Psychoanalytic View Research Articles

The Greatness and Limitations of Erich Fromm’s Humanism

Erich Fromm's most important contribution to “the science of man” and psychoanalysis was the development of an existential humanism. This existential bent was based on his view that the human condition developed over the course of human evolution trans-survival needs for meaning that transcended our biological needs for survival. His second important contribution was a brilliant Marx-Freud synthesis, which he used to explore how ideologies can mask economic conditions, and how shared social values that are internalized (social character) are adaptive to socioeconomic conditions. A third contribution was his view of psychoanalysis as a “center-to-center relation” where analysts and patients are able to recognize and share their common humanity as a vehicle for change. Like all major contributors to understanding the human condition, Fromm had strengths and weaknesses. I propose some revisions that address some of the weaknesses while supporting the strengths.

La confusion mentale : sa place dans l’histoire de la psychiatrie en France

ObjectivesThis paper endeavours to trace the complex history of “mental confusion” in order to determine its place in psychiatric nosography in France. MethodologyFrom the first clinical observations (Pinel, Esquirol, Georget, Delasiauve, etc.), we followed the confused history of mental confusion. To do this we confronted numerous writings in classic psychiatry with contemporary research (psychiatric and psychoanalytical). ResultsThe history of psychiatry tells us that states of confusion (distraction, incoherent and confused thought, disorientation, etc.) can be found in many complaints or pathologies. The contribution of the psychoanalytic view is that the distinction between “state” and “structure” can guide us in our clinical practice. DiscussionWe note that mental confusion was observed at an early date but it was named and differentiated from other types of alienation only with the writings of Delasiauve (1851), before being neglected for some time following the work by Baillarger. Its place in psychiatric nosography was variable. It appears that a distinction between “state” of confusion and a clinical “structure” characterised by confusion is essential. ConclusionWe conclude that it is difficult to treat mental confusion as a single, specific syndrome or as a single clinical entity, nor can symptomatic manifestations alone suffice to establish a differential diagnosis.

Castration Depression: Affect, Signal Affect, and/or Depressive Illness?

The value of Charles Brenner's ideas regarding depression is assessed, focusing on the significance of castration depressive affect. His discussion of whether depression is an affect, a signal affect, or an illness is examined, with special emphasis on his failure to sufficiently address depression as an illness or disorder as defined by psychiatry. Clinical material from the analysis of a man who suffers from severe depression suggests that incorporating psychiatric concepts (biological and pharmacological) with modern conflict theory can be a useful way to understand and treat some patients with depression. Theoretical and clinical controversies associated with combining psychiatric/biological and psychoanalytic views of depression are examined.

“Toward a Sociological Analysis of Pathological Gambling”

“Toward a Sociological Analysis of Pathological Gambling” Joseph A. Scimecca Abstract The academic study of gambling began in the United States in the 1950s with an emphasis on the psychoanalytical approach – gambling was considered a mental illness, a compulsion. In the 960s and 1970s, sociologists began to look at gambling as a social problem, but this approach did not gain much traction in changing the psychoanalytical view of gambling’s acceptance by the mental health community as well as by the general public. In the ensuing decades, the study of gambling behavior has shifted to a genetic approach, with genes being held responsible for what is now referred to as pathological gambling (PG). This change is reflected in the most recent iteration of the American Psychiatric Association’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS-5), which places PG within the category of “Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders.” In this article, an alternative viewing of gambling is offered, one that sees gambling as more of a cultural phenomenon, a result of capitalism’s emphasis on competition, and blaming the victim for not succeeding, than as an addiction. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jssw.v3n1a1

Pernicious Residues of Foundational Postulates

It has long been recognized that many of the original psychoanalytic views of women were derived from misguided theories. Regrettably, residues of the foundational postulates that informed those theories still persist, assuring a pervasive gender bias even in contemporary psychoanalytic investigations. This contribution describes where those postulates reside, while proposing alternates that could prove far more useful for the theory and practice of our profession.

Psychoanalysis, Reparation, and Historical Memory

This paper presents a psychoanalytic view of the tensions in assimilating a largely disowned past into a convergent contemporary social memory. It is based on the idea that remembering is making good a relationship to the past, akin to the Kleinian concept of reparation to a good internal object. By contrast, falsely remembering, or remembering by controlling unwanted memories, is a form of manic reparation that denigrates a good internal object. Reparation is based on concern for damage to the other, while manic reparation is based on narcissistic aggrandizement and contempt for the other. Symbols of reparation, such as memorials, gather conflicting groups around them as enclaves of conflicting memories. As sites of ambivalence, they represent both reparative and manicreparative intentions, as well as intellectual, emotional, and political conflict. Focusing on memorials, the essay addresses the problem of remembering and repairing through an analysis of ambivalence in German memory of the Nazi period after the Second World War. It aligns reparation with introjective identification and manic reparation with projective identification, clarifying and illustrating these concepts as part of the understanding of ambivalent remembering.

