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"I would prefer not to" is an enigmatic phrase by Herman Melville that epitomizes what I would like to explore, namely, the fate of the dissociated spontaneous gesture of rejecting and "fending off" early traumatic absence, and its clinical implications. I will attempt to consider the paradoxical impossibility of "fending off" absence, of rejecting what hasn't occurred yet was expected and needed by the emerging self. Ferenczi's (1933) conceptualization of "identification with the aggressor," Winnicott's (1950) assumptions about motility and aggressiveness, and Green's (1986) concept of "effacement" are my stepstones for underscoring the crucial importance of rejection and of "fending off" for the development of the self. Bartelby, Ferenczi himself, and a clinical vignette will illustrate the devastating traumatic impact of the absence of facilitation of "fending off" in early development.
This article examines the history of psychoanalysis through the lens of disavowal, focusing on the case of Karen Horney, a prominent second-generation psychoanalyst whose contributions were largely excluded from the official history. By analyzing Freud's institutional and theoretical dominance, the article explores how dissenting voices like Horney's were marginalized through mechanisms akin to Ferenczi's concept of disavowal. The discussion highlights how the exclusion of Horney and others shaped the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly regarding gender and authority within the field. The article advocates for recognition of these disavowals, to improve understanding of the internal resistances within psychoanalysis, and their impact on its history and development.
This paper explores the impact of early aesthetic experiences on the developing psyche. The sound bath in the environment experienced by the fetus and then newborn is registered as implicit memory in the non-repressed unconscious and imparts a sense of belonging or alienation, depending on the nature of the early maternal object relations. In the case of the child, displaced from the early mothering culture by flight and emigration, an added stress is acculturation and loss of the familiar sights, sounds, smells of the homely culture, but also the loss of musicality of the language. The clinical material will illustrate how an alienated youth was able to belatedly mourn the loss of his mother tongue and culture after he was drawn back to visit his birthplace. The aesthetic experiencing of his hometown's native culture and learning of his early life experiences from his caretakers opened crypts of past traumas long buried and led him to explore the nether regions of his mind in analysis. The paper also argues that it was the patient's self-preservative instinct that led him to search for his past. The work of construction and reconstruction in the analysis provided him with a narrative that animated his weakened life instinct providing him with renewed meaning and purpose in his life.
Psychoanalysis has been grounded in Freud's discovery of the profound impact of unconscious processes on human being and meaning. And yet, his theories and technique pushed towards the more rational realms of meaning-making. He recognized the extent to which female development remained a "dark" and unexplored "continent" but seemed to turn a deaf ear to those women, such as Karen Horney, who had a seat at the table as psychoanalysis was forming. One hundred years later, Horney's theorizing about what impedes our ability to recognize more fully the capacities and vulnerabilities inherent in the feminine remains relevant. In this paper, I explore some of the forgotten, or under-valued threads from women who have made significant contributions to our field. I hope to invite greater integration of those capacities disparately marked male or female, qualities which are essential to our development as embodied, rational beings.
After the death of Freud, a major thrust of the expansion of psychoanalytic theory involved the increasing recognition that the actuality of the emotional functioning of the object,-the primary objects in the infant's development, the analyst as object in the treatment process-were crucial determinants of developmental and therapeutic outcome. This recognition has been the driving force behind the evolution of various iterations of the role of interaction, inter-affectivity and intersubjectivity in two-person theories of psychic development and therapeutic action. This paper attempts to briefly trace in the work of Bion, Winnicott, Green and the Paris Psychosomatic School not only the effects of traumatic occurrences, but of their negative-i.e., the consequence of the absence of what should have been provided at crucial moments in development but was not.
Ferenczi's concept, the confusion of tongues between the child's language of tenderness and the adult's language of passion, explains that the child feels physically and psychically helpless and alone in the presence of an aggressor who disavows the traumatic acts, creating confusion for the child whether the traumatic experience happened at all. Fully dependent on the adults, the child adopts by introjecting the guilt and hate of the aggressor, in order to maintain the relationship with the adults. The confusion of tongues situation is linked to Ferenczi's complex construct, the identification with the aggressor, in understanding external traumas. With the concept of "autistic-contiguous position," Ogden identifies an area of pre-symbolic experience of a sensory nature, mainly centered on the surface of the skin as the starting point of mental life. These two concepts may permit us to be in touch with attitudes and beliefs in the exploration of individual and group defense mechanisms against climate change and environmental disasters. Using psychoanalytical knowledge, we can try to help people who are reluctant to fully acknowledge the seriousness of climate change, and so to change damaging behaviors in our relationship with the nonhuman world. The author critiques the repeated terrifying and bombarding images on TV and the Internet which would intend to inform about crises and disasters in the world, instead, those images paralyze psychic functioning. He describes how climate terrorism promotes the emergence of persecutory and primitive anxieties, even the activation of psychotic defenses. They foster the difficulties of getting in touch with deep-seated anxieties and remove a sense of responsibility and awareness of one's own participation in the creation of the damage.
Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries the Freudian intrapsychic and drive-based view of development of the human mind has been replaced by work done in several interdisciplinary fields which prove that the human mind is from its very inception a social mind, which best develops in connection with other minds and bodies, in interpersonal realms. It thrives through attunement, attachment, care and synchrony with numerous other minds and personalities. Moreover, research has also shown that higher order faculties in the human subject develop when there is the constant care and sensitivity of another human based on right-brain functions for a lengthy period of time, regardless of the biological sex of the caregiver. These developments of psychoanalytic theory have a strong impact on all aspects of psychotherapy, particularly with regards to the psychotherapy with survivors of what I have called second and third levels of trauma (Mucci, 2013, 2018, 2022), where an interpersonal focus on testimony and bearing witness thorough mind-brain and body are called for, what I term "embodied witnessing" (Mucci, 2018, 2022, 2023a), which could also be applied to personality disorders of traumatic origin, and facilitate healing in trauma survivors.
In this article we consider the question of homeostasis and memory from the perspectives of neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Our aim is to describe a link between homeostasis/dyshomeostasis, memory/language, and violent acting out. Our study is based on clinical observations concerning two groups of persons: those who were incarcerated for perpetrating non-premeditated murder and those who were victimized by violent trauma in their lives. The clinical findings, combined with the analysis of the relevant literature and research, demonstrate that the dyshomeostatic state, through a positive homeostasis, can drive the person to restore the balance by their usual coping mechanisms and thereby generate negative homeostasis. These acts-all violent, non-premeditated, and forms of desubjectivized acting out-stem from being outside language on account of two pathological extremes of memory, its absence or its excess. Aided by neuroscience and the results of our clinical findings, we support the practice of recalling and strengthening memory traces of trauma in psychotherapy.
Karen Horney's masterful pieces "The Dread of Women" (1932) and "Flight from Womanhood" (1926) influenced not only psychoanalysts but students of culture in general. On the eighty-fifth anniversary of the journal she founded, we can look both back at these pieces and consider how dread and envy of women might be affected by the changes in gender identities, developments that Horney would have eagerly followed. In the decades since she described dread and envy of women, feminism has been unable to dislodge the basic binary, indeed hierarchy, of male/female. Trans and non-binary identities are toppling many standard ways of thinking about sexuality and gender. Are we entering a new age when repressive boundaries of gender and sexuality will be overthrown, or as psychoanalysts, should we be focusing on the always enigmatic core of sexuality, where Horney's dread of women will continue to flourish?
This collaborative paper has grown out of the discussions of a virtual study group consisting of four women of ethnically and geographically diverse backgrounds, from San Francisco, Austin, and New York City. Racially/ethnically, the members are of South Asian, African and European descent. We have been exploring a range of subjects, including envy. We have been discussing the emergent envy in these clinical vignettes from the perspective of the Kleinian approach which centers on internal mental states, unconscious conflicts and internalized objects as well as exploring envy from a social, cultural, and racial angle as historically represented by the humanistic and interpersonal schools, and more recently by relational psychoanalysis. These orientations may seem to be incompatible but, in fact are always inseparably interconnected as we all have psyches and we all also live in the social-cultural realm.
This paper describes and demonstrates the Modern Kleinian approach to psychotherapy treatment. An easy way to conceptualize a three-step process of projective identification integration through containment, interpretation, and integration is to describe them as name it, claim it, and tame it. This process can lead to change in unconscious object relational conflict states and to shifts in interpersonal patterns.The concept of projective identification is at the foundation of Modern Kleinian psychotherapy (Waska, 2021). Therefore, theoretically and clinically, Modern Kleinian therapy focuses on how projective identification is often part of the core conflict in patient's psychic struggles. Within the treatment process, integration, acceptance, loss, and containment are often some of the main elements that emerge. Numerous case reports are used to illustrate this journey from the paranoid/schizoid position (Fairbairn, 1940; Klein, 1946) towards the depressive position (Klein, 1935). The challenge towards the depressive position. The challenge of change and the clinical method needed to engage that challenge are demonstrated with case material.The clinical reports are disguised for confidentiality but show the reader how projective identification manifests in individuals and how it colors the transference. The clinical material illustrates how the therapist can make interpretations towards a gradual taming of conflict, cultivating more integrated and balanced ways of experiencing self and other.
This paper revisits D. W. Winnicott's famous account of his patient Piggle to examine the profound nature of her response to the birth of her baby sister in the light of the concepts of object constancy and absence. The author speculates that recent scholarship revealing the mother's Holocaust family history enables us to hypothesise that Piggle's infancy might have been marked by her mother's psychic absence. This contributed to difficulties in the establishment of object constancy leaving her vulnerable to more extreme responses to later absences, such as at the birth of her sister. The focus of Winnicott's interpretations at an Oedipal level is critiqued as is the significance of the psychoanalysis-on-demand setting of the work.
