International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

In this paper I explore the issue of time in Freud's writings from different points of view: his linking of time with consciousness, the supposed timelessness of the unconscious, the return of the repressed, the dialectical approach to time in his concepts of bi-temporality and afterwardness, the notion of "transience", and time as a "feeler". I will argue that there is no uniformity in Freud's conception of time, which leaves space for "heterochronicity" and different representations of temporal experience.

In the spirit of Loewald's synthesis of psychoanalysis and the entwined, temporal-spatial dimensions of being-in-the-world, this paper will explore our historical moment at the cusp of a precarious future. Indeed, we are at the cusp of a great battle for ownership of the future. Building on my previous work, "Falling out of the world", here we will explore existential dislocation, the uncanny, the loss of our taken-for-granted, everyday world - and the longing to find our way back home.

The early Freud recognised a wide range of defences. Between 1894 and 1926, the only defence is repression. Breuer differentiates between splitting of the mind and splitting of consciousness. The former concerns the structure while the latter concerns the psychic content. Freud went on make dissociation coincide with repression by giving importance only to the splitting of consciousness, while for Breuer hysteria is founded on "splitting of the psyche." In 1926 he proposed an enlargement of the field of defences in addition to repression with the recognition of particular defences in phobias and obsessions. This broadening retrieves Janet's concept of dissociation as 'loss of the capacity for synthesis,' which for the early Freud and Breuer occurred in hypnoid states and in the suspension of associative capacities. Contemporary psychoanalysis takes up Freud's initial concept of defences. It retrieves the concept of dissociation considered both as repression and as the inability to integrate experience caused by blocking the fluid dissociative dynamic between multiple states of the Self. Using clinical examples it is therefore proposed that the analytic process simultaneously includes positions of repression as well as positions of dissociation considered as suspension of the patient's and analyst's integrative capacities. Repression concerns the avoidance of conflict, while dissociation suspends the process of access to conflict.

Lung transplantation is a complex psychodynamic process. In a prior study, the authors investigated 40 patients who had just undergone lung transplant operations. Using the analysis of a dream, they elaborated what they termed the "transplantation complex". They also demonstrated that references are made to this transplantation complex in the further interviews of the total sample. In this paper, they examine whether aspects of the transplantation complex in the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "The Intruder", in which he described his own heart transplant operation, can also be found in the eponymous work by the filmmaker Claire Denis. In fact, the themes of the transplantation complex appear both in Nancy's essay and in Claire Denis's film (such as fantasies that the donor is killed, that the recipient's body is broken open and that the organs or the donor are devoured). The article closes with some explanations concerning Nancy's "body ontology".

Building on the centrality of the Narcissus myth and its cultural and psychological implications, the notion of primary narcissism is discussed against the backdrop of neurobehavioural research on the development of the Self. While the concept of primary narcissism emphasises egocentrism, contemporary research suggests a different understanding of the early stages of self-experience. As Freud anticipated, there is a continuum between pre- and post-natal life: early social connections and relationships, beginning in the womb, shape the developing self. This continuum invites the investigation of foetal life to understand the development of a coherent pattern of relationships with the world. The active engagement of foetuses and infants with the outside world is the primum movens of the stages that enable them to live in the world. The quality of postnatal mother-infant relationships and their co-regulation originate in the womb. This suggestion about foetal social life can be seen in part as a development of some of the original insights of psychoanalysis. While emphasizing the importance of narcissism in understanding the Self and its relationship to society, a broader perspective on the early constitutive elements of the Self is needed.