Psychoanalytic Psychology Research Articles

Introduction: Toward a Psychoanalytic Psychology of Repair after Gross Human Rights Abuses.

Introduction: Toward a Psychoanalytic Psychology of Repair after Gross Human Rights Abuses.

Nokan – Die Kunst des Ausklangs

Summary Based upon object relations theory and psychoanalytical self psychology the authors see the present film as a story of finding one’s self. Like in psychoanalytic therapy this »journey to one’s self« happens under support of the other. The authors consider the symbolism of some scenes and elements and discuss the importance of the protagonist’s object relations. The encounter with loss, pain and mourning is regarded as essential for self-development.

“I Shall Not Hate”—On the Transformation of Hate in the Human Mind

While the emotion of hatred is one of the most forceful and difficult emotions in intra-personal and inter-personal suffering in general, this article deals with the possibility of dissolving the emotion of hate, as a last resort of the injured person, through psychoanalytic enhancement and cultivating the spiritual dimension of the human mind in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in particular. Inspired by the book, I Shall Not Hate, and based on the concept of “transformation” in psychoanalytic self psychology as it appears in Kohut’s seminal article “On leadership,” in Raanan Kulka’s work, as well as in Buddhist thought, the article tracks the conditions for the development of the transformational unified mind as a mind of prayer, compassionate and lacking hatred, in human beings in general, and in the psychoanalytical space in particular. A clinical example from the psychoanalytical space will illustrate the way in which the transformational mind occurs as a state of mind lacking hatred.

Adrienne Asch: An Appreciation

Abstract Adrienne Asch's death has deprived bioethics, and the scholarly world in general, of one of its strongest and most distinctive voices. Best known for her passionate advocacy of a different perspective on disability, Adrienne also helped challenge conventional wisdom on reproductive rights, medical exceptions of conscience, feminist scholarship, and other fields. Trained as a therapist, a social psychologist, and a social worker, she also did academic work in philosophy and psychoanalytic psychology. She presented her often counterintuitive perspectives with a gentle fearlessness that gave her arguments a particular persuasiveness. Adrienne's writing and her personal impact will continue to challenge and enrich scholarly discourse for many years to come.

When the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain: Embracing Atmospheric Interrelatedness

This article expands the frame of psychoanalytic consideration to include the environment as a relational context and conceptualizes the potential psychological impact of natural disaster, in this case the devastating tornadoes that struck central Oklahoma in May of 2013, as being a sudden sense of estrangement from one’s empathic atmosphere and the loss of any textured understanding of what will come next. By drawing from psychoanalytic complexity, intersubjective-systems, self psychology, and Native American perspectives, I articulate a deeply interrelated view of existence, inclusive of and emphasizing a total relational atmospheric context. I then demonstrate that therapeutic responsiveness at the community level serves powerfully reunifying psychological functions in the immediate aftermath of such catastrophes due to its experiential reassertion of an empathic (human) atmosphere, which underscores the value of actively embracing interrelatedness and of psychoanalytically informed engagement at these and other frontiers beyond the usual treatment situation.

Breve historia de la Psicología en la ciudad de La Plata (1906-1966).

Muy esquemáticamente, este trabajo aborda seis décadas de la historia de la psicología en la ciudad de La Plata (Argentina), que van desde la creación de la Sección Pedagógica en la Universidad Nacional, en 1906, hasta el golpe de estado de 1966, que puso fin al auge de los estudios psicológicos iniciado con la creación de la carrera profesional, en 1958. En ese período, la psicología pasaría por distintas etapas, signadas por oposiciones tales como “naturalismo positivista”/ “humanismo antipositivista”, “formación disciplinar”/ “formación profesional”, “psicología científica” / “psicología psicoanalítica”, etc. El objetivo de este trabajo es dar cuenta de lo sucedido en ese lapso, poniendo el énfasis no sólo en los actores individuales que intervinieron en ese proceso, sino también en los factores institucionales y políticos que constituyeron el contexto. Los métodos utilizados son los tradicionales de la historia, básicamente, la recopilación de fuentes orales, documentales y bibliográficas. Aunque se las haya interpretado desde una perspectiva crítica.

A 9-Year Analysis With a Connection-Resistant Patient: Theory, Reality, and the Messiness of Therapeutic Action

This article was first presented as a plenary paper at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology in October 2013. In keeping with the theme of the conference, “forms and transformations of connectedness,” the article summarizes my nine-year analysis with “Linda,” a patient who was intensely conflicted about allowing the kind of deep connection I believed was necessary for her to make the kinds of changes she ostensibly was in therapy to achieve. The clinical narrative focuses on our dialogue and struggles around this issue as it evolved through different phases and relational configurations.

