Psychoanalytic Quarterly最新文献

The author distinguishes between two kinds of beginning, conceptually tied to two ways of approaching the psychoanalytic situation described as epistemological and ontological. Through a clinical case, the author shows how her work with a troubled adolescent had two beginnings that corresponded to these types. In this way, she tries to expand on the literature about the ontological turn, focusing on what beginning means in this context. For treatment to succeed, a birth must emerge, a transformative moment with the potential for significant change. The combined ability to transform the most primitive, somatopsychic pain can be more effective if shared by analysts and patients in a predominantly aesthetic form.

While we speak casually about the beginning of an analysis, we are also aware that there are different senses of beginning in the context of an analysis. Certain differences surrounding the nature of beginning reflect technical-theoretical debates within the field. But in addition and more broadly, the various senses of beginning represent different dimensions of our understanding and experience of analysis. In this essay, I explore some of these dimensions and consider the significance and challenges of beginnings throughout the course of analytic work.

The concept of praxis in psychoanalysis includes the way clinical practice embodies the values on which psychoanalysis is founded. As psychoanalysis evolved from a medical treatment to a process of open-ended psychic development, its underlying values evolved as well. Free-floating attention has many facets, shown in the variety of names given to it. From being a means to an end clinically, it became an implicit statement about the human value of the person being attended to. Clinical vignettes, contributions from philosophers, and examples from literature converge around the idea that the unreserved openness of free-floating attention amounts to an act of love. It is underpinned by the values, which are also virtues, of hope, and faith in the possibility of good; it can also be seen, in non-religious terms, as a form of prayer.

The author offers a creative reading of Winnicott's (1967) "Mirror-role of mother and family in child development." Winnicott presents the idea that a pivotal experience in the process of the infant's coming into being as himself is the mother's communicating to the infant, by the look in her eyes, what she sees there when she looks at him. In the absence of the experience of being seen, the infant's capacity to feel real and alive atrophies. The author fleshes out Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that just as the infant comes more fully into being as he sees himself in his mother's eyes, so too, the mother comes more fully into being as a mother as she sees herself in the infant's eyes. The paradigm shift that Winnicott has contributed to psychoanalysis is reflected in the clinical work he presents: (1) the goal of psychoanalysis is no longer the enrichment of the patient's self-understanding; rather, the analytic goal is the patient's coming more fully alive to himself; and (2) the analyst helps the patient achieve this end not by making astute interpretations but by allowing the patient to experience the pleasure of making discoveries of his or her own.

This paper explores how the film The Babadook illuminates psychoanalytic understandings of melancholia and mourning. The author attempts to unwind the complicated character of melancholia, using Freud as an initial point of orientation, then relying on a few ideas from Klein and later writers. The paper attempts to refine our understanding of the difference between absence and emptiness, especially the difference between being captured in the nothing or deadness of melancholic emptiness, on the one hand, and being alive enough to suffer the absence of a lost object, which bears a potential for mourning, on the other. The possibility of psychic tension between these states is explored. Some implications of the relationship between absence and emptiness for the mourning process are considered. The author uses the film as a resource throughout.

The author explores some ways that we help patients to hold paradoxical realities intrinsic to transference and play in analytic work. He suggests that Winnicott's guardianship of the setting for the emergence of playing raises questions about the role of neutrality in an ontological analysis. The author tries to demonstrate some ways that the work of helping patients to hold paradox in play overlaps with a concept that he has earlier referred to as an activity of neutrality. He explores how in the analytic process, understanding and being are two dimensions of the analytic process that work in concert with each other. Often the analyst works quietly in spaces between epistemological and ontological approaches in the holding of paradox.

Wilfred Bion's contributions to psychoanalysis are numerous: his early work on the psychology of groups that grew out of his experiences in the first World War; theories and work on the treatment of psychosis with Melanie Klein and later psychoanalysis with her; and the beginning of his own theoretical and clinical ideas, which nurtured analytic thinking and treatment approaches beginning in the mid-1960's followed by his relocation to the United States (1967). Bion's thinking can be deceptively simple, such as his statement that his third book, Transformations (1965), considered by many as exceptionally dense, is about "the communication of both patient and analyst about an emotional experience" (p. 29).

The aim of this article is twofold: firstly, to describe the seven-year analytic treatment of a TG adolescent (F "April" to M "Tran") and, secondly, based on the clinical observations, to propose a reflection on the intrapsychic events linked to gender transition. We could witness during this analysis that the dissonant anatomical sex, which is at the heart of the gender dysphoria, resists mentalization and consequently its psychological integration. The psychic events of transition, understood here on the model of a mourning process, could denote the various strategies necessary to the TG individual to negotiate the obstacle of mentalization.