International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

This is a brief introduction to Jacques Lacan's paper "Some Reflections on the Ego" which summarizes his main ideas.

This paper argues that, despite its title, "The Ego and the Id" can be seen as the book of the superego, and although it is a metapsychological work, Freud's introduction of the new conceptual tools provided by the structural model was a response to the clinical problems he faced. The implications of Freud's introduction of the superego for the analytic relationship are discussed, with an attempt to deepen our understanding of what he had in mind by reading "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" alongside "The Ego and the Id". Finally, the paper draws on Bion to consider the implications of this remodelling of the analytic scene for listening and interpretation.

I divide this paper into three parts. First, I discuss Freud's ideas about repression and the unconscious sense of guilt in order to compare them with Klein's view that we disown uncomfortable facts through a process of splitting and projection, leading to a paranoid defence against guilt. Second, I describe Klein's struggle to understand the origin and the severity of the primitive super-ego which was so prominent in her child patients. She considered that an important aim of analysis was to moderate the severity of the super-ego to create a more humane inner world. Finally, I will elaborate on her view, as well as Freud's, that some of the primitive terrifying objects that lie buried deep in the unconscious are fixed and unmodifiable. I will use some ideas from Ron Britton to suggest that instead of trying to modify or get rid of these persecuting figures, it might be possible to stand up to them and to emancipate the ego from the tyranny of the super-ego.

It is not well known that The Ego and the Id, where Freud presented his second model of the mind, and introduced a new role for the Ego, was ignored by many of the major theorists that followed. I will attempt to demonstrate the importance of this new view of the ego for clinical psychoanalysis, and what has been lost by its being ignored.

This paper presents an account of the psychoanalytic treatment of pathological mourning in the context of early psychic trauma. I introduce the concept of blank pain, understood as a negative of early trauma, to describe a distinct type of unthinkable anxiety. And I treat pathological mourning as a defence against the unbearable pain of the latter. Clinical observations reveal the extent to which, in a situation where the patient reacts to environmental failure by maintaining a façade (an insincere self), the construction of meaning depends on the use the patient makes of the analytic process and the setting. Considering these observations, I explore the relationship between the structural phenomenon of blank pain and defensive pathological mourning through the therapeutically mutative action of processive interventions and co-enacted scenarios.

Extracts from Shakespeare's Hamlet are used to show how obstacles to mourning may arise from the persistent demands of melancholic internal objects demanding repair and revenge. It is only with the development of symbolic function as a result of separateness between self and object that reparation becomes possible and ghosts are turned into ancestors.

The sudden appearance of the term "desexualization" in The Ego and the Id is considered as a marker of the subtle, almost unnoticeable changes that occurred in Freud's thinking after 1920. The strict dichotomy between life and death drives posed a series of new problems that force Freud to invoke a "desexualized libido" in order to restore some fluidity in the psychic apparatus. But the mechanism of desexualization was difficult to describe and Freud seems to resort to a circular explanation. In the end, the restored dialectics between Eros and the death drive, thanks to desexualization, force Freud to invoke a split in the ego itself.

In this note I have limited myself to describing some convergent and divergent developments arising from the innovative concepts present in The Ego and the Id. It could be argued that a part of the psychoanalytic movement wished to emphasize the function of the Ego (Anna Freud, Hartmann, Rapaport), while another part (Melanie Klein and her followers) delved into the dynamics of the Superego and the Id in primitive and pathological states of mind. I will examine three themes presents in The Ego and the Id: the assertion that a part of the Ego is unconscious; the idea that the death drive becomes part of the dynamics of melancholia and its Superego; the concept of fusion and defusion of the life and death instinct. Freud's writing represents a forge of new ideas that have made psychoanalysis ever more creative and capable of understanding the complexity and mysteriousness of the human mind.

I explore some similarities between experiences of music and of analytic sessions. I focus on qualities of evanescence, the way that music - in contrast to many other arts - in one perspective only lasts as long as it is actually being played. Then it's over. The analyst-patient discussion in a session is similar. Yet the psychic reverberations of some transient, fugitive moments may last a lifetime. And even when no verbally profound understanding is occurring, nevertheless the patient-analyst encounter is emotionally significant. I illustrate this with a clinical example. I explore transference as illusion, and the relationship between truth and illusion in terms of Bion's O. I end with thoughts about the paradoxical value of the illusoriness of aesthetics and nature as considered by Freud in his short paper "On Transience" (1916), and the grin of Lewis Carol's Cheshire Cat, left hanging in the air.