This paper explores Gail Honeyman’s 2017 novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine from the perspective of Abraham and Torok’s concept of the psychic crypt. On one level the protagonist Eleanor, a ...thirty-year-old urban single woman searching for love, resembles a chick-lit heroine; however, Eleanor is deeply lonely, apparently autistic, suicidal and a survivor of childhood abuse and trauma. The paper argues that Eleanor’s difficulties can be understood as the consequences of encryptment which, in Abraham and Torok’s terms, is a disease of mourning where the dead loved one is incorporated rather than introjected into the psyche.
In this review we examine the evidence regarding self-determination theory within the school physical education context. We applied a multilevel structural equation modeling approach to meta-analyze ...data from a systematic review that identified 265 relevant studies. In line with theory, autonomous motivation was positively correlated with adaptive outcomes and negatively correlated with maladaptive outcomes. Introjected regulation was modestly correlated with both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. External regulation and amotivation both showed negative relationships with adaptive outcomes, and positive relationship with maladaptive outcomes. Also supporting SDT, autonomy, competence, and relatedness satisfactions were strongly correlated with autonomous student motivation, and less strongly, but still positively, correlated with introjected regulation. Weak negative correlations were found between autonomy, competence, and relatedness and external regulation. Amotivation had moderate negative correlations with needs satisfaction. Findings further revealed that teachers more greatly impact classroom experiences of autonomy and competence, whereas relatedness in physical education is associated with both peer and teacher influences.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
We found that the different types of motivation identified in SDT differentially predict student outcomes in predicted ways, and that these motivations are systematically associated with instructor supports for students' basic psychological needs. Although teachers can support all three students' psychological needs, teachers appear to have greater influence on students' autonomy and competence, whereas peers seem to have more impact on students' relatedness. These results have implications for the design of teacher and peer focused interventions.
This paper proposes that introjection experienced as a traumatic presence has a goal-directed function, subcortically mediated with essential cortical participation. Anticipation of further ...relational trauma activates this post-traumatic process in which the victim remains watchfully engaged, monitoring from the dominant other's perspective. In consequence, the victim endures a persistent objectifying perspective, a seeing and experiencing from out-there and in consequence, a loss of seeing and experiencing from within. This objectifying perspective emerges from the ontogenetic origins of shame designed to shape compliance with the wishes and needs of more dominant others for the child's protection, social learning, and guidance. However, this ontogenetic process becomes disintegrating and maladaptive in the context of sustained interpersonal trauma. With sufficient reinforcement, it evolves into an attractor state experienced as a traumatic presence. Emerging information on the role of the cingulate in directing attention and mentalizing is consistent with this conceptualization. A sequence of clinical vignettes is used, not as a case study, but rather as a means to access experiential phenomena that illustrate the origins and evolution of this introjective process.
La clinique révèle la fréquente absence de honte chez les auteurs de violences sexuelles comme un négatif de la honte éprouvée par les victimes. Nous avons cherché à comprendre ce paradoxe en ...analysant les dynamiques de l’introjection de la honte dans l’identification à l’agresseur chez la victime et l’injection de la honte dans l’identification projective de l’agresseur sur sa victime.
Nous nous sommes intéressés à Louis, un prêtre destitué, condamné pour comportements pédocriminels. Cette étude fait partie d’une recherche doctorale qualitative menée auprès d’une population de sujets incarcérés à partir d’entretiens de recherche structurés autour du récit de vie.
Nous observons chez Louis, comme souvent chez nos sujets de recherche auteurs de violences sexuelles, que derrière l’apparente absence de honte, se dessine une grande honte inconsciente, tout d’abord introjectée dans les abus subis, puis retournée et injectée dans la relation intersubjective et dans les abus commis, comme moyen de décharge d’une honte insupportable.
L’introjection de la honte de l’agresseur par sa victime dans la dynamique de l’identification à l’agresseur décrite par Ferenczi apparaît comme la réciproque de l’injection de la honte par l’agresseur à sa victime dans la dynamique de l’identification projective : une identification projective ordinaire sous la forme d’un retournement projectif de la honte et une identification projective opératoire sous la forme de comportements violents et pervers.
Le mécanisme des vases communicants psychiques de la honte chez les auteurs et victimes de violences sexuelles, entre injection et introjection, permet de mieux comprendre le caractère contagieux de cet affect dans l’étiologie des violences sexuelles.
Forensic clinical investigation frequently reveals the absence of shame in perpetrators of sexual violence while simultaneously victims seem overwhelmed by shame. We sought to understand this paradox by analyzing the dynamics of the introjection of shame in victims’ identification with the aggressor and of the injection of shame in the aggressor's projective identification with his victim.
We focused on the case of Louis, a dismissed priest, sentenced for pedocriminal behavior. This case is part of a qualitative research project conducted on a population of 14 inmates of a Parisian prison and based on interviews structured around the individual's life story and analyzed with the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology.
