Psychoanalytic Quarterly最新文献

Ill children/adolescents who suffer from severe organic diseases have to cope with their inner experiences, therapies, and the global burden of the disease. Although sometimes depression, anger, and death anxiety are openly encountered in medical settings, other times they can be partially hidden by a reactive and defensive path. In these scenarios, psychoanalysis is challenged to contribute the best comprehension of the intimate communication, maybe hidden, and the needs of the ill patients to express themselves. The best way a child can talk about himself is through spontaneous creativity. The adult's task is to facilitate the creation of an empty space and to recognize the child's mode of communication. There may be intense emotional reactions that the adult has to tolerate to not move the patient towards an over-adaptation. These over-adaptations entail the child being forced to feel good or have fun, thereby causing them to escape from their inner experience. The loss of the child's reality forms an additional burden to the child. The most valid indicator of this attitude is the ability to not take counterphobic attitudes but to allow the depression to be shared in a contact space between the child's true self and the perceived environment.

Karl Abraham, one of Melanie Klein's analysts, undoubtedly influenced Klein in her clinical and theoretical thinking. Abraham was arguably the first analyst to focus on character, as well as the relationship between bodily experience and object relationships-central to the concept of projective identification. His writing on mourning (like Klein's, intensely personal) described identificatory processes with the lost object. In a lesser known essay, Abraham applied some of these ideas to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Through examination of this lesser known paper, this article describes how Abraham initiated ideas around the concept of projective identification, and then extends Abraham's early ideas to a more contemporary understanding of the concept. This extension represents a contemporary elaboration of a psychoanalytic contribution to a study of ritual, which was of great interest to many early psychoanalysts-among them, Abraham.

This paper details my psychoanalytic process evaluating refugees as part of their application for asylum. It focuses on the emergence of unrepresented content and abject states within the intersubjective matrix that lead to collaborative creation of a story of trauma. Such intra- and inter-personal encounters are structured by the larger social, political, and cultural contexts that support, limit, structure, erase, and determine what can be known and told. Knowledge of traumatic inscription necessitates attunement to nonverbal affective states in both survivor and witness as well a receptive society that is able to tolerate grief, acknowledge the degradation and depravity unleashed in victim and victimizer during violence, and absorb survivors' mournful morality tales.

This article describes the various crises of the Oedipus complex. In the beginning, I address the crisis of the first traumatic days when Oedipus was to be abandoned in the wilderness. This early breakdown takes place at what may be denoted as stage zero. During this first crisis, the defensive solution is an act of doubling, according to Quinodoz's dédoublement of the parental pair, accompanied by the defenses of splitting, foreclosure, and annihilation. Protected by these defenses, the child would be able to search for a solution to the neurotic part of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud's and Lacan's conception, these phases encompass the stages of the imaginary omnipotence, of the symbolic prohibition, and the symbolic reconciliation. The second crisis of Oedipus signifies therefore that the desire encounters the prohibition of the third (e.g., the father). I will show these stages in the 1967 film adaptation of Oedipus Rex and the life of its director, Pierre Paolo Pasolini. Against this background, the third crisis of Oedipus is considered: the impending ecological catastrophe.

Using the concepts of microdialect and second skin, this paper explores the idea that a patient's silence in the session may function at multiple levels of psychic and relational organization, and-by virtue of its somatically experienced qualities and the special countertransference states these may elicit-might serve as a vehicle for movement between levels. It can thus be fruitfully approached as a potential portal for access to, and creative transformation of, unrepresented experience.

In this paper, I present a new reading of Erik Erikson's theory of epigenetic stages of development, with particular attention to the concept of identity. I show that Erikson's psychosocial approach requires close attention to the role of the community in the formation of individual identity and to the importance of the stage of generativity as an often overlooked component in understanding both identity and the whole Eriksonian life cycle.