Psychoanalytic Writings Research Articles

A‐void — An exploration of defences against sensing nothingness

The author describes the potentially annihilating terror implicit in the experience of contact with the void—the ‘domain of the non‐existent’ or nothingness, conceived as an immensely hostile object, terrifying space or a place of ‘nameless dread’. All manifestations of existence are threatened by contact with the void, necessitating the deployment of a variety of defences. These various defences—universally employed to avoid contact with this domain—are then discussed. These include trying to search for a fixed sense of identity that can often propel people to seek refuge inside an object or state of mind, as described in Meltzer's ‘claustrum’ and Steiner's ‘psychic retreat’. Other defences, including distraction and grandiosity, are also described. The author then goes on to discuss techniques for helping patients to tolerate contact with mental states engendered by the threat of potential contact with the void, in order to strengthen their capacity to feel and thus enlarge their repertoire of coping with anxiety in a non‐reactive and thus growth‐inducing manner. This involves discussion about psychoanalytically informed Buddhist understanding of these states and the nature of identity itself, as well as the correlation between these insights and those offered by Bion and other psychoanalytic writers.

There Where Primary Narcissism Was, I Must Become: The Inception of the Ego in Andreas-Salomé, Lacan, and Kristeva

Introduction This essay explores the psychoanalytic work of Lou Andreas-Salomé, specifically in relation to theories of the development of the ego. That Andreas-Salomé's writings have received so little attention is especially regrettable in light of the many ways in which they anticipate current discussions. Andreas-Salomé perceives an inconsistency in Freud's thinking on the formation of the ego; she senses, even when she does not explicitly state, that in this respect his theories need reworking. The topic of ego development has played a central role in the debates between mainstream and French psychoanalytic theorists. Whereas in Freud's time other psychoanalysts (especially Jung and Adler) rejected Freud's concept of sexuality because they thought he overemphasized its importance for the development of the self, today his concept of sexuality is accepted by most French analysts (though not by many others), but his account of the development of the ego is widely challenged. This holds true not only for Jacques Lacan but also for Catherine Clément, André Green, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Laplanche. Here I focus on Kristeva's writings and the writings of Lacan that influenced her, examining the theories of both in relation to those of Andreas-Salomé. I am concerned, above all, with Andreas-Salomé's rethinking of Freud's theory of ego development, but I would also like to elucidate the points of connection between her work and the theories of Lacan and Kristeva. 1 [End Page 813] Theories of Ego Development: Freud, Lacan, Kristeva Many social critics of psychoanalysis object to Freud's theory of the earliest development of the self. Their revisions, however, often presuppose an innate striving for a self, which is precisely what Freud thought needed to be investigated. How does a newborn child, this bundled mass of flesh, which cries when it is hungry or in pain, become a person? How does an ego emerge? It is in the context of such questions that Lou Andreas-Salomé's psychoanalytic writings are best located. Freud presents two versions of the development of the ego. From his formulation of the two principles of mental functioning (1911), he surmised that there must be an agency mediating between wish and reality. In the Introductory Lectures, he states that the "transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle is one of the most important steps forward in the ego's development" (1916-17, 357). He posits that the ego emerges when our drives are not satisfied and serves to mediate between the reality principle and the libido. Indeed, he ascribes the function of reality-testing to the ego. In "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," he writes: "We shall place reality-testing among the major institutions of the ego" (1917a, 233; italics in original); and in "Mourning and Melancholia" he again refers to reality-testing as one of the central functions of the ego (1917b, 247). It seems, however, that Freud himself was not completely convinced by his presentation of the ego as developing out of the conflict between the reality principle and the pleasure principle. In The Ego and the Id (1923), he radically revised his earlier conception and depicted the ego as a precipitate of internalized identifications, especially those of the child with its parents during the Oedipus complex. Neither Lacan nor Kristeva accepts Freud's depiction of the ego as an agency that arises through contact with external reality, but both are deeply influenced by Freud's later theory of an ego that arises through internalized identifications. Both believe, however, that a preoedipal form of identification must inaugurate the ego. Freud himself acknowledges such a possibility, albeit only once, when he alludes in The Ego and the Id to [End Page 814] identification with the "father of one's own personal prehistory" [Vater der persönlichen Vorzeit...

