The origins of psychoanalysis, as well as the concerns of our daily endeavors, center on engagement with the fate of the unbearable - be it wish, affect, or experience. In this paper, I explore ...psychological states and dynamics faced by survivors of genocide and their children in their struggle to sustain life in the midst of unremitting deadliness. Toward this continuous effort, I re-examine Freud's theoretical formulations concerning memory and mourning, elaborate André Green's concept of the 'Dead Mother', and introduce more recent work on the concepts of the 'third' and 'thirdness'. Throughout, my thoughts are informed by our clinical experience with the essential role of witnessing in sustaining life after massive trauma. I bring aspects of all these forms of knowing to reflections about a poem by Primo Levi entitled Unfinished business and to our own never finished business of avoiding denial while living in an age of genocide and under the aura of uncontained destructiveness.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
RESUMO: Propomos compreender a poética (Aristóteles, Benjamim) como um aspecto da técnica de enunciação psicanalítica. Partindo da postulação lacaniana conhecida como lalíngua, encontra-se um ...paralelo entre esta língua preconizada por Lacan e o uso da linguagem tal qual ele é feito na composição da poesia concretista. Através da análise literária de dois poemas brasileiros desta escola, somados às narrativas dos próprios poetas sobre o processo criativo que os incutiu, perfaz-se um caminho para a compreensão da assertiva lacaniana de que “o inconsciente é um savoir-faire com lalíngua” como uma consideração sobre o aspecto de criação poética imbuído no enunciado do analista.
Abstract: This article proposes an analogy between poetic function and psychoanalytic interpretation. Departing from the Lacanian postulation known as lalangue, we intend a parallel between this concept and the use of language as it is performed in concretist poetry. Through the literary analysis of two Brazilian poems of this school, Chico Buarque’s Construction and Arnaldo Antunes’s The pulse, we suggest the understanding of Lacan’s assertion (“the unconscious is a savoir-faire with lalangue”) as a consideration of the poetic aspect of the interpretative technique in psychoanalysis.
Objective:
Transference interpretation has remained a core ingredient in the psychodynamic tradition, despite limited empirical evidence for its effectiveness. In this study, the authors examined ...long-term effects of transference interpretations.
Method:
This was a randomized controlled clinical trial, dismantling design, plus follow-up evaluations 1 year and 3 years after treatment termination. One hundred outpatients seeking psychotherapy for depression, anxiety, personality disorders, and interpersonal problems were referred to the study therapists. Patients were randomly assigned to receive weekly sessions of dynamic psychotherapy for 1 year with or without transference interpretations. Five full sessions from each therapy were rated in order to document treatment fidelity. Outcome variables were the Psychodynamic Functioning Scales (clinician rated) and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (self-report). Rating on the Quality of Object Relations Scale (lifelong pattern) and presence of a personality disorder were postulated moderators of treatment effects. Change over time was assessed using linear mixed models.
Results:
Despite an absence of differential treatment efficacy, both treatments demonstrated significant improvement during treatment and also after treatment termination. However, patients with a lifelong pattern of poor object relations profited more from 1 year of therapy with transference interpretations than from therapy without transference interpretations. This effect was sustained throughout the 4-year study period.
Conclusions:
The goal of transference interpretation is sustained improvement of the patient's relationships outside of therapy. Transference interpretation seems to be especially important for patients with long-standing, more severe interpersonal problems.
Critically inclined International Relations (IR) scholars have recently turned to examining the issue of time and its implications for world politics. However, there has yet to be a thorough account ...of how a focus on temporality deepens our understanding of one of the field's core concepts: subjectivity. Drawing upon insights from psychoanalytic theory, this paper argues that the discursive decentering of subjectivity (long a focus in poststructuralist IR) is bound to the subject's temporal decentering. Moreover, conceptualizing these together helps to account for the underexplored role of desire in subject formation. The paper thus draws together insights regarding discourse, desire, and identity to offer a more comprehensive theory of the subject in IR and a richer account of the social construction process in general. The empirical import of these ideas is illustrated with regard to the function of temporality and desire in the politics of the US-led war on terror.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Psychoanalysis has seen a shift in emphasis regarding therapeutic action and technique. A predominant focus on the uncovering or reintegrating of repressed, disguised, or split-off contents has moved ...to include the intersubjective creation, development, and strengthening of psychic processes and capabilities. The analyst’s role in this process has been analogized to that of the primary maternal object in the origins of psychic life. This metaphor illuminates the movement from unrepresented to represented psychic states in treatment, as seen in a clinical example from the analysis of a particularly withdrawn young adult.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Nowhere do we see the beauty of our struggles so clearly as in the world of dreams. This past year saw the passing of one of our most creative and inspiring poets of the world of dreams, Paul ...Lippmann. In this paper, I speak from and about the world of dreams, recognizing ways in which they call to our attention aspects of experience which, unparsed, leave us caught emotionally. Considered will be the dream itself, its forms and functions, ways in which our emotional tangles within the dream space become visual pictograms. Bion suggested that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to enhance the capacities for feeling, thinking and dreaming. The dreaming process is enhanced by and in the psychoanalytic session. Through the dream work of analyst and analysand, dream elements become more fully elaborated into meaningful symbols that enrich the evolving narratives within the sessions. I will also consider ways in which psychosocial perspectives and psychoanalytic field theory have enhanced our understanding of and ability to make sense of our dreams, providing an enlarged playing field beyond the reconstructive efforts of early psychoanalysis.
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.
This paper presents a comparison between a clinical evaluation and a computerized linguistic analysis of the treatment notes of the first two years of an analysis conducted four sessions a week with ...the patient lying on a couch. Clinical notes had been written as part of the analyst’s standard practice after every session, some years prior to the planning of this study. The notes describe the analytic interchange and the analyst’s internal thoughts. The linguistic analysis focuses on two analytically relevant linguistic variables: Referential Activity (RA), a measure of the degree of connection between emotional processing and language, and Reflection, the use of words referring to thoughts. The examination of the linguistic measures point to overlooked parts of sessions which may be clinically significant. In particular, the examination of the clinical material during the nodal points of the first summer break, where significant changes in the linguistic measures were seen, provided clinical understanding of the analytic work that was not explicitly noted at the time of treatment. This method has the potential to be utilized in ongoing treatments and to improve the supervisory process.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Developing Lacan's idea of "hystory," the following reading of D. H. Lawrence's story "The Lovely Lady" considers the personal and historical as deeply entwined, both in their oppression and ...potential liberation. The lady, who represents the order of bourgeois idealism, discovers the key to eternal youth, each night vampirically feeding off the erotic energy of her son. This essay views the story as an allegory of modern life as a dead zone of alienation, in which "hystory" is comprised of the web of transgenerational phantoms, traumas of the past, and haunting secrets from the crypt of the (m)other's unconscious.
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