Psychoanalytic Methodology Research Articles

Holocaust: Artistic Dimensions of Contemporary Ukrainian Prose (Using the Example of Larysa Denysenko’s Echoes: From the Dead Grandfather to the Deceased

In recent times, global events have starkly illuminated the disturbing absence of ethnic tolerance, thrusting interethnic conflicts into the spotlight and casting shadows over both individual and collective identities. This research focuses on the Holocaust, delving into the annals of history through the lenses of recollection, personal identification, and genetic memory, as portrayed within the pages of the novel Echoes: From the Dead Grandfather to the Deceased. The primary aim is to fathom the gradual erosion of collective historical memory over time and discern its profound significance for future generations. Within this study, an examination of the interplay between the ‘collective unconscious’ and the ‘personal unconscious’ is undertaken. Additionally, the novel’s utilization of symbols and details is scrutinized. The research employs a multifaceted approach, encompassing historical-genetic, interpretative, narrative, and psychoanalytic methodologies. Through the protagonist’s transformative journey, the novel highlights the importance of preserving historical memory and recognizing its lasting impact on individual and collective consciousness.

The Psychoanalytic Work in the City: Psychoanalysis in Critical Social Situations

The present work aims to showcase a psychoanalytic approach to social emergencies in settings that stretch beyond the context of middle- and upper-class private practices. We advocate for the development of new clinical devices of assistance in these situations, grounded in a novel psychoanalytic methodology. Our clinical practice takes inspiration in community clinics set up by Freud and his main followers between the years of 1918 and 1938, and is anchored in quintessential psychoanalytic concepts: the unconscious, drive, repetition and transference. Since our goal is not a mere translation of private clinic practices to the social sphere of the city, it is paramount that psychoanalysis is reinvented so as to enable psychoanalytic listening to be present on streets and public squares as well as on the design of public policies by governmental institutions.

A Postmodern Psychoanalytic Critique of Narrative Disruptions and Subversions in Dalit and Post-apocalyptic Narratives: A Comparative Study

This research study investigates narrative disruptions and subversions in Dalit and post-apocalyptic literature using a postmodern psychoanalytic methodology. Drawing on the concepts of Jacques Lacan and Homi K. Bhabha, the research argues that these literary genres use language and plot to subvert and disrupt dominant power structures, social hierarchies and hegemonic discourses. The study examines a few works of Dalit and post-apocalyptic fiction to show how both genres use narrative methods such as fragmentation, irony, parody and subversion to question established standards of representation and disclose the traumas and disjunctions of the oppressed. The voice of the oppressed is explicit through the analysis of the selected texts.

Nostalgia and Creative Urge as Double-Edged Swords in the (Auto)Biographical Writings of Rose Gollup-Cohen

Abstract While some Jewish immigrant autobiographies have received broad critical attention, a few important autobiographical endeavours have been underrepresented or almost forgotten. Autobiographies written by Jewish female writers who immigrated to America from Russia, Poland, or Galicia often draw a bifurcated picture of their struggles in callous New York sweatshops, or, on the contrary, they exalt the Jews’ notable success while blending in the American melting pot. Scarce studies, however, have been devoted to the dislocation and uprootedness of female immigrants and to the nostalgic feelings they have experienced during their absorption into American reality. This paper intends to resuscitate the forgotten voice of a Jewish immigrant female writer, Rose Gollup-Cohen. Moreover, using primarily psychoanalytical methodology and a feminist theory, the paper focuses on the nostalgic feelings that immigrants reverted to. Finally, it deals with both the therapeutic and the destructive powers of compulsive writing and shows how the writing process assists an immigrant writer when coping with distress experienced in her new homeland, but, on the other hand, it also demonstrates how compulsive writing may lead to obsessive behaviours, resulting in losing awareness of one’s surroundings, neglecting one’s family, and even to depression and suicide.

