International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies最新文献

This paper emerged from a sore spot—the kind of sore spot that pulses with an ancient ache, refusing to find stillness. The pain caught me in a passionate unrest, turning my pages and engulfing me in a subdued fury. Re-reading Freud's The Ego and the Id through a dialogical quest with my mother, it reveals the complexities of psychosocial troubles of identity, desires, and oppression—not solely of individuals but of an entire nation. Historical reiterations of dictatorial “thou shalt” (Freud, 1923, p. 55) echo resoundingly throughout contemporary Taiwan. If Japan stood as the foreign father—stern but devoid of the embrace of love—the subsequent rule of the Republic of China, the “biological” father of Taiwan, was characterized by militarization and violence. My inquiry repositions the father, the manifold “authoritarian fathers” of Taiwan, who fixed social relations into precise configurations of dominance and submission. Furthermore, whilst Freud primarily focused on the relationship between the ego and the super-ego, this paper highlights instead the significance of the often-overlooked relationship between the ego and id. This nuanced perspective allows us to perceive the id as a living archive of the oppressed, preserving what has been repressed but never truly forgotten.

The article provides a historical overview of the evolution of social justice, a concept the development of which is interwoven with liberal ideology and practices. The inception of liberalism and its various historical levels are examined, explicating the way social justice arose as a significant social value and shifted as liberal thought evolved. The impact and limitations of these understandings and implementations of social justice over the past 200 years are discussed. The theories of Nancy Fraser and Martha Nussbaum are briefly summarized and presented as approaches that have sought to overcome current challenges to social justice in a globalized context.

This applied psychoanalytic paper explores the phenomenon of murder-suicide in post-Katrina New Orleans, focusing on the case of Zack Bowen and Addie Hall. The aftermath of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina often leads to increased mental health issues, including violence and suicide. The author, who lived and practiced psychiatry in the New Orleans French Quarter (FQ), was involved in a documentary about the couple, providing a unique perspective on their tragic story. Zack Bowen, a veteran of Iraq and Kosovo with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and Addie Hall, an artist with a history of abuse, were star-crossed lovers in the post-apocalyptic FQ. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, with the higher socioeconomic population evacuated, the city experienced lawlessness, but also a bond between subcultural groups seeking anarchy, freedom, escapism, and avoidance of past troubles. Drawing from excerpts of the documentary and material from a book about the couple entitled Shake the Devil Off, this paper utilizes an object relational framework to understand the multidetermined causes of the murder-suicide. It highlights how disasters can bring individuals together in desperate situations, destabilize social connections, and exacerbate avoidant defenses through increased substance abuse. Furthermore, it reveals how such traumatic events can reopen past wounds, including PTSD and experiences of abuse, creating a mental health crisis that extends far beyond the initial impact of the storm. It also underscores the significance of interpersonal containment of toxic projections in the aftermath of a disaster, particularly for individuals with intrapsychic vulnerabilities.

Cruelty as a character trait and as a large-group praxis has existed from times immemorial. It is witnessed among all religious, ethnic, and national groups. A complex phenomenon, cruelty has five features that refer to its being (i) destructive, (ii) intentional, (iii) pleasurable to the perpetrator, (iv) inhumane, and (v) unethical. The etiology of cruelty is complex and involves myriad biopsychosocial variables. Attempts at its amelioration center upon education, empathy-building, and victim-empowerment. All such proposals are thoroughly elucidated and illustrated with the help of clinical vignettes and socio-historical events.

This correspondence introduces several distinct current efforts by Ukrainian psychoanalytic practitioners and researchers from various clinical, scholarly, and applied fields to support the sustainable development of psychoanalytic training and work in the context of the ongoing 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Among these developments are (a) the translation of the classic and contemporary psychoanalytic texts into the Ukrainian language, (b) the promotion of Ukrainian psychoanalytic contributions within Ukraine and abroad, and (c) the support of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy as an evidence-based practice to be officially recognized in Ukraine. The initiatives were integrated with the launch of a scholarly peer-reviewed online open-access journal—the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Journal—which has been confirmed by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science as a scientific periodical. In addition to describing these initiatives, this contribution serves as an invitation to international psychoanalytic audiences to contribute to these processes, including via workshops on psychoanalytic writing and publication, joint panel discussions, or collaborative research projects with Ukrainian psychoanalytic professionals. We also welcome submissions of original previously published (with copyright permission) or unpublished papers to be translated and published in the Ukrainian language.

Cricket in India has evolved much beyond its fundamental definition as a game or form of entertainment in the present century. The liberalization process in the 1990s, followed by the drastic social changes in the country, impacted the game, leading it to acquire new meanings as cultural text. Currently, Indian cricket forms part of collective enjoyment, forming people's habitus and playing a central ideological role in the politics of ethnonationalism. This article attempts to analyze Indian Cricket using Slavoj Zizek's concept of “national Thing,” to critically understand its potential to evoke hyper-nationalism in the Indian polity. The concept of “national Thing,” proposed by Zizek, postulates that the recourse to nationalism can cause a pleasure-in-pain situation and evoke extreme “enjoyment” (jouissance), which functions on the idea of sudden sense of loss. Drawing insights from this, this paper theoretically investigates sport-induced nationalism in cricket in the backdrop of escalating neo-nationalist sentiments in India. Additionally, the article expounds on how cricket becomes a “lost Thing” in Indian popular culture by critically analyzing the Indian film Kai Po Che (2013), in which cricket emerges as a social and political entity, intervening with the lives of ordinary youths in India.

We tend to think of money as concrete and simple, a thing, but in fact it is multi-faceted and complex, more symbolic than actual. In the modern world it has come to take such a variety of forms that economists can no longer define it. On the other hand, our reliance on it causes us to invest it with a stability it does not and, probably, cannot have. Our ideas about money are, essentially, social defenses, and the money we think we have in our pockets or in our bank accounts is based on widely shared fantasies. The anxieties underlying these defenses spring from two sources: awareness that money's fixed values are unreliable, unable to protect us from loss, and an opposite irrational optimism about its capacity to grow magically. This paper suggests that the understanding psychoanalysis can offer about such common fantasies inextricably woven around money can provide the groundwork for an interdisciplinary collaboration with economics and the social sciences.