Unconscious Life Research Articles

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

Where Is My Mother? Childhood Trauma and the Configuration of the Self

ABSTRACT In this account of a long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a confluence of childhood traumatogenic factors in interaction with the patient’s unconscious fantasy life resulted in dramatic permutations and distortions in the patient’s self- organization. From a different but related perspective, the psychic repercussions of an incompletely mourned and internalized maternal object are also explored. The prevailing psychic script or narrative, deeply embedded and nearly intractable, revolved around the patient’s conscious and unconscious conviction of mortal sin and guilt in response to her mother’s death – imposing on her the penalty of “a life for a life.” During the course of treatment, the patient’s investment in becoming a good mother became a powerful incentive for the recovery of previously inaccessible experience, facilitating a gradual movement toward psychic integration. While the primary transference at the outset of treatment was the therapist’s nonexistence, replicating the patient’s experience of abandonment-obliteration, the development of the therapeutic relationship was essential to the gradual assimilation of dissociated traumatic experience and the enlivenment of the unrepresented maternal object.

Contributions of psychogeography to understanding unconscious dimensions of lived workplace experience

This article explores the contribution that the concept of psychogeography can offer to organisational research, theory, consulting, leadership, management, and employees. Through several stories/storytelling coupled with psychodynamic interpretations, it examines and illustrates how people in workplace organisations invest space and artefacts with unconscious personal and group significance; how space and objects serve as powerful metaphors as well as utilitarian, task-based tools. Organisational space and objects are often used to serve as symbols of strong and powerful leaders. Ordinary workplace phenomena such as buildings, entrances, doors, desks, conference rooms and tables, and pictures turn out to possess enormous psychogeographic significance in what Michael Diamond calls the “unconscious life of organisations”. Projection-driven psychogeographic transference and its traps are discussed and illustrated. The article concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of a psychogeographic perspective in understanding and working with ordinary organisational leadership–management–employee relationships, task performance, research, and consulting.

Xenophobia, the Unconscious, the Public Sphere and Brexit

We examine xenophobia from the perspective of the unconscious of individuals, groups and nations, emphasizing the role of fantasy, and arguing that some leaders use xenophobic discourse to exploit fantasies arising from emotions such as anxiety, fear and anger. We discuss this in the context of the public sphere as conceptualized by Habermas. We illustrate this with reference to an analysis of the psychic life of ‘Brexit’, the UK decision to exit the European Union in 2016, arguing that Brexit was one expression of the unconscious life of a nation. We contribute to our understanding of xenophobia and the role of psychodynamic forces within the public sphere by highlighting the key role of the unconscious and its ability to be influenced by leaders. We conclude by reflecting on how we might work to counter xenophobia and its fantasies.

Waiting in Rooms: Discussion of Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

ABSTRACT The author builds on Bonovitz’s fascinating study of the waiting room (this issue). He elaborates the complex function of waiting in analysis particularly with patients who are quite dissociated. Waiting occurs in the waiting room, in the consulting room, and in the minds of patient and analyst. The author explores the paradoxically active process of waiting for the patient to communicate disparate elements of their unconscious life emanating from the patient’s psychic rooms. Central to his thinking is that play often arrives to help illuminate points of transference-countertransference entanglement in relation to disintegrated experiences. The patient described by Bonovitz creates forms of play in the waiting room and the analyst brings the waiting room and consulting rooms together through her capacity to wait herself and make new links. The therapist’s capacity to hold and contain her patient’s capacity to be a nuisance (e.g) in the waiting room involved a level of caring, patience, and artfulness in relation to her patient and herself. Bonovitz reflects these similar capacities in his role as a supervisory third.

