Repetition Compulsion Research Articles

Psychoanalytic Understanding of Repeated In-Vitro Fertilization Trials, Failures, and Repetition Compulsion

Psychoanalytic Understanding of Repeated In-Vitro Fertilization Trials, Failures, and Repetition Compulsion

Time and memory in the therapeutic journey with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children

ABSTRACTThis is a discussion of psychodynamic psychotherapy with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service setting. The clients discussed present with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The paper draws on cultural concepts of trauma and distress and psychoanalytic theories of trauma. It explores how the self experiences an overwhelming experience of fear, as a frozen moment in time, which cannot be mentalized and may be expressed in a compulsive repetition of the moment, in bodily states, and in dissociative states of mind. The paper considers a therapeutic approach based on the therapeutic relationship and the therapist’s capacity to witness the traumatic event alongside the client. This approach, it is argued, enables the client to begin to mentalize the traumatic event and to begin to mourn their experience. The client can thus become able to recover some of the memories and sense of identity which had been fragmented and temporarily lost, as a result of the traumatic event.

The linguistic construction of the self in narratives of obsessive-compulsive disorder

ABSTRACT Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental health problem characterised by distressing obsessions and repetitive compulsions. The autogenous-reactive model of OCD outlines two types of obsessions: 1) reactive, which are triggered by stimuli external to the self (e.g. electrical appliances) and 2) autogenous, which are triggered by stimuli internal to the self (e.g. memories) (Lee and Kwon, 2003). This article demonstrates the differences in the linguistic construction of the self within narratives told by people with OCD about reactive and autogenous obsessions. Narratives are analysed by focusing on the entity placed as grammatical subject. It is found that, within autogenous narratives, personified thoughts and the mind are placed as grammatical subject more often than within reactive narratives. autogenous narratives. These patterns potentially construct the self as agentive and responsible in reactive obsessions but in need of protection in autogenous obsessions.

Indifference and repetition: occupation testimonies and left-wing despair

ABSTRACTAs despair is increasingly seeping into leftist politics in many parts of the world, its long-held image as a hindrance to political activism still prevents the thriving literature on the politics of feeling from adequately theorizing this collective posture. This article seeks to probe the public manifestations of left-wing despair by looking at the despairing dispositions that have evolved in the Israeli Left in response to its failure to undermine Israel’s regime of occupation, using the coping modes this failure has sparked as a conduit for complicating the negative image of despair in politics. The analysis draws on two documentaries that showcase soldiers’ testimonies – Z32 and Censored Voices – in which the compulsive but fruitless repetition of witnessing is brought to the fore and serves as a platform for the enactment of despair as a distinctively public disposition. In dialogue with Wendy Brown’s notion of left melancholy and Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, the article propounds despair – understood not as an affect, a feeling, or an emotion, but as a recursively performed posture – as an alternative analytic grid for grasping the contemporary agonies of the Left. Drawing on the Israeli documentaries, it demonstrates that despair may be propelled and perpetuated by two kinds of crises – a crisis of movement and a crisis of belonging. Taking both modalities as evidence that despair does not necessarily involve a withdrawal into the self and may transpire through public acts of care, the article claims, using Bonnie Honig’s work on public things, that the ground for the assessment of despair should be shifted from its presumed impact on political actors to the tangible imprints it leaves in the public settings in which action takes place.

Getting Better: Impediments and Aids to Psychic Change

Progress in psychoanalytic work can seem slow and arduous. Patients noticing this may harbor inner questions and doubts as to how and when—and even whether—they will finally “get better.” After examining the status of the related concept of “repetition compulsion,” this article explores such concerns by enumerating certain heretofore underappreciated barriers to psychic change; it also discusses various potential—but currently undersung—facilitators of such change. To help illustrate these factors, a case example is presented of someone struggling with a micro-traumatic pattern that might be called “subservient caretaking.” In this maladaptive dynamic, the individual (often the male in the context of heterosexual couples) behaves in an overly nurturing, self-abnegating way toward his partner (often, female), who he perceives as weak and therefore needing this kind of “patronage.” The relevant obstacles and potential aids to overcoming this sort of deeply ingrained pattern are explored in relation to the case example offered.