Born under Auschwitz: melancholy traditions in postwar German literature

In German Studies the literary phenomenon of melancholy, which has a longstanding and diverse history in European letters, has typically been associated with the Early Modern and Baroque periods, Romanticism, and the crisis of modernity. This association, alongside the dominant psychoanalytical view of melancholy in German memory discourses since the 1960s, has led to its neglect as an important literary mode in postwar German literature, a situation the present book seeks to redress by identifying and analyzing epochal postwar works that use melancholy traditions to comment on German history in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It focuses on five writers - Gunter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Iris Hanika - who reflect on the legacy of Auschwitz as intellectuals trying to negotiate a relationship to the past based on the stigma of belonging to a perpetrator collective (Grass, Sebald, Hanika) or, broadly speaking, to the victim collective (Weiss, Hildesheimer), in order to develop a melancholy ethics of memory for the Holocaust and the Nazi past. It will appeal to scholars and students of German Studies,Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Cultural Memory, and Holocaust Studies. Mary Cosgrove is Reader in German at the University of Edinburgh.

A Developmental View of Hostile Aggression

I want to welcome our guests and members to a most exciting day. In the interest of time, I will give some background on psychoanalytic views on aggression, make three or four brief points about vi...

A convergent neurological and psychoanalytic view of the concept of regression and mental structure in a case of NMDA receptor encephalitis

This is a review of a case of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor encephalitis looked at from the vantage point of clinical psychoanalysis and clinical neurology. We will describe the events of our patient's illness and attempt to articulate our ongoing clinical thought process, both psychoanalytic and neurological. We will show that our patient demonstrated a massive regression in mental functioning, whose features were consistent with Freud's views on the nature of regression. With neurological treatment our patient made a full recovery in her mental functioning. We will argue that this regression in mental functioning was the result of a six-month-long absence of functional NMDA receptors in her brain. However, in trying to understand what happened to this patient's mental functioning using Freud's structural theory, we came across some insoluble contradictions in accounting for the dynamic interactions of the id, ego, and superego when these entities were viewed as distinct systems, agencies, or structures of the mind. We will argue that this constitutes clinical and neurobiological evidence for the need to modify some aspects of Freud's structural theory. We will propose that reuniting neurological and psychoanalytic thinking can provide psychoanalysts with a conceptual framework necessary to critically evaluate psychoanalytic metapsychology.

A hundred years of latency: from Freudian psychosexual theory to dynamic systems nonlinear development in middle childhood.

A focus on the latency phase is used to illustrate how theory and developmental research have influenced our psychoanalytic views of development over the past hundred years. Beginning with Freud's psychosexual theory and his conception of latency, an historical overview of the major psychoanalytic contributions bearing on this developmental period over the past century is presented. Recent longitudinal research in latency supports a nonlinear dynamic systems approach to development. This approach obliges us to reconsider our linear theories and how we think about and work with our patients.

Identities and ideals: Psychoanalytic dialogues of self and leadership

The author contextualizes recent developments in sociocognitive approaches to leadership by drawing on psychoanalytic conceptions of self-identity. It is argued that psychoanalytic views of the self are complementary to contemporary social-cognitive approaches, although historical divergences in these literatures have impeded mutual dialogue. This initiative at dialogue examines charismatic, schema, and self-identity theories of leadership within a psychoanalytic framework, arguing that when self-identity is viewed broadly, convergences between these approaches become apparent. A broad view of the self makes notions of authority central to the construction of personal identities, underscores the ambivalence and relationality of self-processes, and highlights the normative assumptions underlying followership that may be difficult to theorize with contemporary sociocognitive approaches.

Mothers of disabled children: in mourning or on the march?

A traditional psychoanalytic view of parenting a disabled child emphasises responses of shock, grief and depression. Parent activists and social model disability authors dismiss such accounts as destructive and prejudiced, foregrounding structural barriers to accessing services and resources. Further, psychoanalysis is criticised for its anachronistic, ideologically uncritical discourse. Each position brings valuable insights as well as silences. This paper seeks to overcome an assumption of mutual exclusivity by creating a new synthesis, drawing on the work of Winnicott and Kittay. Conclusions are that it is both possible and necessary to allow for ambivalent feelings within parents, while attending to the external, material realities of contextual factors.

Notes on neoliberalisms and psychoanalysis

This paper attempts to demonstrate the inextricability of the sociopolitical from the clinical practice of working with patients, by presenting a brief vignette of a session that took place immediately after I listened to a news broadcast. Because I view psychoanalytic theory and practice as inseparable from sociopolitical reality, I propose that psychoanalysis is an approach to living that is grounded in culture and values. I argue that by espousing a view of psychoanalysis as truth, we inadvertently contribute to naturalizing neoliberalism. I also attempt to broaden our view of neoliberal subjectivities.

