Limits Of Psychoanalysis Research Articles

Глубины подсознания и религия

The article examines the genesis, essence and prospects of religion in the interpretation of the outstanding Swiss philosopher and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. The problem of the correlation of religion and myth, the possibility of religious texts to enrich psychoanalysis, the ability of psychoanalysis to influence religious thinking is investigated. It is shown that C.G. Jung refers religion to a purely psychological phenomenon and believes that religion originally arose as one of the principles of the organization of the psyche. Jung describes the "inner god" archetype as one of the key archetypes of the collective unconscious. C.G. Jung calls religious experience numinous (sacred), considering it the most valuable thing that can happen in a person's life. We are talking about a dynamic action or impact that is not conditioned by an act of will. On the contrary, it itself measures and controls the person, who is always more a victim of this influence than the creator. The individual experiences this influence not from an external being — God, as the church teaches, but from his own unconscious, if psychological conditions allow it. However, such an experience, the meaning of which is always in the restructuring of a conscious personality, is infinitely dangerous, since it often ends with mental disorders of religious origin that destroy the personality. Religion, in the literal sense of the word, is, according to Jung, a specific conscious work on mastering this experience. C.G. Jung's views on religion have received contradictory assessments. Many criticized him for his mysticism, because he was looking for a rational explanation of religion. Psychoanalysts were outraged that he was taking this research beyond the limits of psychoanalysis. The clergy were afraid that Jung was proclaiming a new religion and acting as its prophet himself.

Beyond psychoanalysis and group analysis. The urgent need for a new paradigm of the human being

Freud’s momentous discovery that the largest part of mental life, both individual and collective is unknown to us and out of our control, brought about a major revolution in epistemology and our conception of the human being, but such evolution was stalled by Freud’s adherence to several assumptions that were an essential part of his Weltanschauung or ‘Conception of the World’. These were the individualistic paradigm and the misguided attempt to turn the discipline he had created into a positivistic science, framed in the model of the natural sciences. Orthodox psychoanalysis has since focused on the intrapsychic, leaving out the interpersonal and social dimensions. Group analysis, as introduced by Foulkes has been a bold attempt to transcend the limitations of psychoanalysis and integrate the dimensions it has ignored or denied. Nonetheless, the development of Foulkes’ revolutionary contributions was encumbered by his adherence to Freudian theory, just like the latter was by his creator’s subservience to positivistic natural science. Psychoanalysis and group analysis are two aspects of the wider field of analysis, but they are still impeded by a series of assumptions held by both science and common sense. These are: i) materialistic metaphysics, ii) the Cartesian subject, iii) deterministic positivism, iv) neutral objectivism, and v) rejection of teleology. Hence, the need to go beyond psychoanalysis and group analysis and formulate a new paradigm of the human being. This is a work in progress, being tackled by many people from different fields of human knowledge and practice, such as physical science, biology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, group analysis, sociology, political science, philosophy, theology, hermeneutics, and the Humanities, among many others. It is an interdisciplinary enterprise, to which analysis may and should contribute, but only through an open dialogue with its peers in the field of human thought.

Beyond Psychoanalysis: Resistance and Reparative Reading in Alison Bechdel'sAre You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirAre You My Mother? A Comic Dramapromotes a form of reparation for its author and its readers, making a case for the much-maligned idea that literature serves therapeutic aims. The book not only models a reparative reading practice by using comics form to engage the insights and limits of psychoanalysis and modernist literature but also elicits a reparative reading experience for a community of readers forged in the discovery of a common emotional struggle. Bechdel's memoir represents an autobiographical narrator's loving yet ambivalent relationship with her mother in ways that invite readers to acknowledge a shared affective history of complex mother-daughter relationships that merits public examination, empathy, and social inclusion.

