Unconscious Fantasies Research Articles

The Oedipal Virtual Citadel: Varieties of Isolation, Oedipal Conflict, and Cover-Up.

The author elaborates some of the fantasies and defenses that protect some patients in their oedipal fixations, particularly those related to forms of personal isolation. To some extent, cover-up is intrinsic to oedipal conflict and fantasy, but what is covered up is quite variable. In this paper, the author highlights elements of personal isolation that the patient cultivates in order to protect love for a desired oedipal parent and the conscious and unconscious fantasies associated with this love. The patients described here use forms of personal isolation to cover up and secure the gratification of oedipal fantasies. Their isolation also serves to protect them from fantasies of unique forms of destructiveness in relation to self and the desired other. The citadel, a concept from Guntrip's description of defenses protecting the schizoid patient's fear of destructive love, is characterized here for the neurotic patient as virtual because in some ways, each of the participants in oedipal conflict turn a "blind eye" to a staged cover-up. Clinical illustrations examine the transference-countertransference process of shifts from turning a blind eye to sustaining a process of seeing what is being covered up but has already been seen.

"How Can I Trust You When I Know You Can Die?" Surviving the Death of an Analyst in a Child Analysis.

This reflection on the initial stages of treatment of a latency girl whose previous analyst died offers some insights into inner workings of mourning in children. The mourning process intersects in complex ways with a developmental stage, object constancy, unconscious phantasies, and conscious ideas about life and death. Clinical material illustrates some challenges that emerge in the transference-countertransference matrix when working with a child who lost both her primary object (the mother) and her transference object (the analyst). The reality of the analyst's death emphasizes that for a child patient the analyst is always a transference object and a real object at once.

Purity and Unity: Narcissism and Destructiveness in Nationalistic and Fundamentalistic Ideologies

Abstract: In recent decades, Western societies have been exposed to increasing dynamics of change and crisis as a result of ongoing globalization, and of flight and displacement in many regions of the world. The insecurity and humiliation of being more exposed to global developments than being able to influence them leads many people to seek social security. As a result, populist and far-right ideologies have become increasingly attractive to some. There has also been a revival of authoritarian thinking. Based on Erich Fromm’s concept introduced in the 1930s, its current forms are described in terms of the narcissistic self- and other-dynamics. Social science data show that, in addition to authoritarian thinking, a narcissistic longing for a homogeneous society makes populist and far-right ideologies increasingly attractive. If we analyze this phantasm of a homogeneous nation, we find at its root unconscious fantasies of care and sibling rivalry, of purity and the idea of the Other, the fantasy of a protective whole. Such ideal-narcissistic states of purity and homogeneity do not tolerate divergences and are therefore associated with paranoia and violence. Ultimately, the irreversibility of difference and ambivalence in human life is denied.

The Notion of the One in the Light of Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The article concerns on the interpretation of the One in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This notion derived from the Eleatic philosophy and subsequently was developed in a specific way by Plato and the Neoplatonists. This concept also occupies an important place in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In his seminars, Lacan drew attention to the similarity between philosopher’s and narcissist’s discourse when they speak of the total unity. Since the subject never encounters such unity in his experience, there should be an instance producing the idea of totality. According to Lacan, the unconscious is responsible for this, both in philosopher’s and narcissist’s discourse. The narcissistic idea of the One is provoked by the hopes of finding the unity of the self. The narcissist is painfully aware of the fragmentation of the inner experience and tries to reassemble the self through identification with the object of desire, which in Lacanian psychoanalysis is called object a. The ideal for the narcissist is complete autarky, when the total unity is embodied in the figure of the Big Other. Lacan demonstrates that the One in the narcissistic experience is an image of the narcissistic self, idealized and purified from any specific content. Structurally, the same logic is reproduced in philosophical discourse, only the One is described as the highest transcendental reality. Thus, Lacan concludes that the instance that gives impetus to the idea of the One is unconscious fantasy. The driving force behind this process is the combination of desire and pleasure. By examining the position of pleasure, Lacanian psychoanalysis reconstructs the ‘ontology’ and ‘ethics’ of the unconscious that guides it in its constructing the fantasy of the total One.