English

Sigmund Freud is considered the father and founder of psychoanalysis; however, numerous women contributed to its development and practice. Lou von Salome, Karen Horney, Sabina Spielrein and Anna Freud were instrumental in forming one of the leading psychological theories of the 20th century. Although the implications of each woman’s work are different, they individually made a unique impact on the development and practice of psychoanalysis in specific ways. Lou von Salome contributed much to the development of psychoanalysis through the arts, as she was a prolific writer and novelist. Karen Horney eventually broke with Freud and developed her own version of psychoanalysis, incorporating feminine psychology and criticizing the phallocentric and patriarchal nature of Freud’s theories. Sabina Spielrein contributed the “death instinct” to psychoanalysis, although Freud did not credit her fully for this development. Anna Freud, the youngest child of Sigmund and Martha Freud, was the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology along with Melanie Klein. She focused on the ego in childhood and ways to encourage its healthy development. Although each matriarch of psychoanalysis extended the ideas and theories of Sigmund Freud, they have not been given the credit they deserved. Keywords: Psychoanalysis, women, history, mothers.

In Defense of Mainstream Conservatism: A Response to Crouse and Stalker

This article provides a response to Crouse and Stalker's reply to my commentary (Thomas, 2013) on their article titled “Do Right‐Wing Authoritarian Beliefs Originate from Psychological Conflict?” (Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24, 25–44). The authors' critical remarks regarding my commentary are addressed, and recommendations are offered for a more cautious use of psychoanalytic theory and results derived from The Right‐Wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1998) for labeling persons with mainstream conservative political beliefs as being “psychopathological” or “right‐wing authoritarians.” Such assertions regarding the personality characteristics of political conservatives are particularly troubling, since the authors' conclusions were purely speculative, and they collected neither clinical nor empirical data on patients or research subjects with so‐called right‐wing authoritarian personalities to support their speculations.

A Pre-Cartesian Self

Long before disputes about Cartesian and post-Cartesian subjectivity, Greco-Roman philosophy—more a way of life than a set of theories—taught and exemplified a central value on care of the soul. The ancients understood this soul primarily as an ethical voice: organizing, orienting and limiting. This contribution suggests that the selfhood sought by psychoanalytic self psychology may resemble this ancient orientation to the good more than it does the Cartesian or post-Cartesian “subjectivities” of more recent philosophizing.

Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Related Works: A Reappraisal

Freud's 1930Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, here abbreviated as Civilization) is a central essay in a series of contributions to historical and philosophical sociology vs. his earlier focus on individual psychoanalytic psychology, a trajectory begun with Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), to Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (1921), Future of an Illusion (1927), New Introductory Lectures (1933a), Why War? (1933b), and culminating with Moses and Monotheism (1939), the last work published during his lifetime.

Maternal postpartum depressive symptoms and 4-month mother–infant interaction.

Beatrice Beebe, PhD, New York State Psychiatric Institute; Frank Lachmann, PhD, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity; Joseph Jaffe, MD, Sara Markese, PhD, Karen A. Buck, MA, Patricia Cohen, PhD, Stanley Feldstein, PhD, and Howard Andrews, PhD, New York State Psychiatric Institute; Henian Chen, MD, PhD, College of Public Health, University of South Florida. This research was supported by The National Institute of Mental Health (Grant MH56130), The Psychoanalytic Fund, the Kohler Foundation, the Edward Aldwell Mother-Infant Research Fund, and the Los Angeles Infant Research and Psychoanalysis Fund. We thank our filming/coding team: Caroline Flaster, Donna Demetri-Friedman, Helen Demetriades, Nancy Freeman, Patricia Goodman, Michaela Hager-Budny, Elizabeth Helbraun, Allyson Hentel, Tammy Kaminer, Sandra Triggs Kano, Limor Kaufman-Balamuth, Greg Kushnick, Lisa Marquette, Jill Putterman, Jane Roth, Shanee Stepakoff, and Lauren Ellman. We also thank our lab assistants: Claire Jaffe, Daniella Polyak, Julia Reuben, Priscilla Caldwell, Jessica Lateck, Carol Scheik-Gamble, Danny Sims, Jake Freeman, Brianna Hailey, Alla Chavarga, Nidhi Parashar, Josianne Moise, Sarah Temech, Hope Igleheart, Yana Kuchirko, Elizabeth White, Greer Raggio, Kate Lieberman, Alina Pavlakos, Adrianne Lange, Kari Gray, Jennifer Lyne, Annee Ackerman, Fernanda Lucchese, Sarah Miller, Max Malitzky, Sam Marcus, Michael Klein, Kara Levin, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Lauren Cooper, Helen Weng, Iskra Smiljanic, and Christy Meyer. Finally, we thank our students and colleagues who contributed: Sara Hahn-Burke, Nancy Freeman, Michael Ritter, Glenn Bromley, Robert Gallaghan, Naomi Cohen, Paulette Landesman, Tina Lupi, Jillian Miller, Alan Phelan, Danielle Phelan, Katherine Weinberg, Edward Tronick, Doris Silverman, Anni Bergman, Lin Reicher, George Downing, Estelle Shane, and the Monday afternoon seminar, who consulted on our findings. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Beatrice Beebe, PhD, New York State Psychiatric Institute #108, 1051 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10032. E-mail: beebebe@pi.cpmc.columbia.edu Psychoanalytic Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association 2012, Vol. 29, No. 4, 383–407 0736-9735/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0029387

