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Psychoanalysis has passed through several dialectic steps of development. At present, it appears invigorated by social needs such as accountability and by object-relations theory and self-psychology. As the most rigorous application of causality to the understanding of human behavior, it is likely to endure into new social eras and outlive the various diluted and trendy fads.
This paper has introduced three mathematically based models that are part of a burgeoning new formal mode of the science of psychoanalysis: (1) The Power Spectral Density Function, which investigates the vicissitudes of cyclical power; (2) Work and Force, which lead to measurement of the instantaneous power of a session; and (3) Entropy or Complexity, a measurement of the accumulated complexity or redundancy of the communications from patients and therapists in the course of a therapy session. An additional statistical measurement was included, that of the Measure of Linear Influence or Cross-Correlation Function, which was used with a ten-minute window. Each of these measurements were applied to quantitative data that involved ratings of five variables of emotional communication: Newness of Themes, Extent of Narrative/Imagery, Positively Toned Themes and Images, Negatively Toned Themes and Images, and Continuity of Dialogue within a therapy. The paper compares two psychotherapies using these four measurements. They differentiated the two treatment situations, revealing distinctive properties of each. The implications of these preliminary results are discussed.
The concise curriculum vitae of the founder of existential analysis is followed by an exact comparison of the polarity (homo natura versus homo cultura) between Binswanger and Freud. Then the five stages in the development of (Existential Daseinsanalysis Analysis) are described: the stage of learning, of practice, of criticism, of the alternative to psychoanalysis, and of reconciliation. The criticism is aimed especially at Freud's naturalism and at the concept of drive. These concepts are opposed by ontoanalytic doctrines derived from Heidegger's ontoanalysis. The differences are further exemplified by the comparison of the existentialanalytical and the psychoanalytical view of the unconscious. A presentation of the treatment of a "hysterical phobia," which is first explained in psychoanalytic terms and later in existentialanalytic terminology (mainly concerning the world-projects) makes the difference between the two schools of thought explicit.
This presentation, written ten years after the American Psychoanalytic Association adopted a nondiscrimination policy with regard to sexual orientation, discusses the evolving relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality. The paper is in three sections: (1) the process of policy change and the overturning of injustice; (2) the excursion after Freud's death into analytic bias and extreme pathologizing of homosexuality, the struggle to overcome those distortions, and the lessons to be learned from this history; and (3) the search, in the coming decade, for new understanding of homosexuality and all aspects of sexuality.
This paper calls into question the view that it is ethically legitimate for the patient to say whatever comes to his or her mind: that is, to adhere to the fundamental rule. While there have been some variations in the application of this rule since Freud's time, it remains for many the bedrock of clinical practice, and the patient's right to free-associate has never been questioned. Recent debates on the importance of the analyst's strict confidentiality have highlighted this right. Ethical problems raised by adherence to the fundamental rule are explored through an examination of the general ethical limitations on what one may say to another person, and the special features of the analytic relationship that seem to do away with these limitations. The fact that there are ethical questions about adherence to the fundamental rule draws attention to what the author calls the ethical reality of psychoanalysis. The recognition of this reality has implications for the understanding and handling of ethical dilemmas regarding disclosure, as well as for other ethical issues that may arise in the course of an analysis.
Through a discussion of Donald Spence's Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, a critical introduction to the hermeneutic or interpretive perspective is presented. Spence's book has generally been assumed to offer a hermeneutic reformulation of psychoanalysis. However, its presuppositions are incompatible with fundamental tenets of contemporary hermeneutic thought, as expressed in the philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer, and the later Wittgenstein. Spence's basic assumptions are classically empiricist and positivistic. His vision of human experience is essentially associationistic and Humean; it treats experience as involving two processes, the passive reception of raw sense data and a subsequent projection of meaningful interpretation. Spence advocates the gathering of brute data while denying or downplaying the epistemological value of theorizing and of interpretive understandings. These assumptions are contrasted with those of the hemeneutic philosophers. Unlike these philosophers, Spence tends to dichotomize coherence and correspondence theories of truth. As a result, he wavers between relativism (regarding therapeutic interpretations) and objectivism (regarding scientific knowledge).
The serious decline in applicants for psychoanalytic training mandates the attention of psychoanalytic educators. If students are to be drawn to psychoanalysis, creative methods must be employed to convey the vigor and excitement of work in the field. The author describes two experiences as a visiting analyst, in a university hospital psychiatric residency in which there is almost no regular exposure to psychoanalytic thinking. Because he was dissatisfied with an approach that stressed literature review and psychotherapy case presentations and supervision, he developed a teaching technique through which he was able to show the residents how he thought analytically and self-analytically. This teaching method is discussed in terms of Stein's (1988) injunction that analysts reveal more about the process of their thinking when they write, his description of how Bertram D. Lewin taught by encouraging analytic candidates to free-associate as a method of understanding new case material, and Arlow's (1972) view of the centrality of identification in education.