ФОРМУВАННЯ ЖИТТЄВОЇ ПОЗИЦІЇНА РІЗНИХ ЕТАПАХ СОЦІАЛІЗАЦІЇ ДОРОСЛОЇ ОСОБИСТОСТІ

The topicality of studying the life position in psychology is determined by a paradigmatic transition to an understanding of the individual as a self-determined and self-organized structure. The purpose of the article is to theoretically substantiate and empirically determine the peculiarities of the adult life position formation. The theoretical analysis of the problem of life position formation at different stages of socialization is started in the paper. The following methods were used to realize the purpose of the research: analysis of research sources, comparison, classification, generalization and systematization of scientific data, conversation, questioning and testing. The obtained data were subjected to mathematical and statistical processing. The scientific attention is shown to be focused mainly on three determinative periods of life: the formation of an unconscious life scenario in early relationships with parents, a conscious self-identification during the transition from youth to adulthood and the experience of an existential crisis of the midlife. The crisis aspects of identity formation have priority in researches, while gradual, evolutionary changes in the life position (as an indispensable feature of personal development and the enrichment of one's own life philosophy) remain unaddressed. The results of the comparative empirical research in two age groups representing an early (25–39 years) and late (40–59 years) adult population with a total of 70 people are presented. The diagnostics of life orientations, existential fullness, basic values, and psychological well-being was executed. The obtained results show that the level of subject activity, the sense of fullness of one's own life and its profuseness with meaning has the same expressiveness in different age groups. However, the qualitative differences in the characteristics of subject orientation are identified, allowing us to conclude about the gradual unfolding of the life position in different periods of adulthood. The conducted empirical study showed that the transition from early to late adulthood (passing the clandmark stage of 40 years) is accompanied by the changes in life position that manifests itself in the exteriorization of the control locus and creatively-transformative life activity, aimed at knowledge and perfection of their inner world. The basic values profile of different age groups is elaborated, the leading role of social orientation is elucidated. The correlations between the components of the life position and the psychological well-being of the individual are identified and explained. The conclusions are made regarding the nature of the qualitative evolution of the adult life position.

Psychological basis of the image of a dead lover in mythology of transcarpatia and P. Kulish’s story about, why the Peshevtsov pond was dried up in the town of Voronezh

In Ukrainian mythology as in world mythology, there is an idea of the possibility of a love relationship between a human and a demonic creature – a dead lover or a devil. Thus, F. Potushnyak’s article Dead Love in Folk Beliefs (1944) is devoted to this theme. Folk beliefs about demonic lovers precondition the relationship between them and a human, and methods of their overcoming are examined in this article. In the short story About, why the Peshevtsov pond was dried up in the town of Voronezh (1839) written by P. Kulish, we can find a very interesting interpretation of folk beliefs when a dead husband visits his wife. The writer modeled the tragic story of the woman, whose husband disappeared, with the help of folk mythological stories. And because of her deep regret, she became a victim of a demon who appeared in the image of her beloved husband. In the article, the psychological basis of the appearance of visions, in which the main figure is a dead object of love, is analyzed. Through the prism of Jung’s theory, the image of a dead lover is considered as a personification of one of the archetypes of the collective unconscious (Animus, its negative aspect). Destructive display of this image has the same psychological basis both in mythological legends and in P. Kulish’s short story About, why the Peshevtsov pond was dried up in the town of Voronezh. The woman’s consciousness refuses to take the reality as it is and creates an alternative variant for herself – the dead lover comes to her at night (when unconscious dominates – our wishes, fears, etc. are implemented in night dreams). The line between conscious and unconscious life is erased and the woman becomes a hostage of her own fantasy, which removes pain of loss and gives hope to renew the lost emotional and spiritual balance for a moment. Folk stories in the spirit of Christian morality contain “recipes” of fighting a dead lover. However, mostly these rituals cannot help the woman, who is obsessed with love to her dead lover as it happened in P. Kulish’s story.

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

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

“Notes” on the Theory of the Fourth Basic Assumption in the Unconscious Life of Groups and Group-Like Social Systems—Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M

“Notes” on the Theory of the Fourth Basic Assumption in the Unconscious Life of Groups and Group-Like Social Systems—Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M

The Analyst's "Use" of Theory or Theories: The Play of Theory.