On "Unitive distortions": toward a differential assessment of religious ecstasy.

The fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM), published in 1994, featured an entirely new category titled “Religious and Spiritual Problem” (category V62.89). The entry represents the medical community’s attempt to come to terms with such phenomena as near-death, peak, and transcendent experiences. It introduces a nosological distinction between spiritual problems complicated by mental pathology, and those effected by nonmorbid factors such as stress due to identity change, or the fear of social ridicule and ostracization. The inclusion of this category reflects an evolving reversal of long-standing trends amongst psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to dismiss religious experience as both pathological and regressive (Lukoff, Lu, & Turner, 1992). Indeed, the undisguised antipathy toward religion in early psychoanalytic writings is well known. Freud’s categorical pronouncements on the obsessive (1907), infantile and delusional character of belief (1927, 1930), or Alexander’s (1931) notorious claim that Buddhist meditation induces a form of schizophrenic catatonia, are but two examples of the kind of reductionism that has led many to assume that psychoanalysis is, by definition, intrinsically hostile to religion. Yet even early on thinkers such as Pfister (1948) and Erikson (1950) introduced a more judicious account of religiosity and its adaptive potential. On the strength of such key concepts as “regression in the service of the ego” (Kris, 1952), “transitional experience” (Winnicott, 1971) and the “self-object” (Bacal & Newman, 1990), a more recent array of post-Freudian scholars have successfully

Engendering Metafiction: Textuality and Closure in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

In the five years since Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace (1996) appeared, a number of readers have been attracted to the implications of the quilting trope. Each of the novel's fifteen parts takes its name from a traditional pattern in quilt making. It becomes clear, as Margaret Rogerson has noted, that Atwood offers a linear equivalent to the spatial arrangement of blocks in a quilting pattern, and Grace herself is aware of the function of quilting as a metaphor for her own storytelling (Rogerson 8, 19). Thus, it is highly unlikely that most readers will miss the way in which the patchwork trope functions as the organizing principle in this narrative. The novel offers patches of found texts stitched together in a manner which foregrounds both their provenance as received texts and the constructedness of the larger text(ure) into which they have been worked. In this sense, Alias Grace may be read as a text whose stitches and seams are anything but blind, being so obtrusive as to be unmistakable. And because quilting has been an almost exclusive cultural expression of women's s work, this novel, written by a woman, about an historical woman's crime and punishment in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, is inevitably implicated in issues. In Alias Grace it might be argued that Atwood has constructed a text whose obtrusiveness as construction so blatantly expresses metafictionality that it may be read as gendered, not by the sexual identity of either its central consciousness, Grace Marks, or its author, so much as by a postmodernity that might itself be usefully explored as a feminine binary opposite of a masculine modernism. Because both of these terms, and gender, have been problematic for contemporary discourse, this project of examining Alias Grace as engendered metafiction requires a critical or theoretical framework before a discussion of the text can begin. Of the two terms, may be the more manageable. The term has been a part of critical discourse for a generation and thus should nor require a lengthy rehearsal here. Metafiction denotes a fictional text that draws attention to itself as text in a variety of ways. The metafictional text stands in marked contrast to the realist text, which may be conceived of as one whose language aims at its own invisibility, so that the reader looks through the realist's language at the world represented, as though the text were a transparent window. The metafictional or postmodern text, on the other hand, brings itself inescapably to the reader's attention so that the text foregrounds itself as though it were a Tiffany windowpane: a world may exist on the other side of the windowpane, but it is the text or representation that seems to have become more important. Accordingly, reality becomes textual. At the same time, such reflexivity is not synonymous with and the metafictionality of postmode rn texts is implicated in an effort at a more radical subversion than the self-referentiality of older texts. From a number of conventional examples of earlier, self-reflexive texts, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67) will serve the purpose here. Despite its playful subversions of the reader's expectations and its calling attention to its own textuality, Sterne's novel demonstrates little effort at subverting a reality outside itself in the more radical manner in which a novel such as Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) or John Barth's Once Upon a Time (1994) seems intent on affirming that textuality itself may be reality. As with the term metafiction, gender ought not to require extensive rehearsal. A generation of theorists, many of whom at least began as readers of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic writings, has encouraged us to think of as culturally constructed, rather than fixed by differences of sex, or biology. Of particular importance to our shared notions of have been French writers such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, as well as American theorists such as Jane Gallop and Barbara Johnson, who have followed Irigaray in reading differences in Lacan's tropes. …

