Psychic Contents Research Articles

Decisions Under Temporal AND Emotional Pressure: The Hidden Relationships Between the Unconscious, Personality, and Cognitive Styles

The existence of an unaware psychic space that influences the way we think, perceive, and decide has been known for over a century. This space, defined by Freud as the “unconscious,” contains in itself unaware psychic contents. Its sophisticated adaptive functions, implicit and unaware, allow individuals to transform an enormous amount of information into explicit behaviors, influencing their behaviors. In this article, we advance the hypothesis that there is a strong relationship between the unconscious, personality styles, and decisions under conditions of temporal and emotional pressure. The fact that an increase in the quality of a performance follows an increase in excitation, at least up to a certain threshold, clarifies the concept. Beyond this level of activation, not only are the benefits starting to diminish, but we also notice the onset of dysfunctional conditions that consist of anxiety, inner tension, difficulty in concentration, and inability to decide.

"The Skin is the Cradle of the Soul": Didier Anzieu on the Skin-Ego, Boundaries, and Boundlessness.

Didier Anzieu's notion of the skin-ego builds on a long psychoanalytic tradition that began with Freud's idea that the ego is first and foremost a body ego, a projection in the psyche of the surface of the body, or, in other words, the idea that psychic phenomena are always embodied. An interface, a container for the ego, but also its origin: thus did Anzieu conceptualize the skin's psychic function. The baby's fantasy of having a common skin with the mother is the concrete starting point for a development that, through the prohibition on touching, leads to the experience of being a separate and individual person. Psychoanalytic work with severe mental disorders makes it necessary to investigate deficiencies in the skin-ego's containing function before the patient's psychic contents can be explored. In the psychoanalytic situation, the analyst's words replace tactile contact and thereby contribute to healing injuries to the skin-ego. The clinical implications of Anzieu's theoretical model are illustrated by examples from psychoanalyses of children and adults. The close connection between touch, psychic envelopes, and thinking opens a wider perspective on the necessity of setting limits to violence, against both nature and human beings.

‘Diagrams of Motion’: Stop-Motion Animation as a Form of Kinetic Sculpture in the Short Films of Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay

Jean-Luc Godard wrote that ‘The cinema is not an art which films life; the cinema is something between art and life’ (cited in Roud’s, 2010, biography of Godard), an observation particularly true of stop-motion animation. The filmmakers discussed in this essay, Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay, share a fascination with the latent content of found objects; they believe that forgotten toys, discarded tools and other such objects contain echoes of past experiences. Extrapolating Švankmajer’s belief that memories are imparted to the objects we touch, the manipulation of his found objects as puppets in his films becomes a means of evoking and repurposing their latent content, just as the Quays develop their dreamlike films from the psychic content they perceive in their armatures. Making a case study of a selection of these animators’ short films, this article examines the practice of stop-motion animation against that of kinetic sculpture, unpicking the complexities of the relationship between the inherently static mediums of sculpture and photography – symbolic of a fixed moment in time – and that of stop-motion animation, a temporal pocket in which these fossilized moments are revived once more.

De Freud à Benedetti : variations sur la distinction soi non-soi dans la situation psychanalytique avec des patients schizophrènes