Disability and the American Counterculture

On 1 March 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress on his meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Yalta, from which he had just returned. The conference was, of course, a pivotal moment in the shaping of post-War Europe and did much to establish the tense East-West relations that endured for most of the following half century. While the Cold War was indubitably a key shaper of the domestic and international environs within which the counterculture emerged and-for a short time-thrived in the United States, Roosevelt's address was significant in another way, more directly pertinent to this special issue. Since his illness (he was diagnosed with polio in 1921) and, more so, since he decided to run for president, Roosevelt had been careful to downplay the full extent of his lower-body paralysis, avoiding being seen in public using his wheelchair and developing considerable upper-body strength to keep himself upright when delivering speeches. The address to Congress was different: the President began by stating,I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.While it would be far-fetched to suggest that Roosevelt's decision not only to sit, but also to explain why he was sitting, was the harbinger of a swift and painless revolution in the treatment and representation of disability in the United States, or to argue that it immediately tore down the barriers to full and equal participation in public life, it does serve as at the very least a symbolic start to a long, slow, and still ongoing process that has adopted a recognizably modern form since the end of the Second World War. Since then, the place of disabled people in national life has undergone many positive changes, both in terms of legislation and popular understanding; nevertheless, the Cold War culture of the 1950s also did much to codify certain forms of behaviour-most notably, homosexuality-as new kinds of freakery, replacing the popular fascination with the display of the physically othered freak that had been a central tenet of American popular culture from the 1890s to the 1930s.1There were few positive, central representations of physical (or mental) disability in the American popular culture of the post-War years, and key examples that did portray disability often focused on the return to normalcy of men injured in the line of duty. Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950), for example, was a critically acclaimed if commercially unsuccessful representation of a paraplegic war vet (Marlon Brando), coming to terms with his new situation. Brando would become an iconic figure for two generations of the counterculture and, while The Men was hardly central to this process, his depictions of angry, disturbed outsiders certainly helped to create an environment in which figures straddling the boundary between sane and insane could acquire a hip presence for would-be rebels. In contrast, Ironside (1967-75), launched, ironically enough, during the Summer of Love, cast the (non-disabled) Raymond Burr as former detective Robert T. Ironside, forcibly retired after being paralysed by a sniper, before returning to the force as a special consultant and triumphing in case after case. While Ironside was very much an establishment figure, the series was significant in being aired prime-time while having a disabled central character represented positively and repeatedly triumphing over normal adversaries, often characterized by their own deviant criminal behaviour. At the other extreme, movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) did little to challenge the notion that the mentally ill were a danger to everyday life, even if Hitchcock's vision also targeted the hypocrisies of that life and the limitations of psychoanalysis as a means to understanding the mind. …

Psychoanalysis and development: contributions, examples, limits

This article examines the contributions of psychoanalysis to international development, illustrating ways in which thinking and practice in this field are psychoanalytically structured. Drawing on the work of Lacan and Žižek, the article will emphasise three key points: (1) psychoanalysis can help uncover the unconscious of development – its gaps, dislocations, blind spots – thereby elucidating the latter’s contradictory and seemingly ‘irrational’ practices; (2) the important psychoanalytic notion of jouissance (enjoyment) can help explain why development discourse endures, that is, why it has such sustained appeal, and why we continue to invest in it despite its many problems; and (3) psychoanalysis can serve as an important tool for ideology critique, helping to expose the socioeconomic contradictions and antagonisms that development persistently disavows (eg inequality, domination, sweatshop labour). But while partial to Lacan and Žižek, the article will also reflect on the limits of psychoanalysis – the extent to which it is gendered and, given its Western origins, universalisable.

