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PubMed1996

Success inhibitions in neurotic and character-disordered patients.

Freud's initial understanding of "wreckage by success" involved oedipal conflicts. Since that time, preoedipal issues have also been identified as underlying success inhibitions. Work inhibitions in character-disordered patients may be ignored because of our general understanding of how pathological ego and superego functioning interferes in work, as in all areas. However, after significant psychotherapeutic work has been done, the author has often found that such patients have remaining work problems that should be viewed as inhibitions rather than deficits. Separation fears often underlie success inhibitions in more disturbed patients. Careful understanding of work inhibitions in more disturbed patients is crucial, because in many such patients, more freeing of functioning is possible in the work sphere than in intimate relationships. Two cases are presented to illustrate oedipal-level and preoedipal conflicts related to success.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Revenge and resentment in the 'Oedipus situation'.

The author considers an important form of 'psychic retreat' to be based on resentment and grievance. In this paper he discusses how resentments can build up and be nursed when the impulse to violence and in particular revenge is prevented from being expressed. The resentment leads to an impasse from which it is difficult for the analyst and patient to extricate themselves. A clinical example illustrating such an impasse is discussed. Then extracts from 'Kidnapped' by Robert Louis Stevenson are used to illustrate ways in which resentment can be relinquished and replaced with forgiveness. It is argued that the issue of revenge has to be negotiated before such a transformation can result.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

'Narrative', now and then: a critical realist approach.

The author argues that the idea of a 'narrative approach' in psychoanalysis has come to imply that the history of the psyche of a patient is inaccessible and that what the analyst should aim to achieve is the co-construction of a 'story' agreed to by both analyst and patient. She examines some critical realist views on narrative that engage with the problem of how the past determines story-telling in the present. The narrative-hermeneutic perspective has emphasised how much a telling is shaped by the transference, in order, it seems, to urge analysts to forgo a 'naïve realism', an attempt to get at some 'bare facts' of the past, which would lose the bearing of much the patient is communicating in the present. This, as a technical reminder, is excellent. However, critical realism in psychoanalysis has always been sophisticated as opposed to naïve, because of our concern with the workings of oedipal and post-oedipal transformations, and with the workings of the transference. It is the thesis of this paper, written from the perspective of critical realism, that every interpretation, in so far as it contains a narrative truth, that is, speaks adequately of coherence and transference issues, will also refer to a significant aspect of the history of the patient's psyche.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

The Yiddish theatre, the Oklahoma theatre and Kafka's salvation.

The author discusses Kafka's enthralment with the Yiddish theatre, which performed in Prague in the autumn and winter of 1911. Examination of Kafka's 'Diaries' suggests that an important factor in this response was his infatuation with two actresses. They evoked fantasies of avoiding oedipal conflict by surrendering adult male sexuality and its threat of castration by regressing to a prephallic relationship with a maternal woman who would provide a nurturing relationship. Later, when writing the final chapter of his novel 'Amerika' in 1914, he creatively expressed a derivation of this fantasy when the protagonist, Karl Rossman, achieved a sort of salvation by joining the Oklahoma theatre. In the final year of his life Kafka was able to leave home to live with a woman, and in this achievement he fulfilled aspects of this fantasy.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

The shadow of object love: reconstructing Freud's theory of preoedipal guilt.

The systematic terms of metapsychology expressed in Freud's theory of oedipal guilt have overshadowed his emergent ideas about preoedipal internal objects and preoedipal guilt. This article reconstructs the latent theory of preoedipal guilt in his notions of narcissism, fantasy, aggression, and ambivalence. Special attention is devoted to his discussions of the narcissistic function of creating fantasized objects through identificatory processes, in order to compensate for loss or disturbances in object relating. Although Freud put forward the notion of oedipal guilt as a derivative of secondary mental processes, he intuitively grasped that guilt emerges from the conflict-bound sphere of preoedipal relations. "A Child Is Being Beaten" is used as an illustration, as are clinical examples drawn from the author's practice.

Adult↗
PubMed1977

[Oedipus - anthropology of enlightenment and interpretation].

The myth of oedipus follows - from an anthropological-phenomenological point of view - an interpretation as a tragedy of enlightment. Oedipus solves the riddle of the sphinx concerning the finality of human life. By this he has done the step from the cyclical conception of life, essential for early humanity and childhood, towards the causal and teleological thinking of modern man. But by this step he looses the instinctual-prelogical knowledge of early humanity - still observable among so called "savages" - about the ties of blood and the signification of incest. The loss of this knowledge throws him into the fateful marriage of his mother. Only after blinding himself he gains insight into the relations that are hidden to the "enlightened" thinking.

Anthropology, Cultural↗
PubMed1996

The aim of psychoanalysis in theory and in practice.

