Biomedical subjects

J L Ahumada

Publications and source records attributed to J L Ahumada.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

The rebirth of the idols. The Freudian unconscious and the Nietzschean unconscious.

The author explores how psychoanalysis mutates in its passing from the privacies of the session to the public spaces of academia, shifting away from enquiry into unfolding unconscious psychic processes guided by its method, and from the clinically based notions Freud and his diverse followers constructed, here called the 'Freudian unconscious'. In postmodern intellectual contexts Freud's work fuels a 'Nietzschean unconscious', issuing from public lecterns in the protagonistic, self-creating feats of a 'psychoanalytic discourse'. The ideology of such mutation is here traced from Nietzsche on to Heidegger and Kojève, and then to Lacan and Laplanche. It reflects the might of the 'death of evidences' and the Romantic penchant for the limit-experience and the primacy accorded to the creative imagination. Discourse as revelation rests on a 'paradox of the enunciation' whereby the subject (author) of the statement is taken to be identical to the subject (matter) of the statement. Banishing the boundaries of illusion and evidence, and of self-overcoming and insight, academic 'psychoanalytic discourse' creates a 'return of the idols' in 'theoretical' narcissistic identification.

Forecasting↗

PubMed1997

Toward an epistemology of clinical psychoanalysis.

Epistemology emerges from the study of the ways knowledge is gained in the different fields of scientific endeavor. Current polemics on the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge involve counterposed misconceptions of the nature of mind. On one side clinical psychoanalysis is under siege from philosophical "hard science" stalwarts who, upholding as the unitary model of scientific knowledge of Galilean model of science built around the "well-behaved" variables of mechanics and cosmology, argue clinical psychoanalysis does not meet empirical criteria for the validation of its claims. On the other side, its empirical character is renounced by hermeneuticists who, agreeing with "hard science" advocates on what science is, dismiss the animal nature of human beings and hold that clinical psychoanalysis is not an empirical science but a "human" interpretive one. Taking Adolf Grünbaum's critique as its referent, this paper examines how, by ignoring the differences between "exact" and observational science, the "hard science" demand for well-behaved variables misconstrues the nature of events in the realm of mind. Criteria for an epistemology fit for the facts of clinical psychoanalysis as an empirical, observational science of mind are then proposed.

Conflict, Psychological↗

PubMed1997

Disclosures and refutations: clinical psychoanalysis as a logic of enquiry.

The author argues that the empirical status of psychoanalysis has been distorted by the controversy surrounding Aristotelian and Galilean-Newtonian schemes of science, whose core ideas, respectively, are scientific concepts or forms and scientific laws. Bound by the Euclidian axiomatic tradition, Newtonian-style 'laws' do not obtain in the social sciences, and in biology they apply only at near-molecular levels, not at the level of mind. Continuing the traditional Aristotelian reliance on 'exemplars', neither Freud's nor Darwin's work fits the deductivist, infallibilistic scientific criteria used by philosophers such as Tarski, Popper or Grünbaum. Rebutting the charge that the workings of psychoanalysis are not explicit enough, this paper unfolds the logic of enquiry it utilises. In contrast to Newtonian inductivism, Popper's method of conjectures and refutations and Lakatos's method of proofs and refutations, clinical psychoanalysis employs a 'practical logic' of disclosures and refutations, a constantly evolving enquiry of multi-layered and tentative evidence of discordance and analogy. Such epistemic fallibilism, relying on a build-up of ostensive evidences rather than on 'certainties', is illustrated in the text by Moore's famous 'two-hands' argument, is held to fit in with the workings of everyday discernment and, arguably, with Darwinian evolution.

Humans↗

PubMed1994

What is a clinical fact? Clinical psychoanalysis as inductive method.

This paper is an inquiry into the nature of clinical facts in psychoanalysis. The attainment of representability of psychic reality being requisite for insight, the author examines inductive processes on the part of both analyst and analysand, which are to be considered proper aspects of the study of clinical facts. It is argued that the analyst chooses his interpretations guided in good measure by nonverbal material, based on how he intuits that he is 'used' by the analysand and the ways the analysand feels 'used' by him; such nonverbal clues on the nature of the unconscious relational 'frames' operating in sessions guide him to select relevant associations from the universe of the analysand's verbal utterances. He thus comes to voice his interpretations, purveying a 'mapping' of psychic reality that typically makes use of a new viewpoint for description. Insight is achieved when the analysand attains ostensive refutation or redefinition of his unconscious 'theories' about the relationship, and this happens only in concrete individual situations, when the effects of his relational unconscious 'theories' come to be contrasted observationally in diverse 'screens', perceptual and mnemic, against the background of the analyst's neutrality: in such a way unconscious 'theories' attain the Pcs.-Cs. domain of the 'no'.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1994

Interpretation and creationism.

This paper is an attempt to raise questions about certain underlying and implicit assumptions in some hermeneutic and narrative approaches to psychoanalysis. Starting from the view that Freud saw interpretation in the clinical setting as an attempt to unveil the analysand's psychic reality, it is argued that he envisaged that psychoanalysis aims to interpret what is real in the analysand's inner world--an empirical line of thought underpinned by the idea of analytic neutrality and an emphasis on the analysand's capacity to judge reality. By contrast, the tendency within the hermeneutic-narrative tradition is to demote psychic reality in favour of an emphasis on the analyst's capacity to interpret in order to help his analysand construct meaning. This approach may be said to put the analyst's words in the place of those of the Creator; in other words, it amounts to a 'verbal creationism', which the author argues is rooted in the idealistic philosophy of Hegel, Vico and Descartes and, further back, can be traced to the Book of Genesis--a conclusion causing the author to express some reservations.

Creativity↗

PubMed1991

Logical types and ostensive insight.

Discrimination of analogic and digital modes in communication allows clearer distinction of transference (mutative) and extra-transference interpretation. Relying on explicit formulation, Strachey introduces 'implicit' mutative interpretation, which is explicitly extra-transferential but transferential as to process. Each interpretive verbalization has an analogic impact pertaining to the analogic unconscious level of archaic objects, and its emitter--the analyst--is its propositional subject. Interpretation can afford to be as explicit as possible inasmuch as it retains the metalevel in which the analyst can remain as third-party to what he formulates, but it must be gradual in making explicit the archaic object he actualizes. It is by 'withholding'--as Strachey says--the validation of the archaic relational analogic 'psychic reality' that is the referent of interpretive 'mapping', and not be verbal 'mapping' in itself, that the 'judgement of reality' underlying ostensive insight comes into play.

Awareness↗

PubMed1976