Psychic Economy Research Articles

The “new psychic economy” according to Charles Melman

The “new psychic economy” according to Charles Melman

Approche historique des épreuves projectives par le jeu au décours du XXe siècle

ObjectiveThe objective of this article consists in presenting the historical and epistemological analysis of the various psychological currents at the origin of the creation of the various play-based projective tests during the 20th century in Europe. The historical and conceptual sources of these proofs being fragmentary, an analysis of the archives proved necessary in order to grasp the nature of their differences and their common elements. The psychodynamic analysis of the child's motives for playing, along with their traces in the adolescent and in the adult, make it possible to think about the different modes of apprehension of the analysis of play according to the tests’ creators. The different objectives of these creators are analyzed in order to perceive the theoretical background that motivated their creations. MethodThe presentation of the Scenotest to autistic children and the various interpretative possibilities led me to return to the historical sources of the different contexts of the creation of play-based tests: The World Test, The Village Test, The Imaginary Village Test, The Scenotest. The quest for expression through play is constantly questioned according to different concepts in order to access humans’ modes of psychic and perceptual functioning. However, we can observe common elements in the approach to the investment of space and time, which we propose to analyze. The updating of the links between the various creators and researchers leads to an examination of a shared foundation for the various play-based projective tests under discussion, differences in treatment of the material, as well as their implementation. The contribution for each version of the play tests is recorded in the analysis of the diversification of methods. ResultsThe results attest to a common goal centered on the spatial treatment of constructions and what they reveal of the unconscious of each one as well as their links to the collective. Admittedly, research projects take on different colors depending on the creators. There is no shared method: each creator deploys his personal method of analyzing the creation of individual and collective living spaces, circulation spaces. However, we have grouped together several common elements: - None of the test creators make a link with Freudian infantile sexuality. - The focus is on the action of the game, which is used to decipher the qualities of constructions, even strategies to distribute the constructions. - The observation and analysis of the modes of projection of spatial representations are common. However, the motor expression of affect is not noted as an index of psychic economy. The qualities of the affects present in the modes of assembly of the constructions, from the child to the adult, are not analyzed. - The superposition of the diagnostic and therapeutic approach is one of the common elements; the same tools are used in different settings. - No creator mentions the quality of the environment and the major traumatic upheavals, as well as their traces, to which the population was subjected during this period of the 20th century. Jung's works are frequently quoted and taken up as a basis for reflections in these two frameworks; the influence of Jungian theories appears relatively extensive at this time. DiscussionThe memory traces left by the traumas linked to the two World Wars are little taken into account among populations who were exposed to their damage, although the games reveal traces of it. Current research on autism and old age reflects ongoing in-depth studies. A reflection comes up several times in the writings of G. von Staabs that also crosses the two fields concerned by the Scenotest, that of psychotherapy and diagnostic investigation. The reference to construction is interesting to remember, in this period of destruction of the environment; on the contrary, the game and the analysis of its free associativity in children are left in the shadows. The work of Monika Boekholt concerning the Scenotest has made it possible to present a new method of interpreting acting processes by favoring the analysis of the different modes of representation of the body in thought, from perceptual sensory traces to the work of primary and secondary identifications. During our research with children and adolescents with autism using the Scenotest, we were surprised by the attention paid by the patients to the elements to be built which, are immediately invested in building a double bottom and/or reinforcing the edges of the playing area. ConclusionThis historical study sheds light on the new fields of epistemological and therapeutic research, which could be useful in designing relevant diagnostic and therapeutic devices.

Social research in health: why read Norbert Elias?

This essay aims to reflect on the theoretical-methodological challenges of social research in health and, especially, to explore the conceptual matrix present in the work of Norbert Elias, a sociologist and historian whose approach to the civilizing process greatly contributes to understanding the singularities that shape individual and collective existence. By investigating long chains of interdependence throughout history, Elias challenged deterministic interpretations of social processes and built a vigorous analysis of a plurality of objects from an interdisciplinary, constructivist, and relational perspective. By illuminating the dynamics of interaction and the mutual constitution of individuals and society, the author redefines the nature of the reciprocal relations among social structures, the psychic economy, and the body. In this sense, the appropriation of this reflexive perspective can fertilize studies and research processes. Considering the complexity of Public Health, we propose to stimulate possible articulations, dialogues, and uses of the Eliasian theoretical framework in the problematization and construction of strategies and research paths.

