International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies最新文献

This paper explores the intersection of envy and culture in the perpetuation of corrupt workplace practices in Ghana. Drawing on Kleinian and Bionian psychoanalytic theories, particularly Bion's basic assumptions, we examine how unconscious group dynamics manifest as corruption across public, private, and religious organizations. Through detailed case studies of organizations in each sector, we illustrate how employees unconsciously attack the very institutions they depend on, driven by envy masked as entitlement or normalized by cultural practices and religious rationalizations. We argue that corruption is not merely a rational choice but a symptom of deeper psychological and cultural currents. To address this, we advocate for a psychoanalytic framework that brings unconscious processes into awareness, enabling targeted psychoeducation and systemic intervention. This study offers new insights into the psychosocial underpinnings of corruption and emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary strategies to address the colossal problem of corruption in organizations operating within similar cultures.

Human Rights Violations (HRVs) are widespread and frequent and may lead to serious disturbances to individuals' mental health, to families, social groups and to the fundaments of societies. It is well-documented that early, timely and adequate responses and interventions may ameliorate mental suffering and functioning of individuals, families and groups. In this article, a psychoanalytically based approach, Psychoanalytic Field Work, mental health work with persons exposed to HRV, is demonstrated. Basic disturbances of severely traumatized persons are described. It is argued that work with basic dynamics of traumatized persons informed by psychoanalytic understanding and therapy can be used in Psychoanalytic Field Work with traumatized refugees and their families in different contexts where refugees live during and after flight, like formal or informal shelters, reception centers or refugee camps.

Daniel Ellsberg was an outspoken critic of the nuclear arms race, American nuclear war fighting strategy and the policy of deterrence based on so-called mutually assured destruction. With courage and a deep moral conviction, he raised an often-lone voice challenging our denial of the world annihilating potential of a nuclear exchange. His passing offers us a chance to reflect psychoanalytically on the minimization and denial of this and other world threatening existential threats and the omnipotent, hubristic belief in the assumed perfectibility of technology—the absolute conquest of nature by humankind. Together, the twin harbingers of mindlessness, silence and refusing to see, comprise a foundation on which rests the dangerous anti-thought linked to the possibilities of omnicide and world destruction.

Right-wing conservatism in the United States has many features of psychological interest that evoke the question of what factors might be associated with it. One factor that may be of particular interest to psychoanalytically oriented social scientists is object relations, pathology in which is often operationalized in terms of three dimensions (identity diffusion, primitive defenses, and problems in reality testing). There are reasons to expect that each of these three dimensions might be associated with contemporary right-wing conservatism, although this has not yet received much empirical examination. In this study we address this issue, examining the association between dimensions of pathological object relations and right-wing conservatism in a broad sample of U.S. residents (N = 392) using a partial least squares approach to structural equation modeling. Results suggest that primitive defenses and reality testing problems are positively, and identity diffusion is negatively, associated with right-wing conservatism. These findings have implications for how we might understand right-wing conservatism and dialogue with those identifying with it.

Psychoanalysis writ large, has enriched Black lives, but not as a result of the activities of a mostly culturally indifferent institutional psychoanalysis. In its unceasing attempts to pursue a good-enough life, within the obstacles of a racist structure, elements of the Black community have both adopted and offered psychoanalytic-themed perspectives in such attempts. This offer the possibility of informing a re-imagining of a staid, and increasingly irrelevant mainstream clinical psychoanalysis.

The authors propose an innovative group-based therapeutic activity for traumatized children in Palestine, a one-day program creating and flying kites under the leadership of a two-person team. The authors discuss the importance of flying within the religious and cultural background of Palestine as well as the prevalence of kite imagery in children's books, songs, and artisanship. Clinical cases reflecting the theme of flying are also described. The authors argue that the format of the proposed therapeutic activity is particularly appropriate to Palestine because of the large numbers of children with traumatic experiences and because of the central role of collective engagement as the bedrock of psychological resilience in Palestine. The activity of making and flying kites is especially suited to the process of working through losses, because of the kite's symbolic implications of freedom, joy, and personal agency; the child's own kite, and special messages the child may write on the kite, can express enduring psychic connection with beloved people and things who have been lost. The specifics of the therapeutic project are outlined in detail, including the capacity to recognize and to refer for specialized mental health services those children who may require it.