Mental Activity And Psychosomatic Expressions In Digital Times

Mental activity and its psychosomatic repercussions are influenced by the prevailing culture, which is currently very much related to internet articles. The mechanism is the same, but with nuances of stimulation of the thoughts, of origin of the facts of contemporaneity. Affection is of paramount importance in the formation of thought. The mother without the ability to reverie would hinder the alpha function and thus disturb the emotion and the formation of thought - this is the importance of the first mold period. Affection unites with unconscious ideas and fantasies. Since the unconscious fantasies are psychic representatives of instinct, once connected with the unconscious ideas, they would have the manifestations of the affective state. This would be perceived thanks to the pleasant and unpleasant sensations. Probably the greatest contribution to the notion of an organic thought is that constituted by the conjugation of the theory of thought with the theory of instincts and with the theory of affects. The formation of symbols, by projective identification, gives rise to symbolic equations that result in a concrete thought and in the idea that the formation of the true symbols available for sublimation and communication depends on the elaboration of the anguish of depression. The symbol is concretely assimilated with the symbolized object. The symbolic equation is the complete assimilation of the symbol, which is a part of the body, with the symbolized. Nowadays the peculiarity is the cyber effect on behavior, the ideas that arise from internet communications in various senses, either good or bad. In conclusion, thinking and imagination can lead to symptoms and demonstrate what it is like to speak in each body.

The emotional appeal of shared fantasies in Nazi propaganda: A psychoanalytic view

AbstractThis paper explores the emotional appeal of Nazi propaganda from a psychoanalytic point of view. A shared ideological narrative connecting to unconscious fantasies within a large group psychology are utilized to explain this emotional appeal in the context of an intersubjective leader‐audience relationship. A narrative of narcissistic revenge, apocalyptic battle, and utopian unity and purification are explored utilizing speeches of Hitler as examples of ideological transmission. Prophesizing the extermination of the Jews of Europe is understood as integral to the emotional appeal of Nazi propaganda.

Receptivity is not passivity: A comparison between psychoanalysis and phenomenology concerning experience, judgement and the analytic attitude

ABSTRACT Starting from Edmund Husserl’s last book Experience and Judgement, this paper explores the notions of “passivity” and “receptivity” in phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Both sciences agree that receptivity differs from passivity, but they have developed different conceptualizations about the very nature of the rudimentary “ego-activity” which is the source of receptivity. In phenomenological terms, “pre-predicative” experience roots in a primary presence and openness of the ego towards the world, whilst psychoanalysis has emphasized the role of projective and introjective processes which are close to bodily experiences and unconscious phantasy. The second part of the paper draws some conclusions concerning the analytic situation, in particular the shift among receptivity, empathy, curiosity and creative imagination as central features of the analytic attitude from a mainly Kleinian point of view. The paper argues that receptivity is a field where phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches can mutually enrich and learn from each other.

Haunted Houses, Haunted Minds: Psychical Research, Psychoanalysis, and the Philip Experiment

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research conducted a series of experiments in which they attempted to prove that the psychokinetic phenomena that were normally described in the context of spirit communication were indicative of a dormant, psychological power within the individual. The group created a fictional character—Philip, the imaginary ghost—and spent several years of regular séances successfully producing table raps and levitations as they attempted to communicate with him. Importantly, the group often compared their experiences with each other and with Philip as a form of “group therapy.” This article examines the collaborative, playful nature of the Philip Experiment in relation to psychoanalytic theories of play, transitional and intersubjective experiences, and the mediated communication of unconscious fantasies in the context of clinical analysis.

Homesickness: Its Particular Relevance to Children of Separation and Divorce

ABSTRACT This article addresses the similar effects on the very young child of abrupt weaning after breastfeeding, and overnight parenting access with the father when the mother is the primary caretaker and the child is primarily attached to the mother’s home as their home. The role of the young child’s unconscious fantasies is considered, particularly in perceiving the mother in these situations as rejecting, hostile and persecutory towards the young child, as well as the short-term and long-term effects of these early experiences on child, adolescent and adult development. The conflict existing between the application of sound psychoanalytic child development theory and research and the legal Best Interests of the Child standard is raised for discussion. Finally, how these adverse experiences impact on the creation and use of nostalgia are addressed.