Obsessional Whiteness and the Unpaid Debt of Apartheid

AbstractThis paper considers post‐apartheid South African Whiteness from a psychoanalytic perspective. A point of focus is Samantha Vice's controversial and much debated recent article on the ethical quandaries of post‐apartheid White privilege, “How Do I Live in this Strange Place?”, which is read alongside J.M. Coetzee's essay, “The Mind of Apartheid”, written in the early 1990s on the brink of South Africa's transition. Coetzee used a Freudian framework of obsessional neurosis to highlight what he saw as the libidinal economy of apartheid, suggesting that apartheid policies were not only or even primarily aimed at consolidating White material privilege; they were, rather, in Coetzee's view, a set of measures designed to preserve the purity of the White social body from contamination. What the juxtaposition of Coetzee and Vice suggests is that, while the stain of South African Whiteness has shifted or been displaced, post‐apartheid White antiracism, exemplified in the critical discourse Vice elaborates, remains as obsessional, as concerned with keeping the White social body clean, pure, as apartheid thinking. The paper then concludes by considering the usefulness, but also, crucially, the limits of psychoanalysis as a critical frame for interrogating the continuities between apartheid and the new South Africa.

Julia Kristeva's Voyage in the Thérèsian Continent: The Malady of Love and the Enigma of an Incarnated, Shareable, Smiling Imaginary

Drawing on Julia Kristeva's amorous dialogue with Therese in Therese, mon amour, her third volume on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis (La haine et le pardon), and Cet incroyable besoin de croire, my aim in this essay is to unpack Kristeva's theory of sublimation which, I suggest, Therese helps her elaborate, enrich and complicate. In particular, I focus on Kristeva's foregrounding of the mediating role of language in the sublimatory process and her rethinking of the experience and stakes of sublimation in light of what has been discussed as the central problematic of the baroque: namely, the blurring of the distinction between appearance and reality and the uninhibited celebration of illusion. As I demonstrate, this problematic and Therese's unique response to it are most important for Kristeva since they enable her to raise questions which carry her beyond her previous treatments of sublimation. These questions relate to the amorous source of the imaginary; the dynamic established between idealization and sublimation; the dangers of an unbridled imaginary; the uncomfortable residue of matter and the body; the dialectic between finitude and infinity, unity and multiplicity.

Julia Kristeva and the Politics of Life

In her recent writings on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Julia Kristeva develops a theory of power and subjectivity that engages implicitly, if not explicitly, with biopolitical themes. Exploring these engagements, this paper draws on Kristeva to discuss the mute symptoms of homo sacer and the regulatory power of the spectacle. Staging an uncommon (and sometimes antagonistic) conversation between Kristeva, Agamben, and Foucault, I construct a field of inquiry that I term the “psychic life of biopolitics.”

The fear of traveling: a new perspective for tourism and hospitality

In spite of all technological advances in favor of humankind to promote travel, people are experiencing an increasing fear of travelling or flying. Most likely, the events of September 11, 2001, not only increased the risk perception but also brought to attention the importance of security in tourism. Whatever the case may be, the present article is aimed at critically discussing the contributions and limitations of psychoanalysis as well as system psychology, risk travel perception and secure base theory. Paradoxically, in a context wherein more people make use of mass means of transport, a considerable number of travelers feel a major discomfort because of security issues. Of course, progress and development in the last few years have converged on the idea that even if the fear of travelling could be studied regardless of time and country, evidence suggests that, in western Societies, these kinds of psychological attitudes have spread pandemically. Under these circumstances, it is important to discuss the contributions and problems that current theories demonstrates in applied research.

In This Issue/Abstract Thinking: Got a Raise? Thank Your Kindergarten Teacher

This issue launches the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Journal with an editorial by Professor Michael Rutter (p. 3). Looking back over these previous five decades, Dr. Rutter chooses seven articles that represent seminal ideas in our field and significantly affected our current thinking in child psychiatry. Three articles come from the 1960s and 1970s: Stella Chess and colleagues on the longitudinal temperamental features of children, Leon Eisenberg on the limitations of psychoanalysis and the need to incorporate other fields of knowledge in child psychiatry, and Danny Cantwell on genetic factors in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Embracing the Limits of Psychoanalysis

