Psychoanalytic Understanding Research Articles

Can the “internal couple” be our faithful lifelong partner?

For over fifty years the concept of the “internal couple”, as a composite internal object co-constructed in intimate relationships, has been fundamental to a psycho-analytic understanding of couple relationships and their contribution to family dynamics. Considerable societal change, however, necessitates review of how effectively and ethically the concept meets practitioners’ and couples’ current needs. Does the concept of an internal couple help psychotherapists to describe and consider all contemporary adult couples, whether same-sex or heterosexual, monogamous, or polyamorous? How does it accommodate online dating, relating via avatars, and use of pornography? Is it sufficiently inclusive of those experimenting in terms of sexual and gender identity, or in partnerships that challenge family arrangement norms? Can it usefully support thinking about families in which parents choose to parent alone, or are absent at their children’s conception thanks to surrogacy, adoption, and IVF? These and other questions prompt re-examination of this central concept’s nature and value.

Destructive populism as “perverted containing”: A psychoanalytical look at the attraction of Donald Trump

ABSTRACT The author examines the appearances and formation processes of destructive populist developments in the Western world from a psychoanalytical perspective, using the example of Donald Trump and his voters. She draws on the concepts of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld and Otto Kernberg, which build on each other, and drafts the basic features of a psychoanalytic explanatory model of destructive populist social processes. She illustrates the phenomenon of the »destructive populist fit« between Trump and his followers by means of an analysis of Donald Trump's well-documented election campaigns in 2016 and 2020, supplemented by his actions during the COVID 19 crisis in 2020. On the psychoanalytical understanding of the effectiveness of his methods and the susceptibility of voters to destructive populism, she applies Bion's model of containing in conjunction with Herbert Rosenfeld's destructive narcissism and develops the concept of »perverted containing«: in the course of regression to a paranoid-schizoid level, aggressively destructive and omnipotent affects are idealised and the container function of democratic society is increasingly decomposed, distorted and finally twisted. Beta-elements are not detoxified and digested but, on the contrary, are fueled. This dynamic implies permanent escalation through ever new destructive-exciting acts in order to maintain the symbiotic-destructive fit in the mode of destructive narcissism.

Distrust, Panic and Denial … or Hope?

How, in this pandemic, is the issue of trust versus mistrust emerging from a different dynamic than the development model that shapes psychoanalytic understanding? How is the panic we are encounter...

Gender, Violence, and Trauma: A Case of Transmasculine Subjectification and Resistance in the French Biopolitical Context

Given the relative invisibility of female-to-male trans identities in academic literature and cultural representations, the author attempts to provide a psychoanalytical understanding of his therapeutic work in the French activist milieu with an adult wishing to change the female gender assigned at birth. On the basis of the theoretical framework of enigmatic messages by Jean Laplanche and gender melancholy by Judith Butler, he explores the multiple expressions of violence-intrapsychic, family, social, and clinical-that contribute to the complex dynamics of gender subjectivity. In the context of these cumulative traumas, the therapist's self-questioning of his own countertransference proves crucial. The author further reflects on the intersectional interweaving of ethnicity and gender.

Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians

Ethical loneliness in the psychiatric clinic: The manufacture of non-belonging

Summary Arguing for the importance of the clinical encounter as a site of bioethical inquiry, I focus particularly on persons experiencing severe psychic distress. Acknowledging the historical wrongs that have been done to persons with severe psychic distress, I suggest that the contemporary colonization of psychiatric care by the medical model and by neoliberal values that prioritize accountability, metrics, and cost over personhood are doing a grave disservice to such patients. I draw on the writings of social theorists including Agamben to argue that the treatment of psychiatric sufferers produces a risk of causing patients to experience bare life and relegation to the status of nonpersons. Drawing on Stauffer's concept of ethical loneliness, I illustrate the kind of harm that is done when the institutions that we design to listen to patients and receive suffering fail in that responsibility. In the second half of the paper, I offer two illustrative examples of how an emphasis on attuned listening, relationality, and acknowledgement of the rich familial and cultural context of patients’ lives can allow us to engage in ethical listening that leads to receptivity and potential healing. The first illustration draws on a psychoanalytic understanding of the deep psychic injuries caused by inaugural losses in a person's earliest experience, and the second draws on a case that offers rich texture for understanding the experience of a young man who showed up at an emergency room in Morocco in a state of severe psychic distress.