The contribution of Meltzer’s concept of ‘geographical confusion’ to understanding development and the analytic process

ABSTRACT The concept of geographical confusion is very useful in understanding the child and the adolescent. In addition, the clinical examples presented, taken from two different developmental phases in a life of a child patient, show the relation between unconscious phantasy, which produces geographical confusion, and the structure of personality. Furthermore, it is possible to see how analytical work that touches on phantasy through its embodiment in dreams and transference allows for profound changes in personality, also resulting in a decrease in symptomatology.

Fetal Fantasy and the Perfect Child: How Certain Challenges of Adolescence may Inform Aspects of the Abortion Debate.

This article explores psychic aspects of abortion, from the fixity of beliefs over its legalization, to conscious and unconscious fantasies related to the fetus, children, parenting, fertility, and so on. Generally speaking, the field has shown less direct interest in abortion per se than might be surmised, particularly given the centrality of sexuality and procreation in psychoanalysis. The recent legal changes may initiate more psychoanalytic interest in the topic. The current writing studies a possible strand of fantasy in which conscious and unconscious wishes for an unending, idealized, and blameless child-object are displaced onto a fetus or fetal imago. Speculations and suggestions are drawn from casework with an individual which points to a possible channeling or avoidance of unprocessed grief when the seeming perfection of childhood ends abruptly, almost without transition, with the imposition of adolescent personality development.

Falling, primitive separation and encapsulated body engrams – working through a bodily encoded unconscious syndrome

ABSTRACT Besides the symbolic unconscious, psychoanalysis today investigates unconscious structures that are dissociated from mental functioning (Lombardi 2017) and encoded in bodily inscriptions. These bodily configurations often stay outside of the psychoanalytical attention and technique of treatment. Two concepts – encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration – provide a theoretical and technical proposition for the bodily encoded unconscious. Within this frame, the paper focuses on new aspects. It is outlined that the encapsulated body engrams result from a traumatic disorganization of the primal relation to the caregiver leading to an impossibility of a separation from the mother’s body. Separation is now feared as a deadly fall into an endless abyss. However, this element is no longer viewed as an unconscious phantasy that can be interpreted but as the perception of a disorganized bodily syndrome that must be worked through with a considerable reverberation-time (Birksted-Breen 2009) in a body-to-body dialogue. Somatic narration encourages the patient to describe his painful bodily perception and invites the body-self to show up during the analytical encounter. Working this way allows the patients disorganized body-self to slowly develop into a container to harbor, organize and symbolize emotions. Four clinical examples illustrate this manner of working.

‘Stalked by the Malignant Father's Spirit: A Case of Patricide among the Yagwoia (PNG)’ by Jadran Mimica

ABSTRACTJadran Mimica presents the ‘life‐world’ of Yagwoia people of Papua New Guinea as a unique variant of the Jungian Ouroboric archetype, a primal pattern or symbol derived from the ancient Greek ‘tail devourer’ (the serpent that eats its own tail), found in many cultures and individual unconscious phantasies. Treated in terms of ‘ouroboric dialectics’, relations between Yagwoia father and son are hostile, even patricidal, because the son's very existence derives from the father's ‘continuous and irreversible’ transfer to him of his limited supply of vital substance or ‘paternal bone’. Sons replace fathers in ways that fathers may experience as ‘violent loss of … generative bodily core’, a process that Mimica asserts ‘can only be adequately understood through individual‐biographical life‐situations and trajectories’. In bypassing anthropology's classical terrain, or treating Yagwoia life‐ways as contingent upon the ‘ouroboric cosmic Self’ – a ‘wholly pre‐genital gestalt of self‐generation’ – Mimica distorts the role of collective rites of passage and affinal exchange to counter, inhibit, and redirect the primary narcissism intrinsic to human beings. In a small scale society like the Yagwoia, whose survival and well‐being depend upon the integration of nearly all its members, the main ‘work of culture’ is to recruit socially adept adults from each new crop of infants by helping them to overcome – not to repeat or magnify – existential problems of growing up that afflict everyone but that no one can resolve, or even fully understand, on their own. The ‘ouroboric (self‐copulating^eating) phallus’ is one image or ‘mythologeme’ of infantile narcissism. Based upon my own fieldwork among Gimi‐speakers in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, I suggest that such myths serve as templates for rites of exchange intended to thwart the calamity myths envisage – not to facilitate or intensify it.

