Psychoanalytic Process Research Articles

Getting Home: A Discussion of “Accompaniment in Jazz and Psychoanalysis”

Situating his current paper (this issue) within the developing dialogue between psychoanalysis and music, as well as within the evolution of Markman’s own definitive contributions to that dialogue, this discussion identifies Markman’s inspired, embodied musicality as the primary force animating Markman’s writing and clinical work. Markman’s remarkable taxonomy of rhythmic styles of psychoanalytic accompaniment, formed entirely by his clinical experience, is highlighted and elaborated. The value of music as a source of metaphor is contrasted with an understanding of the actuality of music as a dimension of psychical life that is cultivated and healed through psychoanalytic accompaniment. Using “process notes” from a music documentary, the power of actual music is located in the fabric of culture, conducted through musical sound and forms of movement, including the rhythmic practice of the psychoanalytic frame and the antiphonic discourse of psychoanalytic process.

Mysteries of the Psychoanalytic Process: Reflections on Chaos, Complexity, and Emergence

Psychoanalysis is inherently messy and mysterious. The mysteries of the psychoanalytic process are viewed through the lens of chaos and complexity theory. The analyst-analysand relationship is an example of a nonlinear dynamic system, meaning that it is continuously changing, adapting and coevolving; deterministic predictability is lost in the process of continuous adaptation. The fractal nature of the psychoanalytic relationship and the emerging qualities that arise from its self-organizing system and from bottom-up therapeutic approaches are explored and examined in relationship to the nature of healing. The analyst must tolerate chaos, uncertainty, and messiness for the healing process to naturally emerge. In addition, the age-old question of free will versus determinism is examined from the perspective of complexity theory.

Walking the middle ground between hermeneutics and science: A research proposal on psychoanalytic process

ABSTRACT In 100 years of clinical research and 40 years of empirical research, the concept of psychoanalytic process continues to elude a consensual definition, probably because the problem and methodology must be approached in a different way. This article outlines the empirical implications of the epistemological model exposed in a previous article, by proposing a scientific, innovative, and clinically sensitive research programme for the study of psychoanalytic process. This proposal is an attempt at developing psychotherapy research that is founded on psychoanalytic hypotheses derived from a two-person psychology. The research programme focuses on the interactional nature of the analytical work, and on the relationship between the implicit (unconscious) and the explicit (conscious) levels of the analytic endeavour. The authors propose that this research programme be articulated around three methodological approaches: (1) the use of systematic case studies; (2) the adoption of the events paradigm for accessing the salient phenomena of the psychoanalytic process; and (3) a micro-analytic approach to the specific phenomena occurring within relevant sequences of interaction. These ideas are illustrated with a description of the micro-analysis of a clinical case. This article is intended to contribute to a constructive dialogue between psychoanalytic practice and psychotherapy research.

ПОЗАСВІДОМЕ ПСИХОАНАЛІТИКАЯК ОБ’ЄКТ ЕМПІРИЧНИХ ДОСЛІДЖЕНЬ(АНАЛІЗ ПУБЛІКАЦІЙ ІЗ БАЗИ SCOPUS ЗА І ПІВРІЧЧЯ 2017 РОКУ)

on the topic of psychoanalyst’s unconsciousness, published in the professional psychoanalytic journals from the Scopus list during the first half of 2017. According to them, out of 447 articles in 22 journals, 17 papers were discovered that contain the results of empirical research on the phenomenology of the functioning and manifestation of psychoanalyst’s unconsciousness. As a result, mostly the empirical part of them is based on clinical cases and interviews with psychoanalysts, training analysts and supervisors. In them, in particular, we discovered three general groups of key concepts that are the most relevant subjects of study during the specified period: countertransference, reverie and unconscious communication. A brief overview of the introduced categories in each group is described, for example: transference-countertransference matrix, narcissistic needs of the psychoanalyst, analytic eroticism, experiences regarding to the end of psychoanalysis, silence and numbness of psychoanalysts, unconscious fantasy and unconscious intersubjectivity. The conclusions generalize that the psychoanalyst’s unconsciousness and phenomenology of its manifestation in analytical work remains in the constant focus of research carried out in various psychoanalytic approaches, covering not only direct clinical practice (including those with specific categories of analyzers), but also training analysis and supervisor's assessment. The classical and lacanian schools are more focused on the study of countertransference, the British school – the reveries and unconscious imagination, the intersubjectivists are interested in the study on the ability of the psychoanalyst to use his or her unconsciousness in creating a special intersubjective reality between him or her and the analyst. Unity in the views of a psychoanalyst’s unconsciousness is noted in the ideas about its sensitivity, the diagnostic value of the experiences arising in the sessions, as well as the danger of neglecting the influence of his own unconscious on the psychoanalytic process.

