Psychoanalytic Knowledge Research Articles

A Psychoanalytic Moveable Feast

The author describes his development as a psychoanalyst. He describes the weaving of his formative experiences into a source of motivation in the pursuit of psychoanalysis as a vocation. He describes the gradual development of the ability to utilize the synergism of the evolution of his self-analysis, clinical experience, and psychoanalytic knowledge in the evolution of his work as a psychoanalyst.

Prefatory Note to “Origin and Nature of the Great Illusion”

Normally, in seeking out the antecedents of psychoanalysis, we stick to the familiar byways of European thought, accepting that the findings of psychoanalysis can be situated there according to forms of thought projected by Western science and philosophy. It comes as a surprise, reading Luther Askeland’s translation of and introduction to a chapter written by Shankara Acharya (ca. 789–820A.D.), to discover that an elemental concept of psychoanalysis—transference—was formulated by this Hindu philosopher of the early ninth century. Whether the key word, in Sanskrit adhyasa, is translated as “transference” or as “superimposition,” its meaning as “the perception in one thing of some other thing,” or the illusory “projection” of self and non-self onto each other, sounds congenial to Freudian and post-Freudian thought. It is of no less interest that Luther Askeland, a student of Indian philosophy and meditation making no claim to more knowledge of psychoanalysis than that of an educated layman, has evoked in his reading of Shankara concepts that have become—via quite different routes—intrinsic to contemporary psychoanalytic theory. I refer especially to the metaphoric nature of what he calls “verbal perception” and to binary opposition within it. That is, Shankara seems to have anticipated the recognition that linguistic structure goes far to determine our grasp of reality. To be sure, Western philosophy, especially since Kant, covers much of this ground, as students of psychoanalysis have acknowledged: that we do not know the “thing in itself,” and that our universe, whatever it may be in its reality, has to be con-

Controversies and Conflicts in the Institution of "Open" Psychoanalysis: Cases from the History of the Therapeia Foundation

The institution of psychoanalysis has included controversies, dissensions and expulsions at both the theoretical-methodological and personal-organizational levels. There have also been several intra- and intergroup conflicts in the history of psychoanalysis, and in constructing and patterning the future of psychoanalytic knowledge. In the context of Finnish psychoanalysis, the Therapeia Foundation (founded in 1958) met from the start with resistance from official psychiatry and also from the IPA. For example, in the mid-1960s, D. W. Winnicott, as the President of the IPA, supported the orthodox Finnish psychoanalytic study group (later to become the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society), and pronounced that the Therapeia group was too loose and was not strictly able to use the IPA-recognized designation "psychoanalytic." The Therapeia Foundation and its Training Seminar combined classical psychoanalysis and its new versions with existentialphenomenological views, anthropological medicine, research on "social pathology" and even modern theological research. On the basis of their Swiss analytic training, three Finnish psychiatrists, Martti Siirala, Kauko Kaila and Allan Johansson, organized Therapeian training to incorporate sciences and arts, and skills involving the therapeutic "carrying" of burdens. The multifacted nature of open psychoanalysis was seen to find its proper organizational expression when the Training Seminar of the Therapeia Foundation became, in 1974, a Member of the IFPS.

Atendimento psicanalítico a crianças e adolescentes vítimas de abuso sexual

Este trabalho é fruto de uma pesquisa bibliográfica e de campo realizada na Clínica psicanalítica da Violência acerca do abuso sexual na infância e na adolescência. A Clínica é uma instituição de referência no tratamento de vítimas de violência, que tem como proposta utilizar-se do saber psicanalítico para promover a saúde psíquica de sujeitos que precocemente tiveram que lidar com a dor de terem sido violentados em seus corpos e em suas emoções.O relato desta experiência objetiva a maior compreensão do tema para posterior elaboração de meios para prevenir o abuso sexual, colaborando na construção de uma sociedade mais ética.

