Psychoanalytic Investigation Research Articles

Kaës’ Internal Groups and Actual Groups: A Relational Perspective

Rene Kaës (2007), an influential French psychoanalyst relatively unknown to English-speaking readers, extends the field of psychoanalytic investigation and practice to groups. Building on Klein, Anzeiu, Bion, and Lacan, Kaës presents a dual-axes theory in which early oedipal and sibling complexes structure unconscious dynamics of internal groups. According to Kaës, analytic group psychotherapy provides access to the phantasies, affects, and action tendencies contained within internal groups that would be otherwise inaccessible. While a few reference articles have appeared in the English literature, Kaës’ bold assertions, core concepts, and praxis have not been subject to critical evaluation. I introduce Kaës’ main ideas, demonstrate their influence on my group work, and by comparing two case examples, from his practice and mine, articulate our differences, some of which arise from different conceptions of and approaches to intersubjectivity. The discussion continues in the final section which briefly considers the nature of psychoanalytic learning and how we may employ the therapeutic group to reach this goal.

Mourning, melancholia and machines: An applied psychoanalytic investigation of mourning in the age of griefbots*

ABSTRACT Death and mourning are being shaped by posthumous opportunities for the dead to affect current life in ways not possible in pre-digital generations. The psychological and sociological impact of the dead ‘online’ and of ‘grief tech’ is only beginning to be understood. It has not yet been explored psychoanalytically until this paper that examines one type of grief tech, namely the griefbot. This development is critically explored through a psychoanalytic reading of an episode of Black Mirror. I suggest that a psychoanalytic model of mourning provides an invaluable perspective to help us to think about this technology’s potential as well as the psychological and ethical risks it poses. I argue that the immortalisation of the dead through digital permanence works against facing the painful reality of loss and the recognition of otherness, which is fundamental to psychic growth and to the integrity of our relationships with others. Drawing on Derrida’s conceptualization of ‘originary mourning’, I suggest that mourning is an interminable process that challenges us to preserve within the self the otherness of the lost object. The tools we use for mourning need to be assessed first and foremost against this psychological and fundamentally ethical process.

Exploring through Freudian’s psychoanalysis, the impact of ID, Ego, and Superego on Amir’s transformation in the novel the kite runner

This research work provides an in-depth psychoanalytic investigation of Amir’s character in the novel, The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s tripartite model of personality structure. It delves deeply into the analysis of how Amir's character undergoes changes and adapts to various life situation by delving into his instinctive desire, intellectual decision making, as well as internal sense of morality. The study emphasizes how Amir’s actions, choices, and emotions are influenced by the three elements found in Sigmund Freud’s theory. This would furthermore, would shed light on Amir’s ongoing struggle regarding his quest for immediate pleasure, rationality, and ethical standards. Thus, this research exhibits an in-depth exploration of the protagonist's psychological journey and the themes of redemption, guilt, and self-discovery.

Da catástrofe das emergências humanitárias à melancolização

This article is a theoretical study arising from the umbrella research project, Psychoanalytic Investigation of Clinical Phenomena in Depression in the Context of COVID-19, by the Laboratory for the Investigation of Contemporary Psychopathologies (UFF. Volta Redonda Campus), in an inter-institutional partnership with the Graduate Program in Psychology at UFRJ. The aim of the research is to demarcate and define the effects of the contemporary mutation of the social bond on subjectivity, based on the recognition that humanitarian/sanitary emergencies are catastrophic for subjective functioning. In this paper, we will present the Freudian démarche that led us to recognize melancholization as the main impact of humanitarian/sanitary emergencies on subjective functioning. The paper recalls the use of the term catastrophe and its epistemological status within the framework of psychoanalysis. This term is fundamental to our research hypothesis: humanitarian/sanitary emergencies are a catastrophe because they produce the civilizational ruin of guarantees for the affected population and the suspension of the functioning of subjective defences and sublimatory strategies for dealing with the condition of helplessness. By considering humanitarian/sanitary emergencies as a catastrophe, the paper highlights, in the line of argument developed by Sigmund Freud, the emergence of the affect of despondency or melancholization as pathos in dark times of humanitarian/sanitary emergencies.