What psychoanalysts do in their everyday clinical practice: Empirically derived prototypes of the psychoanalytic process.

What psychoanalysts do in their everyday clinical practice: Empirically derived prototypes of the psychoanalytic process.

Reconsidering Regression in Psychoanalysis: Notes on a Central Yet Controversial Concept and Its Relation to Free Association.

The concept of regression is schematically reviewed, focusing on the complexities and confusions that have surrounded this contested notion in the course of psychoanalytic history. Clinical illustrations are used to suggest descriptive differences in regressive functioning occurring in the course of psychoanalysis. It is argued that there may be an important distinction between the sense-making (adaptational, maturational, and integrative) aims of therapeutic discourse and the distinctively deconstructive conditions of a psychoanalytic process. In this context, the "regressive" impact of the free-associative method is illustrated, and on this basis, it is suggested that there is a significant and profound difference between "free association" conceived simply as uncensored storytelling and "full-on free association" as closer to the babbling of a stream of consciousness.

Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary as a Postmodern Novel: Searching for the Artistic Movements in Psychoanalytic Process

Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary as a Postmodern Novel: Searching for the Artistic Movements in Psychoanalytic Process

Recherche qualitative en psychanalyse : l’étude du cas de la théorisation ancrée

BackgroundHow can research remain as faithful as possible to the psychoanalytical approach, which proceeds by case study, and at the same time meet the current requirements for scientific validation and publication in clinical psychology? Especially if the project is part of an interdisciplinary context, aiming to bring psychoanalysis – which promotes qualitative analysis – into dialogue with epistemological frameworks that use very different methods such as, for example, quantitative and hypothetical-deductive medicine. Although psychoanalysis was conceived, from its origins, as both a theory of the human psyche and as a therapeutic method seeking to validate its foundations – the hypothesis of the unconscious, analysis and interpretation of the transference on the analyst –, its endogenous validation criteria remain insufficient, from the point of view of research in the human and social sciences where the psychologist-researcher situates her/himself. Even if a translation of the results is possible, a methodology that guarantees objective results accepted by a larger scientific community is required. Our study, wishing to better understand the psychological effects of cancer in adolescence and early adulthood on romantic life and sexuality, had to consider these epistemological concerns. Conceived from its origin in a dual culture – that of medical care and clinical psychology with an analytical orientation –, it led us to use the qualitative methodology of Grounded theory (GT). Our paper aims to show that the use of GT ensures scientific rigor while maintaining the essentials of the psychoanalytical method and process – applied, in this context, to the collection and analysis of data, and to the way of producing results. MethodologyAlthough they come from sociology, we will show that many of the core operators of GT are very close to psychoanalytical ones. For example, inductive and iterative dimensions or the necessary a-theoretical approach of the researcher offer particularly congruent points of contact with the psychoanalytical process, which we will illustrate with concrete examples from our study. ResultsThe inductive, reflexive, and iterative properties of GT are very close to the central operators of the psychoanalytical process while respecting an accepted scientific approach in the social sciences. Promoting co-constructive results and articulating individual and populational scales, they respect both the psychodynamic subjectivity of the participants and the conditions for targeting a scientific approach more generally used in the social sciences. Moreover, using GT in psychoanalytical research fosters translational research and an immediate transfer of scientific knowledge to participants in the field. This is another point of similarity with the psychoanalytical method in which the process itself can be considered as a result. ConclusionGT offers the psychologist-researcher with a psychoanalytical orientation a particularly relevant methodological tool to satisfy many validation conditions of other scientific communities, while respecting his or her epistemological and clinical reference. It is therefore a valuable methodological operator for interdisciplinary research in psychoanalytical psychology.

Lived Depth: A Phenomenology of Psychoanalytic Process and Identity

ABSTRACTIn this article, I lay out the implications of a phenomenological perspective in which subject, world, and others are given in one stroke, part of the same emergent process. Trends in contemporary psychoanalytic theory lean toward this radical nondualistic view but never quite relinquish a perspective in which subject and object, subject and subject are separate. Through my early studies in phenomenology, I have come to see that psychoanalytic process is better understood as a perceptual engagement in which meaning is formed in the relationship between what is experienced and its context/background/field, a process of lived depth. Strikingly, psychoanalytic identity is a similar process. Inchoate shifts in meaning and investment that we cannot know in formation come clear in relation to a coalescing sense of our place in a professional context. We come to know ourselves retrospectively, an act of après-coup that momentarily stills a continual shape-shifting process, one part of the lived experience of depth.