Babies in therapy, psychoanalytic interventions for infants and their parents.

Babies in therapy: The study "Psychoanalytic interventions for infants and their parents" conducted on infants through the lens of psychoanalysis and clinical work with both parents and infants all contribute to our knowledge of the nature of early relationship disorders. Psychoanalytic theory's concepts of the depressive position, early defense mechanisms, transference, and psychosomatic reactions to depressive emotions are shown to be crucial in clinical cases, giving therapists new tools for intervention and increasing efficiency. Psychoanalysts have researched the long-lasting effects of early disappointments and the sense of being helplessly abandoned; they emphasize that a disruption in the relationship with the caregiver can produce a psychic economy oriented on the avoidance of anxiety, leaving less energy for development. New parents and their sick infants can benefit from early therapies with therapeutic potential and the possibility of preventing future narcissistic pain issues if they are based on psychoanalytic thinking and knowledge of early symptoms.

L’expression de la violence dans la conduite hikikomori

In 1962, when Hanna Arendt proposed the concept of the banality of evil, Pierre Marty and Michel de M’Uzan for their part described operative thought. These two notions were developed in totally unrelated fields: that of war criminals on the one hand and that of patients undergoing consultation for psychosomatic illness on the other. However, they are related in the idea of an elaborative deficiency, an inability to think in the first person singular, in short, a subjective void. In order for this to happen, the developing subject begins to differentiate between his interior and the external real world that he rejects. In this operation of judgment, he learns how to deal with negation, the symbol of which becomes the condition of independence of thought, at the root of the subject. When this process fails, it will be necessary to look outside the libidinal potentialities which have not been constituted within by conforming to ambient values, for example, by the investment of perceptual reality and of the concrete world, as well. Hikikomoris patients fall within this spectrum of disorders, which René Roussillon describes, from a transnosographic perspective, as narcissistic identity suffering. An early division of the ego, established in an insufficiently adjusted primary object relationship, is regularly described as the source of these difficulties. Intellectual and affective processes are separated without further functional communication, as evidenced by language expression. Words do not call for images, they are diluted in abstract generalities or in factual statements, without emotion ever coloring them. The particularity of hikikomoris patients in this range of disorders is that they have cut themselves off from the real outside world, as if to find an interior of their own, at the definitively established border between the two. And if they do attempt a form of subjective affirmation by rejecting the outside world, it is in silence, peacefully, without perceptible hatred. How can we help these singular patients who generally formulate neither desire nor requests (the latter, on the other hand, coming strongly from an exhausted entourage, even desperate in the face of so much immobility that nothing seems able to rectify)? The first task of the therapist is to manage to meet them, sometimes initially at home. When a psychotherapy framework can be set up, adjusted as closely as possible to the constraints and resistance of the patient, it will be a question of helping him to restore meaning to his words, to embody a language that seems disaffected, free of emotion. The laborious work of linking words and affects risks exposing the therapist to the expression of unbridled verbal violence, against “shrinks” and all those who disturb, before the culture and current affairs of the world can offer themselves as mediation that channels this raw instinctual emergence. The confinement to home is usually punctuated by a large consumption of videos, anonymous exchanges on social media, and a thirst for a wide range of information. This matter, cultural in the broad sense, plays a decisive role in the psychic economy of the hikikomori patient. It replaces exteriority and tensions are relieved through words, as they are instinctually reinvested. The aim of the therapeutic process is to accompany the transformation of this violence into an addressed, subjectivizing aggressiveness, the beginning of a libidinal link opposing the effects of intra-psychic cleavage.

