Psychoanalytic Ideas Research Articles

Spatialising skin: Pushing the boundaries of trauma geographies

By focusing on the somatic qualities of trauma this paper addresses emotion and affect as a means to link together trauma's spatial, physical, subconscious and psychosocial dimensions. Its aim is to extend theoretical discussion on spatially located affectual moments of trauma by utilising the concept of skin. Skin is used here as a metaphorical and theoretical framework for examining ideas of boundaries and containment. A container is a deceptively simple idea but requires constant maintenance. Trauma, however, often threatens to spill over the boundaries of containers exposing the fluidity of boundaries both theoretical and material. Close attention is paid to the psychoanalytic idea of skin to extrapolate how trauma draws in ideas of surfaces and abjection. In some ways abjection exposes the fragility of borders, how they can be threatened from both without and within. When working across the skin, an examination of what bodies do in both the post-disaster environment (Christchurch) and in relocated spaces (Waikato) is undertaken to illuminate the theoretical premises of this work. People move toward others in order to share their experiences, thus, trauma is encountered as both: individual and social, interior and exterior, incorporating body and psyche rather than separating the terms.

Reading Formations of Subjectivity: From Discourse to Psyche

AbstractThis article represents a critical overview of strategies to examine subjectivity in discourse, highlighting a series of methodological approaches, which seek to manage the tension between discourse studies' focus on social and cultural structures, and psychoanalysis' interest in unconscious motivations. One aim is to trouble the supposed opposition between discourse analysis and the psychosocial approach and to regard the latter as a possible extension of insights established by the former. It is argued here that psychosocial readings in general, and Lacanian approaches more specifically, offer a cautious, nuanced way of introducing psychoanalytic ideas into the analysis of texts. The first part of this article offers examples of discourse analytic approaches, which have explicitly sought to incorporate psychoanalytic notions, followed by a discussion of Lacanian discourse analysis – a method shaped directly by this psychoanalytic school's concern with language. The article concludes with a series of methodological injunctions for conducting a psychosocial form of textual analysis.

Money as Emotional Currency: Psychoanalytic Ideas

Money as Emotional Currency: Psychoanalytic Ideas

Relating therapeutically in family therapy: pragmatics and intangibles

This paper offers a set of theory reflections on the challenges of relating therapeutically and holding a therapeutic position in family therapy. The context is the relational space of family therapy, which shapes the possibilities and limits of therapeutic relating. Pragmatics unfold in the doing of therapy within this space, and processes of engagement, empathy and the therapist's capacities for resonance and reactivities are all considered as part of the pragmatics of therapeutic relating in family therapy. Yet these processes and the therapist's involvement of self are not simply pragmatic. The exploration turns to ideas that attempt to meet the intangibles of the intersubjective space of therapeutic relationships. Ideas from contemporary family therapy discussions drawing on psychoanalytic ideas are placed side‐by‐side ideas of dialogical therapy as a way of opening out different understandings of the intangibles of the space between in therapeutic relating.Practitioner points The relational space of family therapy shapes the possibilities and limits of therapeutic relating Practices in relation to engagement, empathy and the therapist's involvement of self unfold as part of the pragmatics of therapeutic relating within this relational space Complexities of the therapist's involvement and use of self, and the richness and potentials of the therapeutic relationship, also lie in the intangibles of the space between Ideas from psychoanalytic thinking and dialogical therapy offer understandings of the intangibles of the intersubjective space of therapeutic relating.

Understanding defensive and secure in-group positivity: The role of collective narcissism

ABSTRACTIntegrating psychoanalytic ideas of group idealisation with social identity and categorisation theories, this article discusses the distinction between secure and defensive in-group positivity. Narcissistic in-group positivity captures a belief in in-group greatness that is contingent on external validation. It reflects defensive in-group positivity, insofar as it stems from the frustration of individual needs, and predicts increased sensitivity to threats as well as undesirable consequences for out-groups and the in-group. Secure in-group positivity—that is, in-group positivity without the narcissistic component—is a confidently held positive evaluation of one’s in-group that is independent of the recognition of the group in the eyes of others. It stems from the satisfaction of individual needs, is resilient to threats and has positive consequences for the in-group and out-groups. I review evidence for these two distinct ways people relate to their social groups and discuss theoretical and practical implications for understanding intra- and intergroup relations.

