Psychic Means Research Articles

Clinique de l’obésité : entre (re)construction de l’enveloppe psychique et intériorisation de la fonction contenante

ContextObesity is a chronic nutritional disease, the treatment of which is carried out medically or surgically. However, whatever the treatments offered, this clinic of obesity can be considered as a clinic of resistance to weight loss, where psychopathological swings and psychosomatic collapses are regularly observed. In this context, the concept of a psychic envelope can be structuring to think about the treatment from the beginning, or to propose an explanation of their failures. ObjectiveIllustrate and underline the interest of the concept of psychic envelope in the clinic of severe obesity, based on two clinical vignettes from our practices. MethodAs part of a research partnership between France and Turkey, we present two clinical vignettes of patients with obesity and wishing to lose weight. The first is the story of the psychotherapy of a French patient, who wishes to lose weight using a medical approach. The second is a comparison before and after bariatric surgery in a Turkish patient, based on data from the clinical interview and the Rorschach projective technique. ResultsThe concept of psychic envelope appears particularly enlightening to think about the clinic of eating disorders and obesity. From the traumatic history of the subject and/or his/her family, it seems relevant to identify whether these events have led to an alteration of the psychic envelopes, and then characterize the psychic meaning to be given to eating disorders and obesity. ConclusionWe propose recommendations for the psychological treatment of obesity and eating disorders. The psychotherapeutic objective, in parallel with the medical and surgical approaches to weight loss, will be to reconstruct the psychic envelopes, by internalizing the containing function, and (re)activating the work of mentalization.

Discussion: “The Waiting Room as an Extension of the Treatment: Transference and Countertransference across the Consulting and Waiting Rooms”

ABSTRACT Drawing on theoretical contributions of Ogden, Goldberg, Bleger, and others, this discussion looks at how the frame is used and misused in clinical work. Imagining the psychic, conscious and unconscious meaning of the contents of the room, the waiting room and the office space, one sees how psychic material is both hidden and revealed. Using a clinical example, this discussion explores the ways analysands project disavowed and dangerous feelings into the frame, which is a complex intermediary space, neither outside nor inside.

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

Signe du miroir et adolescence : entre normal et pathologique

ObjectivesDuring adolescence, girls and boys undergo profound bodily and psychic changes, which upset their relationship with themselves as well as with others. Even though chaotic body changes promise many advantages, they also cause anxieties because of the fragile nature of body image and identity. Due to narcissistic and object-relation transformations, adolescents may seek comfort in contemplating themselves in the mirror. The aim of this article is to explore the (psychic?) functions of the mirror sign, considered a normal and transitional symptom in adolescents except when bearing witness to a psychotic condition. MethodThe method is the clinical case study between two adolescent girls presenting an important mirror sign. The comparison leads to admit the idea of a continuum between normal and pathological mirror sign. ResultIf mirror sign can be a psychotic symptom, it also can be a normal narcissistic aid during this period of vulnerability. DiscussionMirror sign does not have to automatically be considered a schizophrenic symptom. One symptom can hide many psychic meanings and functions depending on the quality of narcissistic resources. ConclusionDepersonalization and inquiring admiration of ones own mirror image can too quickly be assigned to schizophrenia. Two case studies of adolescent girls with mirror sign underline its dynamic sense. In Isis's case, the mirror sign helps her to cope with the transformation of narcissism during adolescence, while in Flore's it characterizes a psychotic disorganization.

Critical and reasoned review of the psychosomatic question in French-speaking psychoanalysts

ABSTRACTEuropean psychosomatics, as a branch of psychoanalytic psychopathology, has existed for almost two centuries, but it is a constantly moving body of thought. From epistemology to aetiology, its questions are still evolving and concern the debate between the psyche/soma dualism and the monistic alternative, but also the psychic meaning that is to be attributed to somatic symptoms. In France, the discipline has not had its last word, for it is constantly seeking to position itself as a field of research and clinical practice within psychoanalysis. However, it still needs to affirm itself and open itself more towards other branches of knowledge, such as medicine, neuroscience, or the social sciences. In this context, are the processes of somatisation still to be thought of as boundary objects for psychoanalysis? On what epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and practical conditions is the psychosomatic question still or at last possible? In particular, is it possible to reintroduce the question of the “meaning” of the somatic phenomenon in order to breathe new life into it, without returning, however, to the symbolic interpretation of symptoms, while preserving the subjectivising approach of psychoanalysis and its logic of interpolation? Can we speak in the human sciences of a truly psychosomatic revolution in the image of psychoanalytic advances?