Spit or Swallow? Orality in the Art of Felix Gonzalez‐Torres

This essay mobilizes a psychoanalytic understanding of orality to interpret Felix Gonzalez‐Torres's candy pile works. Focusing on two works from 1991, “Untitled” (Lover Boys) and “Untitled” (Lover Boys), both on display at the Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast in 2015, I follow the artist's suggestion that taking a sweet and sucking on it courts the participant's oral eroticism, to argue that this encounter also invokes the violence of oral sadism. The significance of this sexual violence is explored in the contexts of queer oppression, censorship and socio‐political conservatism in the United States in 1991 and Northern Ireland in 2015, and of mourning, sex and activism in the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. The ambivalence of oral participation with the candy piles, it is argued, registers intersubjective violence at the intersection of multiple injustices, not least, the overlaps of homophobia and racism in the time of HIV/AIDS.

The Relativity of Morality in the Contemporary World

ABSTRACTUtilizing the author’s personal experience and applying psychoanalytic theory, this article explores the similarities and differences between the rise of Fascism in the 1930s and our current political climate, with special attention to the role of morality, both on an individual and collective basis. The article explores the way in which an individual’s morality is shaped by political and social circumstances. Likewise, this article describes the impact of a collapsing social moral order on the individual. Using Heinz Kohut’s self-psychological theory of development, personal morality is linked to internalized values and ideals rather than a Freudian model of the super-ego. The article examines how perpetrators can be motivated by their own ideals and morality while committing heinous crimes. Integrating Theodor Adorno’s ideas and self-psychology, the powerful role of the fascist leader appealing to the psychological needs of his followers is explored. Using the example of Kristallnacht, the article shows how the gradual loss of a moral order can lull citizens into accepting stepwise consequences until it is too late. From the point of view of those who are victims of fascist ideology, the article describes the challenges of holding on to ideals and values under a range of oppressive circumstances. The article highlights the value of a psychoanalytic understanding of our current political situation both for the individual and for society as a whole. A call for us to be mindful of the fragile but vital nature of our collective moral order.

Mediating Trauma and Anxiety: Letters to Fran\xe7oise Dolto, 1976-1978

Françoise Dolto (1908-88) was a prominent French cultural figure thanks to her practice of dispensing psychoanalytically-informed child-rearing advice via the radio. From 1976 to 1978, on her show Lorsque l’enfant paraît, she responded to thousands of letters sent in by listeners requesting help with parenting problems and personal questions of a psychological nature. The article explores Dolto’s cultural position as a child psychoanalyst – understood in the 1960s and 1970s as a radical profession – but from a conservative, Catholic background. It then examines a sample of the letters sent in to her show, analysing the demographics of the correspondents and highlighting their most common concerns. Finally the article studies the relationship between psychoanalysis and trauma. It indicates the anxiety that a psychoanalytic understanding can cause, by reinforcing parents’ fears that childhood traumas are common, can be created unwittingly by parents, and lead to major psychological consequences in later life.

A psychoanalytical understanding of teenage depression

A psychoanalytical understanding of teenage depression

A psychoanalytic and qualitative research on immigrants' “left‐behind” children: “I understand why they left, but why did they leave?”