Science and impossible: an psychoanalytic investigation of evidence-based

Resumo: Partindo da leitura lacaniana de que a ascensão do discurso científico produziu uma mudança na posição do médico, interrogam-se os efeitos do estabelecimento do evidence-based como paradigma para a prática médica. Se a inferência estatística exemplifica a convergência entre matematização e objetividade, lança-se mão de uma vinheta relativa à prática em um ambulatório de Distúrbios da Diferenciação Sexual para interpelar os impasses relativos à designação do sexo nesses casos. Pretende-se evidenciar a diferença entre a práxis da psicanálise e a abordagem médica que se orienta na direção da universalização, situando assim seus limites frente ao real do sexo.

An uncanny dialogue: Lev Shestov’s philosophy as the ‘great art’ of not seeing and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic investigations of the unconscious mind

Having become known as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Lev Shestov (1866–1938) advanced his pioneering ideas in parallel to Freud’s development of psychoanalysis. Originating in his earlier works, his views of philosophy as art and the corresponding idea of the possibility of a fundamental, inner and creative transformation of one’s worldview found its further expression in his mature writings, in which his insight into the nature of other thinkers’ creativity took on a definitively active role in his philosophy. With the focus on the notion of the transformative capability of thought in Shestov’s writing and based on my archival research and translations, in this article, I explore the Kyiv-born philosopher’s ideas in dialogue with Freud’s psychoanalytical theory and in the context of the postmodern view of reality as a symbolical and multifaceted representation.

Psychoanalysis of COVID-19 Patient Narratives: A Descriptive Study.

Background and Objectives: COVID-19 patients are a psychologically vulnerable patient group who suffer from both physical symptoms and psychological problems. The present study is a psychoanalytic investigation of COVID-19 patients utilizing Lacan's desire theory. We aimed to explore the manner in which patients' desire is presented in their lived experience narratives and sought to discover factors which directly impacted on this process. Materials and Methods: In-depth semi-structural interviews were conducted with 36 COVID-19 patients in China. During each interview, participants narrated their lived experiences of COVID-19 infection. Emotions, metaphors, and behaviors in patient narratives were collated as the main points for psychoanalysis. Results: Our findings demonstrated that the desire for being a healthy person made patients emotionally sensitive to the social environment. Anxiety and obsessive behaviors emerged in the process, which reveals their desire for that which they lack. Furthermore, public fear with respect to COVID-19 was somehow converted to psychological pressure on COVID-19 patients. Thus, these patients attempted to "de-identify" their identity as "patients". Positive responses of COVID-19 patients to the external world included admiring medical personnel, government, and country, while negative responses included interpersonal conflicts or complaints about discrimination. Following the rules of the Other, COVID-19 patients were influenced by the Other's desire in constructing their own image of a healthy person. Conclusions: This study revealed COVID-19 patients' psychological need to rid themselves of the identity of "patient" at the individual and social level. Our findings have clinical implications in helping COVID-19 patients to reshape their identity and to live a normal life.

What Happens When a Trans Patient Happens.

Transphobia, now emerging as a limit to the analytic attitude, requires the kind of psychoanalytic investigation that continues in response to misogyny, homophobia, and biphobia, as they figure in both clinical practice and theory building. Without a psychoanalytic investigation into the dynamics of transphobia in psychoanalysis, efforts to conceptualize trans subjects in an analytically open and neutral manner must falter. An exploration of the author's own efforts to overcome transphobic bias, as well as an analysis of transphobic dynamics in a well-known case in the literature, show some of the challenges that arise when attempts at thinking psychoanalytically get caught up in conscious and unconscious forms of transphobia.

Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne's Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David Diamond