AimsThe strict boundary between “self” and “non-self” appears obvious, in the same way as the subject-object dichotomy. The distinction does not however hold for long under scrutiny, in particular in the area of intersubjectivity. Psychoanalysts working with schizophrenic patients are particularly sensitive to these issues, since the type of transference entails considerable influence of the psychic functioning of the patient on that of the therapist. Experiences arise where the two psyches seem to communicate closely, and not merely by forming a common unconscious, mainly studied by Gaetano Benedetti. The aim of this work was to return to the conceptualisations of the main authors in order to demonstrate the specificity of psychotherapeutic work of psychoanalytic orientation with schizophrenic patients. MethodsThe theories and theorisations of the main analytic authors describing their practice with schizophrenic patients will be recalled and contextualised in an attempt to perceive the logic. ResultsIt appears that these authors overall consider that the specificity of transference with schizophrenic subjects resides in a transfer of “psychopathology” (according to Benedetti), arising not in relation to any possibility of realisation of a desire on the person of the analyst who then embodies an imago, but based on archaic movements that the analyst needs to take in and process. This processing of the archaic, which is unconscious, leads the analyst to find himself inhabited by the experiences of his patient, and his efforts will be directed at decoding and detoxifying them so as to return them in a form that is organised by his own creativity. The very principle of the therapy is based on the deliberate subversion of the usual distinction between “self” and “non-self”. DiscussionWhat emerges from these elements is a particular ethic that is inherent in therapeutic work with schizophrenic patients: acceptation of the unconscious psychic intrusion, or in other words a refusal to take refuge behind a “caregiver negativism”, overly rational or too “professional”. This type of work requires supervision, enabling certain aspects of the psychic content that may have escaped the therapist to be retrieved, and the instatement of appropriate care. ConclusionThe specific nature of psychotic transference implies a mode of practice that brings the therapist to “take on” his patient's psychosis in his own psyche, to make it his own illness to be cared for, in a complete subversion of the boundaries between “self” and “non-self”.

F175. Connectivity changes in selected EEG-networks during partial seizures with different types of alteration in consciousness: Ictal and interictal findings in 10 cases

Introduction Consciousness is a central concept in epilepsy: a transient loss characterizes generalized seizures and different types of consciousness impairment may occur during partial ones. Jackson described the “dreamy state” and suggested a consciousness dissociation caused by electrical disturbances at higher levels in hierarchical neural networks. The following decades accumulated evidence of ictal and interictal experiential phenomena and several physiopathogenic hypotheses were raised. Yet, even after the EEG breakthrough, the mechanisms of impaired consciousness and its relation to partial seizures remains elusive. Focal discharges cannot explain the flexibility and variability of experiential phenomena. Current models of brain function imply multiple processes in hierarchical modular assemblies with dynamical non-linear interactions. From this perspective, a focal discharge can modify network connectivity (NC) resulting in more varied and longer lasting changes. OBJECTIVES: (1) to identify changes in NC accompanying ictal and peri-ictal discharges in 10 patients that presented seizures with different psychic contents and (2) to correlate NC changes with the type of consciousness impairment during the seizure. Methods Seizures with altered consciousness, no motor component, were documented in 10 psychiatric patients. The Ictal Consciousness Inventory scored level (ICI-L) and content (ICI-C) of consciousness; psychotic features obtained from the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS-P). Two minutes of EEG seizure activity, artifact free, eyes-closed, were analyzed with Neuroguide software to generate Low Resolution Electromagnetic Topography (LORETA) scores for each of the Broadman Areas (BA). Pearson correlations of spectral power and phase differences for each of the BA pairs in selected networks: Anxiety (AN), Dorsal Attention (DAN), Ventral Attention (VAN), Default-Mode (DMN), Affective (AN), Executive (EN), Memory (MN) and Language (LN). Connectivity Z-scores were calculated with Neuroguide normative database. Multiple correlation analysis tested correlations between affected networks and clinical scales. Results Seizures defined by EEG ictal activity were accompanied by psychic changes in all subjects. Psychic changes and NC patterns differed among patients. The DMN was altered in all subjects, differing in direction and magnitude in correlation with ICI-l. AN and VAN correlated with the PANSS scales. Changes in other networks varied across subjects, uncorrelated with clinical scales. Conclusion Our findings suggest that: (1) EEG-networks can be used to study different types of ictal consciousness impairment, (2) level, content and reality testing may vary independently, (3) variations correlate with patterns of altered NC, (4) DMN structures modulate ICI-L, (5) AN and VAN are involved in reality testing.

