Unconscious Life Research Articles

Away from the Poet!

Contrario a lo que algunos lectores opinan, el autor sostiene que El Punto de Vista es un texto tan importante y autoritario como todos los demás escritos de Kierkegaard y que es de especial interés analizar la llave interpretativa que ahí se ofrece para los textos seudónimos cara a los Discursos de 1843. Se analiza aquí la sensualidad, lo estético y lo poético como posible modo de existencia descartado por el cristianismo para concluir con la postura kierkegaardiana de que la vida poética o estética es una vida no sólo de desesperación, sino imposible. El genio erótico-sensual, representado por Don Juan, aparece como una figura que sólo puede expresarse en la música, como hizo Mozart, y esto no puede existir realmente. Se analizan las posturas griegas de lo sensual frente a la felicidad en Aristóteles, con el argumento del érgon, y en Platón, leyendo el Protágoras con su visión jerárquica de las capacidades y actividades humanas, para culminar con el argumento de Kierkegaard: la vida estética es imposible porque es el esfuerzo por llevar conscientemente una vida inconsciente, es forzar la mente a ser a-mente.

Field Conditions: Discussion of Donnel B. Stern's Field Theory in Psychoanalysis

In this discussion we applaud Donnel B. Stern for undertaking his rigorous comparison of the “field” concept in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis (IRP) and Bionian field theory (BFT). Stern offers a balanced presentation of similarities and differences between these two conceptual models, but we focus primarily on certain differences, starting with what we perceive as differing notions of the nature, purpose, and clinical function of the field itself. We distinguish the interactional view of an essentially relational model of the field in IRP (where the clinical aim is to enlarge the domain of the interpersonal dialogue and the capacity for mutual recognition) from the BFT model of a field viewed in terms of emergent phenomena, realized in multiple modalities of experience (here the clinical aim is to expand the scope of contact with unconscious life and to facilitate the capacity to transform emotional, psycho-sensory and proto-emotional experience). We also take up the differing relationships to external reality and authority within these two models, with special reference to the role of the frame in the function of the field.

Déni, négation et dénégation : aspects psychopathologiques et cas cliniques

The word “denial” has several meanings; in psychoanalytically inspired psychopathology, it signifies a refusal to recognize sensory evidence, and it has a defensive function. Denial makes the perception of certain realities disappear from mental and unconscious life, whereas repression, while performing a similar task, integrates the intolerable reality into the unconscious. The term “negation” points to the negating of a psychic reality; it is the refusal to recognize a thought, a desire, or a feeling that is a source of intrapsychic conflict as one's own. Psychotic denial is multifactorial; it includes the existence of psychic troubles, but also the medico-legal behaviors that result from these. Neurotic denial is partial; it plays the role of a defense mechanism in that, it rejects the reality of a perception perceived as dangerous or painful for the ego. Perverse denial is characterized by the coexistence – within the same personality – of two contradictory judgments, unrelated to external reality. In order to maintain emotional stability in the face of anxieties concerning his physical or psychological soundness, the subject resorts to banalization and minimization. These mechanisms are not limited to the unconscious. The denial of an act and/or its consequences characterizes psychopathic denial; this also includes law and authority. Anosognosia is not a defense mechanism, but rather a pathological symptom, demonstrating a neuropsychological deficit or a cerebral dysfunction. “Insight” is an Anglo-Saxon term related to denial, anosognosia, and introspection, depending on the context. Two clinical examples illustrate different types of denial in different psychiatric pathologies.

THE WILDE ANALYST

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) took on the challenge of teaching us how to live artfully. From the dynamic successes and tragedies of his own life Oscar knew that everything worthy of existence is worthy of art, including its ugliness and suffering. Oscar observed much about human nature, especially his own, in an era when convention was not challenged, knowledge was taught and appearances were everything. For him, "The supreme vice is shallowness."(1) Society and psychoanalysis can still be honored and shaken by his words. The paradoxical and complex nature of Oscar's insights was as good as any coming from a thoughtful psychoanalyst. After the first two attempts to write about Oscar fell flat, it became clear that I must engage with him and try to match the unsparing commitment to explore his unconscious and interior life. In the process of creating the array of sketches of my psychoanalytic encounters with Oscar, I also found the words to describe what drew me to the field some 20 years ago-the art of psychoanalysis.