Reviewed by: Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne's Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David Diamond Magnus Ullén David Diamond. Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne's Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation. Routledge, 2021. 191 + x pp. £120.00 (hardback). In contemporary Hawthorne criticism "[c]lose reading and psychoanalysis are not in favor," David Diamond notes in the introduction to his own refreshingly unapologetic attempt to provide a Freudian reading of Hawthorne's four major romances. While fully aware that "a psychoanalytic investigation of a fictional character is a perilous matter" (10), Diamond nevertheless insists that a Freudian reading, carefully performed, can "bring the reader back to the texts that Hawthorne wrote and draw attention to the urgent moral and spiritual conflicts that envelop the protagonists, conflicts that underpin all movement toward human liberation" (17). Unlike the famous Freudian reading by Frederick Crews (1966), Diamond seeks to diagnose not Hawthorne himself, but his characters. He stresses that he approaches the texts as a practicing psychoanalyst rather than a literary scholar and is careful to hedge his claims accordingly. Even so, his explicitly recuperative aim suggests he is also keen to present his own mode of reading as something of an antidote to much recent Hawthorne criticism. This makes for an engaging study that thrives on its ardent engagement with Hawthorne's texts, even if it does not always convince. Diamond focuses exclusively on the four canonical romances, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. References to the tales and sketches are few and in passing, with the exception of a passage from the 1835 sketch "The Haunted Mind," which is repeatedly advanced as proof that Hawthorne prefigures Freud: "In the depths of every heart, is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above, may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open" (Hawthorne 9: 306). [End Page E-1] According to Diamond, Hawthorne in this passage "drafts the broad outline of what would be central aspects of the Freudian topographic system set forth in The Ego and the Id: the division of the psychic territory of the id, and superego, and the mediating function of the ego" (4). He identifies, in each of the romances, a moment that repeats this early depiction of how "the hidden contents of the haunted mind may flood into consciousness" (23): this is "what Dimmesdale experiences in the aftermath of his encounter with Hester in the forest" (23); it is "what Holgrave experiences in his hour-long vigil with Jaffrey Pyncheon's corpse" (51); it is what Zenobia suffers when losing her "fortune and prospects for love" (82); and it is what makes Miriam signal to Donatello to kill the Model (110–11). In all cases, Diamond starts out from this scene when the unconscious is momentarily let loose, in order "to elucidate the dynamics of this critical moment and the transformation that result from it" (111). The first thing to notice about this approach is that it seems much less dependent upon psychoanalytic theory than Diamond lets on. One can disagree with Freud (or Diamond's understanding of Freud) and still find his discussion of the structural pattern he identifies rewarding. Diamond persuasively argues that critics have tended to overlook to what extent Hester's development in The Scarlet Letter is aided rather than impeded by Dimmesdale's actions. He believes that The House of the Seven Gables truly has a happy ending and that Coverdale, despite his protestations to the contrary, was never in love with Priscilla but with Zenobia. And he holds, finally, that The Marble Faun does not end "with the defeat of romance but by asserting its unique power to effect and transform" and that "there is every reason to believe that as an artist [Hilda] will fulfill the potential that the narrator finds in her" (135). Whatever we make of these judgments (I personally find myself agreeing and disagreeing in about equal measures), many readers will no doubt take delight in the...

A pesquisa Psicanalítica na Universidade: Estratégias Metodológicas de Investigação

Abstract The principle of psychoanalytic investigation is to provide conditions for discoveries, but not necessarily to discover what was sought. On the other hand, at the university level, a frequent requirement is the delineation of general objectives, specific objectives, hypotheses, and expected results. How is it possible, then, in the face of clinical and university claims, to study unconscious phenomena so as not to violate the nature of the object of study? This article proposes to conduct a theoretical discussion on the epistemology of psychoanalytic research and its place within university research. Psychoanalytic research is conceptualized as a matrix of strategies guided by clinical practice and research. In this context, the focus of this article is directed at the case study.

A Deconstructive and Psychoanalytic Investigation of (Corporeal) Law Enforcement

A Deconstructive and Psychoanalytic Investigation of (Corporeal) Law Enforcement

Love for the Colonizer: Literary and Psychoanalytic Investigations of Brazil's Foundational Trauma

The Brazilian cultural and political project began in 1822 with the end of colonization. At its outset, colonization stood fictitious in its enormous power to shape reality. In Latin America there was a confluence between the politicians and writers of the 19th century that guaranteed wholly pervasive foundational mythologies—the people building the legal-political state were also setting the mythological ideology of the nation in stone. As such, foundational myths served to unify the people under a common national banner. However, in their attempts to overcome the ghost of colonization, they ended up guaranteeing a wholly pervasive structure wherein the repressed trauma could fester. In Brazil, foundational works, like José de Alencar's Iracema, instead of rejecting the trauma of colonization, engendered myths that repressed it, romanticizing a narrative for the people to fall in love with their colonizer. This love, I argue, led to a specific cultural complex that induces a repetition compulsion of the original traumatic event up to this day, guaranteeing unconscious entrapment and a constant return and submission to the figure of the colonizer.

Reality and Truth in the Politically Correct Organization: The Case of the Dan Rather Memo Debacle at CBS News

Political correctness may be considered to represent control over discourse. If that were all it were, it would be a matter of little concern to organizations. However, organizational decisions involve positions that are proposed and defended through discourse. Hence political correctness must imply control over organizational decision-making, and hence over every aspect of the organization. The implication of this is that the psychological dynamics that underlie political correctness come to be the underlying dynamics of the organization as a whole. I illustrate this through a psychoanalytic investigation of the Dan Rather memo debacle at CBS News.