The aims of psychoanalysis are reviewed in terms of theories of mental function and structure. The theory of mental conflict remains the central theory of classical psychoanalysis but has been deepened and supplemented by newer theories. In particular the theory of projective identification has radically altered our view of mental structure and function and has allowed us to reformulate the aims of psychoanalysis in terms of the re-acquisition and re-integration of projected parts of the self. The central role of mourning in this process is discussed, and some of the obstacles to progress are reviewed. It is suggested that oedipal resentments may play a central role in the creation of impasse.

Defense Mechanisms↗
PubMed1996

The origins of disquieting discoveries by Melanie Klein: the possible significance of the case of 'Erna'.

Using the example of the analysis of 6-year-old Erna, which extended over more than two years and was the longest treatment conducted by Melanie Klein in her Berlin years, the authors demonstrate the importance of her early child analyses for the development of some of her concepts and hence for a decisive advance in psychoanalysis itself. For this purpose they adduce unpublished original documents found among Klein's papers in London, which include autobiographical material, the text of her Würzburg lecture on her obsessional-neurotic little patient, handwritten session notes, and drawings by Erna herself. Although in the author's view Klein attempted to accommodate her findings within Freud's theoretical framework, her clinical experience of the psychic reality of the relational world of early oedipality eventually called for the introduction of new concepts. The combined parent figure, primary sadism, the paranoid-schizoid position, splitting, the relevance of the death drive to the superego, and later formulations on reparation, envy and gratitude are all shown to be foreshadowed in Klein's account of the treatment of Erna. After some retrospective considerations of Erna's analysis and a fleeting glimpse of Erna as an adult, the authors conclude by emphasising the significance of Klein's emigration to England for the subsequent flowering of her work.

Art Therapy↗
PubMed1997

A mind of one's own.

The author argues that in the transference the patient unconsciously identifies the analyst with what he has projected into him, creating what Strachey called an external phantasy object. In the intimate rapport of the analytic session, the analyst tends to identify with these projections as well, which brings him into a relationship with the patient that complements the patient's narcissistic object relationship with him. The analyst's identification with the patient's projections is a type of pathology of his receptivity to the patient that is exacerbated by the patient's skill at producing states of mind in the analyst with which the analyst is supposed to identify. The analyst's ability to distance himself from the patient's projections and therefore to interpret them depends on his having links to his internal objects that survive the patient's projections and unconscious manipulations. Interpretations make the patient aware simultaneously that he and the analyst are separate and that the analyst has a link to internal objects that are not under the patient's control. The latter is a rudimentary oedipal situation. The author argues that these two 'awarenesses' are really the same, and that working through the depressive position and working through the oedipal situation are therefore fundamentally the same thing.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Freud and feminine subjectivity.

I have delineated a factor, subjectivity, to account for the difficulty in the psychoanalytic understanding of feminine sexuality, particularly the nature of feminine sexual pleasure. This factor has been unappreciated hitherto by psychoanalysts. Subjectivity is a notion that refers to the capacity of a person to posit him- or herself as an independent agent who determines or controls his or her own thoughts and actions. The construct feminine sexual pleasure, and by extension feminine subjectivity, was difficult for Freud and others to posit because of the implicit association among several mental phenomena. Subject, active, and libido (i.e., the source of active sexual pleasure) were, and to some extent still are, considered masculine attributes; whereas object, passive, and, by implication, the absence of an independent actively desirous state were considered feminine attributes. Freud's difficulty in accepting aggression in the mental life of women interfered with his gaining an implicit understanding of feminine subjectivity.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Beyond the he and the she: toward the reconciliation of masculinity and femininity in the postoedipal female mind.

This paper concerns a postoedipal psyche organization in the female mind whereby early overinclusive body-ego representations and cross-sex identifications are recuperated symbolically in the context of a differentiated female identity. This reintegration allows the female to symbolize what has been "lost" upon awareness of sex differences, play out masculine aspects without there being a threat to her core, primary feminine identity, and by linking rather than prohibiting cross-gender representations, provide imaginative elaboration and empathic access to another as a subject. This state does not reflect a denial of difference; rather, it reflects a psychic organization that uses symbolization to play with differences. Bisexual conflict can be mastered rather than repressed. Such mastery transcends normative, rigid, polarized sexual positions and gender conformity, perversions, and disturbed gender identity. Within the classical discourse, this mastery is suggested as an expansion of our limited and archaic notions of a genital stage specifically for the female. A new elaboration of a specific female genital stage can deepen our understanding of adult femininity and the development of cross-gender transference.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Toward further analytic understanding of lesbian patients.

Psychoanalytic understanding of lesbianism has been excessively welded to unitary dynamic and etiologic themes, while actual dynamics vary among lesbian patients. Clinical material will illustrate this variety. Limitations in past theories and countertransference issues will be discussed. It is proposed that dynamics in lesbian patients should not be confused with pathology, and that an object choice originally embedded in conflict can become secondarily autonomous or remain fluid.

Adolescent↗