A Moving Way to Learn About Psychoanalysis

A Moving Way to Learn About Psychoanalysis

On Reason, Discourse, and Fantasy

Reasons (to be thankful) It hardly needs saying: psychoanalysis radicalizes knowledge by asserting its transformative nature. From the moment of the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, a book of "science" based on Freud's revelation of his own unconscious world, a new mode of doing "human science" enters into view. It is marked by anxiety, as attested to by the number of Freud's dream interpretations that center on self-justification of the "You see, I have come to something" variety (1900, 216). Indeed, the whole book can be read as built on the tension between the shame of self-exposure (will readers laugh?) and Freud's wish to be shown, like the biblical Joseph with whom he identifies, to be the true master, the one who knows. So from the inauguration of this method, this theory, there is a vivid construction of a way of knowing that leaves everything touched, changes it all: to accept the assertions of The Interpretation of Dreams is not just to acknowledge a good idea, but to vindicate Freud, make his justificatory dreams unnecessary, and change the nature of our own dreams for all time. Of course, the query over the notion of "science" has haunted psychoanalysis from the word go, despite Freud's own unequivocal view that "Psychoanalysis . . . is a part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung" (1933, 181). One unusual feature of psychoanalysis is that knowledge is given the status both of scientific advancement--pursuing understanding of the general functioning of human subjects, of the unconscious, of psychopathology and so on--and also as the route to personal change. A particular kind of psychoanalytic knowledge--"insight"--is even made the central mechanism through which the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis [End Page 627] has its effect. Moreover, the impact of psychoanalytic knowledge is not some add-on application of the theory, equivalent to other attempts to derive scientific "laws" through one mode of investigation and then to apply them in a set of more specific spheres. For psychoanalysis, the transformative capacity of psychoanalytic knowledge is held to be integral to the theory itself. Studying a mental phenomenon "from the outside" will not produce the kind of knowledge that counts as genuinely psychoanalytic, just as reading about psychoanalysis in books is held never to produce a true understanding of it. For instance, take the critique of developmental psychology, even of the kind influenced by psychoanalysis, that is advanced by those (especially adherents of the British Kleinian position) who argue that all attempts at objectivity miss the point of the analytic approach. Writing about Daniel Stern's (1985) work, for example, Roszika Parker notes: Many writers have commented that this is a world of interpersonal rather than intrapsychic events. Stern's baby does not develop images of the mother mediated by its unconscious phantasy, or archetypal imagery. It seems that Stern's view is that as unconscious conflicts cannot be observed in babies, they cannot be taken into account. (1995, 192) The problem here, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is almost exactly the opposite of that which would be the concern of empirical psychology. Because Stern relies on observation of behavior without mediating it through the observer's own subjectivity (the area of supposed "error" that is most stringently "controlled" in psychological investigations), he cannot produce an account of the infant's emerging selfhood from the point of view of its psychodynamic--that is, at root, its unconscious--determinants. This is because, Kleinians suggest, the only reliable route into the unconscious of another is through the unconscious of the self, through "unconscious to unconscious communication" (195). Hence the requirement of psychoanalytic infant observation that the observer record not just the child's behavior, but the feelings evoked in the [End Page 628] observer as well. This is not, as might be the case from an empirical position, in order to take into account the "distorting" impact of these feelings on the observer's objectivity; rather, it is because the observer's...

The Experience of Abandonment and Adoption, as a Child and as a Parent, in a Psychological Motivational Perspective

The adopted child has experiences of loss, changes of goals for attachment, and of being biologically separate in the family, which are similar to the experiences of adoptive parents who are infertile. In this paper, the correspondence of experiences between the adopted child and the infertile adoptive parents will be examined with the motivational system theory constructed by Joseph Lichtenberg. This theory is based on psychoanalytical knowledge as well as on infant research. It comprises five motivational systems, all existing from the beginning of life, which promote the fulfilment and regulation of: 1. the need for psychic regulation of physiological requirements, 2. the need for attachment and later affiliation, 3. the need for exploration and assertion, 4. the need to react aversively through antagonism or withdrawal (or both) and 5. the need for sensual enjoyment and (later) sexual excitement. In regard to these basic needs, infertile parents have certain experiences that correspond to and correlate with those of the abandoned child. This implies a risk for the development of the adoptive family as well as a possibility for growth. The author suggests potential healing factors that may exist within an infertile couple regarding meeting and understanding an abandoned child.

The training analysis at a time when theory is in short supply

The author discusses the risks confronting the training analysis when original theoretical production is lacking. In his view, little progress has been made since Freud's time in establishing a general science of the psyche based on Freud's interpretive method. What has been transmitted is stated to be not Freud's method of discovery but the knowledge thereby produced, which has been handed down in the form of doctrines, defined as theory presented as psychic fact. Hence analyses tend to apply theories rather than to discover unconsciouses. Some of today's most common interpretational aberrations are described, and the author shows the powerful suggestive effect on patients of using doctrines as metaphors of psychic life. Where such a training analysis is reinforced by a like form of theoretical teaching and supervision, candidates may uncritically assimilate the relevant theory. The author uses his concept of the reality‐providing circuit to show how belief in a doctrine imparted by the training analysis makes that doctrine appear as the ideological basis of psychoanalytic knowledge. He finally notes that, theories being essentially heuristic instruments and not bodies of acquired information, the consequence of the current dearth of theories, which have degenerated into doctrines, is that the training analysis itself has come to constitute the theory of training in many institutes.