Surrealism and the Art of Crime by Jonathan P. Eburne

Reviewed by: Surrealism and the Art of Crime by Jonathan P. Eburne Vincent Aurora Eburne, Jonathan P. Surrealism and the Art of Crime. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. 344. The thesis and methodology of Jonathan P. Eburne's Surrealism and the Art of Crime are made clear from the outset. Eburne's aim is to chart how Surrealism, from its beginnings in the early 1920s to its dispersion in the 1950s, was shaped to a significant degree by its reaction to crime. His methodology is chronological, with each chapter pertaining to discrete moments in the movement's history. The introduction's clarity of purpose is quickly clouded, however, by the first chapter, which deals with 1922, when the proto-Surrealist group was still the particularly fractious Paris branch of Dada. In this chapter, although the Surrealist reaction under examination is vaguely to crime, it is more precisely to artistic "crime," or to the way crime novels "kill" certainty by their multiplication of red herrings and dead-ends, and to the "epistemological murder" (27) of naturalism by photography, which, in their opinion, had co-opted naturalism's claims to realism. The chapter ends with a description of the Surrealists' distribution of nonsensical, decontextualized papillons in Paris, where they carried out an "assassination of unitary logic and its ideological confines," (46) the last in a series of "crimes" that appear rather anemic in comparison to the heartier assertions Eburne makes in his introduction. After this shaky start, Eburne returns in earnest to his thesis in chapter two, which recounts the "période des sommeils" of 1922-23 and the main Surrealist concern of the day--the transcription of Robert Desnos's and René Crevel's waking dreams. In their accounts of these "dream days," (61) the Surrealists stressed the lyrical and poetic aspects of Desnos's dream ramblings, while barely mentioning Crevel's, which were laced with imagery of horribly violent crime. To explain this strange omission, Eburne notes that while the unconscious impulses these dream sessions released were indeed, in Desnos's verbalization, the treasure-trove of great beauty, fantastical images and wonders the Surrealists had hoped for, the unconscious that Crevel revealed was clearly the hiding place for gruesome violence and bloodthirsty desires, all of which were repressed by the ego, and for good reason. According to Eburne, the Surrealists had an unconscious preference for Desnos's happier expression of the unconscious, and subjected Crevel's to a second censorship, after that of the ego, much as they chose to ignore the foul crimes enumerated in Lautréamont's Maldoror, favoring instead a celebration of his "thirst for the infinite." (65). Despite Crevel's and Aragon's objections that the Surrealists [End Page 159] were thus prettifying the truth of unconscious life and ignoring a royal road to the unconscious, Eburne shows that the Surrealists demonstrated a revulsion for crime--an attitude that marked their movement in the years when fascism was looming on the horizon. Chapter three relates the Surrealists' reaction to the anarchist Germaine Berton's assassination of an ultra-right journalist. When the group hailed Berton as a true Surrealist, not just in word but in deed, it united once and for all with the far Left, a union whose excesses included Louis Aragon's acceptance of terrorism as a justifiable means of warfare. As Eburne points out, this acceptance, together with Breton's assertion that firing blindly into a crowd was a simple Surrealist act, would repeatedly return to haunt the Surrealists, and would lead indirectly to Aragon's expulsion from the group in 1932. In chapter four, Eburne charts the ever-deepening anticolonialist alliance between the Surrealists and French Marxists between 1925 and 1928 in reaction to the Rif wars, native uprisings in colonial Morocco that were brutally repressed by French forces. Eburne's focus in this chapter does not, however, pertain to the book's central thesis, since the Rif uprisings, and even the French repression of this unrest, cannot truly be considered crimes per se, however germane they were to the development of Surrealism. Nonetheless, the chapter helpfully demonstrates that while chafing under the strictures of a doctrinaire Marxism, the Surrealists incorporated...

Pamięć robocza i jej rola w procesach uczenia się i pamięci

Pamięć i uczenie się to jedne z najciekawszych zdolności umysłu człowieka, porównywane do kleju, który skleja w jedną ciągłą całość ludzkie doświadczenia, epizody z życia, nabywaną wiedzę. Bez pamięci nasze świadome i nieświadome doświadczenia życiowe byłyby tylko grupą niepowiązanych ze sobą zdarzeń. Dlatego też procesy te stanowią inspirację badań wielu naukowców na całym świecie. Niniejsze opracowanie przybliża tematykę pamięci roboczej, stanowi podsumowanie aktualnej, bardzo szerokiej wiedzy dotyczącej tego rodzaju pamięci, jej miejsca w obecnych klasyfikacjach, roli w codziennym funkcjonowaniu człowieka. Omówiono metody badania pamięci roboczej i jej usprawniania, jak również zaprezentowano aktualną wiedzę na temat mózgowego podłoża pamięci roboczej.

