International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

The essay delineates a psychic phenomenon of incapacity to remain alive, as depicted in Jean-Charles Fitoussi's movie The Days When I Do Not Exist (2002). The film introduces a provocative thought experiment, illustrating the life of a man who vanishes every other day, only to reappear at precisely the same location twenty-four hours later. The author contends that this narrative serves as a poignant manifestation of the inability to metabolize emotions, thoughts, and memories, leading to their continual evacuation and ultimate loss. The recurrent disappearance of the protagonist diminishes his ability to feel alive, even upon his reentry into the world. This fragile psyche undergoes a potential transformation when the man falls in love, giving rise to the hope that the relationship with another human being may facilitate the integration of both the represented and unrepresented parts of his mind. An analysis of The Days When I Do Not Exist connects the cinematographic structure and the narrative plot to illustrate unrepresented states of severely damaged minds, which are under constant threat of dissolution.

Marie Langer (1910-1987) has been recognised as a key psychoanalyst in the development of Argentine and Latin American psychoanalysis. However, in contrast to the many works devoted to exploring her life trajectory or the varied research on her contribution to institutional or theoretical psychoanalytic discussion, studies on her connection with science fiction (SF) have been anecdotal. Since the mid-fifties, Langer found SF to be a source of theoretical-clinical reflection on psychoanalysis, and a field in which to exercise her creativity by writing SF stories. This article proposes an analysis of Marie Langer's relationship with the SF of her time through an exhaustive review of the literature on this subject. On the one hand, it analyses the interdisciplinary reflections that she established between psychoanalysis and SF, in which she exposed theoretical, clinical, and sociological problems; on the other hand, it examines the literary production of SF that Langer developed in her short stories. This review concluded that her work on SF bears the same hallmark that guided her clinical and institutional relationship with Psychoanalysis: a desire for change.

The notion of stability is present in Freud's work. However, the libido theory model limited its use. Kleinian authors have explored this theme in more depth, describing the risks of the loss of ego stability or defensive systems protecting against chaos and mental turbulence. Dynamic systems theory has interested several psychoanalysts since the 1990s, as it seemed to offer a non-deterministic and non-linear model of the human mind. For some, it has a heuristic value as a metaphor for mental functioning; for others it offers the hope of a real formal modelling of metapsychological theories. The author focuses his attention on the forms of stability described in this theory: simple, periodic and structural. He puts forward the hypothesis of transitions from one type of stability to another in the psychoanalytic process, allowing access to the structural stability of representations that retain self-similarity. The analytic situation must offer an open dynamic system between two poles, maternal and paternal, which constitute the strange attractor necessary for the transition from a form of archaic stability to structural stability. Extracts from a child psychoanalysis are used by way of illustration.

Race, including racism, racial trauma, and racial anxieties, remains contentious for psychoanalysts to consider as a psychic phenomenon. Unlike aggression and sexuality, racism is held in silence and resistance, inhibiting exploration of this aspect of mind. This paper describes how we become raced by exploring the transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, writ large, and its intrapsychic, structuralizing components. By examining how and where the analyst locates themselves racially and working through our resistance and countertransference to this type of exploration, this paper invites us to include these aspects of mind for our analytic use. Using examples from the creative arts and clinical vignettes to demonstrate how being raced is embodied and symbolized in mind as a universal phenomenon opens a therapeutic aperture for clinicians who may benefit from a psychoanalytic, intrapsychic perspective on this aspect of our shared humanity.

In this paper I want to trace the complex relationship between grievance and revenge. Both are expressions of the rage that arises in response to feelings of injustice and humiliation, but they differ in the direction that the rage is expressed. In revenge it is outwardly directed, usually as a violent attack, while in grievance the violence is inhibited and the rage is held inwardly in a state of withdrawal. I will use characters and episodes from Richard Holmes' life of Coleridge and from Homer's Iliad to explore this theme, especially with respect to Achilles, whose rage is the chief subject of the Iliad. It is initially expressed as a withdrawal into grievance and subsequently as an active rampage of violent revenge. I will look at the consequences of these different forms of expression of anger and also try to explore what factors enabled the direction of his rage to be so dramatically reversed.