AbstractBackground and PurposeThe psychoanalytic literature on migration has extensively explored the psychic impact of the migration process on the people who migrate, whereas the predicament of the immigrants' children that were left behind in the country of origin has been largely overlooked. This paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, it sets out to explore the experience of being left behind as a child by parents who emigrated to another country for economic reasons, and secondly, it aspires to present a valid combination of psychoanalytic thinking and qualitative design.MethodsFourteen adult men and women who as children were left behind in Greece when their parents emigrated were interviewed about their current perspectives on their childhood experiences. Their narratives were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative research method that can offer material suitable for psychodynamic understanding.ResultsThe analysis of the interviews yielded the overarching theme “Trauma” and four superordinate themes, “Intense emotions,” “Effects on parent–child relationship,” “Defenses,” and “Psychopathology.” The discussion of the results focuses on the psychoanalytic exploration of the trauma induced by the early and prolonged parent–child separation and its psychic sequelae.ConclusionBeing left in the country of origin by parents who emigrated to another country for economic reasons was a traumatic experience for the “left‐behind” children. The complexities of this situation may be depicted through the combination of qualitative research methods and psychoanalytic understanding.

Blue heaven: jazz as connector and disrupter in family and community relationships

Psychoanalytic understanding of the human predicament pays more attention to developmental experiences within families of origin, of whatever form, than to the communities in which they grow up. Recent critiques of attachment theory draw attention to cultural factors that question measures of attachment security based on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) family assumptions, and emphasise instead the significance of trust for individual and community well-being. Music forms part of the communications web in all societies, and arguably precedes language in connecting and separating people. This exploratory contribution will consider the role music, and jazz in particular, can play in communication, considering both its connective and disruptive potential within families and communities. Using clinical illustration, it will consider jazz as a metaphor for couple psychoanalysis.

Clínica-Palavra-Corpo: Afirmar o Que se Vive e Viver o Que se Afirma

O trabalho, construído através de um ensaio teórico, objetiva repensar a clínica psicanalítica a partir de problemáticas da sociedade atual. Pensando nas principais transformações sociais que afetam a subjetividade e as relações interpessoais, buscou-se identificar teorias e práticas que possam ser um contraponto ao desamparo contemporâneo. Voltando-se à escola húngara da psicanálise, foi possível investigar alguns conceitos de Ferenczi, de Winnicott e de Balint que propõem uma clínica afetiva e uma relação menos hierárquica entre analista e analisando. De tal maneira, proporcionando sustentação e possibilitando experiências de “novo começo”. Além disso, trabalhando com a ideia de promover um modo de vida que faça sentido ao sujeito, realizou-se uma aproximação com os conceitos de cuidado de si e parresía de Foucault. Desse modo, integrando o entendimento psicanalítico ao olhar para si e à coragem de escandalizar a verdade no próprio corpo e na existência, buscou-se construir uma clínica crítica e criativa.

Disturbance and destruction: the aetiology of trauma

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine Catherine Malabou’s concept of trauma, and argue that her replacement of the Freudian unconscious with the cerebral unconscious might fit adequately into a different framework from the one she proposes. Comparing her view of pathology to that of Georges Canguilhem, I propose a dimensional reading of pathology. Building on this – and by reference to metaplasticity – I ask whether one can explain the mechanisation characteristic of the new wounded mechanistically. I then look at her exchange with Slavoj Žižek to get at Malabou’s understanding of psychoanalysis. She seeks to realign Freud and neuroscience to resolve issues with both. As part of this shift, she introduces the term ‘the Material’ – linked to the cerebral unconscious – as an alternative to the Lacanian triad of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. She does, however, leave it underdeveloped, and I argue that this points to tensions in her theory. While her concept of plasticity runs against ideas of an isolated transcendental subject exempt from the outside, Malabou seems to literalise (or ‘corporealise’) trauma. If this is correct, then how radical is her concept of trauma, and are there ways of describing trauma that are equally compatible with her concept of plasticity?