Conscience et perception : contradictions de la théorie freudienne et perte d’un héritage philosophique

This paper uses the notion of consciousness as a starting point and a guideline for a theoretical discussion aiming to demonstrate the contradictions and impossibilities of the successive representations of the psychic apparatus that are the two Freudian topics, and justifying a change in the theory: splitting the notions of perception and consciousness and, consequently abandoning the Perception-Conscious system (Pcpt-Cs), which was the central element of Freud's thinking when evolving from his first to his second topic. Freud was unknowingly referring to and rephrasing one of Descartes’ postulates, which is incompatible as such with the concept of unconsciousness. From an epistemological standpoint, it is ironical that the philosophical school of thought, which proposed, after Leibniz and before Freud, the hypothesis of an unconscious life, sustainably defended, as the very basis of this hypothesis, the principle of a separation between perception and consciousness. This is something, which Freud never realized.

D. H. Lawrence: Reply to Malcolm Pittock

Malcolm Pittock makes a number of thoughtful reflections and raises some objections to my recent article on Lawrence (CQ 40/2). Let me begin with the points I would freely concede. The new method that Lawrence outlines in his letter to Garnett and tries to justify in his speculations on the unconscious applies most fruitfully to The Rainbow and Women in Love, less so to the novels that followed. If this is what Dr Pittock intends by ‘limited relevance’, the point is a fair one. I think of these two novels as Lawrence's most accomplished, so if the relevance is limited in scope, I hope it is not so in significance. Also, I agree that Lawrence, perhaps in imitation of Nietzsche, can lapse into strident assertion where one would have preferred calmer, more reasoned arguments (Ursula frequently accuses Birkin, espouser of Lawrence's ideas in Women in Love, of just this sort of bullying). The remaining, and more difficult, objections raised by Dr Pittock are (1) that Lawrence resorts to absurd pseudo-science in his theorising that no one ought to take seriously; (2) that these pseudo-scientific claims are used to support a mistaken view of our unconscious life; and finally (3) that Lawrence's faith in irrational emotion is ethically dangerous.

Is Consciousness a Passive Recipient of the End-Product of Sophisticated Unconscious Computations?

Is Consciousness a Passive Recipient of the End-Product of Sophisticated Unconscious Computations?

Personalidad y comunicación no verbal: acceso al argumento inconsciente por medio de los impulsores psicológicos

The present article is based on the personality evaluation from NeoAdlerian perspective (Frankl, Wexberg Titze, Berne). 1 will start presuming that human beings reveal their unconscious life plan or through their way of talking and certain non-verbal response habits which we call: psychological driving of small argument. The non-verbal behavior interpretation needs theoretical reference added by the author for a better underst andin g. Without talking in the name of Eric Berne's analytic theory and with the Neo Adlerian approach, the author reflects on sorne concepts related to the unconscious subject, the personality structure, the concept of finality in phycology and the counter-argument as the argument sophistication subject s: reformulating since a bio cultural approach whichthe human being interprets as a construction of double normativity.

Reading Susan Isaacs: Toward a radically revised theory of thinking

The author views Isaacs’s (1952) paper, The nature and function of phantasy, as making an important contribution to the development of a radically revised psychoanalytic theory of thinking. Perhaps Isaacs’s most important contribution is the notion that phantasy is the process that creates meaning, and that phantasy is the form in which all meanings – including feelings, defense ‘mechanisms,’ impulses, bodily experiences, and so on – exist in unconscious mental life. The author discusses both explicit formulations offered by Isaacs as well as his own extensions of her ideas. The latter include (1) the idea that phantasying generates not only unconscious psychic content, but also constitutes the entirety of unconscious thinking; (2) the notion that transference is a form of phantasying that serves as a way of thinking for the first time (in relation to the analyst) emotional events that occurred in the past, but were too disturbing to be experienced at the time they occurred and (3) a principal aim and function of phantasy is that of fulfilling the human need to get to know and understand the truth of one’s experience. The author concludes by discussing the relationship between Isaacs’s concept of phantasy and Bion’s concepts of alpha function and the human need for the truth, as well as the differences between Fairbairn’s and Isaacs’s conceptions of the nature of unconscious internal object relationships.

Breaking out of the binary

Do transgender people transcend gender or merely cross from one side of a physical binary divide to the other? Can such transcendence offer opportunities for arguments in support of unconscious life which the majority of psychotherapists would fight for,but often without success. Can the transgendered person offer us a way of thinking about what is termed and fixed as a category as mental illness.