Painting, Atom Bombs and Nudes: Symbolism in the later psychoanalytic writings of Adrian Stokes

(2001). Painting, Atom Bombs and Nudes: Symbolism in the later psychoanalytic writings of Adrian Stokes. Psychoanalytic Studies: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 95-109.

Painting, Atom Bombs and Nudes: symbolism in the later psychoanalytic writings of Adrian Stokes

Painting, Atom Bombs and Nudes: symbolism in the later psychoanalytic writings of Adrian Stokes

Migration and Cultural Orientation: An Empirical Test of the Psychoanalytic Theory in Chinese Americans

The psychoanalytic literature suggests migration entails an intra-psychic challenge of separation–individuation that necessitates the assistance of internal and external objects. While this has been illustrated by anecdotal data and clinical case material, it has not been previously tested in the general migrant community. This study examined three Chinese-American groups who varied in the availability of external objects (i.e., primary caretakers) and stability and solidity of internal object and self representations due to varying developmental stages at the time of migration, and assessed whether, as predicted by some psychoanalytic writers, they would have differential need to embrace their native culture to support their transition. Results showed that unaccompanied minors who migrated without their parents during adolescence evidenced a stronger Chinese cultural orientation than both accompanied minors who migrated with their parents during childhood (perhaps due to less access to external objects) and unaccompanied adults who migrated without their parents during adulthood (perhaps due to less well internalized objects), lending empirical support for the psychoanalytic postulation. Implications of the findings for future research and intervention are discussed.

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIAL WORKER/THE SOCIAL WORK PSYCHOANALYST: WHAT SHALL BE OUR MESSAGE?

Many social workers experience a powerful bond with their profession and with the contributions of psychoanalysis. This paper explores these bonds and demonstrates the substantial overlap, and occasional divergence, which exists between these two important fields. It is especially gratifying to see the renewed emphasis on the treatment relationship in contemporary psychoanalytic writings because the relationship has always been central to social work practice. Finally, all psychoanalytic social workers are encouraged to invest themselves in transferring the legacy of their work to beginning social workers, social work students, and the generations of social workers that will follow them.

Oedipus Again: a Critical Study of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter

In this paper the Oedipus complex is reexamined through a film, The Night of the Hunter. Study reveals a concealed fairy tale structure, a structure that, when presented against a mythic backdrop, is ideal for presenting a certain kind of oedipal situation, that of a vulnerable damaged father and couple (indeed, couples), revealing a skewed oedipal situation. The film, produced in 1954 and looked at forty years later in the context of psychoanalytic writings of the last decade (Bergmann, Feldman, Herman, Simon), provides a matrix with which to reexamine a fundamental psychoanalytic concept, the Oedipus complex. It is the mutual enrichment of art and psychoanalysis that this paper addresses.

Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity: Three Reviews and a Response

In this issue we introduce a new format for the JAPA Review of Books. In our first Book Forum, Irwin Z. Hoffman's Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process is evaluated by three reviewers—Jessica Benjamin, Lawrence Friedman, and Louis Sass. Each provides in-depth commentary on this important new contribution to the psychoanalytic literature. Their reviews are followed by an equally thoughtful reply by the author. In this manner the dialectical-constructivist approach to psychoanalytic work that Hoffman outlines is considered and reconsidered, challenged and defended, and defined and redefined through the perspectives of some of our field's leading thinkers. A particularly unique feature of this dialogue is the backdrop of death and mortality that has long been ignored or minimized by psychoanalytic writers but is brought into bold relief in Hoffman's work. We are certain that readers will be enriched by this exchange. In future issues we hope to repeat this format for other worthy and provocative new contributions to psychoanalytic thought.

Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (review)

Reviewed by: Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment Laura Duhan Kaplan Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, by Jane Gallop; 104 pp. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, $10.95 paper. I devoured this book in a hour because it is about sex and feminism in the life of its author, a university professor. At the end of the hour, I found I did not like the professor, who used her feminism to justify morally questionable sexual behavior. Questions of sex and gender figure prominently in the public life of Professor Jane Gallop. Her psychoanalytic writings on the erotic dynamics within both literary texts and interpersonal relationships have been well-received by both feminist and postmodern scholars. Yet Gallop’s personal explorations of those dynamics led, in 1993, to her being accused of sexual harassment by two female students. Although found not guilty of harassment by a university tribunal, she was declared to have violated the university’s ban on “consensual amorous relations” between faculty and students. The case made national news, and Professor Gallop wrote Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment in order to present her side of the case. Gallop’s nostalgia for the excitement of the early years of academic feminism is central to her presentation. In the seventies, she says, students and professors [End Page 521] were exploring texts, ideas, and relationships together; in the nineties, professors plod through established canons and well-worn lessons while maintaining a professional distance. Further, some of the understandings of the early years have become distorted as feminist ideas have entered popular consciousness. In particular, Gallop argues that the concept of “sexual harassment” has drifted far from its original intent. “Sexual harassment” originally referred to a form of discrimination, in which (according to EEOC guidelines) participation in a sexual relationship was made a condition of a person’s employment. Now, however, “sexual harassment” seems to refer to any kind of sexual relationship in the professional or pedagogical arena. Instead of expressing the principle that discrimination is bad, current sexual harassment cases seem to express the principle that sex in itself is bad. Sex in itself, however, can be a means to self-esteem and power as well as pleasure. Students who are otherwise fairly powerless in our university system, Gallop argues, gain a feeling of power from sleeping with their professors. These are valid points, but they do not serve Professor Gallop well when she uses them to justify herself. She defends her history of many sexual relationships with her students and professors by speaking of her desire to recapture the vitality of her early years as a feminist, of her interest in the many ways that sex can bring people together for mutual pleasure, and of her quest for power. In this, she is refreshingly honest, but hardly heartwarming. I find it difficult to like someone who sees nothing wrong with offering a frankly self-centered defense of actions that might harm others. Gallop argues that she treats her students as persons, in contrast to university policies that treat them as objects by sheltering them from intimate relationships with faculty members. In this respect, she embraces a radical liberalism. She and her students are individuals who come together to engage in temporary consensual (implicitly contractual) relationships. When those relationships end, individuals are fully responsible for their own reactions to the relationship and the breakup. I find this radical liberalism to be a very shortsighted and irresponsible approach to amorous relationships. Refusing even to acknowledge the pain unrequited love may cause in some of her admirers hardly seems to me to be treating those admirers as persons. In another work, Gallop acknowledges that many of the professors she slept with in her student days were married or otherwise attached. Yet she speaks only of how those relationships helped her to awaken sexually, and seems to have no notion of the larger web of persons, such as her lovers’ partners, who may have been affected negatively by the affairs. In an essay in her earlier book Thinking Through the Body (1988), Gallop writes that we cannot erase our bodies and their peculiar inclinations. Our quirky bodies erupt through the limitations we place on them. For...