Gilgamesh: The First Tragic Man

ABSTRACT Studying myths with psychoanalytic understanding is an attempt as old as psychoanalysis itself. Being the oldest written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh narrates the heroic journeys and the desperate search for the immortality of Sumerian semi-legendary king, Gilgamesh. In the present article, the main themes of the epic, comprising fellowship and fear of death, were analysed through self-psychological concepts of twinship selfobject needs and the transformations of narcissism. One of the major schools of psychoanalysis, self-psychology, investigates and understands human experiences from the perspective of selfobject experiences in which the psychological functions of selfobjects are utilized to preserve cohesiveness, vitality, and harmony of the self as extensively described by Heinz Kohut and other self-psychologists.

The Place and Role of The Father in Early Life

Abstract The present paper is an attempt to create bridges of understanding between the subjective investigation in the psychoanalytic situation and the empirical research concerning a subject not enough explored in its earliest dimensions – the place and role of the father in the first year of the child’s life. As part of a more extensive empirical research on the dynamics of child development in the first year of life, the research presented in this article was built and articulated within the psychodynamic theories of development, it was conducted in the form of a standardized research and generated a series of results that are re-integrated into the psychoanalytic understanding, validating and being validated by psychoanalytic knowledge. The central point of this encounter between the psychodynamic understanding and the results of empirical research is that the father is an active presence in the development of the child from the first year of life, in a formula of internal and external triadic relationship and that one of the most important function of the father in this early stage of life is to facilitate a way for the child to build his own loving and creative relationship with the world.

Transitional Space: An Opening of the Experiential Realm Beyond the Mind

Este artículo describe cómo la comprensión psicoanalítica existencial radical de Donald Winnicott de la conciencia de transición y la relación de transición entrelaza nuestra psicología personal y nuestra experiencia más profunda de nuestra propia ontología existencial. Este artículo también aborda las coincidencias ontológicas de nuestra comprensión fenomenológica existencial contemporánea y la praxis tántrica Dzogchen de los siglos VIII y IX. El artículo muestra cómo la comprensión tántrica de Dzogchen CE de los siglos VIII y IX ilumina el pensamiento existencialista que atraviesa la fenomenología trascendental de Husserl y más tarde la fenomenología ontológica de Heidegger y Merleau-Ponty. El artículo también revela cómo estas dos modalidades de psicoterapia fenomenológica existencial y praxis tántrica convergen en el proceso experiencial de auto liberación. El trabajo también describe cómo una experiencia que es de fácil acceso se convirtió en el mundo espiritual patriarcal en algo propio de unos pocos «iluminados» como producto corporativo o marca ofreciendo, así, con este artículo, el más oculto secreto del tantra.

Navigating the ‘shadow of loss’ in mental health social work

ABSTRACTThe human experience of loss has been at the centre of psychoanalytic understandings of the human condition since Freud’s first writings on ‘melancholia’. This essay draws on psychodynamic theory to show how workers who are attuned to the experience of loss in service users can shape their interventions accordingly. By reflecting on how a diagnosis of ‘depression’ might better be understood as the rippling wave of past grief, professionals can utilise the dynamics of projection, transference and containment to help understand the emotional pain of individuals they support. But this essay also suggests that the use of psychodynamic practice works best when it is bolstered by other frameworks – in this case an understanding of systems theory. When the two traditions are utilised together, they provide an understanding of psychic phenomena which can enable social workers to build a basis for effective interventions with service users experiencing mental distress.

A Silent Production, both of Text and Self: Conceptualizing the Psychic Work of Comics Reading

In this paper, we wonder how comics – through its play of absence and presence, and as unique multimodal merger of visual arts and literature – may allow readers to engage in a particular kind of psychic work, involving the influence of memory and unconscious life on reading experience. We thus discuss an explicitly psychoanalytic understanding of reading comics, paying particular attention to the mental movements of repression, projection, and reparation. Drawing on readers’ experiences with Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories, we also consider how the formal elements of comics reading might allow readers to work through the effects of potentially difficult personal histories.

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.