The Fiery Horse: A Russian Fairytale

The horse in fairytales and in dreams symbolizes in a wider sense what carries our instinctual vital forces, our unconscious life basis and body wisdom. It is one of the most comprehensive life instincts. The horse energy carries the ego through life and all the necessary heroic deeds. Fairytales show that with its help, deviation from the basic instinctive pattern can be corrected. A healthy, conscious situation can be restored by the hero who is connected to the horse. The fiery horse, which is the devil’s horse in some cases, represents the suppression of this horse energy. Where no connection can be made to it, the whole process of individuation seems to fail. This fairytale speaks about how to deal with the incredible vitality of the fiery horse, which can be pure destruction but can also carry a person through life. It is also connected to the anima in all the fairytales of this type. Her release from the tower by the hero can only be accomplished with the help of the fiery horse, which leads to a renewal of the whole psychic situation. Jung has given us basic ideas about the importance of this great archetype for the coming age of Aquarius, which stands under the sign of Pegasus.

THE THEORY OF THE BASIC ASSUMPTION OF INCOHESION: AGGREGATION/MASSIFICATION OR (BA) I:A/M

abstractPresented in honour of Dr Estela Welldon as a friend and colleague, and in acknowledgement of her contributions to forensic psychotherapy and group analysis for people who suffer from extreme anxieties associated with confused sex and gender identifications and choices, sado‐masochism and criminality, this article integrates Bionian and Foulkesian perspectives in group analysis by conceptualizing a fourth basic assumption in the unconscious life of social systems. The basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M is derived from a relational rather than an instinctual metapsychology, and assumes that helplessness and the fear of annihilation precede the emergence of envy, thus emphasizing the importance of traumatogenic processes. Traumatized people with crustacean and amoeboid defences/protections against the fear of annihilation are likely to personify aggregation and massification processes, respectively. This theory can be applied in the group treatments of our most disturbed patients, and in understanding the dynamics of traumatized social systems, ranging from families to organizations and even societies.

Beyond Intersubjectivity

Recent trends in psychoanalytic theory and practice have opened up new and complex territory. In particular, intersubjective approaches have led us to examine how the field generated between the subjectivities of patient and analyst often provides access to crucial and otherwise unrecognized aspects of the patient's unconscious life. Yet the more radical implications of these ideas remain relatively unexplored. This paper suggests that a transpersonal context—a context that extends beyond the subjectivity of the individual and separate self—offers a framework with which to describe and address the profound and often mysterious dimensions of the psychoanalytic encounter.

Her Body Knows (review)

Her Body Knows, by David Grossman. Two novellas translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 264 pp. $25.00. In this garland of two novellas, Frenzy and the title fiction, Her Body Knows, David Grossman, the distinguished, prize-winning Israeli novelist, has set himself the difficult task of rendering inner speech. The novellas, like everyday life, are full of talk, but here focused on the speech habits of the protagonists. These monologues are in the apparent tradition of Beckett and Faulkner: they start out as realistic conversations but change our fictional expectations as they turn into fantastic voyages. We enter into the unconscious life of the speakers. While these novellas sketch the audience to whom their main characters ostensibly address their remarks, what we the readers soon discover, however, is that these fictions dramatize the acts of speaking: we experience not monologues but soliloquies, overheard as they are in a play. The fictional narrative of events and actions of everyday life becomes a fateful account of the drama of self-definition. Tell me, how is it possible, he says-the thought always strikes him in the same way, from the same exact angle and always for the first time-how is it possible to grasp that this woman, my wife, my one and only true love, has not missed a single meeting with the man for the last ten years? Except maybe once or twice a year on her sick days or when there was a family event, a war here and there, trips abroad or out of town-days when she absolutely couldn't go out and maintain her life with him. Musing thus aloud about the actions of his wife, the protagonist of Frenzy reveals that he is dominated by jealousy. His fantasy life obsesses him. Like Othello who, once doubting his wife's fidelity, sees in every event and action nothing but evidence for his obsession, this novel's main character is turned inward. He has lost his purchase on objective reality. He broods on his inner rage, confusion, ambivalence, sexual fascination. As the novella unfolds we discover he devotes his energy to stalking his wife and her supposed lover. Yet there is never any objective evidence against which to measure his obsession: we begin to wonder if this process of self-definition is actually an exercise in self-delusion. Esti, his sister-in-law, is driving Shaul, who has broken his leg the day before and is now in a cast up to his groin, in the continuing pursuit of the lovers. But it is not clear what Shaul wants to do should he discover them. The drive from a suburb of Jerusalem south towards Beersheba, as we discover at the end of the novella, also functions as a mutual meditation between the two -or is it a form of psychoanalytic therapy with the patient lying in the back seat unable to glimpse his driver in the dark. Shaul muses: After all, they are a normal man and woman, he snickers, and as he speaks those last words, a flame is ignited wichin him, and for the first time he directs its blaze at another person, and Esti feels it and rushes to protect herself from the sudden violent gust, the likes of which she has never known, as it lunges at her from the fluttering man behind her. She knows she must save herself, but does not know exactly from what, and is not even sure she really wants to be saved and banished this soon from the private master class. The lesson in obsession will also turn out to be hers. Shaul will teach her by example what it means to brood on such matters. The reader, identifying with Esti, who has been drawn in to the role of Shaul's driver since her husband, his brother, is out of town, becomes complicit like her in this speaking process. She fears that if she does not pull herself together at once, she may not have the strength later on to withstand the strange assault which now attacks her in waves with a kind of impersonal insistence, almost inhuman, or perhaps insufferably human. …