Becoming a researcher: psychotherapists’ experience of starting a professional doctorate

ABSTRACT This paper explores the journey taken by experienced psychotherapists as they embark on doctoral research, highlighting the adjustments involved in moving from being a clinician to becoming a researcher. Having touched on the complex relationship between psychotherapy and research as a whole, including how badly this has affected the development of a robust evidence base for many approaches, the paper describes the development of a post-qualifying research programme for those grafting research skills onto their clinical roles. The paper then considers how the kind of research undertaken by psychodynamic psychotherapists has shifted from being primarily focussed on single case studies – so remaining closer to the clinical writing of the past – to including both more general social science research methodologies and more precise psychoanalytic methodologies, capable of exploring in depth the processes at work in the therapeutic encounter. The main focus of the paper is on the impact on the students of undertaking their first research project. At the beginning of this process nearly all students underestimated just how much of a shift in their thinking it would involve, and the paper captures some of the key issues and powerful moments reported after their first year. They speak of the humbling impact of conducting a structured literature review and of the complexity of finding a truly researchable question and viable design, as well as the appreciation of the difference between clinical illustration and evidence. They speak of the impact of thinking about the ethical issues involved in research, and of the need to interrogate their design in order to minimise bias. One of the interesting – and to them surprising – effects is that the shift to research-mindedness feeds back into their clinical identities, in a way that is both challenging and invigorating, overall boosting their confidence as practitioners.

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

<i>The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable</i>, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

Psychoanalytic and Existentialist Versions of Don Juanism: Lesia Ukrainka’s The Stone Host

The article substantiates the necessity of psychoanalytical and existential methodology in interpreting Lesia Ukrainka’s drama Kaminnyi hospodar (1912; The Stone Host), including the works of José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno on Don Quixote, Albert Camus on absurd characters (The Myth of Sisyphus. Essay on the Absurd), and Jacques Lacan’s The Mirror Stage. Biographical data testify to the critical attitude of the writer to world treatments of the legend. Her challenge to tradition was bold and conscious. It is regarded that the main point of Lesia Ukrainka’s polemics with tradition concerns Don Juan apologetics, introduced by romantics and developed by modernists. Exploring Don Juan’s psychological makeup provides the opportunity to show that all participants of the legend have become victims of Don Juan apologetics (that distinguish the tragic fi nale of the story). The Don Juan myth has played an integral role in the image of the Person (social mask) being accepted by characters as a trustful image of the Self. Interpretation of the Mirror Image in The Stone Host and its crucial role in the final scene allows for justifying that the mirror serves the narcissistic characters’ admiration of themselves and shows them not only an attractive appearance but an ideal version of the Self, created by myth.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the Russian Federation

The article provides an overview of the current state of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the NHS of the Russian Federation (RNHS). The authors discuss successful examples of the implementation of psychoanalytic methodology in psychiatry during the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. Psychodynamically oriented professionals of the RNHS and outside of RNHS are mainly concentrated in large cities. Despite a long tradition and a growing body of evidence for efficacy, the medical community is hostile to psychoanalytic ideas in psychiatry. However, psychoanalytic psychotherapy is in great demand in a society.

Obsessive position: the new psychoanalytic approach of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is considered one of the most difficult disorders to treat due to the diversity of its symptomatology, the difficulties of establishing and maintaining a relationship with patients and their rather rigid functioning. Freud made basic findings that described the nature of the disease, however in psychoanalysis there has been no truly novel theoretic approach to OCD ever since Freud’s seminal work. In this present theoretically study, I am examining OCD-symptoms primarily through object relations theory focusing on one group of certain key theoreticians and their followers. My summary of psychoanalytic literature on OCD is based on the works of Freud, Ferenczi and Klein. As a second step, from an object relational point of view, beside paranoid-schizoid and depressive, I am postulating a third position under the name obsessive position, what we can assume as a specific constellations of object relations with anxieties, defence mechanism and patterns of thinking. The specific characteristics of this position are discussed in the study. I am making a clear distinction between the obsessive ego-state and the realistic ego-state and discuss the differences between the two states. Through the introduction of the obsessive ego-state I am suggesting the definition of OCD as a disorder of personality organization and ego-organization. In the study, I therefore, argue for the application of a modified psychoanalytic methodology in the case of OCD-patients. I am offering a glimpse into this technique through a segment from a session of psychoanalytic therapy with an OCD-patient.

Rethinking Therapeutic Action: Finding Commonalty in Diversity

Understanding what the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy have in common with other forms of therapy helps us identify essential elements of therapeutic change. Several processes that cut across diverse psychotherapy approaches are outlined, based on clinical empiricism, theory, and research. A model of therapeutic action is considered that places emotion schemas at the center of therapeutic change across modalities; to modify these memory structures, diverse therapies utilize overtly different, if complementary, methods. These shared processes are drawn together into a common, coherent change model that is further informed by the role of neuroplastic memory reconsolidation. Although the model seeks to explain and to link multiple transformative therapy approaches, and in that sense, is a general model that applies to many therapies, for the purposes of this paper, the case example applies the model to psychoanalytic therapy. Paradoxically, the case illustration brings into sharpened focus what is important and often underemphasized in psychoanalytic therapy, while also opening and extending customary forms of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic thinking and methodology.

