Psychic Reality Research Articles

Infant observation and the French model

Psychoanalytic training in the French Societies belonging to the International Psychoanalytic Association does not grant any place to the observation of babies as it exists in certain societies of other countries. Infant observation is even the object of sharp critiques by eminent French theoreticians. The reasons given for condemning infant observation and refusing to give it any place in the training programme lie in theoretical positions concerning the very nature of the Freudian discovery and its interpretation, which is more idealistic than empirical. The author discusses these reasons while drawing attention to the frequent confusion between a reference to empiricism and a reference to the experimental. The fear of a psychologizing deviation of metapsychology and of a denial of psychic reality leads, in the French model, to placing the emphasis on personal analytic experience during the candidate’s psychoanalysis, prolonged by supervisions. It excludes any academic teaching of metapsychology or of related disciplines. The confusion between the empiricism of Esther Bick’s method and the recourse to experimental procedures in developmental research stands in the way of making a place for infant observation and of recognizing its training value, not so much for the acquisition of new knowledge or the validation of metapsychological models, as for its usefulness in developing a mode of psychoanalytic observation and an increase in the candidates’ containing capacities.

The analytic state of consciousness as a form of play and a foundational transference

The analytic state of consciousness is a particular regressive altered state in the patient characterized by an increased sensitivity and reactivity to impressions arising from both the inner world and the analyst, a heightened sense of dependence and vulnerability, a permeability of boundaries in regard to the analyst, and a shift toward functioning on the basis of omnipotent fantasy in the analytic relationship. These changes are accompanied by a feeling of realness of one’s psychic reality, but without any true loss of reality testing. Based on an analysis of the structure of play, this state can itself be understood as a kind of play; it serves as a foundational transference underlying more specific transference manifestations; and it is central to the analytic process. Over time, in response to physical aspects of the analytic setting, its safety, the analyst’s emotional accompaniment, and a generally restrained analytic stance (an issue I discuss in some detail), it emerges in a more developed form that promotes symbolization and ownership of aspects of self, greater emotional presence, and a deeper sense of meaning in one’s experience. Additionally, the concept of the analytic state of consciousness provides a new look at the role of abstinence and frustration in analytic process.

The Doors of Reception: Commentary on Paper by Stephanie Lewin

This discussion on Stephanie Lewin's “Parallel Identification: A Shield Against the Assault of Traumatic Jealousy” addresses the challenge of introducing new concepts and revising previous conceptual understandings while maintaining a balance between innovation and appreciation of the work of previous theorists. In the course of considering Lewin's notion of parallel identification the subjects of internalization, the nature of internal space and its relation to psychic reality, the role of unconscious models of therapeutic action, and the oscillating tension between the selected fact and the overvalued idea are explored and discussed in terms of their relevance to both development and clinical analysis.

Un‐thought out metaphysics in analytical psychology: a critique of Jung's epistemological basis for psychic reality

The author investigates the relation of Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger to Jung's attempts to formulate theory regarding the epistemological conundrum of what can and what cannot be known and what must remain uncertain. Jung's ambivalent use and misuse of Kant's division of the world into phenomenal and noumenal realms is highlighted in discussion of concepts such as the psychoid archetype which he called 'esse in anima' and his use of Schopenhauer's concept of 'will' to justify a transcendence of the psyche/soma divide in a postulation of a 'psychoid' realm. Finally, the author describes Jung's reaction to Heidegger's theories via his assertion that Heidegger's 'pre-given world design' was an alternate formulation of his concept of the archetypes. An underlying theme of the paper is a critique of Jung's foundationalism which perpetuates the myth of an isolated mind. This model of understanding subjectivity is briefly contrasted with Heidegger's 'fundamental ontology' which focuses on a non-Cartesian 'understanding' of the 'presencing of being' in everyday social and historical contexts.

O conceito freudiano de pulsão (Trieb) e algumas de suas implicações epistemológicas

O artigo analisa o conceito de pulsão [Trieb] e discute algumas das implicações epistemológicas dele decorrentes para o estatuto da psicanálise. Tais implicações estariam diretamente relacionadas 1) com a demarcação de um campo de estudo, o terreno propriamente psicanalítico, 2) com a natureza dos fenômenos que habitam o terreno assim demarcado e que, portanto, tem a ver 3) com o estatuto epistemológico da psicanálise como disciplina científica autônoma. Detém-se na análise do significado da pulsão como representante psíquico dos estímulos provenientes do interior do corpo, a fim de evidenciar o caráter erógeno da realidade psíquica.