Trilogy of Body Imaginary: Dance/Movement Therapy for a Psychiatric Patient with Depression

The purpose of this study is to discuss the application of dance/movement therapy to the case of Chun-Li, a 56-year-old woman diagnosed with major depression with psychotic features, and underscore the relevance of psychic meanings to the treatment process. The treatment consisted of three phases: phase one was focused on building the therapeutic relationship with Chun-Li through regimens and health-enhancing exercise that are rooted in Taiwanese folklore; in phase two, she was encouraged to pay attention to her body and make verbal interpretations in relation to her movements; and phase three was intended to help her embody the inner imagination, making contact with her inner conflict and revealing her traumatic event. In this paper, three aspects of the casework are discussed and related to the theories and practices of dance movement therapy: (1) the bodily relationship in ballroom dance; (2) the effect of the partnership in ballroom dance on Chun-Li; and (3) the imagination invoked by a moving body in dance. This article attempts to explain the meanings of significant body experience and body knowledge development through the transformation of the body.

Peasant in the Analyst's Chair: Reflections, Personal and Otherwise, on Class and the Forming of an Analytic Identity

The author explores the issue of social class from an experience-near perspective, as it relates to her transition from a working class background to the forming of her analytic identity. Discussion of the relevance or impact of the analyst's social class on the endeavor of psychoanalysis has, for the most part, been non-existent: psychoanalysis unconsciously has tended to assume a kind of class neutrality or homogeneity among its own. Disavowal and dissociation from anxieties related to class, particularly those related to class shame and the desire to belong and want, can mean a premature foreclosing of the exploration of the deeper psychic and intersubjective meanings of social class as they affect the analytic candidate's forming of an analytic identity. The author challenges psychoanalysis to confront this omission.

On Childlessness

This article explores the experience of childlessness in individuals who want children. Psychoanalytic literature has documented many psychic meanings of childlessness. The author focuses on one factor that has not received much attention: a loss of connection to early objects and continuity with one's past and future. The author provides several clinical cases—both male and female, as well as a discussion of the life and work of the famous artist, Frida Kahlo, to demonstrate how childlessness can rob the individual of a way of coping with his or her fears about death. The author speculates on the sense of the inevitability of death as a driving force toward procreation.

Identifications Annealed, Adhesive and Political: Commentary on Paper by Nina Farhi

Farhi's fascinating paper pays tribute to and extends those segments of Milner's clinical work that Milner hesitated to theorize explicitly herself. Seeking to understand the latter, I trace psychoanalytic politics in general and the history of Milner's relationships with Winnicott, Klein, and Riviere in particular to explore how her dutiful compliance to the rigid taxonomy of psychoanalytic power of her time bore on the trajectory of her becoming an analyst with a mind of her own. It is in accounting for how she struggled to disentangle herself from that web, that we discover how Milner was able to creatively refashion her work with her patient Susan, a process by which Susan was greatly impacted. Following the trail of Farhi's ideas around this process and considering her thoughts around their psychic meanings for both analyst and patient, I explore their clinical implications. I focus on the transferential iterations of these dynamics to consider Farhi's suggestion that an annealed bond needs to be established in the treatment of patients who have, early in life, failed to develop annealed identifications. This opens up questions around how such bonds can malignantly colonize the analyst's mind and psychic reality, raises questions of self-care in the analyst and contributes to prognostically anticipating certain sets of enactments in the course of long-term psychoanalyses.

Wrapping things up: Ending art therapy with two adults with learning disabilities

This paper explores the art therapy ending process for two adults with learning disabilities, Gavin and Megan (both pseudonyms). In particular, it considers a tension that develops between ending and the emergence of a new beginning suggesting that this tension can sometimes be captured within the art work. This paper also looks at the use of objects within these two case examples and the way they are endowed with psychic meaning and vitalized.

Identities of Ambivalence: Judith Thompson's Perfect Pie

This paper examines Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie, using Judith Butler’s discussion of subjectivity in The Psychic Life of Power. According to Butler, stability as a subject necessitates a simultaneous recognition and denial of subjugation to power, but this stability is also constantly threatened by desire which promises to destabilize the subject. Desire is therefore thwarted in order to guarantee the subject’s existence. As Butler points out, the process of subject formation resemblesmelancholia: the subject is never fully able to disengage from the discursive and psychic means by which it is constituted.