Loss, Mourning, and Healing

Human beings constantly face the pain of loss through their lives. According to Freud’s concept of ‘repetition compulsion’, this is also because people constantly repeat what that they have not been able to mourn. Healing from the experience of loss should hence be discussed by tackling the question of mourning, which become a stable structure in life through the experiences of loss and hurt. Loss leads to a state of remorse by subduing humans into the sorrow of depression. Accepting the loss is hence an uneasy task. This paper will examine the problems of loss and depression in Humanities therapy through the thought of Donald Winnicott. According to Winnicott, what is important in the process of maturation is a gradual construction of trust and faith, as illustrated by the way a child plays with his toy in the absence of his mother, with the belief that she will not run away. What matters in the overcoming of the child’s depression from the loss is the partial acceptance of this latter with the discovery of an object replacing the lost one.

The story of Lucy: lessons learned, lessons taught

ABSTRACTThis article provides an extended case example highlighting the value of a supportive approach to practice, in addition to the importance of holding a psychodynamic developmental frame of reference. Concepts of repetition compulsion, the holding environment, and object constancy are applied to the clinical material. The case is underscored for its value as a teaching tool.

Democracy and education: ‘In spite of it all’

This article draws on psychoanalytic theory to reconsider democracy, education and their relationship. The author argues for the pervasive presence of fantasmatic thinking in relation to both democracy and education in much media and policy discussion, which fuels our subjection to ideology through cruelly optimistic promises about the future benefits which will accrue from current sacrifice – promises which are exposed as false by persistent and growing economic inequality and the substantial failure to fulfil its inflated promises that is endemic to modern education. By contrast, the article argues for a politics grounded in an acceptance of constitutive lacking status as desiring subjects, which recognises and embraces the enjoyment that comes from loss, thereby freeing us from the spell of compulsive repetition reflected in our fixation on fantasmatic programmes of redemption in both politics and education. This might open possibilities for realising, albeit indirectly and obliquely, the goals which continually escape our more overt attempts to grasp them. The author’s overall argument is that the flaws and illusions characterising our experiences of democracy and education are not reasons to abandon them, but instead suggest a need to rework our relationship to them in less fantasmatic ways, ‘in spite of it all’.

Developing Groups That Change Our Minds and Transform Our Brains: Systems-Centered’s Functional Subgrouping, Its Impact on Our Neurobiology, and Its Role in Each Phase of Group Development

ABSTRACTSystems-centered11 Systems-centered and SCT are registered trademarks owned by Yvonne Agazarian and the Systems-Centered Training and Research Institute, a non-profit organization. therapy and training (SCT) is a theory-based systems approach that introduces the method of functional subgrouping that enables groups to more easily integrate differences in the service of group development and transformation. Functional subgrouping interrupts the endemic group dynamic pattern of scapegoating differences and enacting repetition compulsion roles fueled by group phases that fixates group development. It also simultaneously develops the capacity of the group for Porges‘ (2011) social engagement which supports group members learning to enhance and utilize their social brain functioning and resources.

Money and Mercury

The nuclear disaster at Fukushima in March 2011 has led to a burst of research on the role of uncertainty in social and scientific knowledge production. This line of research is not limited to the special uncertainties of radioactive contamination. In fact, from the 1960s to today, a loosely affiliated group of antipollution thinkers and activists have been exploring the relationship of human society to its environment in extremely creative and fruitful ways. Beginning with the methylmercury poisoning called “Minamata disease” of the 1950–70s, this group began what they called “Minamata studies” (Minamatagaku, 水俣学) as a way to develop new modes of analysis and remediation of toxic sites. This article focuses on the key category of the lived site, the genba (現場), and the role it plays in the politics and medicine of environmental disease. Finally, this article explores an apparent repetition compulsion at work in the series of toxic disasters in modern Japanese history from Ashio to Fukushima.