“The Opening of the Egg”

In his philosophy of the libido, first presented in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, or Symbols of Transformation [of Libido] (Jung 1911-12/1952), Jung claimed that saying “all differentiated achievement as a substitute for some form of sexuality” avoids the real task, namely, to acknowledge psychic reality. He claimed even so-called primitives know the danger of this “deviation” into the sexual. The author explores Jung’s The Red Book painting of Prajapati bowing before Agni in this context. The implications for analytical psychology are discussed. While problems caused by blocked or split-off libido are part of treatment, the larger task is taking on the demands of developed awareness of psychic reality.

The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (review)

Reviewed by: The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field Sara Boffito Giuseppe Civitarese . The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field. 2008. Trans. Philip Slotkin. London: Routledge, 2010. xviii + 222 pp. $82.46 (hc), $36.95 (pb). Giuseppe Civitarese's first book opens before the adventurous reader many doors leading into warm, intimate rooms that one is invited to explore. "Intimate," of course, is what the analyst's consulting room is by definition, and Civitarese embodies the promise of some recent developments of psychoanalytic theory and practice that have shown the relationship between patient and analyst to be warmer and more intimate than it has frequently been considered to be in the past. It is not by chance that the first chapter makes use of Freud's metaphor of a fire at the theater to describe those situations in which an emotion suddenly bursting forth in the transference or the analyst's internal setting—which Civitarese defines as "the capacity to hold oneself at a level of listening specifically directed towards understanding the patient's unconscious" (14)—has a disruptive effect, causing a surprising change of scenery, a potentially transformative discontinuity. In the first chapter, with a similarly disruptive vigor, Civitarese tackles two themes at the core of contemporary psychoanalytic debate: the reality or unreality of the transference, and the interplay between internal and external worlds. These themes run through the whole book, and each chapter functions as a nodal point from which to view them in all their luminosity. The theoretical hypothesis from which the author starts is that the rigorous adoption of the dream paradigm in the session [i.e., the idea that the session can be considered as a dream] . . . succeeds in combining the radical antirealism expressed in the postulate by which all the patient's communications concern the transference-as displacement and projection of the patient's psychic elements-with the "reality" of the transference and with the conviction that the facts of the analysis are codetermined by the patient-analyst dyad. It is moreover misleading to think of being [End Page 380] able to separate the phantastic component from the real component in the analytic relationship. . . . [T]he perspective pertaining to a model of the analytic field-adopted in this chapter-considers on principle any element of the patient's discourse as potentially "transfigured" by the dreamwork and by the rhetoric of the dream; in short by psychic reality and by the transference. (3; italics added) At the center of Civitarese's book is the field model, introduced by Willy and Madeleine Baranger in the 1960s, "a Copernican revolution in the observational vertex of psychoanalysis" (Ferro and Basile, 2009, 1). Adopting this model, according to which every analytic session can be seen as a continuous retelling of the emotional facts of the field, enables patient and analyst, in the words of Anna Scansani's review of Antonino Ferro's Souls in Torment (included in this issue of American Imago), "to work on complex, nonlinear phenomena in a much more radical way." The usefulness of the field model is clearly shown by Civitarese, because the situations he analyzes are complex, multifaceted, and paradoxical. As indeed are the "facts" of analysis, something of which Alberto, one of the patients whose case is described by Civitarese, is fully aware. Alberto starts his long story of a childhood memory by saying, "I'm ready to tell the facts. Pure facts" (4), and then moves on to give an "extremely vivid, overbright" (5) account of the traumatic beginning of his insomnia. Civitarese makes us reflect on how those facts are happening live, in the here-and-now of the transference and the setting; thus "the patient's insomnia is also for long stretches the insomnia of the analysis, ensnared in a dizzying, immobile vigil of intelligence and reflective logic, lacking—except in some rare moments—imagination, playfulness and humor" (5). The way in which Civitarese proceeds in his clinical work recalls Bion's words in one of his 1976 Los Angeles seminars: "What matters is whether the person can have enough respect for the reality, for facts, to allow himself to observe them. . . . [I]f...

A psicanálise é o que reintroduz o nome-do-pai na consideração científica

Lacan def ine a tarefa da psicanálise como sendo a de reintroduzir o Nome-do-Pai na consideração científica. Procura-se demonstrar o que esta definição quer dizer. Para isso, analisa-se a introdução do conceito de Nome-do-Pai como a formalização lacaniana do mito edípico com o qual Freud conceituou a realidade psíquica. Em seguida, percorrem-se as vias do progresso deste conceito bem como as descontinuidades sofridas por ele no primeiro ensino de Lacan.