The Psychology of Patriotism

PATRIOTISM can be a force for good or evil. American patriotism helped vanquish fascism; German patriotism helped create and sustain it. Wars of national liberation depend on patriotic fervor to oppose colonial rule; unfortunately, ethnic cleansing draws on this same fervor. Appeals to the transcendent value of the nation-state can be progressive or regressive. But regardless of the purpose to which patriotism is harnessed, all forms of it share similar psychological dynamics. Patriotic symbols such as the nation--including its manifestations in images like the flag or the Founding Fathers--represent the fulfillment of our longings for connectedness and safety. In this sense, the nation is a metaphor for a family. Families serve the function of providing psychic security and attachment. We project onto ever-expanding forms of social authority the longings originally satisfied by parents in childhood. It's easy to see the workings of these two needs in our collective responses to the attack of 9/11 and to the devastation visited on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina. In the first instance, people looked to government to provide security and defense, including a muscular retaliation against our enemies. On a symbolic level, looked to our leaders to provide the protection and strength usually associated with fathers. In the second instance, people looked to government to provide care and nurturance, a safety net--qualities associated in our culture with mothers. While patriotism draws a great deal of its energy from the unconscious mind, it is not reducible to it. That is, social attitudes and behaviors are the products of a complex interplay between the rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, private and public factors. Nevertheless, one of the reasons that patriotic fervor can be so passionate--and, as a result, so vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation--is that its roots lie in deep levels of the psyche. Patriotism is a container for a range of psychological needs that originally play themselves out in the family. Over 50 years of psychological research have established that human beings have an innate need for attachment and recognition and that not only is the satisfaction of this need essential for psychological and physical survival, but its frustration is one of the primary sources of mental suffering. (1) I see such suffering ever day in my consulting room--families in which parents can't empathize with their children or each other, or narcissistically use their children, or neglect them altogether. I see children who grow up taking care of others instead of themselves or who retreat from intimacy because of fears of rejection and abandonment. Furthermore, the helplessness of the human infant and its absolute dependence on adult caregivers for survival generates a powerful need for protection and an idealization of the power and authority of these caregivers. When parents are protective and reasonable, children grow up with a basic sense of security and an ability to rely on others. When parents fail to protect children and exercise their authority in arbitrary, frightening, or inconsistent ways, children grow up with a basic sense of insecurity and difficulty trusting others. Unfortunately, this latter scenario is all too common. However, the fact that our needs for connection and security are often thwarted does not mean that they go away. We continue to long for recognition and relationships of mutuality even as often suffer from loneliness. And continue to seek security even as feel unsafe and unprotected. In this context, it's easy to understand the powerful psychic meanings of patriotism. To feel like an American, to identify with the United States of America, is to feel at once safe and connected. Patriotism establishes a we that satisfies the longings for connectedness and affiliation that are so often frustrated in our private lives. …

‘You just can't fly on off and leave a body’: The Intercorporeal Breastfeeding Subject of Toni Morrison's Fiction

In the attention that feminists have given to the discourses surrounding women's embodiment, breastfeeding has emerged as a continuously contested cultural practice.1 Debates on the topic often ove...

Hungers and Compulsions: The Psychodynamic Treatment of Eating Disorders and Addictions

JEAN PETRUCELLI & CATHERINE STUART, (EDS.): Hungers and Compulsions: The Psychodynamic Treatment of Eating Disorders and Addictions. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Publishers, 2001, 392 pp. $50.00, ISBN: 0765703181. This book presents the different psychological perspectives of eating disorders. The editors' goal was to be inclusive about eating disorders and other addictions, and they have succeeded well. Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D., F.P.P.R., is the co-founder and co-director of Eating Disorders and Substance Abuse Service, and is the supervisor of psychotherapy, teaching faculty at the William Alanson White Institute. Catherine Stuart, Ph.D., is the co-founder and co-director of Eating Disorders and Substance Abuse Service, and the supervising analyst, teaching faculty at the William Alanson White Institute. Dr. Stuart is also on the faculty at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health. This book comes out of the Hungers and Compulsions Conference created by the Eating Disorders and Substance Abuse Service of the William Alanson White Institute. Hungers and Compulsions presents a thorough exploration of the subtleties of therapeutic work between psychotherapist and patient. The book is a compilation of writing of authors who differ in their psychotherapeutic approach. Each author has a vast experience in either eating disorders or addictive behaviors. The book's seven sections cover: Addictive Economies; Expanding the Analytic Space: Dissociation and the Eating-Disordered Patient; On Being Stuck: Enactments, Mutuality, and Self-Regulation with Eating-Disordered Patients; To Eat or Not to Eat: The Psychic Meanings of the Decision; Creativity and Addiction; Desires and Addictions; and Winnicott and Masud Khan: A study of Addiction and Self-Destruction. Joyce McDougall's wonderful opening chapter (The Psychic Economy of Addiction) defines addiction and introduces the concept of a good enough mother. She provides an excellent synthesis of Winnicott's work, laying the foundation for addictive behaviors. Her thesis is that the addictive solution is an attempt at self-cure in the face of threatening psychic stress. Judith Brisman, a pioneer in the field of bulimia nervosa, writes a thoughtful chapter (The Instigation of Dare: Broadening Therapeutic Horizons) on deepening one's understanding of non-verbal communication. She challenges the notion that traditional means in the therapeutic space don't work with eating disordered patients. Philip M. Bromberg, in (Out of Body, Out of Mind, Out of Danger: Some Reflections on Shame, Dissociation, And Eating Disorders,) beautifully describes dissociative states, while Lewis Aron (Narrative, Affect, and Therapeutic Impasse) reviews how therapists get stuck in their clinical work when, because of their own fears in identification with aspects of their patient's story and character, they lose their ability to keep the therapy moving fluidly and get bogged down in analytic statements. He discusses mutual regulation of each other's states of consciousness. …