Repetition in the service of the erotisation of suffering. When addiction enters into the relationship to work: Theoretical considerations on a clinical case

ABSTRACT This article tries to reconsider the relationship to work that one can develop to the point when it impacts the intimate sphere. To do so, it shall question the role of the sexualisation of the suffering between subject and object of a work/job that has become the vector of an enjoyable torment. The study will focus on the clinical case of a patient who is being treated in psychoanalytical psychotherapy (she started the therapy 5 years ago). This patient maintains a relationship to her work that could be defined as “addictive.” The approach will be to use the psychodynamics of work (Dejours, 1992. “Pathologie de la communication. Situation de travail et espace public: le cas du nucléaire.” In Pouvoir et légitimité, Raison pratiques, edited by A. Cotterau and P. Ladrière, vol. 3, 177–201. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS; 2003. L’évaluation du travail à l’épreuve du réel: Critiques des fondements de l’évaluation. Paris: INRAA Editions) in perspective of Paul Denis’s work on satisfaction and influence. Therefore, it will clinically illustrate the process inherent in the subversive and intimate perversion of the relationship to work: between resistance and suffering serving a satisfaction for which the relations of impulsive subordination (between means and goal) have been inverted to the benefit of a repetitive compulsion.

Repetition Compulsion Revisited in Relational Family Therapy: The Discovery of Old in Order to Develop Something New.

Psychoanalysis has always been full of diversity and controversy, in the theoretical field and especially in the plasticity and variety of its modalities and approaches. Yet all these theories are based on the premise that individuals compulsively repeat their old psycho-organic content, both in their personal lives and in analysis; the premise of Relational Family Therapy is that old emotional, behavioral and bodily complications must first be repeated before being fully processed so that something new can be created.

Thinking Developmentally in Child and Adult Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACTPsychoanalysis in theory and clinical practice is a developmental domain. Psychoanalysts think about their patients from a developmental point of view. The analytic relationship promotes development in both analyst and patient. Two concepts central to this author’s developmental point of view are epigenetics—as used in biology and philosophy—and that of the analyst as “developmental object.” Optimally, the analyst as developmental object facilitates what Rita Tähkä terms the “developmental illusion,” which intersubjectively transforms psychic structures, enabling alternatives to the repetition compulsion. Two vignettes with adult patients illustrate how empathic intimacy in psychoanalysis with an emphasis on latency and toddler phases as reconstructed in adult analysis presaged psychic growth. Transference as a vehicle for a developmental history taking is also considered.

Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Beckett'sQuadand Agency in the 21stCentury

Lying in ditches, tromping through mud, wedged in urns, trash bins, buried in earth, bodies in Beckett appear anything but capable of acting meaningfully on their environments. Bodies in Beckett seem, rather, synonymous with abjection, brokenness, and passivity—as if the human were overcome by its materiality: odours, pain, foot sores, decreased mobility. To the extent that Beckett's personae act, they act vaguely (wandering) or engage in quasi-obsessive, repetitive tasks: maniacal rocking, rotating sucking stones and biscuits, uttering words evacuated of sense, ceaseless pacing. Perhaps the most vivid dramatization of bodies compelled to meaningless, repetitive movement is Quad (1981), Beckett's ‘ballet’ for television, in which four bodies in hooded robes repeat their series ad infinitum. By 1981, has all possibility for intentional action in Beckett been foreclosed? Are we doomed, as Hamm puts it, to an eternal repetition of the same? (‘Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.’)This article proposes an alternative reading of bodily abjection, passivity and compulsivity in Beckett, a reading that implies a version of agency more capacious than voluntarism. Focusing on Quad as an illustrative case, I show how, if we shift our focus from the body's diminished possibilities for movement to the imbrication of Beckett's personae in environments (a mound of earth), things, and objects, a different story emerges: rather than dramatizing the impossibility of action, Beckett's work may sketch plans for a more ecological, post-human version of agency, a more collaborative mode of ‘acting’ that eases the divide between the human, the world of inanimate objects, and the earth.Movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology challenge hierarchies among subjects, objects and environments, questioning the rigid distinction between animate and inanimate, and the notion of the Anthropocene emphasizes the influence of human activity on social and geological space. A major theoretical challenge that arises from such discourses (including 20th-century challenges to the idea of an autonomous, willing, subject) is to arrive at an account of agency robust enough to survive if not the ‘death of the subject’ then its imbrication in the material and social environment it acts upon. Beckett's treatment of the human body suggests a version of agency that draws strength from a body's interaction with its environment, such that meaning is formed in the nexus between body and world. Using the example of Quad, I show how representations of the body in Beckett disturb the opposition between compulsivity (when a body is driven to move or speak in the absence of intention) and creative invention. In Quad, serial repetition works to create an interface between body and world that is receptive to meanings outside the control of a human will. Paradoxically, compulsive repetition in Beckett, despite its uncomfortable closeness to addiction, harnesses a loss of individual control that proposes a more versatile and ecologically mindful understanding of human action.