Three contributions on psychosis: A brief introduction

The psychoanalytic investigation of psychosis dates back to the very origins of psychoanalysis itself. Freud discusses the process of psychotic symptom-formation on several occasions in his letters...

From Resistance to Analytic Truth

“Resistance” in psychoanalysis from its inception has meant the patient’s opposition to and interference with the analytic process that must be followed to resolve the patient’s neurosis. This concept of “resistance” implies the analyst possesses an objective truth about the patient and the therapeutic action of the process. Without that assumption, the concept itself is meaningless. It is argued that the concept of objective truth is inapplicable to any study of the human process, such as psychoanalysis, so resistance is not a defensible concept for the field. However, the commonly proposed alternative, relativism, leads to solipsism and therefore is also not a viable epistemology for psychoanalytic investigation. The concept of analytic truth is proposed as a third way that avoids the pitfalls of both objectivism and relativism. It is argued that when the patient opposes what the analyst regards as a self evident truth, an especially difficult type of enactment is occurring. The clinical approach to extricating the analytic pair from the strangulated enactment of clashing viewpoints is illustrated with the case of a young man who “never got angry.”

Freud and Leonardo in Egypt

Freud and Leonardo in Egypt DANIEL ORRELLS Stories of selfhood were central to the nineteenth -century cultural and literary imagination.1 For numerous intellectuals of the nineteenth century, the Italian Renaissance had become a privileged site for thinking about the emergence of the category of the individualized self in the history of the West, in a grand narrative about the rupture from ecclesiastical authority to secular and scientific thinking. The life-story of Leonardo Da Vinci, artist and scientist, was a crucial example for nineteenth-century historiography about the origins of modern individualist subjectivity.2 It is hardly surprising, then, that Freud turned to concentrate on Leonardo in his 1910 biography of the Renaissance man, to construct the psychoanalytic account of the history of the self. What is remarkable and fascinating, however, is that ancient Egypt should be so important in Freud’s biography: it reveals Freud’s investment in Egyptology for the development of the psychoanalytic narrative of selfhood. If the Italian Renaissance was figured as the rebirth of Graeco-Roman paganism in the history of European culture, as late nineteenth-century commentators such as Walter Pater—read and imbibed by Freud—had argued, then what did ancient Egypt have to do with Leonardo?3 This essay excavates Freud’s fascination with the place of Egypt in understanding the beginnings of the self in his 1910 biography of Leonardo, whose pre-Oedipal relationship with his mother was crucial for Freud’s portrait of the Renaissance man. The complicated place of ancient Egypt within arion 28.3 winter 2021 106 freud and leonardo in egypt the modern European cultural imagination—both the object of linguistic and racial anthropologies and the archive of the truth of the biblical narrative—profoundly informed Freud’s psychobiography of Leonardo. On the one hand, the possibility that Egypt was at the origins of the story of what it means to be human—before Oedipus, before Greece—that Egyptian archaeology might contain timeless, esoteric truths was crucial to Freud’s understanding of the subject at the dawn of desire. And yet, on the other, the early-twentieth-century investment in the scientificity of the new discipline of Egyptology provided Freud with a support mechanism for his own “scientific,” psychoanalytic investigations into Leonardo’s life-story. Indeed, Leonardo was such a fascinating figure for Freud—a figure for identification—precisely because, as the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo was both artist and scientist. Freud’s interest in the classical and sacred art of Leonardo as well as Leonardo’s scientific investigations reflected Freud’s own complex intellectual identity, informed by his classical humanistic education and his medical training . As Richard Armstrong has put it so well, the Leonardo essay can be “read as a key for understanding Freud’s personalized genealogy of empirical science.”4 The complexity of the position of Egyptology at the turn of the century, then, will be crucial to any understanding of Freud’s own precarious epistemological authority as it was explored in relation to Leonardo.5 We will begin by examining the importance of Egyptian archaeology for Freud’s understanding of Leonardo’s early relationship with his mother, which in turn provided Freud with a method for interpreting Leonardo’s paintings. Freud will invoke the heroics of modern Egyptologists, such as Jean-François Champollion, who in the 1820s had successfully deciphered hieroglyphic writing, in order to characterize the psychoanalyst as the decipherer of the hidden meaning of Leonardo’s art. And yet, as we shall see, the overdetermined position of Egypt in the European public imagination Daniel Orrells 107 since the Enlightenment would also encourage Freud to turn back to the Egyptology before Champollion’s decipherment. Freud’s Egyptological excavations would also allow him to intervene in early twentieth-century debates in the “racial” sciences which were developing increasingly hardening views about the “Aryan” and the “Semitic” “races.” If Leonardo’s biography was such an important narrative for the story of the origins of the western self, then it was not only Leonardo ’s mix of artist and scientist which was important for Freud. By linking Leonardo back to Egyptian origins, Freud was able to make a point about the “Aryan” / “Semitic...