Camille Claudel: a revulsion of nature. The art of madness or the madness of art?

(Suassuna, 1996). However, art produced by mental patients has also been termed psychopathological art, an expression which greatly displeases me for there is no such thing as sick, psychotic or mad art and neither can a work of art be said to be mentally ill. For this reason, I would rather refer to it by the scholarly term previously referred.In the context of art produced by the mentally ill, it is extremely important to tell the artist – amateur or professional – who has exercised his technical skills from the insane that eventually became an artist, i.e., a psychiatric patient who either spontaneously or through occupational therapy started producing plastic arts or literary works. It is evident that both the works produced before the presentation of any pathological symptoms and the ones produced after them provide clear clues as to the morbid processes which have been developing in the patient’s mind (conscious and unconscious psychic life).

Jungian archetypes of self, shadow and ego in the legend of the Lord of the Rings: an analytical psychological view

According to psychoanalysis and analytical psychology schools myth and religious stories are believed to be the representatives of the intrapsychic life and they symbolize the evolution, interactions of elements, fears, hopes and failures and growth of the human psyche reflected in the language of symbolic stories. An archetype is a universal form or predisposition to characterize thoughts or feelings, an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way that can evoke powerful emotions in the reader or the audience because it awakens a primordial image of the unconscious memory. They are the essence of myths, legends and religious stories, through which analytical psychologists seek the traces of the human psychic nature and unconscious life. These legends and stories can also be of diagnostic and therapeutic help as they can be guidelines to the steps of the person's psychic evolution and its difficulties. They may also be used for helping people to know where they are in their journey toward the so-called process of individuation. In this paper the very interesting, complex and well-known modern legend of the Lord of the Rings (Tolkein, 1954), now a major and acclaimed film series, is explored. The major archetypes of Self, Shadow and Hero and their interactions, the levels of the psychic growth and its hazards can be traced in this story, and have probably been a major contributor to its success. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Countertransference in the Context of the Fourth Basic Assumption in the Unconscious Life of Groups

The treatment of choice for traumatized and difficult patients is psychoanalysis or psychoanalytical therapy followed by intensive group analysis for an unlimited period of time. The group is able to help the analyst make therapeutic use of inevitable difficulties in countertransference processes. Also, traumatized and difficult patients are likely to create the basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification, and to personify the roles associated with it. These processes can be used in order to provide such patients with appropriate therapeutic attention involving both containment and holding, and interpretation. Extensive clinical data from psychoanalysis and group analysis are used to illustrate both this clinical approach and the author’s theory of Incohesion.

Icarus versus King David: two sides of the evolution toward the self

AbstractAccording to psychoanalysis and analytical psychology schools, myth and religious stories are believed to be the representatives of the intrapsychic life. They symbolize the evolution, interactions of elements, fears, hopes, failures and growth of the human psyche that is reflected in the language of symbolic stories. An archetype is a universal form or predisposition to characterize thoughts or feelings–an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way that can evoke powerful emotions in the reader or the audience because it awakens a primordial image of the unconscious memory. Myths, legends and religious stories are full of archetypes, which enhances their power to affect us at an unconscious level as well as at a conscious one. Through these legends, myths and religious stories, analytical psychologists seek the traces of human psychic nature and unconscious life. These legends and stories can also be of diagnostic and therapeutic help because they can be guidelines to the steps of psychic evolution and its challenges. They may also be used for helping people to know where they are in their journey toward the so‐called process of individuation. In this report the symbolism of two spontaneous pictures of Icarus and King David that recurrently entered the consciousness of a well‐socialized young man are discussed and compared. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.