We observe that behind Louis's apparent absence of shame, as with many of our research subjects guilty of sexual violence, there is, in fact, a great deal of unconscious shame, first introjected by the victim in the abuse suffered, and later injected in the victim in the abuse committed as a means to unload an unbearable shame.
The introjection of the shame of the aggressor by his victim in the dynamic of Ferenczi's identification with the aggressor appears as a complement to the injection of shame by the aggressor into his victim through the dynamic of projective identification: both an ordinary projective identification in the form of a projective reversal of shame, and an operative projective identification in the form of perverse behaviors.
The communicating vessels of shame among perpetrators and victims of sexual violence, between injection and introjection, help us better understand the contagious characteristics of shame in the etiology of sexual violence.
Humans are unconditionally confronted with social expectations and norms, up to a degree that they, or some of them, have a hard time recognizing what they actually want. This renders them ...susceptible for introjection, that is, to unwittingly or "unconsciously" mistake social expectations for self-chosen goals. Such introjections compromise an individual's autonomy and mental health and have been shown to be more prevalent in individuals with rumination tendencies and low emotional self-awareness. In this brain imaging study, we draw on a source memory task and found that introjections, as indicated by imposed tasks that are falsely recognized as self-chosen, involved the bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Notably, reduced right MPFC activation within this condition correlated with trait scores of ruminations and reduced emotional self-awareness, but also introversion. Moreover, correct recognition of tasks as self-chosen involved the right MPFC. Accordingly, the right MPFC may play a role in supporting the maintenance of psychological autonomy and counteract introjection, which individuals with certain personality traits seem to be prone to. This research has significant implications for the study of mechanisms underlying autonomous motivation, goal and norm internalization, decision-making, persuasion, education, and clinical conditions such as depression and burnout.
The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the ...cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, tended to distort his theory. The psychosis attached to Reich by his detractors was the culmination of decades of scapegoating by psychoanalysts, Nazis, communists, and conservatives. But Reich’s environmental and Cold War preoccupations and his slow-burning fascination with UFO phenomena were not signs of a madness incipient since his break with Sigmund Freud. They anticipated and reflected much in the American psyche. Defining the presence of a “cinematic self” in the misunderstood analyst once considered an heir to Freud, Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers rejects orthodox portrayals of Reich’s final years as merely pathological. Combining original analysis and evidence from the Wilhelm Reich Archive, James Reich uncovers the fatal moments in the psychologist’s uncanny identification with the “spaceman,” and the myth of a scientist lost to his own grandiosity and paranoia. Taking seriously the influence of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, and other pop cultural narratives on Reich, this “psychoanalytic detective story” concerns existential traps, conscious and unconscious collaborations and betrayals by disciples, and unidentified flying object-relations. Reich’s is an atomic-age passion narrative. Vitally, Reich’s story could be ours. The author is not related to his subject.
In this discussion I use the interaction between Dr. Davis (referred to as Scott) and his analysis and, Sue, to examine an implicit ideal that we all might hold, that is favoring the need to ...re-present experience in words as a way of helping patients. Often a worded response (as opposed to an embodied registration, a facial expression or verbal pause or accent, for example), can feel to those we work with as robbing them of the power of their efforts in treatment that we are witnessing and trying to recognize. The worded response can feel like a usurpation of agency serving the narcissistic needs of the analyst over those of the patient. Bollas has called this an “extractive introjection.” I explore moments in the clinical interaction where this might have occurred at the same time that Scott adroitly uses his and his patient’s embodied emotional registrations effectively.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional physical, social, psychological reference points and perspectives, through immediate lockdown, discontinuity of supply, exacerbation of demand and the ...generation of fear, uncertainty and panic. The latter scenarios could be reframed and reviewed through a creative and poetic lens as the matrix for creative reinterpretation by highlighting the impacts of COVID-19 on space, time, mind, consciousness, emotions, thinking, and behaviour, as seen through 'space implosion,' 'the matrix of creativity,' 'I and I,' 'technological kinship' and 'time explosion.'
This study is about the mouth and its parts in the book of Job on the one hand, and on psychic introjection on the other, even when these two aspects do not completely overlap. The dominance of the ...mouth and orality in this biblical book speaks for its symbolic and psychic implications, including dependency and depression, but also symbolisation and empathy, where psychic digestion is resymbolising what has been desymbolised by trauma. The hypothesis is therefore that the mouth plays a crucial role in the process of mourning in the Book of Job.Contribution Interdisciplinary research into biblical texts from the perspective of psychoanalytic literary criticism adds to the broader horizons within which these texts can be analysed and interpreted. Within this frame, the focus on the mouth continues and promotes the Bodies Studies movement, which has been blossoming for over 40 years.
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