Psychology and Mysticism: the Case of Saint Theresa of Jesus

Strictly speaking, it is not possible to make psychology of Saint Teresa of Jesus, to study her experience or psychic reality, since we do not have direct access to her as an historical subject. Psychology can, however, legitimately approach her texts and study them through their language, since written texts are intentionally communicative. Cognitive psychology has tools which are suited to this type of analysis. I will examine texts written by Saint Teresa of Jesus (she is often also called Saint Teresa de Ávila) as human conduct and as especially suited to psychology as an explicative-causal and comprehensive-intentional science, though I do prefer to look at them as a mix of the two, explicative-comprehensive — a combination of both levels of reality.

Les destins de l’inceste

The clinic of patients, victims of incest in childhood, invites us to question the fate of such psychical trauma and working-through issues offered by psychoanalytical treatments. Differentiation and articulation between the registers of the act and the factual reality, and those of fantasies and psychical reality, are at the heart of the psychoanalytical approach of incest. But, despite the theoretical contributions of Ferenczi on early trauma and because of a misunderstanding of the “abandonment of Neurotica” by Freud, psychoanalysis, until recently, has been accused of ignoring the specific sexual trauma by favouring only the psychical reality. A reassessment of this theory precedes a reflection on various figures of incest worked through in psychoanalytic literature: if the father-daughter incest is considered relatively often, mother-child incest, which is more rare in its genital forms, is nevertheless common on the form of perverted care, and is just as psychologically harmful. The difficulties of counter-transference work under intense transference reactivation show that the psychotherapist is attacked in his mental capacity to contain and associate. The particular destructiveness of incest trauma lies in its attack of the œdipal organization and its structuring value.

Origins: on the genesis of psychic reality

Figures Acknowledgments About the Texts Introduction: Rethinking Mind in the Age of the Brain Axioms Prolegomena to a System 1 Spacings of the Abyss 2 Deciphering the Genesis Problem: On the Origins of Psychic Reality 3 Mind as Projective Identification 4 Unconscious Semiotics 5 Ego and the Abyss Notes Bibliography Subject Index Author Index

Trauma and deprivation: The relationship between early object relations and the constitution of a sense of self

The paper analyzes the relationship between deprivation and trauma, based on a clinical vignette of a male child, born to a psychotic mother and adopted by a foreign couple when he was seven years old. Based on the importance of maternal care and of a holding environment for the constitution of a sense of self during infancy and childhood, this paper will discuss the factors that facilitated this child's capability to form emotional ties and to constitute a psychical reality even when faced with a very precarious life situation and maternal loss.

The Numbing Feeling of Reality

The author elaborates on Bion’s (1961) description of “the numbing feeling of reality,” to which the analyst may become susceptible in certain clinical situations; that is, the analyst may become preoccupied with the patient’s reality and, under pressure of his morality, can become numbed to an awareness of the psychic reality of the transference. In particular, this involves a propensity by both patient and analyst to deny the reality of loss through deployment of omnipotent fantasy. When this is recognized by the analyst, he can adopt more limited and realistic goals, and omnipotence may gradually be relinquished and mourned. Illustrative clinical material is provided.

The role of imitation in the constitution of psychic reality: The contemporary psychoanalytic perspective of Thomas Ogden

This paper intends to examine the meanings of imitation in the development of psychic reality, taking into account processes that relate to a primitive and sensory-dominated area of experience, described by Thomas Ogden as the autistic–contiguous position. Influenced by the works of Tustin, Bick, Meltzer, and Gaddini, Ogden understands imitation as a form of object relatedness associated to this mode of psychic experience. He emphasizes its role as a primitive and presymbolic mechanism that allows the subject to hold onto some aspects of the other in the absence of a consistent inner space of fantasies where they could be stored. Ogden also examines imitation from the point of view of psychopathology, stressing its role as a defense mechanism against experiences of disruption of the cohesion of the self, but by no means restricted to patients suffering from severe psychological conditions. The paper first examines Ogden's theoretical influences and how imitation may act as a condition for the emergence of an integrated self. Second, it scrutinizes imitation as a predominantly sensorial set of experiences engaged in the production of subjective changes and meanings, and draws distinctions between Ogden's and the other authors’ understanding of imitation.