Contextual Approach as an Integrator of Innovations in Education

The article discusses the contextual approach developed in the scientific school of A. A. Verbitsky. This approach is presented as a meta-approach that allows to integrate various innovations in education. Educational innovations are a necessity today and for the foreseeable future. However, innovative approaches, concepts, technologies and techniques can enter among themselves the contradiction that complicates the process of their introduction to the theory and practice of education. As a result, there is a need in a general approach, the role of which and applies the contextual approach. The context is interpreted in it as a mental semantic mechanism for the generation of meaning and sense of the perceived phenomena in their correlation with each other as a psychic content (representations). The different contexts of the educational process represent different, complementary ways of understanding the one reality. In the event of a conflict between different private approaches are removed by identifying the boundaries of their applicability, that is, those contexts in which each of these approaches is most appropriate. Contextual approach integrates all educational approaches and innovation into a single synergistic system.

Le fou rire comme équivalent orgastique de la sexualité infantile

Résumé Le fou rire semble réunir les conditions qui permettent une jouissance et une décharge de tension. Sa survenue est généralement provoquée par un accident de pensée, à savoir la rencontre impromptue d’un contenu psychique refoulé ou clivé avec un fait perçu aux répercussions sensori-motrices. Le télescopage topique qui en résulte s’équilibre avec des identifications primaires collectives favorisant la contagiosité du phénomène. Le sexuel infantile délié en est le maître d’œuvre.

Haunting across the Class Divide: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and The Little Stranger

Haunting in literary fiction is often interpreted psychologically as a sign of suppressed psychic content or as nostalgia or mourning for the loss. Yet, it may also be used allegorically as a manifestation of hidden social conflicts, and hence mark a political agenda of thus constructed works. In the novels by Sarah Waters spectres, poltergeists and haunting appear not as a sign of or a contact with an outer reality; to the contrary, they may be seen as perfectly human—though eccentric—expressions of class and economic inferiority. In Affinity spectres and spiritual seances are presented as a means of earning money by lower classes and the latter’s cunning use of the upper classes’ credulity. In The Little Stranger the poltergeist may be interpreted as an accumulated anger and desire of the servants long ignored by the masters of the emblematic country house. In both, haunting and ghosts manifest vengeance of the underprivileged taken on the socially superior. The essay shows how fictional haunting and spectrality, far from marking a supernatural reality or introducing extrasensory concepts, may function as an allegorical method to discuss political and social problems such as class inequality or social justice.

A Model for Integrating Actual Neurotic or Unrepresented States and Symbolized Aspects of Intrapsychic Conflict

In psychoanalytic theory, the importance of actual neuroses—considered to be devoid of psychic content—diminished as Freud and subsequent analysts focused on unconscious intrapsychic conflict. This paper explores the relationship between actual neurotic and unrepresented states, which are believed to be best addressed through attention to countertransference, intersubjectivity, and enactments rather than interpretation of intrapsychic conflict. Models suggesting how actual neurotic states and symbolized intrapsychic conflict may interact with each other and environmental stressors are described. Symbolizing actual neurotic states and establishing meaningful linkages between somatic/affective experiences and intrapsychic conflict are viewed as necessary for effective treatment of many disorders.

Family Psychic Transmission and Anorexia Nervosa

Abstract Studies show that family relationships can act as mediating agents in triggering and maintaining the symptoms of anorexia nervosa (AN), especially the mother-daughter relationship configuration, which contains unconscious elements transmitted inter-generationally. This study aimed to understand the role of intergenerational psychic transmission in the articulation of anorexic symptoms in a young woman in treatment. Three generations of women of the same family were interviewed: maternal grandmother, mother and daughter, all diagnosed with AN. Some psychic contents that could not be elaborated were identified in the reports and these were, subsequently, converted into legacies transmitted to later generations. Feelings of inhibition and shame regarding sexuality and the female body, transmitted from grandmother to mother and from mother to granddaughter, seem to have blocked the emotional development in all generations. Incorporating these findings into treatment may facilitate the processing of the transmitted unconscious contents, contributing to the reorganization of the family's psychodynamic functioning.