THE TRAINING ANALYSIS AT A TIME WHEN THEORY IS IN SHORT SUPPLY

The author discusses the risks confronting the training analysis when original theoretical production is lacking. In his view, little progress has been made since Freud's time in establishing a general science of the psyche based on Freud's interpretive method. What has been transmitted is stated to be not Freud's method of discovery but the knowledge thereby produced, which has been handed down in the form of doctrines, defined as theory presented as psychic fact. Hence analyses tend to apply theories rather than to discover unconscious. Some of today's most common interpretational aberrations are described, and the author shows the powerful suggestive effect on patients of using doctrines as metaphors of psychic life. Where such a training analysis is reinforced by a like form of theoretical teaching and supervision, candidates may uncritically assimilate the relevant theory. The author uses his concept of the reality-providing circuit to show how belief in a doctrine imparted by the training analysis makes that doctrine appear as the ideological basis of psychoanalytic knowledge. He finally notes that, theories being essentially heuristic instruments and not bodies of acquired information, the consequence of the current dearth of theories, which have degenerated into doctrines, is that the training analysis itself has come to constitute the theory of training in many institutes.

The Experience of Abandonment and Adoption, as a Child and as a Parent, in a Psychological Motivational Perspective

The adopted child has experiences of loss, changes of goals for attachment, and of being biologically separate in the family, which are similar to the experiences of adoptive parents who are infertile. In this paper, the correspondence of experiences between the adopted child and the infertile adoptive parents will be examined with the motivational system theory constructed by Joseph Lichtenberg. This theory is based on psychoanalytical knowledge as well as on infant research. It comprises five motivational systems, all existing from the beginning of life, which promote the fulfilment and regulation of: 1. the need for psychic regulation of physiological requirements, 2. the need for attachment and later affiliation, 3. the need for exploration and assertion, 4. the need to react aversively through antagonism or withdrawal (or both) and 5. the need for sensual enjoyment and (later) sexual excitement. In regard to these basic needs, infertile parents have certain experiences that correspond to and correlate with those of the abandoned child. This implies a risk for the development of the adoptive family as well as a possibility for growth. The author suggests potential healing factors that may exist within an infertile couple regarding meeting and understanding an abandoned child.

Psicopatologia Fundamental: de una cierta transmision

La psicopatología fundamental, conformada a partir del trabajo universitario y teórico de Pierre Fédida, se constituye como punto de encuentro de diferentes disciplinas en relación al sufrimiento humano, y plantea interrogantes metodológicas, entre otras, cómo establecer un diálogo que articule distintos recortes teóricos, y de qué manera tratar las diferencias relativas. El tema de las diferencias está presente tanto por el lado de los métodos de investigación y de intercambio, como por el de la concepción de una estructura institucional que acoja esas diferencias. El psicoanálisis puede hacer contribuciones a estos temas, en la medida en que se ve confrontado a una doble alteridad: tópica – la relación conciencia/inconsciente – e intersubjetiva, ya que es condición del dispositivo analítico poder acoger la subjetividad del otro en tanto radicalmente otro. Hay una homología estructural entre los niveles intrapsíquico, intersubjetivo, interteórico e interdisciplinario en lo que hace a una epistemología de la alteridad. El saber en psicoanálisis escapa a toda tentativa de institucionalización pues es propio a la alteridad de su objeto resistir y dejar siempre un resto. De manera similar, la psicopatología pundamental tampoco se adecua a una institucionalización del saber. Es un espacio vacío – khôra – que acoge movimientos metafóricos inherentes a la producción de saber, y al no-saber que en forma complementaria lo acompaña. El “nombre del padre” opera así, no como fidelidad a una letra, sino como habilitación a la creación y soporte de lo figurable a venir, a partir del acto fundacional de khôra.

Freud and the institution of psychoanalytic knowledge

List of abbreviations Preface Introduction Part I. Recognizing Psychoanalysis: The Institutional Uses of Greek Tragedy: 1. Schoolboy psychology 2. Psychoanalysis as 'Necessity' 3. Lacanian psychoanalysis at Colonus Part II. The Psychoanalytic Domain: 4. Professionalization and Freud's cultural theory 5. Applied psychoanalysis Afterword Notes Bibliography Index.