The Analyst as (Auto)biographer

The Analyst as (Auto)biographer Adrienne Harris The conventional relationship of biography to psychoanalysis has been that the latter serves the former as a mode of analysis, that psychoanalysis is a powerful tool of biography. Feeling that this transaction flows too unidirectionally, I am going to work against this arrangement to explore the presence of biography and autobiography in analytic writing. This would not be a simple reversal but more likely a dialectic. Neither psychoanalysis nor biography exist any longer in pure uninflected form. Many literary genres, particularly biography and autobiography, are already infused and permeated with psychoanalytic technique and concepts. Tracing the reflection of literary conventions back into psychoanalytic writing could involve an uncanny double mirroring. But I think it could be productive to watch for the tropes of narration and of personal voice. Story telling is a form of identity making and identity maintenance, in clinical psychoanalytic writing, as Schafer (1992) has argued. I am going to approach this topic in two ways. First, I will explore both the presence of a biographical and autobiographical impulse in analysts’ writing by a close reading of three texts about and/or by the English psychoanalyst, Margaret Little. Little, an analyst who did groundbreaking work on countertransference and transference regression, was in analysis with Winnicott from 1949 to 1955. She appears (disguised) in clinical vignettes in a number of Winnicott’s clinical papers. Most powerfully, however, one can see the use to which she put her personal experience in her collection of essays “Transference Neurosis and Transference Psychosis” (1980). This interdependence of writer as subject and object is illuminated by a reading of an explicitly autobiographical essay she wrote in 1985. In Winnicott’s texts, in Little’s memoir and in her theoretical work, it is possible to watch subtle turns of the prism through which an analyst views and records his/her [End Page 255] experience. Theory and insight emerge from deeply personal life events and occasions. Secondly I want to look, in a more general way, at how conventions of biographical writing have entered and shaped analytic writing. Is there a genre of the psychoanalytic essay, in particular of the presentation of case material and clinical vignettes? How have the conventions of life story telling or the aesthetic demands of drama influenced the organization or presentation of clinical work? Most psychoanalysts who write seem influenced by the formal conventions of scientific writing and so produce writing in a dispassionate, objectifying voice. Relatively few psychoanalytic writers have an individual voice or style or see their written work in artistic or literary terms even if the artistic elements in psychoanalytic practice are frankly acknowledged (Loewald 1970). One might say that the passive voice is a kind of professional fetish. Yet despite this somewhat generic neutrality, miming perhaps an idealized clinical stance of neutrality, one can detect the presence and organizing power of literary and biographical conventions in psychoanalytic writing. There are a number of developments within psychoanalysis upon which this essay is predicated. Relational psychoanalysis is an emerging clinical and theoretical perspective (Mitchell 1988, 1993), drawn from British and American object relations theory and from the interpersonal tradition of Sullivan and Fromm. From this perspective, analytic work is always considered to be the co-construction of shared meaning and often the co-creation of multiple narratives. This has led to a quite thorough reworking of the concepts of transference and countertransference. Ogden, an important influence on relational theory, perhaps a fellow traveler, defines these terms as follows: “I do not view transference and countertransference as separable entities that arise in response to one another: rather I understand these terms to refer to aspects of a single intersubjective totality experienced separately (and individually) by analyst and analysand.” (Ogden 1995, 696). There has been a profound epistemological and ideological shift within psychoanalysis of which countertransference analysis is but one feature. Relational psychoanalysis entails a [End Page 256] shift from a one person to two person psychology. Hermeneutics, theories of social construction, pragmatic theories which address how meaning and reality are constituted in contexts: all these movements in philosophy and social theory have played powerful and complex roles in the reshaping and reworking of...

Kafka's “A Visit to a mine”: The literary path to a Freudian view of identification

This paper will show that Kafka, in his enigmatic short story, “A Visit to a Mine,” depicted the concept of identification in a literary manner, similar to the way Freud articulated identification in his psychoanalytic writings. It will be argued that the subjects found in “A Visit to a Mine,” and who were used by Kafka in his quest for personal and professional identification, were among the most important European writers of the early twentieth century. This group of authors with whom Kafka identified included many highly influential figures, such as; Gorki, von Hofmannsthal, H. Mann and Anatole France.