German Jews between Freud, Marx, and Halakha: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Erich Fromm, and the Psychoanalysis of Jewish Ritual in 1920s Heidelberg1

Abstract This essay explores the psychoanalytic sanitarium (Therapeutikum) directed by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Erich Fromm in Heidelberg from 1924 to 1928. The Therapeutikum aimed to combine adherence to Jewish ritual with psychoanalytic practice and radical politics for a group of German Jews who were rethinking their Orthodox backgrounds in light of new intellectual and political currents and modern sensibilities. Visitors to the sanitarium included many leading German-Jewish thinkers, and Heidelberg’s proximity to Frankfurt placed the Therapeutikum in the orbit of the Institute for Social Research and near a major hub in the renaissance of Jewish learning then occurring. At the centre of the article is a discussion of essays by Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm that subjected Jewish ritual (kashrut and shabbat) to psychoanalytic investigation. Appearing in Imago in 1927, the articles marked the two writers’ public break with Orthodox Judaism. This essay argues that the Imago articles marked a crucial moment in the political, intellectual, and religious history of German Jewry. Even if the Fromms’ synthesis of Freudianism, radical politics, and Judaism was conceptually shaky, their sanitarium illustrates the centrality of psychoanalysis—as a sensibility, a hermeneutic and above all a way of creating social and communal bonds—to a generation of German Jews navigating the challenges of German and Jewish modernity.

Otto Fenichel and Ecopsychoanalysis in the Anthropocene

Otto Fenichel, whose era coincided with a time of immense social and political upheaval, was well known for his engagement in social as well as clinical spheres. In recent years, several psychoanalytic thinkers (e.g., Lertzman, 2015) have similarly crossed into the social by attempting to address perhaps the defining challenge of our own time: climate change and the environmental crisis. Human effects on planetary systems now rival the great forces of nature, with scientists proclaiming a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The psychological causes and consequences of this momentous fact are in urgent need of psychoanalytic investigation. This paper seeks to articulate the legacy of Fenichel and his ideas through a reading of several key papers and to layer his thinking onto the emerging psychoanalytic approaches to the climate crisis. Particular reference is made to Harold Searles, who provides a theoretical counterpoint.

Do under-3s think of day-care centers as “home from home”?: Psychoanalytic investigations into primary socialization in day-care centers taking the German situation as an example

The authors note a contradiction between empirical findings and the dismissive conclusion of the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (FMFASWY) that the treatment of children in early day care will not affect their relationship to their mother or entail any serious damage for their future. They use this contradiction as an opportunity to discuss the social function of early childhood socialization in day care. They come to the impression that the FMFASWY, in its assessment of research on day-care centers, was also intuitively guided by sociopolitical interests insofar as the emergence of a social character satisfying current social requirements is favored more by primary socialization in day care than in families.

MEETING OUR PATIENTS HALFWAY: TOWARD AN ETHIC OF CARE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

The question of if, when, and how we “care for” our patients has been the subject of much debate within our field. While some hold the ethic of care in high regard and as central to our work with patients, others disparage it as, among other concerns, gratifying our patients, inhibiting their autonomy and agency, and demanding too much of us as clinicians. This paper traces, albeit briefly, the long history of “care,” while questioning whether the disparagement of care might be linked to holdovers from our psychoanalytic past, including the repudiation of all things feminine, soft, dependent, and vulnerable in favor of a more robust, masculinized theory. The paper searches for some deeper understanding of “care,” suggesting that it is care that provides the therapist (or, for that matter, anyone) the capacity to empathize – to mediate experience between self and other. Care, if practiced with care (and it should not be called care if it does not), propels the analyst to employ empathy both as a method of psychoanalytic investigation and data collection and as a force for healing itself.