Integrity of Z. Freud’s sublimation concept: additions to psychoanalytical methodology in literature studies

Integrity of Z. Freud’s sublimation concept: additions to psychoanalytical methodology in literature studies

OBSERVING PARALLAXICAL IDENTITIES OF PLACE IN ARCHITECTURE – ADOPTING ARCHITECTURAL AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO URBAN FABRICS

This article analyses the concept of the parallaxical identity within architecture, and its significance in identifying a metaphysical barrier between buildings, urban fabrics, and cognitive understanding. The research focuses and expands upon Slavoj Žižek’s parallax of postmodernist cultural architecture and it’s “zero-institutional” role in marginalising class-struggle and incommensurability between architecture and audience. Interrogating psychoanalytical parallax and architectural concepts of parallax in its history, it explains the determining of a “parallaxical identity of place,” present within cities and as a result of regeneration schemes. Through a design method examining an example of cultural architecture, this article presents a case to integrate psychoanalytical analysis as a useful design methodology within practice. At the end of the article, recommendations are made on how to observe and manage against any potential dissociative or psychological barrier between architecture, environment and community.

Television as psychical object:Mad Menand the value of psychoanalysis for television scholarship

Claims that Mad Men (2007–2015) is an obedient post-feminist text overlook the drama’s images of both women and the history of feminism and its potential to impact on contemporary understandings of gender politics. Mad Men can be seen as a psychological object, helping viewers to explore links between their own experience and that of characters on screen as the narrative unfolds. Making links between the social re-emergence of feminist awareness, the drama’s representations of second-wave feminism and a psychoanalytic understanding of mourning, I suggest that a return to psychoanalytic methodologies has the potential to enrich television scholarship.

"In Constant Fellowship with One Unseen": Negotiations with the Native Other and American National Identity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona

"In Constant Fellowship with One Unseen":Negotiations with the Native Other and American National Identity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona Alex McDonnell (bio) Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Octave Mannoni have used postcolonial psychoanalysis to analyze the interrelations between the political aspects of the colonial situation and the psychological conditions of the colonizers and colonized. However, there has been little research into the development of the national "psyche" of the United States as a postcolonial state during the nineteenth century in relation to its own brand of imperialism, namely Indian removal. This article draws on the recent postcolonial psychoanalytic methodology of Ranjana Khanna to extrapolate how U.S. nineteenth-century fiction dealt with the legitimacy of national expansion and the American state pertaining to Indian displacement. I will discuss Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) in terms of how it works against masculine conceptions of violent frontier conquest while advocating for Indian assimilation. Nonetheless, I propose there is a dissonance at the heart of her reform agenda, which more generally reflects the nation's melancholic negotiation with its historical treatment of the Indian. Jackson's national ideal emerges from the conflicts between her assimilationist discourse, her racial attitudes, and her preservation of tribal sovereignty, an ideal that underscores her conception of the U.S. as a participatory, democratic state. The preservation of an undefined Indian-otherness, one that cannot be reduced to the parameters of the American imaginary, exists to validate the choice of assimilation and define the boundaries of national community in the novel. Nonetheless, this epistemic space of the Other is never fully delineated or directly explored. Jackson incorporates rather than assimilates the Native American into the nation by variously drawing upon and repressing his otherness to define a sense of national community. [End Page 571] I will propose that her conception of American subjectivity is melancholic as a result of this dissonance, which links back to the national psyche's historically conflicted understandings of Western frontier colonization. ________ Bringing a postcolonial psychoanalytic apparatus to Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) enables exploration of the novel's conflicted approach to Native American assimilation, recognition for tribal sovereignty, and the national ideal in nineteenth-century southern California. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and postcolonial theories advanced by Ranjana Khanna in Dark Continents (2003), I propose there is a melancholic dissonance at the heart of Jackson's reform agenda which emerges from the preservation of a racially and culturally different unassimilable Other—"the Indian"—that is also used in discourses of native sovereignty as an extension of the democratic ideal of the American state. Although Jackson condemns the violent nature of U.S. imperialism, she nevertheless supports the idea of civilizational expansion under the proviso that it is regulated by the enlightened dictates of domesticity. This article will examine a conflict in the narrative of Ramona between its desire for assimilation, its suppression of resistance towards this end, and yet its implicit recognition of Indian sovereignty, which underscores its particular national ideal. This recognition in turn necessitates its paradoxical acknowledgment of native resistance. Melancholic markers are produced by the failure of the narrative's approach to show national identity in which the Other is absorbed and erased. Such signifiers of melancholia are identifiable, for example, in Ramona's repressed Indian subjectivity at the end. Furthermore, the novel's romantic plot deflects attention from its compromised political agenda and therefore tries to contain the unassimilable elements generated by an inability to effectively assimilate the Indian into the national corpus. Postcolonial Psychoanalysis Before turning to analysis of Jackson's conflicted national ideal and her ambivalent treatment of the Other, I will detail some key concepts dealt with by Khanna and others which will later afford unique insights into the political-psychical dynamics of the text. One of Khanna's central contentions is that national affiliation entails specific forms of haunting, narrative, sites of memory, and psychical effect. She also adopts Freud's [End Page 572] terms, melancholy and melancholia, demonstrating how they can be used to critique colonialism and its effects. For Khanna, melancholia can be characterized in an ethico-political context as a remainder which "insists on...