Interpassivity and psychoanalytic theory: Transformation of the Meaning under Influence of discourse of Authenticity and Ideology Theory

The concept of interpassivity plays an important role in understanding the interaction of contemporary human and media; this explains the growth of its usage in the last two decades. However, popularization leads to a transformation in the understanding of this concept or its confusion with others. In our opinion, it is important to preserve the original meaning of this issue. An analysis of the main elements of the concept by R. Pfaller and S. Zizek demonstrates the heuristic value of such “conservatism”, which limits the shift in thematic emphasis. The influence of other concepts (authenticity and alienation) leads to a simplification of the interpassivity, since in this case this concept no longer draws our attention to those aspects that are poorly distinguishable in the optics of humanistic discourse and social criticism. On the contrary, the preservation of the original interpretation makes it possible to include issues of pleasure, unconscious fantasies and beliefs in the consideration of a number of problems of human relations with contemporary media.

THINKING THE DREAM: DREAM AND DREAM THINKING IN SIGMUND FREUD, HANNA SEGAL, AND WILFRED BION.

In the dream and its interpretation, psychoanalysis, in its founding period around 1900, identified the "royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life." But already in the development of Freud's work itself, the dream lost its central position: As early as in the 1920s, psychoanalysis ceased to be a theory and practice defined by dream interpretation-a caesura in a process which completed itself in 1950. Two further developments proved, up to the present day, particularly momentous for the conception of the dream: Melanie Klein's development of the concept of "unconscious phantasy" and the extension of psychoanalytic treatment to psychosis, originally declared inaccessible to psychoanalytic therapy by Freud. This article draws an itinerary of this path and the subsequent fundamental changes in the psychoanalytic reflection on the dream affecting the whole of psychoanalysis until today, by casting spotlights on essential stations: conceptions of the dream developed by Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion, the latter's theory perpetuating Freud's dream theory as well as it conceptualizes dreams, dreaming, and thinking in a fundamentally new way.

On Meme Work

Abstract While memes have been implicated in a loosening of the boundary between illusion and reality during the rise of Trumpism and the COVID-19 pandemic, they have been afforded scarce attention from a psychoanalytic perspective. This essay proposes that Sigmund Freud's language on dream-work can be used to describe the psychical work that these digital items effect. If Freud's terms identify the operations by which unconscious fantasies are inscribed in certain cultural artefacts, their resonance with memetic characteristics suggests that the meme may be a privileged form for investigating the mass mediation of group dynamics. Drawing on the work of psychoanalysts such as Stephen Mitchell, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, René Kaës, and Didier Anzieu, this text explores how their theoretical frameworks might enrich a conceptualization of the role that memes play within the psychic life of groups.

The Play of Mourning.

Playing is a form of responsiveness that involves a shift from more formal interpretation about defense, unconscious fantasy, or transference to one that employs humor or irony regarding the content of fantasy or poses a more direct confrontation between internal fantasy and external reality. Playing is differentiated from more formal interpretation by the analytic couple's intensity of affective expression, the idiomatic language used to express affect or ideas, or the analyst's more personally revealing reaction to the patient's recruitment of him as an internal object. Two clinical vignettes show how play emphasizes experiences of loss and waste that have been enacted in the patient's life and often in transference-countertransference engagement. Through newly discovered forms of play, these processes are occurring now in real time between patient and analyst and less through frozen memorialization of what never was.

Prosthetic Gods, Projected Monsters

This paper examines several narratives of techno-horror in literature and film. Special attention is paid to the recurring trope of monstrosity arising from a technologically augmented sense of sight. Utilizing a psychoanalytically informed analysis, this paper argues that fictions can express latent, untenable dimensions of very real experiences. In the case of techno-horror, narratives of sight, imagination, and projection-made-monstrous are rooted in contemporary relationships with technology and its capacity for depicting and transmitting unconscious fantasies. In this relationship, the technological is the extension of a tangible category of humanity, while nevertheless containing the fear that this extension dissolves its stability. Thus, the genre of techno-horror is unique in expressing the role of unconscious fantasies – our unattainable ideals for becoming “prosthetic Gods,” as Freud put it (1930) – in our relationship with technology. Like the ideal of transcendence in religion, this technological ideal is a desire for both an impossible future, as well as the wish to return to an equally impossible, infantile past. Ultimately, this paper suggests that techno-horror narratives are expressions of a failure in taking responsibility for the othered unconscious fantasies that motivate our relationship with technology. Understanding these narratives within the context of psychoanalytic projection and situating them within the long tradition of imagining a transcendence of the human subject affords a better understanding of the cultural work accomplished by these contemporary expressions of the human-made-monstrous.