Two clinical vignettes demonstrate a methodological approach that guides the analyst's attention to metaphors and surfaces that are the focus of different theories. Clinically, the use of different theories expands the metaphorical language with which the analyst tries to make contact with the patient's unconscious life. Metaphorical expressions may be said to relate to each other as the syntax of unconscious fantasy (Arlow 1979). The unconscious fantasy itself represents a metaphorical construction of childhood experience that has persisted, dynamically expressive and emergent into adult life. This persistence is evident in how, in some instances, long periods of an analysis focus on translating one or a few metaphors, chiefly because the manifest metaphorical expressions of a central theme regularly lead to better understanding of an unconscious fantasy. At times employing another model or theory assists in a level of self-reflection about clinical understanding and clinical decisions. The analyst's choice of theory or theories is unique to the analyst and is not prescriptive, except as illustrating a way to think about these issues. The use of multiple models in no way suggests or implies that theories may be integrated.

Blood brothers, ugly sisters: School counselling and sibling dynamics

This article explores the particular relevance of sibling dynamics for counsellors working in schools. School, when viewed as a large ‘lateral’ organisation, both reflects and reactivates sibling dynamics. This thinking about school counselling is based on the ‘whole school’ approach, in which a school counsellor works with staff and students, and with organisational dynamics, seeking to understand the unconscious emotional life of the school system, as well as those within it. The initial sections of the article are concerned both with the place of siblings in psychodynamic theory, and with challenges which sibling dynamics present for a counsellor working in a school context. There follow three linked sections in which the invitation to ‘think sibling’ is illustrated with some clinical examples, drawn from the specific context of a boarding school. All identities have been changed and anonymised to protect confidentiality. The article concludes with a discussion of sibling dynamics in practice, within the context of schools.

The Freedom to Speak: Psychopolitical Meanings in Argentine History

AbstractIt is important to understand how three registers – the psychological, the political and the ideological – converge to frame unconscious life in ways that either inhibit or facilitate individual and group capacities to exercise free speech and free association. Here a model for assessing how these registers of human affect and behavior either facilitate these freedoms of expression or sabotage them in favor of submission to authority is suggested. The discussion is positioned in the context of two traumatic periods in Argentine history, namely the military dictatorship's Dirty War (1976–1983) and the country's complete economic collapse in 2001.

On Working With Opaque Silence in Group Psychotherapy

This article explores the phenomenon of what I have termed opaque silence in groups—silence which is particularly impenetrable. It is argued that this silence has its origins in traumatic experience and the manifestation in the unconscious life of the group of the basic assumption (ba): Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification as described by Hopper (1997; 2003; 2012). A description of the phenomena associated with opaque silence is given, and their relationship to Hopper’s theory. A clinical vignette is provided that demonstrates the manifestation of opaque silence in a group of adolescent patients and how the author managed it. This is followed by a discussion of the application of the theory to clinical technique.

Organology of Dreams and Archi-Cinema (

Stiegler argued in Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (the third volume of Technics and Time) that we must refer to archi-cinema just as Derrida spoke of archi-writing. In this article he proposes that in principle the dream is the primordial form of this archi-cinema. The archi-cinema of consciousness, of which dreams would be the matrix as archi-cinema of the unconscious, is the projection resulting from the play between what Husserl called, on the one hand, primary and secondary retentions, and what Stiegler, on the other hand, calls tertiary retentions, which are the hypomnesic traces (that is, the mnemo-technical traces) of conscious and unconscious life. There is archi-cinema to the extent that for any noetic act – for example, in an act of perception – consciousness projects its object. This projection is a montage, of which tertiary (hypomnesic) retentions form the fabric, as well as constituting both the supports and the cutting room. This indicates that archi-cinema has a history, a history conditioned by the history of tertiary retentions. It also means that there is an organology of dreams.