Ode to an Ever-Open Pathway to Listening and Learning

This essay shares reflections offered by the author when she moderated a "Meet the Author" panel with James T. McLaughlin at a June 2006 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, held in Washington, DC. Taking place only a few weeks before McLaughlin's death, the panel discussed his final work, The Healer's Bent: Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter (2005), edited by William Cornell, which includes both new and some previously published writings, many reviewed here by the author. The author describes how she first met McLaughlin in 1980, when she sought him out after reading his as yet unpublished but soon-to-be classic paper, "Transference, Psychic Reality, and Countertransference," with the thesis of which—challenging the implicit hierarchy in the prevailing view of the inner experience of analyst and of patient—she felt in deep resonance. McLaughlin became for her a model of someone who, in growing older, never stopped learning and rethinking and always remained open to another way of looking at a matter, and at himself. In moderating this panel, the author, along with the other speakers, tried to convey something of the extent to which his book offers a beautiful personal, historical, theoretical, and clinical exposition of continued learning anew.

Life Is Not a Dream: the Importance of Being Real

This paper explores the value attached to "being real," how it is used in various contexts, and how this value persists outside the purview of reality testing or other objective criteria. It addresses how we view the form of a dream and other illusions of reality, including fetishes, whose sole value resides in their material reality. With Proust's description of the experience of tasting a madeleine (compared with the indistinctness of highly charged emotional memories) and a clinical incident as examples, it is possible to assess the important role the search for perceptual identity plays in making the past come to life. Because this search stems from a period of development earlier than the striving for thought identity, it has wrongly attained the status of a poor relative. To counter this, an effort is made to demonstrate its implicit value as a motive underlying repetition. Because in analysis insistence on the reality of an experience is frequently used defensively, analysts run the danger of joining patients in treating external and psychic reality as dichotomous, thereby underestimating the beneficial potential of being real for limiting unconscious omnipotence and thereby restoring from oblivion the past and the wider context of an experience.

Attachment and the driving force of development: A critical discussion of empirical infant research

Empirical infant research has led to an enormous expansion of our knowledge of the psychological functions of the infant. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, it must be questioned whether this research has increased our knowledge of internal psychic life and helped answer the questions of what initiates and drives development. In the first part of this article, we argue that psychoanalysis must necessarily adopt a critical stance towards a scholarly ideal that rests on the positivist empirical tradition. Psychoanalysis has as its object unconscious processes that cannot be directly observed. In the following section, we take as our point of departure the project of attachment theory that Peter Fonagy and his colleagues have developed in an attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis with the empirical and experimental study of small children, and we demonstrate concretely the limitations of such a project vis-à-vis the exploration of the psychic reality of the child. Our line of reasoning continues to demonstrate how drive theory can be shaped so as to contain an object relations theoretical perspective – as has taken place in Jean Laplanche's reinterpretation of the theory of seduction – without abandoning the psychoanalytic theory of the drive and the unconscious.

On the madness of lecturing on gender: a psychoanalytic discussion

This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about to go to war. These psychoanalysts are known for representing ‘the mad side’ of gender and consider femininity and masculinity as lending emotional weight to the body and as one source for phantasy material that propels gender’s reach into symbolisation, conflicts, and intersubjectivity. Their views are brought into tension with Winnicott’s reconceptualisation of aggression in gender development. While historical questions on the relation between psychoanalytic theories of gender and the context of World War II are raised, Winnicott turns to a little war in the emotional life of gender to analyse traces of mental pain that its history leaves in its wake. He raises the new problem of the play between internal and external reality and how a one‐sided take on gender as either masculine or feminine as the entire experience and goal of the body forecloses attempts to understand the self’s gender work as both internal conflict and intersubjectivity. Loyalty to one side, or the defence of splitting into good and bad, itself the condition for war, has as one of its roots gender polarity. The madness of lecturing on gender resides in conveying this problem. My contribution leans on psychoanalytic allegory: that a return to historical discussion of psychoanalysis on the problems of representations of gender may allow reflection on our world of war and create elbow room needed to reconceptualise the currency, difficulties, and emotional obstacles repeated in contemporary pedagogical efforts and research.

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.

Ontology of information. Philosophical essays

The information approach is practiced to study the Macrocosm (physical reality), biosphere, Microcosm (psychic reality), social reality, spiritual reality, and the technosphere. The ways in which scientists of different specialties understand information are characterized in detail. The interrelations between types of realities and types of information are revealed.