France, sought to reform psychoanalysis by focusing on empathic observation and enactment, but reconciling it with the mythical paradigm of the Freudian-phantasmatic model, which created an impasse. In order to resume its development, psychoanalysis needs to carry out a scientific revolution proposed by, among others, Stern and the Boston group in the United States with the theory of inter-subjectivity, and by Coimbra de Matos, in Portugal, with the theory of the New Relation. Continuing along this path, we propose that intimate human relations, and their transformation, constitute the new paradigm of current psychoanalysis. To access this new object, psychoanalysis preferably uses the methodology of inter-intentional observation and intervention. Thus from the quality of the "foreintentional" OU "forward-intentional" attunement, from the analytic pair, there are often spontaneous complementary intuitions, empathic enactments and future-oriented actions that result in new forms of intimate relationship in daily life, new social relations in the world and new meanings for life. This is a proposal that integrates the discoveries of neuroscience and psycho-sociology in psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis in the other sciences.

Don’t Be Put Off by My Name

ABSTRACT This essay seeks to remind the reader that psychoanalysis is inextricably linked to the culture that produces it. Psychoanalysis has been Eurocentric and heteronormative because such was the culture of those conducting psychoanalysis. By offering personal history as well as linking such history to analytic ideas, it is my goal to offer an alternative future of psychoanalysis: a psychoanalysis that can broaden its lens to make space for all human conditions, rather than one that seeks to distill all human conditions into its narrow and rigid boundaries.

The future of psychoanalysis: Preserving Jeremy Safran’s integrative vision.

The future of psychoanalysis: Preserving Jeremy Safran’s integrative vision.

The Future of Psychoanalysis: The Debate About the Training Analyst System, edited by Peter Zagermann, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 378 pp.

The Future of Psychoanalysis: The Debate About the Training Analyst System, edited by Peter Zagermann, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 378 pp.

Psychoanalytical Theory in Postcolonial Discourse

This article deals with some earlier applications of psychology for the analysis of the colonial condition offered by three thinkers—Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon and recent applications of Freudian psychoanalytical theory in the poststructuralist approach of Homi K. Bhaba. An attempt is made to compare their standpoints and reflect more broadly on what their implications mean for the future of psychoanalysis’ place in postcolonial critique. Also to answer a vital question in the theoretical project of postcolonial studies: Is psychoanalysis a universally applicable theory for psychic disruption in the colonial context? What are differences in the application of psychological theory for studies of colonial discourse? The conclusion of the paper is: Despite the problematic inheritance of racializing thinking psychoanalysis has proved to be an important and reoccurring methodology in colonial critique and postcolonial theory. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognize that psychoanalysis itself is a colonial discipline and must become an object of colonial discourse analysis.

Psychoanalysis and The Demarcation Criterion: Epistemological Criticism Revisited and New Paradigm

The debate on the demarcation criterion that distinguishes science from non-science, fundamental to epistemology from the 1950s to the 1980s, has progressively lost its appeal. Philosophers of science have perhaps considered it less interesting to identify a single criterion since the emergence of complexity theories. In this article, we will not try to choose among different demarcation criteria. Instead, we will show that evaluating the epistemological implications of these various criteria as a whole has some interesting consequences for the present status and future of psychoanalysis and dynamic psychology.

What Is the Future of Psychoanalysis in the Academy?

What Is the Future of Psychoanalysis in the Academy?

Like a phoenix from the ashes – or “sack cloth and ashes”?: The reconstitution of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany since 1945 and its consequences

Here, I attempt to formulate some thoughts about the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis and its institutions in Germany. To do this, I have employed my varied experience as a supervisor and consultant to many such psychoanalytic institutes over the past several years. Themes discussed include the history of psychoanalysis in postwar Germany, the organizational structure of German psychoanalytic institutes, and their cultures in regard to group and organizational dynamics, and political and economic aspects. Finally, I add brief thoughts about the future, taking into account recent developments relating to planned changes in laws governing psychotherapy in Germany. Further, I attempt to analyze and comment on: coming to terms with the past; how to begin after the “Zero Hour”; the form of organization of psychoanalytic institutes in Germany; missing patients and missing candidates; constructive debate and hurting people’s feelings; the lack of “detoxification” and “recycling” of the poisonous remains of psychoanalytic processes; and the future of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany. I end with an example of a typical primary task used in conducting large groups in the institutes in which I worked, and include an anonymized table listing individual interventions, their duration, and frequency. These should provide an idea of my way of working, and an overview of the dimensions of the task.

Book Review: Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language, and the Future of Psychoanalysis

Book Review: Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language, and the Future of Psychoanalysis

Muriel’s Claims on Psychoanalysis (and Me)

ABSTRACTThis essay memorializes Muriel Dimen and her creative and generative claims on the future of psychoanalysis. The essay goes over her early ideas about gender and sexuality as well as her keen feminist analyses of the everyday that continue to fuel my own standards as a feminist psychoanalytic theorist.

Review of Metaphor and fields: Common ground, common language, and the future of psychoanalysis.

Review of Metaphor and fields: Common ground, common language, and the future of psychoanalysis.

Introduction

The half‐day conference in 2014 at which the following papers were presented was held as part of the Interdisciplinary Programme of the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, to mark the 70th anniversary of the series of 10 scientific meetings known as the Controversial Discussions held in the British Psychoanalytical Society between 1942 and 1944 (King and Steiner, 1991). The conference and its papers now published here aimed to develop further the detailed histories made available by King and Steiner together with their relevance for contemporary clinicians. The extraordinary resource provided by the gathering of the documents relating not only to scientific controversies, but to the training of candidates, institutional decision making, and the nexus of power relations in psychoanalytic institutes is a profound scholarly contribution for all concerned with the future of psychoanalysis and the place of its past in that future.

Resistances and Progress in Developing a Research Framework in Psychoanalytic Institutes

This article explores the resistances against a major research function as part of psychoanalytic education within contemporary psychoanalytic institutes. It stresses the essential function of research development to assure the future of psychoanalysis as a science and a profession, and the self-destructive consequences of the absence of a research framework as part of the psychoanalytic enterprise. This article explores the reason for the state of affairs, and suggests fundamental changes in psychoanalytic education as an essential part of the training of psychoanalysts and the mission of psychoanalytic institutions.

Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language, and the Future of Psychoanalysis

This edited volume is aimed at psychoanalysts belonging to different schools of thought. What all these analysts must have in common however is an interest in thinking through the importance of theories of metaphor and theories of fields as applicable in the context of psychoanalysis. It would not be a stretch to say that the basic concepts of ‘metaphor and fields’ are periodically reinvented by psychoanalysts of various persuasions who are not acquainted with each other’s work since they do not read or review the literature that is produce outside the school to which they belong.