International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

It is a fascinating decision to hold a conference on identifications in Florence. Now identified for more than five centuries with a brief portion of its millennial story, it sometimes seems imprisoned in its apparently timeless beauty, which is in fact extremely fragile and precarious. In this alternation of isolation and openness Florence is undoubtedly an ideal representation of Italian history. In the end, the characteristics of the development of psychoanalysis in Italy could also be summed up in the oxymoronic pairing of Isolation and Openness. It is thanks to this evolutionary niche that linguistic isolation has been transformed from a difficulty into an advantage. Italian psychoanalysis is a blend of different psychoanalytic traditions interpreted and retranslated into an autonomous psychoanalytic language. If we wish to trace a common feature in Italian psychoanalysis we could point to the concept of relationship as one of its most important transformations, with a shift of focus onto the work of the analytic couple. "Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it", the later Freud's most enigmatic legacy, seems to be one of the compasses for contemporary psychoanalytic research in Italy, one that spins around extensions of practice and the widening of technique.

Here the author draws on Theodor Fontane's 1895 novel Effi Briest to consider the links between Freud's paper "The Uncanny" and his elaboration of the trauma of sexuality and the après-coup. Conceptualizing trauma in contemporary clinical theory inevitably draws on the theory of the après-coup: the blow that is inflicted on the psyche when the impact of the early event is retranscribed at a later date. The author considers the trauma that Effi experiences, not the catastrophic trauma of death or assault but the deceptive trauma, is disguised as an unparalleled opportunity for Effi. Her story highlights the trauma of sexuality and the incestuous Oedipal dimension. In the cruel economy of incestuous exchange across the generations Effi, in what she experiences as dreary incarceration, is left isolated with her libidinal yearnings. Arguing that Effi as a seventeen-year-old girl is drawn into the incestuous world of her parents and the mother's suitor Innstetten, the author describes how the trauma involving the denial of her sexuality leads to her being ostracized and facing psychic death. Captured in the deferred maternal desire, Effi unknowingly becomes part of a system of incestuous exchange. This is a trauma that is only known in the après-coup.

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.