Le traumatisme psychique au risque de la parole. Le rôle du transfert dans les psychothérapies

Traumatic neuroses are a clinical entity which manifests and develops as a result of psychological trauma. Since their first description by Oppenheim in 1889, they have posed a problem with the specificity of care they required. The answer to that question, that of treatment depended primarily on the concept with which the author had already of psychic trauma. Shell shock considered primarily as a stress disorder, was first described by the British military psychiatrists at the time of the First World War. It was this psychophysiological concept that prevailed in this line of thought which led to the diagnosis of “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD). The proposed treatments aimed to reduce or to eradicate the symptoms by acting directly on them by cognitive-behavioral techniques, hypnosis, “EMDR”, etc. At the same time, another school of thought, initiated by Freud and his students, defended the idea that the psychological trauma resulted from an encounter with the “reality of death”. Freud's successors clarified that the traumatic event took place when the Ego of the subject was completely absorbed by his efforts of repression. (“Fenichel”), that is to say, presented neurosis transference, hysterical or obsessive. This corresponds to what we learned from clinical and psychotherapies which we had brought to patients presenting with a traumatic neurosis. These psychotherapies are not “cure types of psychoanalysis” but they use the concepts of psychoanalysis in particular on the issue of transference. We will use the metaphorical schemas of the psychic apparatus proposed by Freud to try to understand the link between the traumatic image which broke in and what Freud calls “the lost object”. This “lost object” is a myth constituted over the early days of the nursling's life: there would be an object capable to fully satisfy the subject, appearing to show nothing missing. More the structure of the subject is neurotic, that is to say, the more it is dissatisfied with the objects of his desire, stronger the longing for the mythical lost object will be. And it is in this place that comes to lodge the traumatic image purveyor of a paradoxical enjoyment even if it pays a fear of annihilation as infants. In biogenic law, with the acquisition of language, the fear of annihilation and pleasure suffer repression (primal repression). We understand more now that there may be a therapeutic effect on the neurotic structure grace of transference. In transferring, the patient sends a message towards a subject (the therapist) seemingly to know. That is to say, he has the desire to inform the therapist of his thoughts with as little censorship as possible, and in doing so, he informs himself, consciously and unconsciously in its own psychic content conscious and unconscious. The motor of this work is the unconscious guilt resulting from having faced the real of death, which is the subject of an anthropological censure. Oedipal guilt pre-conscious or conscious is induced by the previous primary conviction. At the end of this journey that involves the data of the Oedipus complex, the mythical lost object loses its appeal. The traumatic image will possibly disappear, the traumatic event is no longer something that is repeated but a more memory, the subject feels relieved of the trauma as well as the lost object. Three progress-reports of psychotherapy illustrate the theoretical points.

The typical contents of Freud’s and Jung’s dreams

Freud (1900) listed many typical dreams, defined as dreams with the same manifest content. Jung (1944) differentiates the typical dream, in the manifest content, and the typical motif, an archetypical expression of psychic core contents and conflicts. From the viewpoint of the continuity hypothesis Domhoff (1996) analysed 28 dreams reported by Freud and 31 dreams reported by Jung (1961), showing that the differences between the two dream series are in continuity with the lives of the two theorists. From the same perspective, the analysis of five dreams of Sigmund Freud demonstrates that Freud himself linked these dreams to significant experiences, events and feelings of his waking life (Schredl, 2008). The main objective of the present study is to verify the frequency of typical contents in Freud’s (32 dreams) and Jung’s dreams (33 dreams). The research is carried out through three methods: 1) The list of typical dreams in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900), 2) the Typical Dreams Questionnaire (Zadra & Nielsen, 1999); 3) The grid of Categories of Typical Contents (Maggiolini, Cagnin, Crippa, Persico, & Rizzi, 2010). The analysis with the list of typical dreams proposed by Freud (1900) shows that 12% of the Freud’s sample has a typical content. With the TDQ 48% of Freud’s and 63% of Jung’s dreams has some typical content. The third method finds 91% of typical contents in Freud’s and 100% in Jung’s dreams. The relevance of typical contents in the dream narrative opens a new perspective on dream interpretation.