Better Problems

Better Problems

États d’âme en réanimation COVID-19 : des émotions aux devoirs moraux des acteurs du soin

La pandémie à Covid-19 installe des émotions qui peuvent être comprises au sens pathologique de trouble psychique et/ou au sens heuristique d’une dimension morale. Qu’en est-il donc de cette distinction dans les services de soins critiques et de réanimation dont les soignants sont aux avant-postes des événements ? Que faire des émotions ? L’objectif de ce travail est de poser sur ces questions un regard médicopsychologique et éthique en partant de l’hypothèse que les émotions ont une utilité propre pendant la pandémie. Il s’agira dans un premier temps de montrer que l’angoisse et la peur, bien que différentes d’un point de vue épistémologique, surgissent d’un même lieu historique qui est le discours du monde médical avec la mort. La prise de conscience de l’inéluctable fait partager un même besoin du soignant et du citoyen d’une économie psychique qui va conduire à différencier deux réactions possibles face aux émotions : un « faire front » et un « composer avec ». Cet entredeux psychique, inhérent au contexte pandémique, interpelle le soin critique sur une dimension morale en rapport avec la problématique d’abandon de la personne humaine et la notion mal connue de « mort en masse ». Une réponse à cette difficulté se trouverait dans le concept d’« être-soignant-proche » mais son application suppose aussi une réflexion éthique sur les exutoires et les vertus personnelles.

Hypermoderne, pléonexie et nouvelle économie psychique : éléments de réflexion pour une nouvelle écologie des liens

ContextThe advent of hypermodernity, promoted by neoliberal ideology, was accompanied by changes in the social bond that had major consequences in terms of psychic economy and of the ecology of relationships. In this, based on a social bond whose motor is no longer desire but envy, and where the Real appears to be evacuated in favor of an injunction to maximum jouissance, this construction has come to radicalize the so-called pleonexic tendency identified by Plato and classical Hellenist philosophy. In this sense, it tends to promote a way of living where having and appropriation predominate. GoalsWe try to highlight how these aspects, which various authors have identified in terms of psychic economics and relational schemes, are essential to an understanding of the climate crisis and the subject of hypercomplex research that it represents. MethodFrom a socio-historical analysis and from our position as practitioners of micropolitics, we identify the terms of hypermodernity, and we show how it comes to radicalize humanity's natural pleonexic tendency. We emphasize how this strengthening of having deflects the exchange, and more generally the “gift cycle,” by promoting an ecology of relationships focused on the mimicry of appropriation and on the symmetrical logics of accumulation. Finally, in the light of these elements, we analyze the elements of observation that can be identified around the climate issue. ResultsOur developments highlight how hypermodern pleonexic subjectivity turns out to be a relational and systemic deadlock, leading to a loss of flexibility in the bond between subject and environment. ConclusionFrom the analysis of this particular link to the environment, it is our way of being there, of being with, and of living that is put to the test. We point out, in the face of emerging ecological issues, the importance of strengthening the collective and mimetic logics of collaboration in our supporting micro-political practices; in this, we seek to promote a commons of the intelligible, rather than that of the uniformity inherent in neoliberalism.

The emotional issue at the heart of the therapeutic link

Within the caregiver-patient relationship, the emotional burden and internal psychological tensions are central. If the desire to care leads to an encounter with the patient, a whole professional "growth" is to be built in order to learn how torelate to emotions and affects that accompany care situations. This "step sideways" allows for caring thinking. The avoidance of this acceptance can lead the caregiver to a psychic economy, to an overly framed posture, at the risk of not welcoming the patient's suffering. Finally, the managerial ideology, if present in the hospital today, represents a brake on the capacity to think the clinic.