Psychoanalytic sociology and the medical encounter: Parsons and beyond

AbstractWhile sociologists earlier this century often used insights derived from psychoanalytic theory in their writings, contemporary sociology has largely tended to ignore this body of work. This is as true of medical sociologists as it is of others, despite the fact that the ‘founding father’ of medical sociology, Talcott Parsons, used psychoanalytic perspectives extensively in his theorising on the social aspects of medicine and health. In this paper I make a case for a return to a medical sociology that incorporates understandings of subjectivity derived from psychoanalytic writings, with particular reference to the medical encounter and the illness experience. The paper begins with an overview of psychoanalytic sociology. I go on to review the major insights Parsons developed in his writings and the work of other writers who have more recently used psychoanalytic theory productively in theorising the sociocultural dimensions of medicine and health care. The paper concludes with some thoughts about future directions for taking up the psychoanalytic perspective in the sociology of health and illness.

Introduction

Introduction Jack Spector Many scholars in the fields of art history and art criticism, even after the debates of the last decades, see the value of applying a psychoanalytic viewpoint to certain problems involving not only individual but group psychology and not only living artists but ones long dead. One still hopes to combine the fields in such a way as to produce new perspectives and insights into the materials unavailable to either approach separately. Naturally, old problems remain (manifest in numerous failed efforts at “psychohistory”) of integrating psychoanalytic insights into history without reducing the richness and complexity of historical situations to psychological elements and without simplistically projecting the results derived from the behavior of individuals to social groups. Frequently both problems have originated from the uninformed ambition of specialists exploring unfamiliar materials. The contributors to this issue have both a specialized knowledge of an area of art history, and a good acquaintance with psychoanalytic writings relevant to their subject. Their studies of materials unlikely to be familiar to a psychoanalytic audience have a degree of clarity and freshness that will, I hope, expand the horizons of the readership of American Imago. When, at the beginning of this century, the “Founding Fathers” of psychoanalysis analyzed art they did so as a metapsychological avocation from their clinical practice. They devoted their attention to the most famous (often Italian High Renaissance) masters; everything else they either ignored as uninteresting mediocrity or studied as the protocol of a psychopathological condition. In recent decades both the nature of the critics and their subject matter have changed dramatically in the U.S.: comparatively few of the psychoanalytic critics maintain clinical practices; and, following the examples set by minority and feminist critics, they have paid increasing attention to non-canonical art, art that falls outside [End Page 1] the traditional definition of “fine-art” represented in the standard art history survey texts of Gombrich, Janson, and Helen Gardner. Here, they encounter art historians like those contributing to this volume (only two of whom have clinical practices) who increasingly find their material in “non-art” images such as scatology, pictographic cartoons, art by and for children, intentionally distorted self-portrait masks, technological schemata, and graffiti. The determining influence on the new art history has come from critics concerned with the last two centuries, mainly modernist art, literature, photography, and film of France. French critics found novel ways to adapt the idealism of German thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger to their interest in linguistics and semiotics. In their work visual theory overshadowed the traditions of iconography and connoisseurship; and factuality (the Annales School) yielded to new theoretical concerns. Spreading from Johns Hopkins and the Ivy League schools who invited Derrida, Lacan and others, these new ideas powerfully influenced a whole generation of American scholars. Now—saturated perhaps with visiting French scholars—there is an increasing effort in the U.S. to engage in a dialogue between French semiotics (Saussure) and theory (Lacan, Derrida) and Anglo-American empiricist and positivist concerns: Peirce displaces Saussure and theory engages history, iconography, and connoisseurship. (But least of all in the Italian Renaissance where many entrenched scholars and most of the big museums maintain a predilection for “great art.”) Psychoanalysis in its variations and reincarnations has been an important ingredient in the new directions of art history, especially of the eighteenth century and later: all the studies in this collection evidence this interdisciplinary turn. The eight articles assembled here fall roughly into two categories based on chronological emphasis, and will accordingly be published in two issues of American Imago, the first containing the articles of Gandelman, Spector, Ettinger, and Levine; the second those of Collins and Cowart, Knafo, Kuspit and Spitz. Claude Gandelman ’s discussion of scatology during the French Revolution shows how aggressive anal humor was [End Page 2] aimed at elevated and powerful targets like the King and Queen. (One could relate this to the political satire that served from antiquity on the aim of humbling authority.) My own analysis of the monstrification of independent women overlaps Gandelman’s period, and shares with his article and that of Collins/Cowart a concern for showing that the icons representing the...