The notion of professional boundaries is a relatively recent addition to psychoanalytic practice. Freud and his early disciples indulged in a good deal of trial and error as they evolved psychoanalytic technique. The study of these early boundary violations illuminates the study of the evolution of the concepts of transference and countertransference. The recent publication of the correspondence between Freud and Jung, between Freud and Ferenczi, and between Freud and Jones has provided us with extraordinary insights into the boundary transgressions that occurred in the early days of psychoanalysis. The boundary violations of the analytic pioneers have contributed to the legacy inherited by future generations of analysts. Institutional resistance to addressing these difficulties in contemporary psychoanalytic practice may relate in part to the ambiguities surrounding boundaries in the training analysis itself.
It is widely believed that the transference neurosis, understood as both a repetition of the infantile neurosis, and as an opportunity for new forms of object relations, is the hallmark of psychoanalysis. Because the concept has become caught up in such polemics over the years and has acquired such a variety of meanings, some call for its abandonment; some also call for abandoning the concept of the infantile neurosis. This paper argues that both these concepts refer to significant clinical phenomena and so rather than being abandoned, they should be clarified and redefined in the light of contemporary developmental theory.
Recent theory and research on men and masculinities within feminist and critical social psychologies has largely drawn upon social constructionism and discourse analysis. This work has been useful in extending our understanding of contemporary discourses drawn upon by men to construct masculine identities and/or to construct 'subordinated others' such as women and gay men. But it has been pointed out that discourse analytic work does not adequately account for emotional or experiential dimensions to (masculine) identities. To address this problem, several writers have turned to versions of psychoanalytic theory as this perspective is directly concerned with emotional life. Psychoanalysis has been reworked so that concepts traditionally read as intra-psychic essences (e. g. anxiety, desire, defence) are re-interpreted as interpersonal and contextual. Informed by this work, I argue that a psychoanalytic, particularly Kleinian, reading of focus group discussions with heterosexual men can help illuminate aspects of the contemporary reproduction of masculinities. I use data collected from a 'men and masculinities' project and focus primarily on emotive talk which 'others' gay men and women. Concepts such as 'projection' are used to connect the men's constructions of others with shared anxieties about masculinities. The implications and advantages of pursuing psychoanalytic accounts of (masculine) subjectivities within social psychology are then discussed.
Memory has always been a central issue in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Recent developments in the cognitive and neural sciences suggest that traditional notions of memory based on stored structures which are also often underlying psychoanalytic thinking cannot account for a number of fundamental phenomena and thus need to be revised. We suggest that memory be conceived as a) a theoretical construct explaining current behaviour by reference to events that have happened in the past. b) Memory is not to be conceived as stored structures but as a function of the whole organism, as a complex, dynamic, recategorizing and interactive process, which is always 'embodied'. c) Memory always has a subjective and an objective side. The subjective side is given by the individual's history, the objective side by the neural patterns generated by the sensory motor interactions with the environment. This implies that both 'narrative' (subjective) and 'historical' (objective) truth have to be taken into account achieving stable psychic change as is illustrated by extensive clinical materials taken from a psychoanalysis with a psychogenic sterile borderline patient.
It is unusual to combine mysticism and psychoanalysis. Marion Milner, however, achieved precisely this. Through her self-analysis and analytic work with children and adults--and using as an illustration her own and others' imaginative ideas, paintings, doodles, drawings and pictures--she drew attention to the potential for health and creativity of undoing the obstacles to mystical experience of oneness with what is beyond or other than the self, which she sometimes called God, the unconscious or the id. This article seeks to explain and highlight this aspect of her contribution to, and continuing importance for, psychoanalytic theory and practice--particularly that associated with Winnicott--through detailing her early life and diary-keeping experiments, some of her psychoanalytic case histories during and after the Second World War, her work as an artist, ending with her travels and her involvement during the 1980s and 1990s with the Squiggle Foundation and British Association of Art Therapists.