Kim Hyun’s Criticism and Psychoanalytical Methodology

Kim Hyun’s Criticism and Psychoanalytical Methodology

You Can Get Here from There

You Can Get Here from There Louise Braddock (bio) Note: This reply is only/largely to the first, main part of Leite's (2018) response to my paper. A reply to the second, which criticizes the use of the imagination in the account, has to be left aside for reasons of space. What more, following Wollheim, I have to say about the imagination and its relation to identification, can be found in Braddock (2012). Originally, my paper was organized around the above title (but suppressed by the Editor!), my meaning being that, on the one hand, the paper showed how to 'translate out' projective identification from its hermetic psychoanalytic usage (thus getting 'here' from 'there') by combining philosophical analysis and the 'extension of ordinary psychology' approach. This would enable the ordinary person to get quite a lot of the way to an understanding of projective identification (getting 'there' from 'here'), something that many psychoanalysts see as important, but difficult to do. At the same time, the title was also intended to show that it is possible to retrieve an intelligible thesis about unconscious communication from what analysts write about projective identification in their vocabulary, and what, as they claim, occurs in the sorts of interactions Leite describes in his response to my paper. My initial response to Leite is to say that his remarks give me the opportunity, and the opening, to say a number of things that had to be left out of "Understanding Projective Identification," or that appeared in a perhaps over-compressed form in my Introduction, and thus to make explicit what was all along the implicit project of the paper: to speak to the lay audience of those who find psychoanalytic claims in general, and consequently find the concept of projective identification in particular, at best unsupported and at worst incomprehensible, and so write them off. I am, that is, ambitious to help those who are bemused, to understand projective identification, and to show those who are disposed to reject psychoanalysis wholesale that there is a way to make at least this part of it intelligible. (I am also ambitious to explain psychoanalytic concepts such as projective identification within an analytic philosophical framework and without opting for either deflation or an eliminitivistic reduction to neuroscience. Finally, I am also ambitious to provide an entry point for psychoanalysis into those social sciences that recognize a place for psychoanalytic methodology and theory but are ill-served by the empirical indeterminacy of Lacanian theory. Further, the psychoanalytic theory I have in mind is post-Kleinian theory, which in my view is both a powerful and theoretically productive contemporary theory embodying what is essential in Freud's own, by now historical theory, and is also exceptionally well-grounded in a method of observation developed by precisely the school of analysts on which Leite himself draws.) Leite, unusually for a philosopher in the analytic tradition, is knowledgeable about what it is [End Page 89] that contemporary psychoanalysts think and do. He draws on this knowledge for the psychoanalytical case material that he adduces as counterexample evidence to my argument; the clinical material he cites is of both verbal and nonverbal behaviors described by psychoanalysts as the basis on which their attributions of projection and projective identification are made or, as he puts it, they judged projective identification to be 'actualized.' In my Introduction, I noted that such behaviors are indeed modalities for projective identification. I concur that both the sorts of case cited by Leite, and also importantly the bizarre verbal and nonverbal behaviors described by Bion, Meltzer, and other analysts working with psychotic patients, are indeed the sorts of clinical observation that need to be addressed and given theoretical clarification. My strategy in using the 'extension of ordinary psychology' approach is to get as far as possible with it and the resources of philosophy, and to clarify those areas where a contribution from psychoanalysis is both needed, and needs to be philosophically clarified albeit in ways that may put pressure on philosophy itself; the 'extension of ordinary psychology' approach is such as to reach a limit in explaining psychoanalytic phenomena, and beyond which it is psychoanalytic theory itself, which...