The End of Strangers and the End of Intermediation

The End of Strangers and the End of Intermediation Eva Illouz Being a stranger is the universal condition of modernity. Simmel, like many of his fellow sociologists and Germans at the end of the twentieth century, was riveted by the question of what the new era of trains, light, cities, and money had in store for humanity; but following his anti-positivism and Weberian tendency to look for ideal types, he grasped this change through the emblematic figure of the stranger. Why was the stranger such a key figure of modernity? One reason may lie in Simmel's biography. Although both Simmel's parents had converted to Christianity, he was not able to secure a stable position at the university, largely because he was perceived by others as a Jew. He was, so to speak, forced to be a stranger. Being an outsider from within was the familiar experience of assimilated, modern Jews, a position that turned them into the observers and analysts of the structures that simultaneously accepted them and excluded them. The second reason that the stranger has much to do with modernity is connected to the enormous fluxes of immigration at the end of the nineteenth century. Simmel could not have been unaware that by 1908, the publication date of the collection of essays in which "The Stranger" appears, the largest part of the 2.5 million Eastern European Jews who would immigrate from 1880 until 1924 to the United States had started a new life on the continent. To be sure, many or most of them lived in insalubrious conditions and poor neighborhoods, but they found a country in which they could live, trade, and exercise their religion without the threat of pogroms (which is not to say that antisemitism did not exist in the U.S.). A third reason that the stranger is the key figure of modernity has to do with the enormous development of cities at the end of the nineteenth century. The metropolis—about which Simmel wrote a memorable essay—became a social matrix whose greatness and danger was its capacity to transform people into indifferent strangers to one another, strangers who were no longer [End Page 297] integrated into a psychic economy of hatred, fear, and mistrust. The indifferent stranger has proved to be the main social character of modernity. Simmel thus implicitly opposed two forms of strangeness: one that was unassimilable to Christianity; and a new form of strangeness enabled by the burgeoning secular (or quasi-secular) cities and nation-states, in which the hard boundaries of groups were starting to dissolve. The nation-state not only tolerated but encouraged the perpetual creation of strangers, as millions of peasants throughout Europe left the countryside and migrated to urban centers and as fluxes of population within Europe reshaped the human landscape of cities. This is why the stranger was a figure of intermediation between the state and other states, as well as between social groups constituting a society. Such a modern stranger is the synthesis of nearness and distance. The stranger does not belong to the dominant religion, does not speak the local language, may dress differently, or may eat differently; yet he becomes part of the local social fabric through abstract and impersonal modern intermediaries such as money and the city. For Simmel, the trader is indeed the paradigmatic stranger because he is the node for the circulation of money and of commodities that were destined, until the end of the nineteenth century, mostly for city dwellers. At the end of the century, the notion of the "trader" and the "stranger" might have been a code word for Jews. As described by Simmel, the stranger had all the outer appearances and inner characteristics of the Jew. The Simmelian stranger is an "indifferent stranger," a stranger that was no longer threatening a thick cultural tissue of churches, communities, and tightly bound groups. This is because the modern nation-state was unknowingly promoting three key properties of modernity: abstractness, freedom, and cities—the three key themes of Simmel's sociology. Abstraction of forms of life (bureaucracy, for example), freedom (enabled by the free circulation of goods and money, for example), and...

Vulnerability, Insecurity and the Pathologies of Trust and Distrust

ABSTRACT While some trust theorists have adverted to the vulnerabilities involved in trust, especially vulnerability to betrayal, the literature on trust has not engaged with recent work on the ethics of vulnerability. This paper initiates a dialogue between these literatures, and in doing so begins to explore the complex interrelations between vulnerability and trust. More specifically, it aims to show how trust can both mitigate and compound vulnerability. Through a discussion of two examples drawn from literary sources, the paper also investigates the effects of pathogenic vulnerability on the psychic economies of trust and distrust.

Plastic Flowers: Overlooking Resource Scarcity in Postwar America

This essay historicizes cultural and psychic economies in the postwar United States under the sign of material scarcity. It situates the proliferation of plastic flowers in domestic space within a context of bureaucratic anxieties surrounding natural resource scarcity, and trends toward ‘outdoor living’ that were an offshoot of the ideology of economic growth. Interrogating repeated, if relatively unexamined, invocations of ‘anxious’ suburban subjects in descriptions of postwar society, the essay suggests that plastic flowers shored up a sense of stability and permanence at a time when nuclear annihilation, Cold War paranoia, and population growth combined to render life uncertain and potentially unsustainable. The essay concludes by reflecting on how legacies of that epoch – and the fiction of permanence offered by plastic flowers – endure in contemporary fantasies of limitless progress.