Introduction to special issue on ‘Acknowledgement and accountability in the Israel-Palestine conflict’

This special issue presents several papers that use psychoanalytic ideas to help understand the dynamics of conflict in the Israel-Palestine situation. Separately and as a whole, these papers also describe and advocate routes towards social justice. This introduction offers the rationale for the special issue and outlines the content of the individual contributions.

Annihilation anxiety and crime

This article explores the psychoanalytic construct of annihilation anxiety in order to develop a more thoroughgoing engagement between criminological theory and contemporary psychoanalysis. Though a few criminologists have commented on crime, scapegoating and retribution using classic psychoanalytic ideas, we bring Hurvich’s current empirical work on annihilation anxiety to the discourse. Beginning with his definition of annihilation anxiety as ‘fears of being overwhelmed, merged, penetrated, fragmented, and destroyed’, we apply Hurvich’s measures to reactions to crime and insecurity and interpersonal, collective and international crime. We discuss doing criminology interpretively, applied to the dynamic connections between crime and reactions to it, including political and policy responses. We conclude that criminologists could and should help distinguish between potential and imminent threats, to advance a post-positivist approach to crime and other security threats. We argue that such an approach moves criminology toward a social science more humane and pragmatic for its conscious engagement with unconscious fears harboured amidst the purportedly rational calculi of justice.

Psychoanalytic Teaching by Video Link and Telephone.

In this era of global connectedness, there is great interest in using distance video platforms such as Skype and VSee, as well as the telephone, for conducting psychoanalysis and psychotherapy across geographic distance. Little, however, has been written about the use of technology for psychoanalytic education. The International Psychotherapy Institute has extensive experience in the use of videoconference and telephone technology in the teaching of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, including didactic teaching, infant observation, and individual and group supervision, with individuals and groups across the United States and overseas. Use of this technology for tele-education has facilitated the spread of psychoanalytic ideas, recruitment of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic trainees, and ongoing training for members living at great distances from one another and from the institute. This work is in many ways similar to ordinary psychoanalytic teaching and supervision, and yet presents significant differences in technique, opportunity, and group dynamics. Further implementation and study of this methodology can greatly aid in the dissemination of psychoanalysis in the digital age.

Temporality and the torments of time.

Immersion in time gives birth to consciousness, as well as conflict and torment. When human beings developed a sense of future, they also gained the ability to anticipate threats from nature or their fellow beings. They thereby created cultures that are bastions of survival, as well as places of poetry, art and religion where they could band together and reflect upon their common plight. The practice of psychoanalysis is in many ways a temporal process, a process of remembering, for owning and elaborating a past that gives us substance, thereby providing a basis for reflective consciousness. Stimulated by Freud's early writings, Lacan, Laplanche and their successors in particular have focussed extensively on time and psychoanalysis, and their views are a central point of this discussion. A substantial case study is offered that provides concrete examples of these perspectives. A multi-faceted view of temporality emerges, one that is more syncopated than linear or teleological. In conclusion, I will briefly discuss recent findings in the neuroscience of memory and 'time travel' that underpin contemporary psychoanalytic ideas in surprising ways. It is important to remember that acceptance of the contradictory nature of temporal experience can open space for increased freedom and playfulness.

Psychotherapy with people who smell

This paper stems from psychotherapy work with patients who ‘neglect personal hygiene’ in homelessness and chronic mental health settings, and consultancy to staff groups tasked with patients’ ‘social inclusion’. Psychoanalytic theory has largely eschewed exploring internal psychic states communicated by odour and, equally, the meaning of marked societal hostility towards malodorous individuals. The paper looks at historical and anthropological notions of ‘dirt’ and the construction of the ‘unwashed’ as a social category in the formation of bourgeois society. Psychoanalytic ideas of unconscious bodily and psychic communication are described. Case examples explore how troubled relations between body and mind result from early abuse/neglect, where the internal world is suffocated by trauma and ‘dread’ which cannot be contained and processed. From a psychosocial perspective, taking up a role as ‘unacceptable’ is the paradoxical condition of belonging for many members of the social whole. The paper suggests that invasive smell confronts us with our repressed knowledge of that which is ‘rotten’ in the emotional and sociopolitical environment in which ‘the unwashed’ exist. An example from organisational consultancy traces profound disturbance in institutional dynamics that occurs when the malodorous individual seeks to claim shared social resources. The author questions the prevalent view that ‘being smelly’ is an attempt to withdraw from social and psychic contact, rather than a meaningful communication which is within the scope of psychoanalytic thought to understand.