Martin Bergmann demonstrates different aspects of what is very distinctively, a psychoanalytic orientation of mind in extension of viewpoint and value, having no equal in our postmodern world. Unselfconscious in forthright use of the analyst's personality in demonstration of psychoanalytic thinking, Bergmann's 1963 paper "The Place of Paul Federn's Ego Psychology in Psychoanalytic Metapsychology" presents a Rosetta Stone for discerning the Jewishly inflected and particular cultural presence of Bildung (Mosse, 1985; Sorkin, 1983, 1987), the Enlightenment practice of self-development, in the textual history of psychoanalysis.
My study is inspired by the clinical and meta-psychological contributions of Sándor Ferenczi, an underexplored voice, in the psychoanalytic understanding of creative processes. Ferenczi discusses fragmentation and reconstruction in the realm of creativity, and the creative reconstructive power of Orpha (Ferenczi, 1932a), a force against psychic death, following traumatic experience. To illustrate the creative process, I refer to the discourse on trauma and creativity, in the diary of the Italian poet Alda Merini (1986), fuelled by her post-traumatic narrative of her history of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Literature here serves as a psychic space and a base for reconstruction in and after the transition to a new broken existence.
The concept of the unconscious is at the heart of psychoanalytic study and practice since its beginnings. A human being's awareness is bounded, and the deeper layers of the mind are mostly inaccessible. Sensations, emotions, dreams, symptoms or creative work may give us a glimpse of the landscape and mediate our relationship with the forgotten, the unknown and the unknowable. The mind has its ways to remain organized and balanced through the development of barriers or shields. However, overwhelming emotional experiences may break through and confront us with the unbounded, infinite and chaotic nature of the unconscious. Resorting to Matte-Blanco's bi-logical theory, this paper aims to explore the effects of trauma on the mind, both as a disruption of psychic barriers and as an unbearable emotional experience of infinity within.
Dr. Jeremy Safran had a unique talent to seamlessly weave together clinical work with his broad knowledge of philosophy, history, and theology. Alongside his commitment to researching the minutest clinical interactions, he was conscious of the broad values of the nature of the good life that underpinned his analytic approach. This paper will explore the concepts of the enchanted unconscious, clinical impasses, negotiation, and surrender, suggesting that these concepts together provide insight into Safran's larger philosophy of life. It will then provide the approach to these concepts of the Rebbes of Ishbitz/Radzin, a school of Polish Hasidic thought. It will conclude with an exploration of how both Safran's psychoanalytic approach and the Ishbitz/Radzin Rebbes' Hasidic approach to the Torah provide distinct insights and applications of these concepts, which can be mutually enriching for both disciplines.
This essay was inspired by the experience of observing a newborn baby and the mother on a weekly basis for an entire year. I explore the receptive function of the maternal body whose mirroring acts created the intermediate area between her and her baby facilitating for what I call imitative playing. The concept of imitation came to mind because of its physicality. The reason for naming it 'playing' lies in its quality: I am trying to capture something about the perceptual and communicative capacity of the body. Born out of affective mutuality of the dyad, it is a corporeal elaboration of their union, the primary physical aliveness, that could be an observable element of personalization, a precursor in the journey to symbolism. The direct observation of infants is not sufficient to arrive at the ideas that I have suggested without psychoanalytic knowledge, the substance that I have imbued with what I perceived. In Winnicottian language this could be described as psychoanalytic apperception. I think it stems from an analyst's visceral self that gives life to psycho-analytic concepts as well as transforms an analysand's non-verbal expressions into communications.
This paper seeks to convey the spirit that guided the 14th International Sándor Ferenczi Conference. It does not aim to place Ferenczi in a position of mastery, nor to encourage an uncritical adherence to his concepts, but rather to value his openness to mixture and impurity in both theory and the psychoanalytic relationship. It introduces the notion of decoloniality, critiques the colonial legacy in the construction of psychoanalytic theory, and discusses how Ferenczi's ideas can help us to think about and practice a form of psychoanalysis attuned to our time and to our own way of working.
The paper aims to present Jacques Lacan's study on the theoretical foundations and clinical implications of the use of knot topology in the psychoanalytic context. The configuration of the Borromean knot-namely an interlacement consisting of three rings whose bond is based on a global triadicity-lends itself to offer an important support for thinking about the intertwining of the three registers of human experience: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. These three registers represent fundamental aspects of human life, and the Borromean knot allows us to consider the forms and dynamics of their reciprocal and global interaction. Finally, Lacan introduces the need for a fourth ring, the so-called sinthome, which performs a substitute function to hold together the undoing of the Borromean knot. The sinthome (unlike a medicalized vision of the symptom) represents an element of singularity that a subject identifies in her history to continue living and be able to face the disquieting experience of the Real and its impossibility to be represented.
This paper observes the emphasis on the past in psychoanalysis and the relative neglect of the future. Paradoxically, there is a prevalence of 'post' and a relative absence of 'pre.' It is important to fill in these missing links. I have suggested that 'prescience' is a variety of omniscience and shares much of its impulses. The paper discusses three manifestations of prescience and suggests different ways of interpreting these. It is finally argued that Bion's idea of 'premonition' be thought of as a technical tool that can counter this unnoticed form of false knowledge that may be sabotaging the analysis in ways that are hard to capture.