Becoming of Use as an Analyst: Imagining Something that was Never there Before.

Every analysis that becomes generative must be an original experience, in both senses of the word: an experience that reaches into the origins of the emotional life of the analysand and one that creates something entirely new. If the analysis goes well enough, these efforts lead the analysand to feel the oldness and newness to be an integrated whole. Analysands who have experienced an absence of intimate emotional connection early in life especially require that new psychological capacity be developed from their germinal potential as a means by which the psychoanalytic process is brought to life. In such cases, both analyst and analysand are required to find ways to expand their receptivity to sensory experience and to cultivate their imaginative capacities in a manner that make emotional growth possible. Through this process words become embodied and better able to articulate the analysand's self-experience and to create the experience of reciprocity with the analyst and with others in ways never before experienced.

The Psychoanalytic Education of CAPA Graduates

ABSTRACTThe CAPA Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Training Program and the evolution of Internet videoconferencing applications have inspired and enabled graduates of its advanced program to seek distance psychoanalytic training, mainly in approved institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Two forms of training, Formal Distance Programs and Distance Accommodation, are described. Distance analytic training presents technical and pedagogical challenges to institutes and to their faculty. Some of the objections to distance education that hamper participation by essential faculty are presented. These issues are discussed and remedies are suggested. With experience, these challenges can be addressed and the training experience becomes satisfying for faculty as well as students. The candidates themselves, in two letters, describe their positive experiences in simultaneous training. A sample of clinical work brought to supervision by a distance candidate in the early years of training is presented to give some sense of the aptitude for psychoanalytic work that exists among distance candidates. Some preliminary thoughts about the variations in the psychoanalytic processes are raised and will need to be supplemented by further experience.

Meeting a Brilliant but Quirky Mind: Insights Offered by Infant Research

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the “moving along process” toward “moments of meeting” identified in the Boston Process of Change Study Group’s “Something More” paper. Insights from infant research–Tronick’s dynamic description of “match, mismatch, and repair” and Beebe’s model of vocal rhythm coordination–will be used to explore the “moving along process” that can lead to a “moment of meeting”. These theoretical considerations will be illustrated with clinical material from the psychoanalytic treatment of a 3-4 year-old boy. The author suggests that these insights into psychoanalytic process derived from infant observation research are useful to understanding therapeutic change and may in some ways be more helpful than focusing on a specific psychoanalytic theory or technique.

A Child Analysis from Childhood into Adolescence: Elements of Therapeutic Action at Different Developmental Stages

ABSTRACT This paper describes a psychoanalytic process that took place over a 10-year period, and provides a platform for consideration of the technical challenges of analytic work at different development phases. The case also demonstrates the emergence of the capability for transference and the nature of analytic work prior to the development of that capacity, as well as the vicissitudes of analytic work with children who have experienced severe early maltreatment.

Johannes Schefler: Mystical Poetry as a Catalyst of (Post)Modern Thought

This article deals with the history of reception of the German Baroque poet Johannes Scheffler (aka Angelus Silesius, 1624-1677), which served as a significant catalyst (to use the renowned poetological term of T. S. Eliot) on a number of writers and philosophers in the 19th and 20th century. First of all, the analysis is focused on Scheffler’s impact on Jorge Luis Borges who in reading of Scheffler’s mystical epigrams attempted to find the way out of the impasse of modernist subjectivity. Next, the article investigates the reception of the distinguished German poet by three renowned 20th century philosophers: Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan. It becomes clear that all three have creatively appropriated the verses of Johannes Scheffler, and it has turned out that the mystical paradoxes of his poetry paved the way for the articulation of some typical postmodern concepts of these philosophers. In Heidegger’s case, Scheffler’s verses on the mystical rose helps define the ungroundedness of being. In the case of Derrida, the scope of Schefflers epigrams seems very close to that of the so-called experience of deconstruction, and in case of Lacan, Schefller’s poetry is read as the most efficient meditation on being, which in opposition to un-being (the Real) marks the successful end of the psychoanalytical process.

The impossible possible narrative: the quest for truth in Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

ABSTRACT The paper explores how the film Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011) represents the difficulty of uncovering meaning and truth in a psychoanalytic process of coming to ‘know thyself’. The film is about a journey to resolve a murder mystery, a crime without reference, trace or known motivation. The protagonists’ aspiration for truth is met by a maze of empty signs, confronting them with distortion, disorientation and a variety of possible narratives. The clarification of facts leads to dead ends; solving one mystery only leads to another, opening more contradictory narratives, alternate memories and disputed spaces. The paper reflects on the possibility that the film’s non-discursive, poetic style can capture, beyond its mimetic aspects, a reality beholden to memory, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious. In containing both, by means of its poetic discourse, the film enables an expanded meditation on truth and meaning. It offers a resolution that emerges in the creation of a tale bound not only to facts, but to a general truth: a scheme above time, enabling reflectivity, a story to be told – ”Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy and its supervision via videoconference: experience, questions and dilemmas.

