Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association最新文献

To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the contents of the analyst's interpretations, but the feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful not because of what they say but because each one is evidence that the analyst, who generally becomes someone of great significance to the patient, knows the patient more than before the interpretation was made. As a result of this process of "witnessing" patients not only know and feel-they also "know and feel that they know and feel." They can feel their roles in authoring their own experience. Therapeutic action results: patients "come into possession of themselves." Interpretations are the outcome of shifts in the interpersonal field, which reveal this new freedom to think and feel. This new freedom allows the creation of the analyst's interpretations, which therefore serve as a sign of a new way of being in one another's presence that has now become possible between analyst and patient. Field shifts are jointly created, without conscious intention, and interpretations arise from these shifts. Thus, interpretations are not really created independently by the mind of the analyst, but are instead the voice of the field. A clinical vignette illustrates these ideas.

Martin Heidegger's thought deeply influenced both Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, the catalyst they seemed to have been waiting for. For Loewald, Heidegger's ontological centrality of time to Being-in-the-World would bridge to Freud's centrality of transference to the analytic process, thereby operationalizing transference as a prism of time. In revealing the interwoven correlatives of present-past-future, how they bootstrap one another phenomenologically, Loewald also revealed a spiral of recursive meaning (in essence, après-coup) that draws us into the future, "the something more" of existence. In parallel, through his recognition of the power of après-coup, Lacan rescued from obscurity Freud's profound conception of Nachträglichkeit, or the spiral and causal force of unfolding meaning. Lacan was now situated to bring après-coupin conjunction with Heidegger's Being-in-the-World, with time interwoven into all aspects of existence, thereby underpinning, too, language and the Symbolic Order. By reading Freud through Heidegger and then creating their brilliant syntheses, Loewald and Lacan, through their striking sameness and differences, illuminate the nature of the unconscious, of memory and meaning, of the spiral of time, and of existence itself.

This paper is an investigation into the prominence of hysteria in Lacan's work and the enduring significance of the diagnosis for contemporary practice. Beginning with Lacan's theory of neurosis, the importance of language, and symbolic functions, we will begin to understand why the hysterical symptom is the symptomatic structure par excellence. Lacan lauds hysteria as the neurosis in direct dialogue with a given historical moment, teaching the psychoanalyst where we are in the unfolding struggle between neurosis and civilization. He returned to the case of Dora throughout his twenty-eight years of teaching to refine his work. He even saw psychoanalysis as the progressive "hystericization" of the patient and depicted himself as an hysteric walking around on a stage, not knowing what he was saying, while attempting to teach the psychoanalysts. Lacan's reading of Dora seems to mark important shifts in his own life, from his beginning to write as a psychoanalyst, to being thrown out of the IPA, to struggling with his own school and the ensuing political eruptions in France in 1968. By tracking his elaboration of Dora we can witness the evolution of Lacan's work and how he uniquely positions the analyst in the transference.

This paper explores the principal reasons for the exclusion of Lacanian ideas from psychoanalytic training institutes in the United States. The history of Lacan's role in the International Psychoanalytical Association, from which essentially he was expelled, occupies a central place in this story. Significant issues arose also from his practice style and technical innovations, whose rationale remains controversial today. Another major obstacle for the reception of his work is the theoretical framework of Lacanian analysis, so different from that of other schools. Inclusion of its unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts poses practical problems for training programs. At a more fundamental level, the strong antihumanist evolution of Lacan's thought runs contrary to the increasingly relational and intersubjective orientation of American psychoanalysis. The incompatibility between the disparate languages of a scientific theory aiming at objectivity and a phenomenology of personal intentionality and meaning greatly limits the possibilities for dialogue. The tension between these perspectives cannot be resolved, but a productive exchange between them is possible if they are accepted as valid and complementary ways of speaking about human behavior.

Lacan's effect in America was dramatic but limited following his 1975 visit. His polemic with ego psychology in Écrits radically changed the way literary critics, notably feminist critics, thought about psychoanalysis, while in those same years-the 1970s and 1980s-American psychoanalysts, taken up with their own reactions to ego psychology, paid him little attention. Yet après coup, looking back at that period, Lacan can be counted among those who contributed importantly to a major shift in our conception of psychoanalytic process: our contemporary sense of acts of reading-including clinical listening-as acts in themselves, rather than as steps toward the interpretive determination of hidden meaning. In acts of reading inspired by Lacan, feminist critics helped free Freud's theory of disavowal from its origins in the male anxieties of the castration complex. Speaking as the disavowed "others" of psychoanalysis, Lacan's feminist readers also went beyond him in moving psychoanalysis toward acknowledgment of questions of social and historical reality, including its own. Regarding this evolution, it can be speculated that hidden behind the bitterness of the split in the 1950s and 1960s between Lacan and the once European, now American ego psychologists can be found an unconscious agreement. On both sides of the Atlantic, psychoanalysis had had its reasons, if different reasons, to disavow for years the ways it was implicated in the unspeakable trauma of recent European history.