The culture of family secrets

In mainstream psychology, family secrets are usually discussed in terms of intra-psychological processes. However, the sense making of the family, which is a multilayered system, is mediated through culture. Hence, a complementary intersubjective perspective is inevitable for understanding secrecy formation. Merging psychoanalytic ideas with cultural-semiotic analysis, the current paper explores the relationships between three complementary levels of secrecy formation: the macro-level of cultural mediation, the mesoscopic-level of family dynamics, and the micro-level of intra-psychological processes. This perspective is developed and illustrated through an in-depth reading of Amir Gutfreund’s novel, Our Holocaust.

Behind Closed Doors: Sadomasochistic Enactments and Psychoanalytic Research

Psychoanalytic research has flourished in recent years, yet so has animosity toward it. This curious state of affairs has led to a divergence of opinions in a professional community that is demanding more (and more rigorous) evidence regarding treatment efficacy. In this article, we briefly review the ways in which psychoanalytically oriented research has served to strengthen psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic treatments in the professional community. We discuss ways in which this research has been devalued within some psychoanalytic circles and suggest that such efforts can be considered as a sadomasochistic enactment that impedes the advancement of the psychoanalytic endeavor. We close by offering strategies for how to overcome these negative ideas and actions so that psychoanalytic ideas will continue to gain traction in contemporary psychiatry and psychology.

The other side of marketing and advertising

My aim in this article is to look at the relationships between three diverse, but related, areas of human activity in terms of their possible effect on the human being, namely, marketing/advertising, psychoanalysis and art. For a long time, art has been an important inspiration for psychoanalysis. Art also has an important function in marketing and advertising. From its very inception marketing and advertising has sought inspiration from psychoanalysis. Indeed, Edward Bernays, the founding father of public relations and a nephew of Freud, applied psychoanalytic ideas, theories and principles to the domains of public relations and advertising. Art is made to function in the domain of marketing and advertising with the aim, of course, to sell products and to open up new markets. Art lends itself very well to that aim. Hagtvedt (as quoted in Mielach) writes:

‘Spiritalismus vincit Mundum’ Dutch spiritualism and the beginning of psychical research

The science of psychical research and parapsychology stemmed, among other things, from wonder about the phenomena of spiritualism: manifestations of the deceased through mediums in seances. In the Netherlands, academic psychical research emerged in 1919, when the Studievereeniging voor Psychical Research (SPR) was founded. In this paper, it is argued that a revival of the popularity of spiritualism during the war contributed to the emergence of the Dutch SPR shortly after the First World War had ended. Mass bereavement does not suffice as an explanation for the growth of the spiritualistic movement in the neutral Netherlands in the war years. It is demonstrated that in the writings of spiritualists about the First World War persistent fin-de-siecle themes can be distinguished. Before and during the First World War Dutch spiritualism was dominated by ‘ideologically’ inclined spiritualists and their more ‘critical-scientific’ counterparts were a minority. This had hindered the development of Dutch psychical research. After the war spiritualists shared their hopeful and optimistic perspective of the human soul with scholars leaning towards psychoanalytical and psychomonist ideas. This eventually led to a joint foundation of the Dutch SPR. This alignment between ideological and critical-scientific spiritualists would not last; opinions on how to handle the research subjects (i.e. mediums) remained too distinct.

The illusion of autonomy

This article assesses a realm of psychoanalytic social theory that is relatively under-discussed – existential psychoanalysis – in order to gain further insight into the relationship of psychoanalytic ideas to humanism. I offer a reading of certain influential thinkers in this tradition, namely Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, presenting conceptual clarifications while highlighting a cluster of important aspects of their respective repertoires relevant to humanism. I do so with the intention of teasing out how contributing voices to existential psychoanalysis negotiate humanism’s foundational ideas, specifically the notion of ‘the individual subject’, with the bed-rocks of psychoanalytic thought, namely the unconscious. Finally, I conclude with critical commentary on the existential-psychoanalytic project drawn from what is often thought of as the anti-humanist tradition, with specific attention paid to Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault.