Eine Pathoanalyse der Religion

No AccessEine Pathoanalyse der ReligionBemerkungen zu einem unvollendeten Projekt FreudsDr. Herman WesterinkDr. Herman Westerink Titus Brandsma Institute/Center for Contemporary European Philosophy Radboud Universität 6500 HD Nijmegen Niederlande http://www.ru.nl/ptrs/ccep/ Authors email:[email protected]Titus Brandsma Institute/Center for Contemporary European PhilosophyRadboud Universität6500 HD NijmegenSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Jul 2017https://doi.org/10.13109/weme.2017.69.4.301SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail AboutAbstractAn important premise in Freud’s psychoanalytic methodology is the idea that the psychoneuroses are magnifications and intensifications of normal generally human psychic dynamics and complexes, and that consequently human nature can best be studied from the perspective of the psychopathologies (patho-analysis). In this article the importance and implications of this principle for the study of religion are explored. Also, the article identifies some of the main reasons why Freud never consequently pursued the patho-analysis of religion. Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverVolume 69Issue 4July 2017 ISSN: 0043-2040eISSN: 2196-8284HistoryPublished online:July 2017 PDF download

Reaching out for the object in the process of meeting

ABSTRACTReaching out for an object has been broadly discussed within psychoanalysis using the term 'object-seeking'. This article develops the idea that it is a fundamental feature of human beings to reach out for objects in order to survive and/or to gain vitality. Self-love, which is a derivative of object love, is not possible to achieve in a developmental manner without a sufficient phase-specific emotional response to the subject’s object seeking. In terms of psychoanalytic methodology, the present article represents a tradition (e.g. Tähkä) of renewal related to the classique approach, which is a more passive psychoanalytic technique (e.g. Freud and Winnicott). This traditional psychoanalytic methodology is complemented with a more active technique in order to be therapeutically efficient – especially in the treatment of individuals who are not primary neurotic. The four psychoanalytic schools (drive, object relations, ego and self-psychology) are integrated in a patient’s authentic attempt to reach out for the developmental object in the process of meeting.

Researching the Use of Psychoanalysis in Narrative Inquiries

Human lives are inherently storied. It is the story or narrative of life which allows for arriving at “meanings”, “feel”, “sense” of our and others’ lives. The present article is abstracted from a psychoanalytically informed, qualitative research work endeavouring to explore and understand identity dynamics in the lives of young men and women. It is an attempt to provide insights into the psychoanalytic methodology of studying lives. It tries to respond to the methodology-related concerns like: How does the researcher understand the participant’s communication? What is the role of theory in research? Does the participant speak in a singular voice? Is it possible to map through the participant’s biography, a cultural biography as well? These concerns are addressed through a life story of an Indian young man interviewed as a part of a research project and interweaving it with available models of interpretations. In doing so, the author has retained and reflected a self-reflexive consciousness. The article, rather than engaging in theoretical debates, presents a researcher’s meaning-making journey of reaching questions and finding answers. It also provides an overview of the utility of psychoanalysis for qualitative research.

CINEMATOGRAPH OF INDEPENDENT UKRAINE AS «MIRROR» OF CORDOCENTRIC MENTALITY

The article attempts to trace the preconditions and the main driving forces for the formation of specific Ukrainian cinema, the relationship between the philosophical tradition of the ethnos and its manifestation in the genre of contemporary cinema art. The problem of non-commercial orientation of film production and its possible consequences for the industry as a whole is considered. The emphasis is placed on the mental features of the genre of cinema in the works of Ukrainian directors, the possibilities of the Lacanian psychoanalytic methodology in the analysis of the laws of «maturing» of the national cinema of Ukraine are explored.