This article outlines my essential paradigm as it relates to self psychology, how I arrived at it, and how I would position my perspective in the context of the larger psychoanalytic and scientific community. My dialogic complexity systems model is most closely aligned with the intersubjective systems theory of Atwood and Stolorow and was shown to have acquired its defining shape in the context of an in-depth exploration of the connection between the latter theory and Kohut's self psychology. My paradigm is part of the wider relational turn in contemporary psychoanalysis. I have characterized the evolution of my perspective as my continuous preoccupation with the deepening and refinement of my understanding of the limits of psychoanalytic theory and practice and the cultivation of a clinical attitude that allows me to fully embrace those limits, an attitude that combines the caring ambience of genuine dialogue with the spiritual calmness of nondual awareness. My perspective can, therefore, be understood as my ongoing attempt at unifying my intellect, my heart, and my spirit into one experiential whole. A dialogic complexity systems model grounded in a post-Cartesian nondual philosophy constitutes the explanatory reduction of my theory and philosophy as lived in real time.

Revolutionaries without a Revolution: The Case of Julia Kristeva

Hirtler, Kurt, Ola Stahl, and Ika Willis, eds. 2003. Mourning Revolution. Special issue of Parallax 9.2, April-June 2003. New York: Routledge. $100 electronic copy. 113 pp. Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 288 pp. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. $34.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 392 pp. I tell you this in truth: this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the [End Page 188] death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . .the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse now, I tell you . . . the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I don't know what else? (Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy") The Rhetoric of Ending and the Mourning to Come Certainly Derrida's inventory is far from being complete, but it recreates with gripping poignancy the frenzy in which death certificates have been meted out to all repositories of thought, of hope, and of life writ large. By virtue of enumerating, enlisting, and discerning the far reaches of the rhetoric of ending and of the apocalyptic imagination underpinning it, Derrida's account itself can be said to participate in what it seeks to outflank in the first place. Yet, perhaps Derrida cannot be held accountable for the hairsplitting entrapments of this discursive graveyard-whistling; perhaps this is, after all, the crime (or logic) of philosophy itself—a discourse that cannot help folding back or receding into a reflection on its genesis and, by implication, on its ending. More than anything else, perhaps philosophy is, as Derrida himself intones, fond of quasimythical metadiscourses that can intransigently, irascibly, and in an "overlordly" way declare its dissolution or, to use Derrida's own word, its cadavérissement (literally, its reduction to a corpse). Not infrequently, the philosophical rhetoric of ending has unwittingly overlooked its implication in an indissoluble contradiction that, while contending that the ending has been reached, not only participates in it but also lives through it, that is, in many respects survives it in order to announce it. "Who (or what) would announce the end were there nothing to be announced?" Of course, such a rhetorical question implies that, should there be an end or an apocalypse, no one would survive it in order to report it: the end would be the end of everything, period! "For that is also," as Derrida rightly conjectures, "the end of the metalanguage concerning eschatological language" (81). I am not here suggesting that there is no hors texte, no outside, from which the end could be announced by a meta-being, only that there is, practically, no ending whatsoever that humanity can pronounce or announce, let alone ascertain. On the other hand, "Who (or what) would announce the end were there nothing to be announced?" is a question that also implies not only that the end (associated, for so long, with the end of the millennium) proved not to be an end—only a mere illusion, which is exactly the position held by Jean Baudrillard—but also that nothing really will ever end without leaving remains, without coming back under the banner of [End Page 189] "hauntology," a theme Derrida belabors in Specters of Marx. By and large, whether we have missed the end or fallen prey to the returning ghosts of our precursors, it is important to stress (1) that the rhetoric of...