Dilemmas of psychoanalysis and psychology: critical conceptions of subjectivity in the work of Marie Jahoda

This article explores work that anticipates current interest in the development of ‘psychosocial studies’. Marie Jahoda’s Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology raises important questions about the historical and extant relationships between psychoanalysis and the discipline of psychology. This article traces those questions within two contextual frames. The first contextual frame comprises the historical vicissitudes of psychoanalysis and psychology from the 1930s through to the 1970s. Jahoda’s questions are rooted in a theoretical background that brings the tradition of German-speaking radical psychoanalysis into Anglo-American psychology. The second contextual frame is the development of ‘critical’ psychological attempts to recruit psychoanalysis for an alternative account of subjectivity from the 1980s through to the turn of the 21st century. Jahoda’s contribution, and its place as a ‘hinge-point’ between old and new conceptions of psychology, is to draw attention to the role of psychoanalytic ideas in the discipline and to provoke further critical reflection on Freud’s work today.

Psychoanalytic ideas and their place in psychiatry training in the UK

1when he undertook the challenge of revealing the power of the human mind using a new framework. Over time, the framework came to be based on two models of the mind: the topographic and the structural. The former conceptualises the mind as being made up of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious aspects; the latter divides the mind into three structures: the id, ego, and superego. The two models are overlain to give a more complete picture of the mind. Freud’s theories, and the method of psychoanalysis based on these theories, have frequently been criticised for being unscientifi c,

Reflective Supervision for Child Protection Practice – Reaching Beneath the Surface

This paper describes a model of reflective supervision for child protection practice that is informed by psychoanalytic theory. Eileen Munro promotes the idea of depth in practice, referring to the skills and knowledge required to undertake the work. Her reports highlight the importance of supervision to provide a thinking space for practitioners where reflection can take place. This paper will explore the importance of supervision in more depth and describe how psychoanalytic ideas can help us understand the complexities of our work with families, anchoring us to a solid theoretical base and helping to make sense of the maelstrom of feelings that are stirred in us as well as in our colleagues and clients.

The Unconscious Work of History

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the emotional processes that animate historical work. Starting with a critical discussion of recent work in the history of emotions, it investigates the emotional aspects of the historian's relationship to the past, and demonstrates how psychoanalytic ideas – particularly the concept of the unconscious – can illuminate that relationship. Part one describes the emotional hold of the past and how historians and psychoanalysts have perceived it. Part two examines the unconscious resonances of personal sources such as letters, memoirs and oral testimony. Even in the most private personal account, such as a diary, the writer imagines a reader, and emotions are evoked through the communication between the writer or speaker and the audience, real or imagined. The historian, in viewing such communication, tries to be receptive to the states of mind being conveyed. In that way she or he is drawn into the unconscious dramas of the historical actor. Part three is concerned with the unconscious pressures in the present to which the historian responds. This is as much a matter of collective psychology as it is of the individual historian's subjectivity, relating to the types of unconscious work that society demands of history. Historical scholarship, I hope to show, not only reflects the particular intellectual, political and economic milieu in which it is produced, but involves the historian in a process of navigation between her or his own unconscious, the past traces of unconscious emotion in historical artefacts, and the present psychological needs that history serves.

Belonging to oneself alone: The spirit of neoliberalism

In the last three decades, neoliberalism has come to dominate most of the West, reshaping many institutions according to its ideological belief in markets as the optimal form of regulation of social and economic life. Whereas formerly market ideology was contested by collectivist ideas of the public good, at this point of its triumph there is little systemic opposition to it. Does psychoanalysis have distinctive insights to offer on neoliberalism, and if so, can they contribute to contesting its domination? Two starting points for such a critique are the relational ideas that are the foundations of psychoanalytic object-relations approaches, and the post-Kleinian theory of narcissism. Neoliberalism is engaged in the remaking of identities and subjectivities in individualist terms, and psychoanalytic ideas provide a resource for contesting its conception of human nature.