Our psychoanalytic discipline originated, has evolved and is still located within a congregational network that blends and binds together, in an inextricable and contradictory way, the missionary mandates and commendations of a 'movement' and a 'cause' with the inherent prerogatives and functions of academic professions and sciences. In this paper the author explores the consequential past and present impedimenta of this organisational and educational syncretism, for six fundamental dimensions of action for psychoanalysis. Subsequently, the nature of a proposition is delineated, suggesting a reorganisation, local and international, to address what the author visualises as five of our most pressing contemporary challenges: a) an autonomous university educational model, freed from regressive societal-political inertias, enabling us to abandon our seclusive monasticism; b) the consolidation of an epistemological frame of reference, idiographic and nomothetically substantiated against our cumulative inductivism, which is the seedbed of our sectarianism, cross-sterilisation and pseudo-ecumenism; c) local and external educational and professional systems of accreditation and certification, independent from affiliation and membership privileges of our supraordinate ecclesia; d) social relevance and community presence, moving away from our meaningless organisational and educational cloistering; and e) a local and international functional and interdependent reorganisation, in the context of sovereignty and integrity, in contrast to our prevalently crusading and indoctrinating homogamous pathological co-dependency. The author concludes that only a harmonisation of objectives and administrative structure might loosen the talons of faith that keep us retrogressively tied to our past.
The author argues that psychoanalytic clinical thinking has evolved towards an organisational model of affect and that multidisciplinary research broadens this thinking. Integrative influences of affective processes have been given little attention in psychoanalytic theory. Such influences are reviewed using examples from research in early development. Affective processes are shown to provide integrative influences across systems in an individual's development, facilitating developmental change, as well as developmental continuity. In a related vein, affective processes provide incentives for the development of both individuality and connectedness with others. The notion of an 'affective core of self' is updated and the important psychoanalytic idea of emotion schemas of self in relation to others is reviewed. Integrating influences of affective processes in psychoanalysis operate mainly non-consciously and are in need of further study.
The author begins by pointing out that, whereas Freud first turned his attention to dreams in 1895, they became an object of neuroscientific interest only in the 1950s, after the discovery of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and the observation that a subject woken in an REM phase could remember and narrate them. He discusses the various brain structures found by the neuroscientists to be implicated in dreaming and the associated hypotheses about their involvement in the processes of remembering dreams, their spatial construction and semantic organisation, and the dreamer's emotional participation in and narration of dreams. Attention is drawn to recent psychophysiological research findings indicating that dreaming occurs in all sleep phases and not only in REM episodes. The cognitivist contribution is also discussed. The author goes on to demonstrate the difference between the neuroscientific and psychoanalytic approaches to dreams. Whereas the neuroscientists are interested in the structures involved in dream production and in dream organisation and narratability, psychoanalysis concentrates on the meaning of dreams and on placing them in the context of the analytic relationship in accordance with the affective history of the dreamer and the transference. The brain structures and functions of interest to the neurosciences, while constituting the physical and biological substrate of these aspects, are stated to be irrelevant to their psychoanalytic understanding.
Controversies are part of the process of scientific knowing. In psychoanalysis, the diversity of theoretical, technical and epistemological positions makes the debate particularly necessary and by the same token difficult. In this paper, the author examines the function of controversies and the obstacles to their development, taking as examples the debates held in the Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires and Montevideo) during the nineteen seventies, when the dominant Kleinian ideas came into contact with Lacanian thought. The author examines different examples of argumentative discourses, using concepts taken from the theory of argumentation. The major difficulties encountered did not hinge on characteristics pertaining to psychoanalytic theories (i.e. the lack of commensurability between them), but on the defensive strategies aimed at keeping each theory's premises safe from the opposing party's arguments. A true debate implies the construction of a shared argumentative field that makes it possible to lay out the different positions and see some interaction between them and is guided by the search for the best argument. When this occurs, controversies promote the discipline's development, even when they fail to reach any consensus.
In response to Deborah Cabaniss's article, "Beyond Dualism: Psychoanalysis and Medication in the 21st Century," the author further considers the differences between the aims of symptom reduction and psychic integration, the concept of mind-body dualism, and the nature of scientific inquiry as they pertain to the use of medication in psychoanalytic therapies. He warns against the collapsing of concepts, aided by a misapplication of science, with respect to how we listen to, organize, and respond to clinical material. He argues that only when such scrutiny occurs can the important and challenging questions pertaining to the use of medication in psychoanalytic therapies be meaningfully considered.
Given all that is invested in psychoanalytic training and practice, it is understandable that psychoanalysts wish to view the future as promising. Those who have contributed to the development of The Academy can be proud of their past and present efforts, and undoubtedly hope that these contributions will be lasting. However, to ensure the future of The Academy, we must invest in education. Whatever the location of the psychoanalytic institute, the location of medical training will always be in the universities. As psychoanalysts, we must remain visible to the medical student; we must participate actively in the training of the psychiatric resident. We must be able to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalysis. Exactly what lies ahead is uncertain, but without a commitment to education there will be no future. Because of its history, The Academy has a special opportunity to ensure the future of psychoanalytic contributions to psychiatry.