The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, and: Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (review)

The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, and: Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (review)

Three Phases of Treatment with Borderline and Psychotic Patients

Three distinct, yet overlapping, phases of treatment emerge when working with some borderline and psychotic patients. This are patients who test the ordinary limits of psychoanalysis, but can profit from its deep exploration. The first phase is colored by acting out, interpersonally and intrapsychically. An analytic envelope of containment is necessary to sustain the treatment. Interpretive holding and containing help the patient find a psychic receptacle capable of detoxifying violent projections. Many of these patients terminate prematurely. The second phase is centered around the patient's defensive use of the death instinct to extinguish or destroy certain parts of their mental functioning. This difficult standoff between parts of the patient's mind becomes replicated in the transference. The third phase reveals the more fundamental problem of paranoid∼schizoid anxieties of loss and primitive experiences of guilt. These include fears of persecution and annihilation. Some patients abort treatment in the first or second phase and never work through the phantasies and feelings of loss. Nevertheless, much intrapsychic and interpersonal progress is possible. Given the instability and chaotic nature of these patient's object relations, the analyst must be cautiously optimistic in their work and realize the potential to help the patient even when presented with less than optimal working conditions.

The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (review)

The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (review)

How Wide is the Widening Scope of Psychoanalysis and How Solid is its Structural Model? Some Concerns and Observations

The author advances the thesis that in the past 35 years there has been a relatively silent but nonetheless significant movement within the mainstream of American psychoanalysis toward a more "modest" position. This movement has been stimulated from different sources, sometimes with diverse goals and different programs. One determinant was the reaction to the post-World War II euphoria in regard to psychoanalysis and its possible therapeutic powers. Another element has been the ongoing consolidation of our knowledge and understanding of the ego-psychological, structural-model approach to analytic theory and technique, an approach which emphasizes both intrapsychic conflict and compromise formations. A consequence of this more modest position has been a greater appreciation of the limitations of psychoanalysis as well as the significance of those limitations. This more realistic appraisal of psychoanalysis may not have encouraged the widening scope of the indications for analysis, but the enhanced understanding of its limitations offers the promise of more effective psychoanalytic work in areas that have not been considered ideal for the so-called "traditional" analysis. It is suggested that more sophisticated approaches in the analysis of resistance and character, of "conflict" (in distinction to "diagnoses"), together with a more applicable understanding of the psychoanalytic process, can all contribute to a deepening, if not necessarily widening, of our psychoanalytic endeavors.

Who is in analysis with whom? Freud, Lacan, Derrida

The paper is concerned with the limits of psychoanalysis and the concept of the non-analytic, in the light of the work of Lacan and Derrida and the relation to Freud. The functions of rumour, gossip, third parties are discussed, so as to highlight structural features of the analytic situation; such that the analytic scene is always the other scene. The function of repetition that this necessarily supposes is examined, in the light of Derrida's theory of the name of Freud, of the filiation to Freud, and the historical origins of analysis. The central concept of transference (and its recent twin, countertransference) are linked to this repetition of the other scene, and Lacan's attempts to propound a theory of stories about becoming an analyst is shown to be one reponse to the impasse of the unanalysed residue left, and represented by, Freud.

The psychodynamic approach to psychosomatic disorders: contributions and limitations of psychoanalysis.

The psychodynamic approach to psychosomatic disorders: contributions and limitations of psychoanalysis.

LIMITATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.

LIMITATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.

The challenge of results in psychotherapy.

I believe these simple rules within our means if within our desires. We should hardly ask less of ourselves if we ask others to consider us scientists when we teach and practice psychotherapy. We can and should learn much about psychotherapy through other studies besides those of results. Yet we can only judge a therapy as therapy by its results and not by its attendant retinue of theories, however elegant and harmonious these may seem to be. Some years ago, Glover sounded a solemn warning on this matter with regard to psychoanalysis when he stated, In my opinion, the main obstacle to the progress of psychoanalysis is the absence, first of reliable statistics of results, and, second, of any followup investigations. . . . Unless we know with some precision the exact limitations of psychoanalysis in different groups of mental disorder, we run the risk of providing new theories to explain away failures(16). These reproaches apply equally to all kinds of psychotherapy. Their truth and the urgency which underl...