Becoming Human: Dombey and Son and the Economy of the Pet

ABSTRACTWhile much has been written about Charles Dickens’s figuration of the daughter as a means of salvation for the capitalist father in Dombey and Son, the figure of the pet, which bears enormous ideological weight, is underanalysed. Attending to the style, content, and purposes of the symbolic and psychic economy of the pet, I argue that the distinction of public and private on which Dickens relies is interchangeable with another dichotomy he labours to establish between the untamed and the domestic. Examined from this angle, the novel’s chief concern is with the possibility of becoming human - that is to say domesticated - within a relentlessly feral world. It is through intersubjectivity that the stray canine becomes Diogenes the pet, a process that prefigures, and as I will show intimately related to, Paul Dombey’s own metamorphosis.

Desamarre. Malestar en lo político y crisis de los discursos: de una posible continuidad entre adicción y nacionalismo

El movimiento social que tuvo lugar en Francia bajo el nombre de “chalecos amarillos” actualiza una vez más el malestar político en la representación. La política, en beneficio de los poderes apoyados por referencias de identidad arcaicas, está surgiendo en casi todas partes del planeta. ¿Estamos presenciando una desarticulación de lo simbólico y lo real? La llamada ciencia moderna ha excluido la enunciación del proceso de validación de sus declaraciones y ha llegado a la obsolescencia de las restricciones del goce instituidas por el Nombre del Padre y el campo del Otro; estas se han empobrecido con el desarrollo de la nueva economía psíquica y la promoción de los goces del cuerpo. ¿El despido de lo político representa el síntoma de una extensión en el vínculo social de recurso a la economía del signo? En consecuencia, el vigor preocupante que encuentran los nacionalismos puede interpretarse como un recurso en un callejón sin salida; ese de proponer el farmacéutico con este adictivo júbilo, al blandir su solución, para curarnos de “no es eso”, es decir, para eliminar la alteridad al movilizar el veneno de la segregación.

La parole entre croyance et savoir, impasses subjectives en soins palliatifs

Based on a cross-disciplinary analysis — carried out by a medical doctor and a psychologist — as well as a psychoanalytical, philosophical, and ethnological reading of a clinical case encountered by both authors in a palliative care service, we identify and explore some of the issues related to speech and to the relationship of care in the particular context of the end-of-life period. Our reflections have led us to explore the following points. In some cases, serious and incurable diseases are diagnosed and announced to patients before they have experienced it in their own bodies. At this stage, the disease therefore only exists on the basis of an interpretation of biological and radiological test results, provided by a “knowing figure.” In this specific context, we question the stakes and effects of this person's discourse, which absolutely contradicts the patient's permanent and continuous bodily experience. Throughout the stages of a serious disease, physical pain can have a range of different effects. On a relational level, it can represent a kind of screen onto which the existential suffering of the patient is projected and communicated to others in complaints. Simultaneously, in terms of the patient's psychic economy, this pain sucks up all the available energy, like a black hole, and thus considerably impoverishes the subject's self. We propose to study pain during the end-of-life period in terms of the functions it could perform, in response to the subjective impasses with which palliative care patients may be confronted. Finally, an anthropological reading raises the question of “voodoo death” and of the doctor's shamanic position — particularly in palliative care —, which we found to be relevant theoretical illustrations of how some patients can heed and believe a knowing figure's words. Some acts, words, or attitudes towards the palliative care patient may be experienced by the subject or their loved ones as a prediction of their imminent death, leaving little room for the desire to participate in life and hindering the opportunity to project oneself into a possible future.

Can we do without the death drive?

ABSTRACTThe concept of the “death drive” is overly laden with the word death, so that its use is subject to a startling confusion of the tongues. Freud identifies two types of drives and their fusion and defusion inscribe fundamental dynamics in the psychic economy throughout life. The death drives are often regarded as the negative element but they can also turn out to be useful and beneficial. The plurality of the death drive's action in the twofold perspective is put forward by Freud: destructive unbinding at the service of construction. The paradox is that the death drive may well be sometimes the only resort for the preservation of life – “dying in order to survive.” However scandalous it may seem, the experience of pain is what ensures the permanence of the taste for life. The analysis becomes a site of suffering that amounts to a transitional space where the question of belonging is no longer really at stake. What can be experienced in the transference is the capacity to suffer in the presence of the other, which implies the capacity to experience, in the here-and-now, a high degree of excitation through physical or mental pain, via a tolerable narcissistic withdrawal, despite the presence of the other. Jeanne's treatment underscores this perspective.