L’écriture limite: Kristeva's Postmodern Feminist Ethics

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

Containment and the threat of catastrophic change in psychotherapy groups

Wilfred Bion's seminal work with treatment and training groups is considered by many group therapists to be a classic study of group behavior. Despite the influence of his early work on groups, practitioners frequently find his later writings difficult to apply to group settings. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the potential usefulness of Bion's later psychoanalytic writings to our understanding of the complex dynamics active in therapy groups. This paper examines the relationship among four concepts that Bion emphasized in his later writings: projective identification, containercontained, (Ps<---->D), and catastrophic change. Two clinical vignettes are presented to demonstrate how these concepts can aid the therapist in understanding the complicated dynamics active in therapeutic group settings.

The higher and lower in mental life: an essay on J. Hughlings Jackson and Freud.

Freud's familiarity with the work of the eminent neurologist J. Hughlings Jackson enabled him to make substantial contributions to aphasiology and inspired Freud's earliest insights into the emotional determinants of speech disruptions. However, Jackson's hierarchical model, which came to dominate Freud's topographic system of mental organization, created a number of insoluable difficulties in the early psychoanalytic writings. Despite the contention of some that Jackson's influence lent additional rigor to Freud's cognitive psychology, it is argued that the Jacksonian trend in Freud's thought contributed to a narrow notion of repression based on rather untenable notions of how thoughts attain or do not attain consciousness. It contributed also to certain problems in the dream theory, particularly regarding the role of language in dreaming.

An interpersonally based model of chronic pain: An application of attachment theory

The article examines the applicability of attachment theory to the development of and adaptation to chronic pain. We begin with an overview of traditional psychological models of chronic pain, including psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and cognitive—behavioral theory. It is noted that psychoanalytic writings on chronic pain are few. Those that exist are based on drive theory and place little emphasis on interpersonal factors. The behavioral tradition was more interpersonally based, with its emphasis on social reinforcement of pain behavior. The cognitive—behavioral perspective signalled a return to an emphasis on intrapsychic factors in the etiology and maintenance of chronic pain syndrome. The interpersonal dimensions of the pain experience suggested or implied by these theories is discussed further. This is followed by a review of Bowlby's (1969, 1975, 1981) attachment theory. The tenets of attachment theory are used as a foundation for furthering our understanding of the development of and adjustment to chronic pain, within an interpersonal framework. Bowlby (1988) suggests that pain and illness evoke attachment behaviors that are meant to preserve the organism's survival. The four attachment groups identified by Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) are described. Descriptions are provided as to the manner in which members of each group are likely to react to onset of chronic pain. Emphasis is placed on accounting for etiology of chronic pain and implications of this model for the assessment process.

Therapeutic impact disclosure: A last taboo in psychoanalytic theory and practice

AbstractThis article highlights the therapeutic intervention of impact disclosure. Impact disclosure occurs when the therapist voices to the patient his or her perceptions of and reactions to the patient's actions, as experienced by the therapist during their sessions. We first provide a brief statement of the interpersonal communications theory in which the intervention originally was embedded. Then we summarize essential definitions of impact disclosure, principles that might guide its use in therapy, and available empirical findings. Next we discuss perspectives on countertransference by recent psychoanalytic writers. Finally, we confront theoretical and other concerns regarding use of impact disclosure in treatment and discuss its advantages, with the hope that the intervention might assume its rightful place both in the practice and research of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.