Perlaboração de mecanismos defensivos em relação ao trabalho em empreendimentos de Economia Solidária

Este artigo pretende contribuir para uma fundamentação teórica, a partir da experiência em Incubadoras de Empreendimentos de Economia Solidária, sobre a manutenção, dentro do processo de incubação, de mecanismos defensivos frente ao trabalho adaptados às experiências anteriores dos trabalhadores em empreendimentos de lógica capitalista heterogestionária. É analisado teoricamente como a manutenção desses mecanismos defensivos pode ocorrer a partir da noção de compulsão à repetição e perlaboração pensada a partir da psicanálise, da teoria crítica e da psicodinâmica do trabalho, bem como das ações voltadas para a superação desses mecanismos defensivos inadequados para o contexto atual do trabalhador da economia solidária.

Daemonic, Mesmeric, Parasitic: Dickens and Evelyn Waugh

Abstract It has long been recognized that there is a close relationship between the works of Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh, the most important English comic novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively. This essay argues that this relationship should be seen not as a matter of literary borrowings by Waugh, nor in terms of loose analogies between their works, nor as an essentially Oedipal conflict. Their writings, I argue, act as both parasite and host to each other. Waugh's writing is parasitic on Dickens's, burrowing into it for names, allusions, and narrative tropes. Through their incorporation into Waugh's host texts, these in turn act as parasites that embed their own disturbing trajectories and associations within their new fictional homes. Waugh's relationship to Dickens, a figure who is called in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold “the most daemonic of the masters,” is seen most powerfully in the forces of compulsive repetition, haunting and mesmerism that irrigate both that novel and A Handful of Dust. Such forces comprise, derange and invade many of Waugh's texts and their shaping aesthetic and affective stances, and are particularly seen in moments of death, madness, and wild laughter.

Postmemory's Graphic Symptom: Disembodied Voice, Repetition Compulsion, and Working through Trauma in GB Tran's Vietnamerica