Navigating the Relational Psychic Economy of Disability: The Case of M

This paper presents a theoretically-informed psychosocial analysis of the case of M, a physically disabled man from South Africa. We use M’s account as a platform from which to consider projection, melancholic suspension and grief, as these are played out in the negotiation of dependency in relationships for disabled people. Making use of a case study methodology, we examine the various strategies through which M manages those disability stereotypes which are ascribed to him, creating a picture of how identity is negotiated in the face of interpersonal dependency as well as disablist prejudice. A central proposition is that, for M, upholding relationships which bring much-needed assistance means caring for the emotional lives of his carers, in a manner which leaves him more vulnerable to internalizing identity insults, and less able to resist his own oppression. Employing a psychoanalytic frame, we suggest that the “melancholic suspension” which some disabled people may be subject to, may lead to the necessity to “take on” certain projections, in the process of accessing much-needed care. As shall be seen, M maneuvers creatively through this relational realm by engaging in trade-offs between positive identity and physical need, employing strategies which include self-deprecation, the performance of mastery, playing with gender, and humor. With these and other techniques, he navigates the relational and psychic economy of his dependency.

Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition's Histories

### FRANCESCA BRITTAN and CARMEL RAZ > Fiction may struggle to hold us spellbound in the manner of music, but its prompting of more diverted states of mind, and its depictions of the richness and freedom found in the sloppiness of drifting thought, suggests how constricted a world can be that

From the Greek theater to the mind: the opportunities of the mask

From some elements of the mask in the ancient Greek theatre which are expressed in the current civilization and psychic economy, it is possible to identify positive some psychological functions that can be performed by the mask, especially the self-protection and the possibility to put into play unknown parts of the self, therefore meeting the diveristy within and outside us. It's highlighted how the ongoing simplification in the mask could on one side offer a supporting screen in a society that multiplies images and amplifies the fragmentation risk, and on the other could reduce the risk of distortions of one own’s image in the other’s eyes. Therefore, the problem of believable speakers on which one could put his epistemophilic trust is arised and this is linked to the theme of openness to the future, to the persistence and the necessity of sharing, of relationship. Namely, it’s highlighted the possibility offered by the mask of experimenting what is not yet, but is present in the desire, as a sort of anticipating background that, instead of being closed in a mental fantasy or in a daydream, is played in the reality (virtual?). It's underlined how this function stays in a delicate balance between experimentation – the “carnival” function – and the gamble and its collocation could therefore fluctuate between the work-in-progress frame and the suicidary one, in which parts of the self can be integrated rather than reduced. Finally, highlighting the dimension of beauty and culture, recalled from the Greek theatre mask, it’s adfirmed the importance of these values, translated as play and care systems, a transitional space, in the psychological and psychotherapy fields. The explained themes are lastly evoked and exemplified through the illustration of a clinical case.

The Draw to Overwhelm: Consent, Risk, and the Retranslation of Enigma.

The concept of affirmative consent presumes a subject who is fully transparent to herself and who can anticipate the precise effects of her assent. This essay proposes limit consent, a concept that offers us different ways to think about the sexual-and about the analytic encounter. Limit consent involves a more nuanced negotiation of limits and becomes possible when the subject makes herself passible (Lyotard 1988) to an other-a condition that is neither active nor passive. Processes described in depth here suggest that passibility has ties to the rousing of infantile sexuality (Freud) and to the subject's normative perversity (Laplanche). When the psychic economy of the infantile sexual is followed to its apex, a particular kind of state is produced that I call overwhelm-a word that is used here as a noun. Overwhelm is a state of dysregulation that can be confused with, but is not the same as, repetition compulsion. Overwhelm entails risk, and under some circumstances it may open up space toward significant psychic transformations. A detailed clinical example illustrates how overwhelm may make itself known in the clinical encounter, and how it can infiltrate the transference/countertransference. Specific technical suggestions are made regarding analytic work with overwhelm.