The corrupt organization

This article explores the psychic meaning of corruption understood as an attack on norms of conduct in organizations. The primary focus is on why individuals fail to become securely attached to norms, and on the part played in this failure by certain key features of corruption: greed, arrogance, a sense of personal entitlement, the idea of virtue as personal loyalty, and the inability to distinguish between organizational and personal ends. The essay considers the moral dimension of the problem and suggests that conduct normally interpreted as corrupt often expresses a powerful attachment to primitive moral thinking rather than a rejection of morality.

Emotional life—a perspective close to the body

Emotional life is a dynamic complexity where the concept of affect allows us to elucidate the relation between body and mind. The “affective matrix” denotes the potentially meaningful part of the structurally unconscious, what Freud called “supposedly somatic concomitant phenomena” and named “truly psychical”, in “An outline of psychoanalysis”, 1940. In these basic processes, the affective matrix is the potentiality of drives to respond to stimuli either negatively or positively. By creating emotional tensions and feelings that we connect with positive or negative ideas, it thus plays a crucial role in our experience of reality. It also affects our bodies, giving rise to somatic symptoms, the psychic meaning of which we tend to overlook. Bodily phenomena are, nevertheless, as meaningful as all other human expressions, but, like dreams, they have to be interpreted. Starting from Freud's article on disturbances of vision, case studies and modern neuro-scientific research, the author argues that similar, potentially meaningful psychic processes are at work in the case of somatic as well as mental illnesses. In this context, dissociation will be defined and ascribed a central role in this process.

Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Evil: Debating Othello in the Classroom

