Biomedical subjects

Melvin R Lansky

Publications and source records attributed to Melvin R Lansky.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

The impossibility of forgiveness: shame fantasies as instigators of vengefulness in Euripides' Medea.

Unforgivability in Euripides' Medea is explored in the context of intrapsychic forces favoring disruption and narcissistic withdrawal and precluding the influence of forces favoring repair of bonds, not necessarily to the betrayer, but to the social and moral order. The forces underlying disruption and withdrawal operate to such an extent that forgiveness and cooperation with the social order become impossible. Euripides' literary insights are explored with the purpose of deepening and extending the psychoanalytic understanding of shame, shame fantasies, projective identification, and vengefulness as they bear on the problem of forgiveness. Three types of shame fantasy are pertinent to the transformation of Medea's mental state from one of anguished and disjointed shame to diabolical vengefulness: anticipatory paranoid shame, the projective identification of shame, and withdrawal as a defense against shame.

Drama↗

PubMed2005

Hidden shame.

Shame dynamics, after decades of neglect, reappeared in psychoanalytic thinking with increasing prevalence in the last thirty years. Shame that is hidden is an aspect of complex clinical phenomenology that is particularly likely to be missed and hidden further by partial psychoanalytic explanations that drive shame more and more from view. Shame is often hidden theoretically by formulations limiting conflict to conflict between drives or impulses and something opposing them. By contrast, the incompatible idea model propounded by Freud in Studies on Hysteria emphasizes awareness incompatible with the dictates of conscience, and hence is broader in scope and closer to actual experience. Although shame and guilt arise developmentally earlier than does a true sense of morality, these emotions and their unconscious variants become entwined with the individual's sense of morality as development proceeds. The dynamics of shame and guilt are considerably more complex than their phenomenology as overt emotions. Shame emphasizes weakness, vulnerability, and the likelihood of rejection--so much so that its acknowledgment often generates more shame. Guilt, however, since it is action- and power-oriented, often obscures shame and so defends against it.

Awareness↗

PubMed2004

Trigger and screen: shame dynamics and the problem of instigation in Freud's dreams.

This paper concerns the problem of instigation, that is to say, the dynamic triggering, of the dream in Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900)/1953). The problem of instigation came to the author's attention in the course of studying treatment difficulties and failures outside of the psychoanalytic situation, specifically the dynamics of impulsive actions and of posttraumatic nightmares, which the author then used in the consideration of problems associated with conceptualizing instigation in "The Interpretation of Dreams." Instigatory dynamics other than Freud's metaphor of "capitalist and entrepreneur" have attracted scant attention; and that metaphor as Freud applied it is an incomplete example of the instigatory process since its theoretical formulation are discrepant with Freud's clinical sensitivity to the instigation of his own dreams. Four of Freud's major dreams reveal an instigatory experience consisting of a contemporaneous ego-ideal conflict due to an anticipation of professional status as denied or lost. This contemporaneous ego-ideal conflict resonates with early and unconscious shame dynamics and shame fantasies involving tension from the ego-ideal that result from Freud's seeing himself as relegated to inferior or asexual status. The wish to possess an object of desire was not primary in any of these dreams. The complex nexus of shame dynamics, in turn, instigates more visible competitive wishes; these strive to alter the circumstances that threaten to give rise to shame or turn the tables on the shamer. The instigating shame dynamics are thus screened by the more visible dynamics of hostile competition. This formulation offers an expanded view of the dynamics of instigation which leads to a more balanced understanding of the nature and components of instigatory shame dynamics and their relationship to the dynamics of conflicts involving hostility, competition, and guilt.

Austria↗

PubMed2003

Shame conflicts as dream instigators: wish fulfillment and the ego ideal in dream dynamics.

Understanding of the instigatory dynamics of the dream is essential to the understanding of the dream as a fulfilled wish. Both the meaning and the function of the dream can be understood only in relation to the instigating disruption that drives the dream into being. It is the instigator of the dream that connects the working of the inner world with events in the external world. The literature on the process of dream instigation is scant, still deriving from Freud's metaphor of "capitalist and entrepreneur." Hidden shame conflicts that react to the dreamer's anticipation of danger of exposure and shame are significant factors in the instigation of the dream. Clinical material in support of this view is presented in the form of a verbatim session that included a dream.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

The "incompatible idea" revisited: the oft-invisible ego-ideal and shame dynamics.

The observation that incompatibility with conscience initiates deployment of defense goes back to Freud's conceptualization of the "incompatible idea" put forward in Studies on Hysteria. In this view, consciousness itself, insofar as it gives rise to painful affect resulting from conflict with the conscience, is the cornerstone for dynamic thinking, first as regards repression of traumatic memory and later for dynamic thinking generally. Subsequent discoveries about the conscience tended to give rise to pars pro toto thinking in which the new discovery replaced rather than added to the basic notion of conscience. Such pars pro toto imbalance exists in full force in psychoanalytic thinking today: Modern conflict theory privileges the postoedipal retaliative aspect of the conscience, as Kleinian thinking does for the preoedipal projective aspects of retaliation. Neither conceptualizes shame adequately. Kohut appreciated the role of shame, but discarded the notion of incompatibility with the ego-ideal. The incompatible idea model still provides an all-inclusive model for conceptualizing the conscience in the context of intrapsychic conflict.

Consciousness↗