On the Neurotic and More Primitive Aspects of Personality

The pathology that seemed to be predominant during the first decades of the century (until the Second World War) was considered by psychoanalysts primarily as neurotic, i.e., as symptom or character neuroses. The clinical material indeed favored the adherence of psychoanalysts of the time to the study of so called "high level" psychopathology arising from intrapsychic conflict, especially the structural conflicts of the oedipal phase of development. However, the "range of possible diagnoses was greatly limited by the contemporary state of psychoanalytic knowledge" (Gaddini 1984/1992,187). The shift of interest from neurosis to psychosis or near-psychotic (borderline or narcissistic) conditions, in spite of some brilliant publications (for example, Freud 1914, 1924, etc.) has not yet taken place. In recent decades psychoanalysts and mental health professionals have been increasingly confronted with a variety of severely regressed (prone to psychotic decompensation) patients whose core-psychopathology is indebted to earliest preoedipal (in classical terms) trauma. They reveal ego-weakness, poor identity integration, primitive defenses of splitting and projective identification, fragility of ego-boundaries and of reality testing. After an impressive outpouring of the literature over the last forty years (Klein 1946; Sullivan 1947; Fromm-Reichman 1952; Bion 1957/1988; Segal 1950/1988; Searls 1956; Rosenfeld 1947; Steiner 1987/1988; Little 1981/1986; McDougall 1991, etc.), primitive dimensions of experience have become commonplace. Some analysts not only treat severely disturbed patients, but find psychotic-like phenomena even in our "most solid citizens" (Milner 1987). In fact, we now know much more about the earliest traces of mental life, about the "primitive edge of human experiences" [End Page 43] (Ogden 1989)--up to the most sensory dominated, pre-structural and pre-symbolic (Gaddini 1984/1992) psychological organization, namely, the autistic-contiguous position (Ogden 1989) that lies even beyond the states "addressed by Klein's concept of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions" (Ogden 1989). In this position, the infant attempts to organize and structure different sensory impressions, particularly tactile sensations of the skin "that come to constitute bounded surfaces" (Ogden, 49). As Ogden suggests, these tactile impressions primarily at the skin surface constitute the earliest experience of the self and are forerunners of later internalized self- and object-representations. Failure to establish a secure, lasting sense of a bounded sensory contiguity leads in turn to pre-symbolic anxiety involving the terror of "impending disintegration of one's sensory surface or one's 'rhythm of safety' resulting in the feeling of leaking, dissolving, disappearing, or falling into shapeless unbounded space" (68). Whether psychopathology has changed or analysts have changed, the once ruling "pure" neurosis has been dethroned, though not banished outright from the pantheon of psychoanalytic diagnoses. Oedipus (or Guilty Man) has been replaced by Hamlet (or Tragic Man) as the prototype of our period (Green 1977; Kohut 1977). Psychoanalysts have gradually refined their diagnostic and technical capacity and turned to the "frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail though meanings still exist" (as Ogden 1989, cites T.S.Eliot). Now, in the psychoanalytic diagnostic lexicon, besides neurotic, the "magic words" are borderline, narcissistic, psychotic. As Nancy McWilliams (1994) wrote recently, "it is one of the ironies of contemporary psychoanalytic parlance that the term 'neurotic' is now reserved for people so emotionally healthy that they are considered rare and usually gratifying clients" (53). But in fact, many of the patients Freud diagnosed as having neuroses had underlying near-psychotic (or borderline) personality organization, and some had periods of psychotic decompensation (for example, hallucinations that clearly crossed the border of reality testing). The realization of this fact raises some questions: Should we reserve the term "neurotic" exclusively to denote a very high level of capacity to [End Page 44] function despite some emotional suffering which centers predominantly around oedipal problems? Should we apply the structural theory alone ("monocular vision") to understand neuroses and high-level character disturbances? Or may we adopt "binocular vision" and apply simultaneously (or successively) different models (structural, object relational, self psychological...