Postmemory's Graphic SymptomDisembodied Voice, Repetition Compulsion, and Working through Trauma in GB Tran's Vietnamerica Jin Lee (bio) In the graphic memoir Vietnamerica, GB Tran draws and narrates his family history, which revolves around the First Indochina and the Vietnam Wars. Growing up as a second-generation Vietnamese American, GB did not know much about his parents' Vietnam War experiences due to their silence on the topic (I will use GB Tran's first name to differentiate him from family members whose surnames are also Tran). Indeed, in Vietnamerica, Vietnam War survivors—and in particular GB's parents, Tri and Dzung—show neither negative emotions nor traumatic symptoms in spite of the tragic events in their lives. Although his parents display no obvious symptoms of trauma, scholars have discussed Vietnamerica as a work of postmemory, as coined by Marianne Hirsch to explain Art Spiegelman's relationship to his parents' traumatized memory of the Holocaust.1 Hirsch conceives of postmemory as belonging to second-generation war survivors, like GB, thereby presupposing a child adopting or accommodating a parent's trauma. In this article, I argue that despite the lack of traumatic symptoms, Vietnamerica does in a sense represent a work of postmemory, but not as heretofore discussed. Rather, trauma is not conveyed by the parents or their son but implied in a disembodied, haunting voice—in expressions or phrases that mysteriously return throughout the narrative and in contexts not ordinarily considered to be [End Page 67] traumatic flashbacks. I term this mode of communicating an instance of trauma a graphic symptom. More specifically, words associated with GB's parents are repeated in unusual contexts to signal trauma and to communicate that, at times, trauma is not obvious and is also more pervasive than might be expected. As such, a graphic symptom could conceivably be thought of as a flashback experience. As I discuss below, however, their words reappear in narration boxes or in quotation marks instead of in speech balloons, thereby becoming a disembodied, ghostly voice. While this mode of revealing trauma could be called many things, I call it a graphic symptom since its presentation underscores how graphic narratives can communicate in a complex manner. Pursuing graphic symptoms in Vietnamerica also reveals postmemory a more complex condition than heretofore discussed. After all, since his parents do not have obvious traumatic symptoms, the graphic symptoms appear only in GB's work of postmemory. To discuss graphic symptoms, I adapt Hirsch's observations concerning images in postmemory to explain why the disembodied voice recurs in the manner of repetitive compulsion, which she identifies as a particular symptom in trauma survivors, who repeat their traumatic events through reenactments, flashbacks, or dreams. I further rely on Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub to underscore the fact that it is not GB's parents but the graphic memoir itself that shows repetition compulsion. Thus, regardless of whether their trauma exists or not, Caruth's trauma work on textual symptoms legitimizes GB's working through the trauma on behalf of his parents. Likewise, Laub's work on an absence in witness' knowledge undergirds my observation on Vietnamerica's disembodied voice. This article thereby contributes to the literature on Vietnamerica, since the disembodied voice in the graphic memoir has not yet received scholarly attention.2 This article further contributes to the literature on postmemory since it articulates a theory of the graphic symptom, found not in trauma survivors but only in second-generation postmemory. For purposes of this article, I will focus on GB's father, on Tri's story, since he is a mysterious figure with an emotionless façade behind sunglasses and an influential character, less of a voice but more of a presence in the graphic memoir. [End Page 68] Postmemory As revealed later in the narrative, Tri had catastrophic experiences. He had been fatherless since the age of three, after GB's paternal grandfather, Huu Nghiep, left to aid North Vietnam. Suddenly single, GB's grandmother, Le Nhi, lived with a French colonel who eventually left her and his own son to protect her children from vengeful repercussions. And indeed, because the South Vietnamese government had been pursuing him, Huu Nghiep could...

Colonialism, Trauma, and Affect: Chinua Achebe's <em>Arrow of God</em> as Oduche's Return

The paper examines Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God, which deals with the advent of colonialism in Nigeria, as a trauma narrative. It argues that, though the novel has generally and profitably been read as exemplifying the problem of cultural conflict in Africa, seen through the prism of the writer's last memoir, its primary aim is clearly to map out a genealogy of a certain "African postcolonial structure of feeling," in which the fracture of traditional society in the face of colonialism dramatized in the novel is seen as, to a large extent, a symptom of the foundational trauma of Umuaro's genesis. Thus, it is argued that Achebe deploys the fiction genre as a discursive site for mourning the loss of a precolonial cultural and political space. However, the paper does not read trauma in terms of the repetition compulsion complex proposed by Freud and poststructuralist trauma studies, but instead, it attends to the ways in which the novel re-historicizes trauma as a way of working through it. It considers the act of writing the novel itself as part of that process of working out the historical trauma of postcolonial affective dysfunction.

Is Instinct Compatible with Religion?