The patient lives in Berlin, the therapist in Lisbon and the supervisor in Budapest. Not long ago, continuous psychotherapy and supervision would have been impossible in such a setting. Nowadays, modern communication technologies via the Internet create new possibilities for patients, therapists, and supervisors. However, when we engage in psychoanalytic practice via modern means of telecommunication, we need to examine if the fundamental tenets of the psychoanalytic process are preserved. We need to think about initial assessment, about how we arrange the setting, how we work with transference and countertransference, what kinds of new forms of resistance we are facing and, indeed, how we can recognize new phenomena and handle inevitable problems. In this clinical paper, we tackle these questions in the context of three-times-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Process Research: A quick ride through what you should know about process (research).

This paper gives an overview of psychoanalytic process research, which brings to light the complexity of psychotherapy sessions. This complexity is so rich that many instruments intended to make the process measurable failed in the past because they initially used a strategy of complexity reduction. This method however did not help to further our understanding of the complexity involved. Three former presidents of the Society for Psychotherapy Research (Stiles, Hill, Elliot 2015) decided to solve the following equivalence paradox: many therapies work successfully though they all follow different theories, produce a heterogeneity of processes and often enough a misfit between what theories maintain to be a good process and their realization in the treatment room. As theories are often compared to maps, a driver would wonder which route to take. But therapists-as-drivers go undaunted - and nevertheless achieve their goals together with their patients. Norcross and Wampold (2018) found that good therapists invent new therapies with every new patient. They hypothesize that it is because of conversation. This is in accord with the 3 former presidents' proposal to return to detailed single case analyses including the micro-analytic power of conversation analysis of which a few insights are outlined in this article.

Constructing Intimate Space Through Narration: Ferenczi's Clinical Diary.

Psychoanalysis is a narrative activity of a very special kind. One could even say that the method of free association is a subversive activity since its purpose is to cut through layers of previous conditioning in the effort to open new spaces in the psyche. The hypercathexis of neurotic functioning can only be transformed if new, unknown dynamics are able to emerge, and can then be invested by the subject. This process necessitates economic change-investing novel psychic functioning. Aided by personal analytic experience, the psychoanalyst's role is to help initiate and support this subversive activity in the patient by initiating him/her into the method of free association. Difficulties arise when neither the patient, nor the analyst are comfortable with the symbolic and metaphorical dynamics of free association. Reacting to Freud's lack of interest in an emotional analytic process with the patient, Ferenczi considered the analytical space as a mutual frame, to be transformed in and by the intimate psychoanalytical process. The author explores Ferenczi's Clinical Diary as the construction of an intimate space through narration, attempting to discover Ferenczi's techniques in this subversive activity.

Beyond the hermeneutic/scientific controversy: A case for a clinically sensitive empirical research paradigm in psychoanalysis

ABSTRACTThis article is devoted to the topic of the conditions for a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalytic theory and practice and research in mind disciplines neighbouring psychoanalysis applied to the concept of psychoanalytic process. The first section reviews the contemporary controversy about psychoanalysis and research and the contributions that different disciplines—such as empirical research in progress in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, in attachment and the early mother–infant relationship, and neurosciences—propose for the construction of theory in psychoanalysis. The gaps in the scientific investigation of central aspects of the psychoanalytic conception are highlighted, such as the dyadic nature of the construction of the experience in therapy and the relationship between the implicit and explicit levels of the analytic relationship. The article concludes by laying the foundations for a novel research programme for psychoanalysis that addresses the outstanding gaps.

What Child Work Stands to Teach Us: Discussion of “Tyler in the Labyrinth: A Young Child’s Journey from Chaos to Coherence”

I view Stephanie Pass’s paper (this issue) as an instructive illustration of what therapists who do not work with children stand to learn from child therapists. Despite the reality that much psychoanalytic meta-theory was generated by theorists treating children, in addition to the contributions made by infant researchers and developmentalists, psychoanalysis has yet to fully attend to these domains of clinical work and research especially as regards their implication for the psychoanalytic process (commonly referred to as “technique”). The privileging of the capacity for representation and communication through language/verbalization in psychoanalysis has limited our theories and our conversations. However, the tide is shifting in favor of exploring what I would call the “ground” level of our work. By that I mean the non-verbal, non-conscious, unpredictable and intuitive contact-making dimension that establishes the foundation upon which the house of meaning-making is built.