Contemporary psychoanalytic views on the experience of immigration.

Contemporary psychoanalytic views on the experience of immigration.

Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett by Laurens De Vos (review)

Reviewed by: Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett by Laurens De Vos Rob Connick (bio) Laurens De Vos . Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011. Pp. 255. $75.00. Laurens DeVos engages in a formidable task in this study: proving that not only are Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty concepts more easily seen in theater production than most critics claim, but they can also be explicitly found in the works of two more generally well-regarded playwrights—Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett. To do so, he continually displays how all three artists "launch an attack on the subjectile of language" (171) in both their theories (for Artaud) and their scripted works by highlighting how language can actually work against understanding. De Vos argues three major claims in this book. First, he seeks to prove that these three "share a common worldview that is structurally embedded in their work and that is reflected in their ideas of what literature should convey and on what language can and cannot do" (26). Second, he claims that proving Kane's influence by both Artaud and Beckett helps "determine more easily the degree of Beckett's Artaudian sensibility" (26). Finally, he argues that Artaud's Theater of Cruelty ideas, which focus on moving away from a dependence on the written word, are "not altogether anathema to the literary genre of tragedy" (26). This approach results in a study that combines theater and literary theories with linguistics and psychoanalysis in a way that makes these varied disciplines accessible without reducing them to overly simplistic generalizations. De Vos begins by examining Artaud's writings through the lens of psychoanalysis to determine how the artist's hostility to the written word mirrors critical thinking and attempts to place these critical discourses in the theatrical realm. Artaud's hostility toward Western theater, De Vos argues, stems from the fact that it has rejected those characteristics that make it inherently unique as an artistic medium. "Not only has the theater abandoned the staging of pure life forces," De Vos writes, "it has taken the novel as its model in that it felt obliged to stage a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Only what could be narrated was appropriate for the theater" (29). In a move that separates this book from many others that have examined Artaud's work, De Vos then places Artaud's concerns about theater in comparison to several psychoanalytical views of thinking in such a way that the reader may easily understand the concepts and connections that De Vos makes to psychoanalysis and literary theory without needing a comprehensive knowledge of either field. Lacan's psychoanalytical views of development (and its relationships among the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real) become a major argument for Artaud's attempt to return theater from its current literary constraints to the pre-Oedipal [End Page 129] stage of development that would allow the artist to circumvent the necessity of the written word as meaning-maker and image-creator. From the very beginning, society's emphasis on the word creates a worldview that Artaud can no longer shape as his own. "To begin with, he is given a name, and thus categorized and labeled from his first moments. The name Antonin Artaud defines him, and raises expectations he must live up to" (39). No matter what we do with our lives, our very name and genealogy place certain restrictions or freedoms on us, for example the benefits or stigmas that would come from being a member of a wealthy family or having the surname Hitler. De Vos then focuses on Artaud's nontheatrical works to demonstrate how this struggle against the dictatorship of language enveloped all aspects of Artaud's life and how they relate to the playwright's views on family, God, defecation, sexuality, bodily organs, and repetition. Freud and Derrida appear sporadically in these views, but De Vos makes it apparent that he considers Artaud as a (perhaps) unwilling advocate of Lacan's views. De Vos further argues that the Theater of Cruelty can...

The niche of envy: Conceptualization, coping strategies, and the ontogenesis of envy in cultural psychology

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it responds to the worries that gnaw at them and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanings and their greed until they believe these to be virtues.—Carlos Ruiz Zafón“The niche of envy” is a cross-disciplinary attempt to capture and understand the complex and self-conscious emotion of envy as unfolded within social relationships and cultural settings. One of our main interests concerns how children come to understand envy in ontogenesis. Accordingly, we review existing theoretical approaches to understanding envy and introduce preliminary data about children’s understanding of envy. This paper consists of three sections. In the first section, we define envy by introducing the conditions and components that form part of it. We emphasize the fact that envy is a complex and embodied emotion, which embraces a triadic relationship, social comparison, and inequality. In this section, we also introduce social conditions that may facilitate envy and its consequences, such as hostility and aggression. The second section deals with coping strategies for envy. Here, we integrate research from different disciplines, e.g., socio-cultural, psychological, and anthropological research. Finally, in the third section, we introduce a cross-cultural and developmental view of how envy is embodied. We briefly address and offer a critique of Klein’s psychoanalytic view and present recent results from our cross-cultural studies of the ontogenesis of understanding envy.

