International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

This paper is an exploration of gratitude as a fundamental concept in psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein's classic article "Envy and Gratitude" (1957) named gratitude at one pole on an axis of human suffering and flourishing, but with a few notable exceptions, the article stimulated research into envy. This paper explores the historical and philosophical traditions that have, to some extent unconsciously, influenced our contemporary understandings of gratitude. The paper also works to explore the social and ethical meanings of gratitude as well as gratitude's psychoanalytic significance. The aim is to uncover the overall psychic significance of gratitude and its place in human flourishing.

José Bleger's paper on the setting (encuadre) is integral to his 1967 book Symbiosis and Ambiguity. Relevant concepts from the book are summarised before examining his view of the setting as a "non-process" consisting of "constants", complementing the "variables" of the analytic process. Process and setting are related as figure and ground in Gestalt psychology. The ideally maintained setting is studied as a thought experiment, uniting the categories of institution, personality, body schema, and body. Deposited in the setting, the psychotic part of the personality, or "agglutinated nucleus", is a remnant of early symbiosis with the mother. Bleger distinguishes two settings: the analyst's and the patient's. The latter can only be analysed by strictly maintaining the former. Ritualisation of the setting denies temporal reality. De-symbiotisation is not always possible. A concept of "internal" setting is suggested, but Bleger nowhere mentions this and the concept is problematic, leaving open the question of how to listen to the silence of the setting. Bleger's concept of encuadre can be applied to constants (invariants) in the wider world, the psychotic part of the personality being deposited in everything that is familiar and felt to be constant, including technology, which creates a "platform" for human activity.

This paper attempts to expand José Bleger's classic, metapsychological descriptions of the psychoanalytic frame to formulate and emphasize the role of the analyst's internal frame in establishing a psychoanalytic observational perspective in the analytic situation. The rationale for doing so follows from clinical necessity, especially when working with patients and psychic organizations that are 'beyond neurosis' and in non-traditional settings such as distance and telemetric analyses. Clinically speaking, in its most effective state, the analyst's internal frame can inform the possibility of an observational vertex aimed at the intuitive grasp of psychic reality rather than a sense-based, empirical observation of parameters denoted by the elements of a consensually validatable social reality.

Freud's very brief 1922 paper on the beheading of Medusa by Perseus wisely concludes with a call for a further examination of the sources of the legend. A now widespread interpretation of this legend is based (often without acknowledgement) on an addition to traditions concerning Medusa made in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is argued here that this Ovidian innovation has often been misinterpreted, and that a more careful reading of Metamorphoses supports neither a widely alleged exclusively vengeful portrayal of Medusa, nor Freud's portrayal of Medusa's decapitation as solely a pitiable and terrible symbol of castration. Instead, Ovid's complex treatments of myths involving Medusa, Minerva and Perseus present parallels with Kleinian insights into phantasy attacks on fecundity, and into imagined revivals of dead or damaged inside babies. Thus the "displacement upwards" of the fearful castrated maternal genital envisioned in Freud's "Medusa's Head" must stand beside a quite different "displacement upwards" of the life-giving maternal genital. Indeed, tradition holds that Medusa's beheading gives rise to the birth of vigorous twins. Together with allied details, this aligns Ovid's masterwork with theories that modify or displace the so-called "sexual phallic monism" that some believe taints Freud's theories of gender development.

This article explores the impact of the analyst's life-threatening illness on the analytic couple; it is informed through two theoretical lenses - Freud's ideas about the vicissitudes of mourning, which have been elaborated on by Melanie Klein and John Steiner, and Christopher Bollas's ideas about destiny and idiom. Clinical material will focus on my on-going work with a middle-aged man who has a history of early abandonment and loss and who struggles with being able to remain separate from his objects while being in relationship with them.

This paper describes the anxiety evoked in a patient threatened by invasion or engulfment by his object on the one hand, and the fears of isolation and abandonment on the other. The author illustrates the patient's strugles to find a distance between himself and his object he can tolerate. The analyst has also to cope with the anxieties evoked by the patient's projections, and find a distance between himself and his patient that enables him to think and work.

This article explores the notion of inhibition at a theoretical and clinical level in psychoanalysis. The first part follows the development of the notion in Freud's work, from the "Project" (1950a [1895]) to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d). It identifies the two approaches to inhibition, the first from an energetic point of view, the second from the angle of its relations to anxiety. The second part of the article is devoted to the links between inhibition and Freud's thoughts about death, in particular in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and the links to the death drive. It draws on some of Jones' notes and presents a brief clinical illustration. The third part focuses more particularly on general inhibition, especially in depression and melancholia. Based on the treatment of one patient, the author shows how the slow process of overcoming general inhibition is achieved through the gradual use of negation. From an economic point of view, it is suggested that psychoanalytic treatment, through the transference and associative speech, has an effect on the depletion of energy by diverting the "suction" of stimuli, paving the way for the formation of drive representatives, or inhibitions as symptoms, which will need to be dissected.