A Postscript to Panel Discussion of Gianni Nebbiosi’s “The Smell of Paper: On the Usefulness of Musical Thought in Psychoanalytic Practice”

Gianni Nebbiosi’s paper, “The Smell of Paper: On the Usefulness of Musical Thought in Psychoanalytic Practice,” explores many levels of the analyst’s clinical sensibility. These include the finding of a patient in the mind of the psychoanalyst, the discovery of new points of creative inflexion in developing metaphors with a patient who is frightened of symbolic meaning, the use of countertransference analysis to explore the analyst’s points of resistance to helping his or her patient, and the development of a creative shared frame of reference between patient and analyst that emerges from the patient’s unconscious life.

Synchronicity: did Jung have it right?

Synchronicity: did Jung have it right?

Living in Contaminated Sites: Which Cost for Psychic Health?

In this paper, we would like to offer a psychoanalytically oriented perspective on the psychic costs of most documented technological disasters (e.g. oil spill and nuclear accidents) or industrial pollution (e.g. asbestos manufacturing). We report a brief literature review about the relationship between Contaminated Sites (CSs) and mental health. The articles were selected from the most important medical and psychological databases: MEDLINE/Pubmed, PsycINFO and Proquest Psychology Journal. After electronic searches, we have manually reviewed reference lists from the identified publications. Literature review reveals that despite the specific kind of technological disasters (i.e. nuclear accidents, oil spill, asbestos manufacturing), the cost of survival is pretty much the same: anxiety, somatizations, rage, depression and post-traumatic conditions, which undermine one’s own sense of psychic integrity. This cost seems to be even higher when people have to fight an invisible and boundless enemy, which threaten not only themselves but also their own children. Clinicians, mental health services and policy makers need to reflect upon these traumatic conditions in order to activate and promote a thinking process that can give rise to a new capability of containing all the experiential aspects that have remained alien, dissociated and unthinkable until that moment. Qualitative approaches and multi-dimensional analysis could lead a deeper understanding of the psychic dynamics and unconscious life in CSs. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s3p207

Bosco et la dépersonnalisation, ou le battement d’un fantasme

All Bosco's work is fulfilled with strange places, strange sensations, strange situations, strange persons. We suppose this is around what Bosco writes his books. Throughout his novels, Bosco writer tells us a childhood in L’âne culotte, L’Enfant et la rivière, and then two kinds of adult's life in Le mas Théotime, Malicroix, four works crowned by literary prizes. We have therefore chosen these to argue our work. This is the use of the resort of this feeling of strangeness that will stop our thinking, more particularly the three moments of the hero's depersonalization. In his novels, Bosco learns to let free course to his inconscient life. At the episodes of depersonalization, is superposing the elaboration of his fundamental phantasm which subtends these, and the hero's intimity with his tearings, his fears and his desire to find the object of his love. Like this, Bosco seals in his novels his phantasmatic world with his unconscious life.

The form of the soul ― on the body in Freud’s psychoanalysis

To formulate the problem of the relation between body and soul in terms of how one should understand the relation between consciousness and the brain, or in terms of explaining how mind can arise out of matter, is a modern and far from innocent tendency that has instigated the whole spectrum of theories and answers suggested by the philosophy of mind of the so-called Analytic tradition during the 20th century. During the last 5 decades, we have seen a number of attempts at incorporating Freud into this discussion about the relation between body and soul. In this article, the author develops an argument according to which the philosophy of mind of the Analytic tradition is not really an appropriate intellectual environment for Freud´s theory of the body and its constitutive rôle. Rather, we should turn to phenomenology and transcendental philosophy where the body is thematized, not in terms of matter taken to give rise to consciousness in an empirical sense, but rather in terms of the “lived body” that is taken, in a transcendental sense, to constitute the organization of meaning in our conscious and our unconscious psychological life. On the basis of an outline of this phenomenological theory, the author argues that Freud, most of all in his theory of psychosexual development, thematizes the body as the form of the soul.

The Personal Is Political: Gender Stereotypes in the Unconscious Life of Groups: Commentary on “Consciousness-Raising in a Gender Conflict Group”

The Personal Is Political: Gender Stereotypes in the Unconscious Life of Groups: Commentary on “Consciousness-Raising in a Gender Conflict Group”