“Coser y desgarrar, conservar y arrojar”. Visiones del enemigo y estrategias de supervivencia psíquica en la División Azul

This article analyzes the fears and projections of the Spanish fascist soldier in the Blue Division, all through the analysis of language from a psychoanalytic view. In some way, the aim is to understand how the enemy is seen and how is produced the process of contempt toward the enemy that made possible the deployment of an extreme brutality in combat. In this sense, we’ll see an absolute correspondence among the Russian people (civilians and soldiers), Communism, Judaism and the landscape. So much so that the fascist soldier lives under a permanent feeling of siege. At last, we can see how the fascist face this threat at the same time that he avoids it running away in a violent drive understood as act of faith.

Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare Gina Bloom (bio) James M. Bromley. Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 210. $95.00. As courtrooms and chat rooms across the nation fiercely debate which couples have the right to have their until-death-do-you-part unions recognized under law, some queer theorists have asked us to consider why marriage is considered the sine qua non of intimate relationality in the first place. James M. Bromley’s book offers an important contribution to this conversation by providing a history of marriage’s association with intimacy. Bromley locates “in the age of Shakespeare” an alternate conception of intimacy that, had it not ultimately been foreclosed, [End Page 565] would have made the current marriage debates virtually moot. According to Bromley, the definition of intimacy often taken for granted today began to be codified in the early modern period, ultimately becoming the foundation for modern views of intimacy as inextricably linked to coupledom and heterosexual monogamy in particular. Marriage has come to be seen as the most privileged form of heterosexual monogamy because it presumably balances perfectly two key elements: interiorized desire and futurity. The first of these is the view of desire as internal to the subject such that to become intimate with another is to pursue “interpsychic connectedness” (4), penetrating beneath the surface of the body to something deeper below. The second key element in modern definitions of intimacy, Bromley explains, is the sense of a relationship’s potential to last into the future, evinced especially through the expectation that marriages produce offspring. Bromley’s book shows that this two-part definition of intimacy was not fully instantiated in the early modern period, however; thus, it was still possible then to imagine “alternate forms of relationality” and to “challenge the authority of couple form intimacy” (2). For early modern writers, the intimate could be fleeting and nonpenetrative (as in the unconsummated desire in Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander); nonreproductive (as in the anal pleasures of William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well); surface-level (as in the sadomasochistic skin markings that create pleasure in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy); and experienced not between two individuals but among a group (as in the erotic exchanges of the cloistered nuns imagined in the anonymous The Merry Devil of Edmonton). Bromley demonstrates how a range of literary texts, including poetry, prose, and drama, represent these alternate forms of relationality, which he calls “failures of intimacy”(3)—failures not because they are unable to provide satisfaction and pleasure but because they do not interiorize desire and/or allow access to futurity. The book’s most original contribution to early modern studies and the history of sexuality can be found in its rethinking of interiority, an area that has received so much attention by scholars within and beyond these fields in the last several decades that there would appear to be nothing more to say on the subject. But Bromley points out that there is much at stake in querying the assumption, for instance, that desire is located on the inside of a body. He observes that critical approaches to inwardness—many of which are grounded in psychoanalytic views of desire and subjectivity—tend to be so invested in a distinction between internal and external spheres, with the former seen as hierarchically superior to the latter, that they overlook relationships that “reverse this hierarchy, make the external and internal equivalent, or completely avoid the distinction altogether” (13). In these latter relationships, intersubjective knowledge is not a precondition for or evidence of intimacy, as intimate pleasure can be found through “corporeal [End Page 566] proximity and even anonymity” (14). The significance of Bromley’s insights becomes especially clear in his discussion of masochism, a sexual practice that “locates pleasures at the body’s surface, uncoupling inwardness from affective relations” (80). Insofar as the masochist sets the terms of his or her submission, this sexual practice has the potential to destabilize the supposedly entrenched social hierarchies of places like the Renaissance court, as it is depicted in Thomas...

Adorno’s view of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis sets out to solve the riddles and enigmas of the psyche. For Adorno, however, psychoanalysis itself is an enigma. Why, he asks, have both the theory and its therapeutic applications become entangled in insoluble contradictions? Adorno identifies to a certain extent with the great psychoanalytic riddle-solvers, Freud and Ferenczi, as he probes these contradictions. He hopes, however, to move beyond the limits of a theory that reduces all phenomena to psychological factors, so he also approaches the problem as a sociologist. This perspective enables him to describe the static and dynamic aspects of the social structure within which psychoanalysis developed in the first half of the 20th century. And it frees him, furthermore, from the misconception that Freud passed on to most of his followers: the belief that they were pursuing a natural science of the soul, which would generate its own rigorously scientific psychological technique.

Transcending the Legacies of Slavery: A Psychoanalytic View by Barbara FletchmanSmith. Published by Karnac, London, 2011; 123 pp; £16.99 paperback.

Transcending the Legacies of Slavery: A Psychoanalytic View by Barbara FletchmanSmith. Published by Karnac, London, 2011; 123 pp; £16.99 paperback.