Since "evil" has become a term much in vogue in our current political climate, it seems ever more important to explore its psychic meanings and origins. What, first of all, do analysts and therapists mean by the word "evil"? The grandiosity of the term, as well as its traditionally religious connotations, perhaps make it unsuited to the therapeutic context. As Ruth Stein (2002) has commented, "'Evil' may sound too allegorical or too concrete, too essentialist or too objective for psychoanalytic ways of thinking that are oriented towards the study of individual subjectivity" (394). In an article entitled "Evil in the Mind of the Therapist" (2001), Robert Winer surveyed a number of practitioners and found a general consensus that "an evil person is someone who knowingly deeply hurts innocent people" (613). The emphasis here, he says, is on the "knowingly"—conscious deliberateness is key—as it is on the extremity of the hurt inflicted: "negating the other person's soul, . . . destruction as an end in itself" (613). Winer discusses how his own psychological engagement with a patient works against his ever seeing that patient as evil, "no matter how outrageous his crimes" (614). The social psychologist Roy Baumeister (1997) has observed that even serial killers never see themselves as evil but "regard themselves as victims" (47). Winer suggests that it is easier to experience characters in books and movies as evil because we know them only through their evil actions. Even so, he concludes, "Our inability to identify with a character we understand to be evil seems connected for me to our inability to acknowledge our own destructiveness" (621). [End Page 481] Othello (1604) is a text that forces us to consider the nature and problem of evil, as well as the difficulty of acknowledging our own destructiveness. The play is also enjoying a sort of renascence in our present time, as several recent film and television adaptations attest. 1 The vexed questions that Othello raises, I believe, are particularly timely: How do we understand Iago, for instance, as a representation of evil? Is he a figure of irrational destructiveness for whom we can find no motivation, no understanding based on reason or cause? Does he suggest an instinctual basis of evil, a destructiveness intrinsic to the human psyche, as Freud or Melanie Klein would have it? Or should he be interpreted as inextricable from Othello and his anxieties about his race and Desdemona's love for him? Can Iago be interpreted as a projection of Othello's enraged but disavowed destructiveness, a destructiveness that is in fact rooted in the terrors of humiliation and disintegration that narcissistic injury and erotic dependency can arouse? This paper will consider these questions, along with various responses of students in my classroom, as they speak to current debates in the play, in psychoanalysis, and in our culture. Critics have long pondered the issue of why Shakespeare deliberately stripped the Iago character of clear motives when he reconceived Giraldi Cinthio's original story from the Hecatommithi, a collection of tales printed in Italy in the sixteenth century. In Cinthio's story, the Iago figure, known as the Ensign, is himself passionately in love with Desdemona. He is also convinced that Desdemona is secretly in love with the Captain (Cassio), and thus the Ensign's wicked machinations are spurred by genuine sexual jealousy. Shakespeare removes this motive, mentions Othello's promotion of Cassio over Iago, and leaves only a few vague, passing references to possible sexual jealousy. Iago alludes twice to his suspicions that both Othello and Cassio may have slept with his wife: "I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat" (2.1.295-6); and only parenthetically, "(For I fear Cassio with my nightcap too)" (2.1.307). When Iago first refers to the rumor about Othello and his wife, however, he adds oddly, "I know not if it be true, / But I, for mere suspicion in that...

Shame's Revelatory and Transformative Potential, and Its Use and Misuse by the Church's Pastoral Ministry

Abstract This article builds a case for the centrality of the affect of shame in human life, and its importance in understanding the psychic power, meaning and transformative potential of the Christian Incarnation. It draws upon scriptural descriptions of the life, words, trial and passion of Jesus to demonstrate that heor at least the archetypal figure that the gospelers describe-experienced the sting of shame at many points in his life and death. This article claims that shame is an integral and archetypal part of the human condition, and indeed is at the core of the most profound religious conversion experience because it is the affect closest to the experience self. If shame is not invidiously defended against, shame can draw us to God. Depth psychologists have seen that when shame experience is honestly confronted instead of bypassed, it is transformative and revelatory of identity. Pastors can use the shame experience of Jesus and those to whom he ministered to validate and legitimize shame experien...

Witchcraft, Science and the Skeptical Inquirer: Conversations with the late Prof. Peter Bodunrin

This paper reviews the connection claimed to exist between magic, witchcraft, and parapsychology. Special attention is given to issues raised by the late Prof. Peter Bodunrin of Nigeria, including the demand that knowledge gained by psychic means be grounded in beliefs justified by good reasons and convincing experimental evidence. In contrast, I argue for a more inclusive view of both knowledge and the scientific enterprise that recognizes the importance of non-experimental evidence and the influence of social trends on the choice of research orientations.

Internalization and symbolization in the process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy: A case study

My aim is to describe the therapeutic effect of psychoanalytic psychotherapy by estimating the psychotherapeutic relationship from the viewpoint of symbolization? reflectiveness, which forms the framework for my consideration. The psychic development takes place as an evolution of symbolic and reflective functions, which proceed as an epigenetic process in successful psychotherapy. I formulate symbolic function by using Charles Peirce's sign terminology. These signs are index, icon, and conventional symbol, which form the corresponding three modes of symbolic function. The human mind binds physical observations, which come from him:herself and:or from the outer world, by means of symbolic function and the reflective capacity; thus psychic structures and meanings are formed. A model of symbolization?reflectiveness in the psyche is presented. A longitudinal psychotherapy process is described to illustrate the patient's capacity to process the undifferentiated anxiety into psychic differentiation by means of the epigenetic development of indexical, iconic, and verbal symbolization. The emergence of the reflective self is a crucial phase to consolidate the stable core identity. The nature of symbolization ?reflectiveness in the human mind is twofold: on the one hand, symbolic function creates psychic structures from physical observations, and on the other hand, the human being can then, using the reflective capacity, give to these psychic structures meanings that are individual and permanent. I use the symbolization? reflectiveness model for the consideration of the psychic development in the process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. A detailed psychotherapy process of a borderline patient illustrates these dynamic phenomena of therapy.