Only connect: Developmental issues from early to late life1

Summary This paper links aspects of early experience and developmental processes (especially the Oedipus Complex) to troubled states of mind, both in later life and, at length, in the mental predicament of the very elderly — especially in relation to confusion and dementia. The paper draws on psychoanalytic and observational literature, and also on infantile developmental research to trace the ways in which capacities more familiar in the care of infants and young children are especially relevant in extreme old age — eg an understanding of containment, reverie, projective identification, splitting and denial, etc. through a series of detailed observations from within a single family, the paper explores the ways in which psychoanalytic knowledge of early ‘childishness’ may contribute very immediately, even technically, both to an understanding of ‘second childishness’ (to draw on As You Like It) and to how to work therapeutically with these enfeebled states of mind. Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. —As You Like It, II, vii 163–166

What is psychoanalytic about the tavistock model of studying infants? does it contribute to psychoanalytic knowledge?

What is psychoanalytic about the tavistock model of studying infants? does it contribute to psychoanalytic knowledge?

Public Affects

The entwinement of affects and the public dimension seems an enigma. We cannot resolve this problem if we continue to refer to the Freudian analysis that deals with the classic dualisms opposing violence to order, love to death, and the body to social order. A feminist analysis, reworking psychoanalytical knowledge, offers another thesis. Taking the concept of `affects' – defined as one's corporeal drives in their sociocultural expression – a different analysis and new political practices emerge. This concerns recognizing a necessary tension between an irreducible singularity and the `being-together' dimension, which is beyond the classic dualism opposing the body to the Law.

Dying of Landscape: E.L. Grant Watson and the Australian Desert

The six, relatively neglected I Australian novels of Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, written between 1914 and 1935, present an intriguing and complex reworking of their author's engagement with the Western Australian desert. Equipped with a broad literary background, a close knowledge of psychoanalysis and Jungian ideas, a deep interest in comparative religion and the prior experience of travel in the Middle East, as well as a training in biology and anthropology, Watson would seem the archetypal Renaissance man, uniquely qualified to interpret his experiences within the European context of his time. Yet, unlike his two later autobiographical explorations of this period, But to What Purpose (1946) and Journey under the Southern Stars (1968), the novels proposed such radical views about Aboriginal culture and European settlement that, despite their anti-feminist stance, they could now pass as respectably postcolonial and as prefigurings of the late twentieth-century preoccupation with the spirit of place that in Australia is peculiarly associated with desert areas.

The Psychoanalytic Interview as Qualitative Research

The psychoanalytical interview is one innovative form of knowledge production that has remained outside the discussions of scientific method in psychology. Major parts of the knowledge presented in current textbooks of psychology stem from psychoanalytical interviews, a method that does not exist in textbooks of psychological methods. Some postulates and paradoxes about psychoanalytical knowledge production are posited and aspects of the psychoanalytical interview as a research method are outlined on the basis of Freud’s writings on therapy and technique. Drawing on postmodern conceptions of knowledge, the relational and constructive aspects of therapeutic knowledge production are emphasized. Characteristics of psychoanalytical knowledge production are then discussed, and it is concluded that therapeutic researchers may learn from current developments in social science interview research, and that social scientists may learn from the knowledge production in therapeutic interviews, a knowledge source that remains to be taken seriously by therapeutic researchers themselves.

The pre-oedipal father-son relationship in Korean myths and in the patient today.

The author uses the material of Korean myths and folktale and from a patient to understand the way in which the Oedipus complex is negotiated and resolved in Korean society. In Korean myth and folktale a benign and supportive pre-oedipal father-son relationship is more appreciated and encouraged than the competition and rivalry in the oedipal father-son relationship. Consequently, in Korean myth the boy can develop balanced masculinity through the father's encouragement and protection and set out on his own journey to be a man as strong as his father. Oedipus, in contrast, was abandoned by the parent, which led him to act out his unconscious desire to kill the father, ending with total destruction. The difficulties of applying western-based psychoanalytic theory to Korean culture are discussed. Although we are influenced by historical, social and cultural patterns of external reality, we are more influenced by our unconscious than we are aware of, which enables us to share current psychoanalytic knowledge to understand Korean myths and patients without much deviation.

Raça, psiquiatria e medicina-legal: notas sobre a “pré-história” da psicanálise no Brasil

Resumo Este trabalho investiga o modo como a psiquiatria e a medicina legal brasileira do início deste século se apropriaram da teoria psicanalítica, combinando-a a preceitos higiênicos e eugênicos, vinculando-a firmemente a um projeto educativo-civilizatório. Examinamos, para isto, texto de duas figuras representativas deste debate que se travava em torno de um projeto nacional no início deste século, quanto ao uso que se fazia da teoria psicanalítica: Afrânio Peixoto e Julio Pires Porto-Carrero.