EMMA DONOGHUE'un ODA’SINDA VE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’NUN KIRMIZI LEKE’SİNDE ANNELİĞİN PSİKANALİTİK ANALİZİ

This study aims to analyse Emma Donoghue’s Room and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter from a psychoanalytic perspective with a focus on the mother and child relationship. In the novel Room we witness the experiences, traumas, fight in the ‘’outer space’’ of a five-year-old boy Jack, along with his mother, Ma who spent her years in an eleven-feet room as captives. The inspiration of Room is the Fritzl case in Austria and in the real case Elizabeth Fritzl was raped and sexually abused by her biological father for 24 years and as a result of this disgusting systematic incest, she gave birth to 7 kids in the cellar of their home. Emma Donoghue’s gorgeous pen writes this heart-pounding situation of Elizabeth and one of her sons in a fictional way by naming them Ma and Jack. On the other hand, the Scarlet Letter deals with the intimate relationship of Hester and Pearl in an abandoned world. They are a reflection of each other as well as the voice of their conscience and a light of hope for each other to survive in a challenging society. Especially Hawthorne’s life overlaps with the relationship between Hester Prynne, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth in many respects, such as the observation of Oedipus complex. The writer reflects his unconscious personality on his characters by putting himself in their place through psychoanalytic theory. Both novels feature the identification of a mother with her child in an enclosed, isolated area as if they were imprisoned captives in their secluded rooms and demonstrate how they complete each other and contribute to each other’s self-development and transformation in the mother-child relationship under social pressure. Through the act of writing, the author expresses his/her desires and the words become his/her digging tools. Like an archaeologist, he/she digs for the past and wants to express the experience of the past. Therefore, he/she fantasizes and manifests his/her wishes in the form of art. For Freud’s informal talk called Creative Writers and Day- Dreaming which was given in 1907 and consequently published in 1908 as a written document there is a close relationship between unconscious phantasy and creative art and while we are reading a text, we understand the psyche of the author in a way. Because the desires of a man remain suppressed in his unconscious level of mind and when he produces something like an artistic work regarding a poem or novel, those desires and ideas rise up and come to the surface. While demonstrating both novels that bear the traces of Emma Donoghue and Herman Melville’s childhood traumas, this study also analyses how the fictional characters reveal their inner worlds, repressed desires, and feelings through their actions. Closely related to psychoanalytic theory, Nathaniel Hawthorne deals with the effects of social taboos and constraints on individuals in the expression of repressed feelings, desires and inward thoughts. He enables readers to go deeper into the complicated minds and psychological disorders of his characters with a focus on their later psychological transformation. Ma’s id, ego, superego, Oedipus syndrome that Jack lives, the dreams of the characters that unmask their unconscious starkly are touched upon in this study as well.

Narratives, Ontological Security, and Unconscious Phantasy: Germany and the European Myth During the so‐called Migration Crisis

This article synthesizes scholarship on narratives and Kleinian defense mechanisms against anxiety to develop a framework that enables a nuanced understanding of ontological security‐seeking dynamics in times of crisis. Using the case study of the German narrative of the European Union during the so‐called migration crisis of 2015, this article engages with the broader question of how unconscious phantasy influences and guides decision‐making processes on a collective level as well as the question of how exactly narratives help subjects to manage anxiety to maintain a sense of ontological security. We show that, in the case of Germany, the EU offers a highly affective political myth that has guided both the decision‐making of the government during the crisis and the construction of German self‐identity narratives by attempting to introject the good part‐object of “Europeanness.” Crucially, German self‐identity narratives and narratives on the EU were not only inextricably linked but the EU also became an idealized (Kleinian) part‐object. During the so‐called migration crisis, this fostered processes of projective identification whereby decisions subverting European values and humanitarian narratives as well as general “badness” were externalized and projected onto other member states, most notably the Visegrád states.