정신분석학과 성리학은 본능과 종교의 양립가능성에 관하여 상반된 견해를 취하고 있다. 정신분석학의 주창자인 프로이트에 의하면, 본능은 타고난 무정형의 힘―프로이트의 용어로는, ‘원초아’(Id)―을 뜻한다. 그러나 프로이트에게 그 타고난 무정형의 힘은 출생 이후의 삶에서 표출되는 욕동 등에 시간상 앞서 있는 것일 뿐, 논리상 이전이 아니다. 그리하여 종교는 개인이 자신의 타고난 무정형의 힘에 들어 있는 쾌락을 전혀 누리지 못하면서도 도저히 그 일을 그만 두지 못한 채 되풀이해대는 반복강박증의 하나로 설명된다. 프로이트의 정신분석학적 관점에서 볼 때, 종교는 생명 본능(Eros)이 점차로 죽음 본능(Thanatos)으로 변환되는 전위(轉位)의 과정이다. 이에 비하여, 정신분석학을 새롭게 발전시킨 것으로 평가되는 융은 본능을 ‘마음안의 신’, 즉 영혼으로 파악한다. 그러나 영혼은 종교에 의해 실현되는 최종 목적일 뿐, 그 경지에 이르게 하는 경험적 발판은 될 수 없다. 융은 프로이트가 언급하고 있는 욕동에 들어 있는 힘이 개인들을 영혼으로 고양시킨다는 점을 과소평가한다. 이 점에서 융 또한 프로이트와 마찬가지로, 그들 사이의 약간의 견해 차이에도 불구하고, 본능과 종교의 양립불가론을 견지한다고 볼 수 있다. 이러한 프로이트와 융의 견해에 대비하여, 성리학은 본능과 종교의 양립가능론을 주장한다고 볼 수 있다. 성리학에 의하면, 타고난 무정형의 본능과 출생 이후의 경험적 수준의 욕동은 표준과 그 표현의 관점에서 재해석될 수 있다. 말하자면, 타고난 무정형의 본능은 형이상학적 마음의 운동을 가리키며, 출생 이후의 경험적 수준의 욕동은 경험적 마음의 운동을 가리킨다는 것이다. 성리학의 이 관점을 따를 때, 종교는 형이상학적 마음의 운동―즉, 형이상학적 본능―이 경험적 마음의 운동에 힘입어 그 스스로를 표현하는 활동이라고 볼 수 있다.Psychoanalysis and Neo-Confucianism take contrary views of compatibility of instinct and religion. According to Freud, as a distinguished author of psychoanalysis, the instinct means inborn shapeless power, Id in his technical terminology. But, with Freud, the inborn shapeless power is not logically but temporally prior to the drive which bursts out ever since birth. The result is that Freud thinks of religion as a repetition compulsion, impelling individuals to perform actions which just afford the individuals no pleasure inherent in inborn shapeless power, from which he is, however, too powerless to desist. In the light of Freud’s psychoanalysis, religion is a process of displacement by which life instinct is gradually converted into death instinct, Eros and Thanatos in his technical terminology respectively. In contrast, Jung, as another outstanding exponent of psychoanalysis, comprehends the instinct as ‘God in-us’, or soul. But, with Jung, the soul is nothing but terminal objective of religion and is devoid of empirical base which leads individuals on to it. Jung underestimates the power implied by the Freud’s conception of the drive which can uplift individuals to the soul. In this sense, some different views notwithstanding, Jung as well as Freud asserts that religion is incompatible with instinct. Contrary to Freud and Jung’s psychoanalysis, Neo-Confucianist assertion is that instinct is compatible with religion. According to Neo-Confucianism, the instinct as inborn shapeless power and the instinct on the empirical level can be reinterpreted as not-yet-manifested standard and its manifestations respectively. That is, the instinct as inborn shapeless power and the instinct on the empirical level refer to the motion of metaphysical mind and that of empirical mind respectively. In the light of Neo-Confucianism, religion is defined as the self-manifesting process of the motion of metaphysical mind, or metaphysical instinct, which is triggered by the motion of empirical mind, or empirical instinct.

The Time of My Life

The Time of My Life