Generative leadership: responding to the call for responsibility

PurposeThe responsible leadership movement may be seen as part of the wider sustainability revolution. Sustainability was defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development as “economic development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Since then, guiding principles have been formulated and a growing number of business leaders have issued a call to action. Still one expert, Orr, recently concluded that “virtually no indicator of planetary health is moving in a positive direction, and we should ask why.” The purpose of this paper, heeding the admonition to “ask why”, is to examine what it means to be responsible as a leader at this time, in this context.Design/methodology/approachA consensus view of the context and the accountabilities it implies is gleaned from an analysis of sustainability principles. A psychological approach to conceptualizing leader responsibility as a variable in personal development is elaborated under the normative construct of generativity. A new model for coaching developing leaders and promoting leader responsibility is proposed. It is based on recent advances in psychoanalytic psychology, and aspects of its theory base and method are illustrated in a case example.FindingsDevelopment of responsibility is found to hinge on personal value commitments that can best be awakened and cultivated through professionally‐relevant personal development in conjunction with experiential development strategies such as stretch assignments and action learning.Originality/valueThe approach offers a practical, developmental pathway for promoting leader responsibility.

CHARACTER, PSYCHOANALYTIC IDENTIFICATION, AND NUMERICAL IDENTITY

AbstractIdentification figures prominently in moral psychological explanations. I argue that in identification the subject has an ‘identity‐thought’, which is a thought about her numerical identity with the figure she identifies with. In Freud's psychoanalytic psychology character is founded on unconscious identification with parental figures. Moral philosophers have drawn on psychoanalysis to explain how undesirable or disadvantageous character dispositions are resistant to insight through being unconscious. According to Richard Wollheim's analysis of Freud's theory, identification is the subject's disposition to imagine, unconsciously, her bodily merging with the figure she identifies with. I argue that this explanation of identification is not adequate. Human character is held to be capable of change when self‐reflection brings unconscious identifications to conscious self‐knowledge. I argue that for self‐knowledge these identifications must be an intelligible part of the subject's self‐conception, and that Wollheim's ‘merging phantasy’ is not intelligible to the subject in this way. By contrast, the subject's thought that she is numerically identical to the figure she identifies with does provide an intelligible starting‐point for reflecting on this identification. This psychoanalytic account provides a clear conception of identification with which to investigate puzzle cases in the moral psychology of character.

A esquizofrenia e a demência no Teste de Apercepção Temática: Uma análise da angústia e da relação de objeto

Within the scope of Psychoanalytic Psychology, this study empirically draws on aspects of the classical discussion between the schizophrenia and the former denomination, dementia praecox. The aim of this research study is to explore a possible association between a specific psychic personality structure and the diagnoses of schizophrenia and dementia, in terms of angst and object relation patterns. The sample consisted of 58 female participants, 30 participants diagnosed with schizophrenia (M = 68.83 years of age, SD = 8.13) and 28 participants diagnosed with dementia (M = 83.36 years of age, SD = 7.51). The instruments used for psychological assessment were the projective test TAT (Murray, 1973; Shentoub, 1999) and the Manual for the Measurement of Symbiosis in Human Relationship (Summers, 1978). The fragmentation angst and the fusional object relation are associated with schizophrenia and, in turn, the abandonment angst and the anaclitic object relation with dementia. It was assumed that specific psychic personality structures were associated with the different diagnoses. In a continuum, the psychotic structure is connected with schizophrenia and, the borderline structure with dementia. The discussion highlights significant issues of this study. Some suggestions for further research have been proposed.Key words: dementia, schizophrenia, psychoanalytic psychology.