La dimensión anímica del derecho: una aproximación preliminar desde la psicología analítica

This paper presents a proposal of interdisciplinary approach between analytic psychology and law. From the basis of Carl G. Jung’s theoretical framework, we argue that the law is animated by psychic contents of archetypical nature, which shape the way in which humans relate with rules and authority and impact how we regulate as a society. The paper introduces myth interpretation as a means to comprehend that animic dimension of law and describes the concepts, techniques and cares that should guide the analysis. An interpretation of the fall of Adam and Eve is conducted as an example of the proposed interdisciplinary approach. The analysis leads us to argue that the psychic tendency to separate the inner self from the outer self, with the relegation of the former, derives in the domination of the masculine over the feminine and in a relationship characterized by distance and fear between humans and the authority. The regulation that arises from that context is one also marked by separation, fear of sanctions and is focused on the external behavior. The image of Jesus is thus presented as compensatory one since it tends to the reunion of the inner with the outer and of the feminine with the masculine, which derives in a regulation substantially different from that of the Old Testament.

The Skin-Ego: Dyadic Sensuality, Trauma in Infancy, and Adult Narcissistic Issues

The skin-ego is a metaphor created by the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu to describe the process by which the infant's emerging ego develops a container for psychic contents and achieves a secure feeling of well-being. The ego encloses the psychic apparatus as the skin encloses the body. The ego becomes able to fix barriers protecting the internal world and to screen exchanges with the id, the superego, and the outside world. The skin-ego is an envelope that contains thoughts and gives to thinking activity some limits, continuity, and a protection against the instincts. The functions of the skin-ego are to maintain thoughts, to contain ideas and affects, to provide a protective shield, to register traces of primary communication with the outside world, to manage inter-sensorial correspondences, to individuate, to support sexual excitation, and to recharge the libido. The skin-ego is the foundation of the container-contained relationship. An important part of psychoanalytic work with borderline patients is the reconstruction of the earliest phases of the skin-ego and their consequences for mental organization.

Grice's cooperative principle in the psychoanalytic setting.

Grice's "cooperative principle," including conversational implicatures and maxims, is commonplace in current pragmatics (a subfield of linguistics), and is generally applied in conversational analysis. The author examines the unique contribution of Grice's principle in considering the psychotherapeutic setting and its discourse. Such an investigation is called for chiefly because of the central role of speech in psychoanalytic practice (the "talking cure"). Symptoms and transference, which are characterized as forms of expression that are fundamentally deceptive, must be equivocal and indirect, and must breach all four of Grice's categories and maxims: truth (Quality), relation (Relevance), Manner (be clear), and Quantity. Therapeutic practice, according to Freud's "fundamental rule of psychoanalysis," encourages the parties (analysand and analyst) to breach each and every one of Grice's maxims. Using case reports drawn from the literature, the author shows that these breachings are essential for therapeutic progress. They serve as a unique and important ground for revealing inner (psychic) contents, and demarcating real self from illusive self, which in turn constitutes leverage for integrating these contents with the self.

Some notes on Freud's concept of conversion

The author investigates conversion, the process by which psychic contents are transformed into bodily symptoms. The author concludes that this process cannot be explained by libido theory or by assuming the existence of a psychic energy. He argues that although Freud was convinced that “the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation … can never be fully comprehensible to us,” this process is, nonetheless, comprehensible in terms of Freud's own conceptualisation. To understand this process, one must take the characteristics of the primary process to which the “replacement of external by psychical reality” belongs as radical as his thesis of a hallucinatory wish fulfilment. This thesis includes not only the hallucinatory satisfaction of instinctual wishes, but also the hallucinatory satisfaction of the desire to avoid unpleasure, which is understood as a process by which the internal conditions of this affect are displaced from the presentational world into perceptions via conversion.

Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Returning to Juliet Mitchell’s own rereading of her account of sexual difference, this article takes up the question of how structures of kinship—along with the laws of sexual difference that constitute them—are transmitted. According to Mitchell, the construction of sexual difference is characterized by a certain degree of conservatism in that, despite efforts to effect social change, certain normative ways of organizing sexuality manage to persist and to be conveyed across generations. She stresses that this transmission, if it is in fact one, is not necessarily a conscious operation. As such, it is difficult to locate within a precise topography and may require us to rethink the conditions of address and reception at work in the notions of “acquisition” or “transmission.” This essay analyzes two of the examples that Mitchell offers for understanding the historical acquisition of unconscious ideas related to sexual difference, namely, the case of transgenerational guilt and that of the child who emerges into heterosexuality despite being raised by two parents of the same sex. Acknowledging Mitchell’s suggestion that sexual difference is marked by recalcitrance, but refusing the way in which she binds sexual difference to the semantic opposition between masculine and feminine, this essay offers an understanding of kinship that, first, recognizes the inadequacy of mimetic accounts of sexuality that treat parents as “models” for the formation of sexual desire and, second, argues that “invariant” laws of sexual difference, which are not merely reproduced from one generation to the next, do not persist without alteration. The trajectory of psychic contents is not unwavering, and what is relayed into the present is only communicated with translations, transpositions, and deviations that leave what is passed on changed and never fully predictable.

Reading Susan Isaacs: Toward a radically revised theory of thinking

The author views Isaacs’s (1952) paper, The nature and function of phantasy, as making an important contribution to the development of a radically revised psychoanalytic theory of thinking. Perhaps Isaacs’s most important contribution is the notion that phantasy is the process that creates meaning, and that phantasy is the form in which all meanings – including feelings, defense ‘mechanisms,’ impulses, bodily experiences, and so on – exist in unconscious mental life. The author discusses both explicit formulations offered by Isaacs as well as his own extensions of her ideas. The latter include (1) the idea that phantasying generates not only unconscious psychic content, but also constitutes the entirety of unconscious thinking; (2) the notion that transference is a form of phantasying that serves as a way of thinking for the first time (in relation to the analyst) emotional events that occurred in the past, but were too disturbing to be experienced at the time they occurred and (3) a principal aim and function of phantasy is that of fulfilling the human need to get to know and understand the truth of one’s experience. The author concludes by discussing the relationship between Isaacs’s concept of phantasy and Bion’s concepts of alpha function and the human need for the truth, as well as the differences between Fairbairn’s and Isaacs’s conceptions of the nature of unconscious internal object relationships.

I'm a Soldier in the Army of the Lord: Terrorism as Sacred Ritual

Modern global terrorism has destroyed thousands of lives in pursuit of its vision of reclaiming a paradise lost. Spurred on by history, post-colonial dreams, economics, and politics, terrorism is the weapon of choice for many groups around the world. Standing behind the social imperatives, however, are psychic forces from humankind's warehouse of long-forgotten experiences, the collective unconscious, which steer terrorist acts as well. We see this in the images and language used by terrorists. These images flow directly from the power of ancient myths of creation, regeneration, and renewal as psychic content. The myths in turn evoke the ritual praxis of sacred combat, the means by which the renewal occurs. No blood, no regeneration.

Positive syndrome of schizophrenia and epilepsy

An analysis is carried out of a set of psychic phenomena appearing always in the same way: an experience suddenly invades the consciousness, unfolding automatically and with great intensity. This psychic automatism, of which the patient is a passive observer, is accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of strangeness. Our hypothesis is that these phenomena are the expression of partial seizures with a psychic content. A comparative study is then made of the phenomenology of these partial seizures with a psychic content, on the one hand, and of that of positive syndrome of schizophrenia, on the other. It reveals a wealth of clinical information indicating an overlap between the two conditions. This inclines us to postulate of an existence of shared etiopathogenic mechanisms for both pathologies.