Psychoanalysis and social cognitive neuroscience: A new framework for a dialogue

The fields of psychoanalysis and neuroscience use different methods of description, analysis and comprehension of reality, and because each is based on a different methodology, each approach constructs a different representation of reality. Thus, psychoanalysis could contribute to a general psychology involving neuroscience to the extent that a “psychoanalytical psychology” (the theory of mental functioning that is extrapolated from psychoanalytical practice) defines natural objects of study (mind functions) for a multidisciplinary approach. However, the so called “naturalisation” of psychoanalytical concepts (metapsychology) does not imply the reduction of these concepts to biology; rather, it suggests a search for compatibility between psychoanalytical concepts and neuroscientific description. Such compatibility would mean the search for common objects that could be described from either a psychoanalytic or a neuroscientific point of view. We suggest that inter-subjectivity, empathy or “co-thinking” processes, from early development to the psychoanalytic relationship or the interaction between the patient and the analyst, could be such a common object for cognitive social neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Together, neuroscience and psychoanalysis could then contribute to a multidisciplinary approach of psychic inter- or co-activity.

Negative Parental Influences on Religious Conversion: Implications for Pastoral Care

This essay discusses the contribution that psychoanalytic psychology has made to research on religious conversion and asks what implications it might have for pastoral practice. Some of conversion’s most dramatic manifestations occur amid familial instability, or negative parental influences, that stand to be misinterpreted by religious leaders if their full psycho-spiritual context is not understood. The Freudian tradition has provided some context as to why people with rocky upbringings might undergo dramatic change. The data supports the conclusion that these radical conversions are much less a sign of direct supernatural influence than they are of a need for the converts to receive pastoral care in working through a “crisis stage” of faith development.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

P03-471 - Profile of attachment and suicidal ideation during a major depressive episode

During a major depressive episode, suicidal risks are increased and the possibility of request of help and treatment is conditionedby the way the subject structured its attachment in the childhood. We present a study which concerns the detailed examination, during 6 months, mental states of 40 patients presenting a major depressive episode and frequenting a Medical psychological Center connected with a Psychiatric hospital. The collection of the data is made with tools stemming from various fields (DSM4, theory of the attachment, the psychoanalytical psychology)“.The population is divided to three Camire profiles (Pierre Humbert et al, 1996) (Secure, Preoccupied, Avoidant). We chose 3 markers which can inform us about the evolution of the crisis according to the profile of attachment :1-Intensity of the suicidal idéation « SSI » (Beck et all.1979)2-therapeutic Alliance “WAI” Horvath et Greenberg, 1989)3-Intensité of the depression. (Hamilton HAMD-21)HypothesisThe attachment says “sécure” facilitate better scores in these 3 markers.Results1)The regulations emotional Secure does not protect against strong suicidal ideation in patients suffering from major depressive disorder. Freud's theory of trauma in this direction by assuming a tolerable threshold above which any topic is disorganized. (p-value = 0,05)2)The strategies of emotional regulation parts protect against suicidal thoughts while concerned about emotional regulation strategies to expose depressed suicidal subjects. (p-value = 0,09)3)According to the literature, we find a better alliance with secure attachment. (except at the beginning of care) (p-value = 0,06 at period T3 and p-value = 0,08 at period T6)

Landscapes in Time: A Psychotherapeutic Intervention

This essay explains the key intellectual, aesthetic and theoretical concepts underpinning a practice-based project by the authors, presenting digital film footage captured by three cameras positioned in the snow-capped peaks of the French Alps over a period of four months. The cameras were placed in three different positions: a high mountain refuge, a snow ridge, and in the valley, in order to provide different perspectives of one mountain range, providing an experience impossible by being physically located within the landscape. The film footage was captured using time-release technology, with the cameras set to shoot at 30-second intervals, a process enabling the viewer to experience the landscape over a more extended period than is normally possible. The essay is ambitious in drawing together a range of disciplines, well-established theories of art and culture, philosophy and aesthetics, and developmental and clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy. In particular, the project is informed by new thinking, the concept of mentalisation in psychoanalytic theory (Fonagy 1991), cognitive psychology, and mentalising in practice (Jon G. Allen 2006), which are linked to ideas concerned with art, culture and the self. The film is designed to intervene in customary ways of looking at a mountain landscape. Thus, the viewer is encouraged to develop an inquisitive, contemplative and reflective spectatorial stance and to engage in mentalising what is experienced. The film supplies a platform from which perceptions of natural phenomena provide for a better understanding of the self and others, and concomitantly the self’s relationship to nature. As such the project is primarily concerned with providing an innovative psychotherapeutic intervention able to yield an empathic connection between the viewer and nature, beneficial to the individual, society, and the environment.