International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

This paper discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic perspectives may have been limited by the Western cultural context in which they originated and explores the potential of the Indian cultural imagination to broaden psychoanalytic thinking about ego formation, the nature of Eros, bisexuality, and individuation. The case is made for the need to retain the diverse perspectives offered by the cultural imaginations of different civilisations despite the globalization of ideas.

The contributions to this Psychoanalytic Controversies section explore the question of what psychoanalysis may be able to contribute to thinking about some of the challenges currently confronting humanity and how such communications can be made effectively. This introduction to the section frames the debate with some reflections on anxieties that have been expressed about the application of psychoanalytic ideas beyond the clinical context, the risks of insularity, the need for appropriate humility, and the reality of the embeddedness of analytic practice, in particular social, cultural, and historical contexts. Contributions from Claudia Frank, Sudhir Kakar, Eli Zaretsky, Michael Rustin, Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, Magda Khouri, and Sally Weintrobe are introduced.

This essay explores the inextricable connection between the psyche and the social, and its relevance to contemporary global challenges, such as isolation and polarization. The author discusses the possibilities that psychoanalysis holds for the public good, underscoring the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to understanding the social world and creating greater access to psychoanalytic knowledge. Notably, transforming psychoanalysis to reflect multiple sociocultural subjectivities and addressing the polarization within psychoanalysis is critical for this endeavour.

This text compares four essays dealing with war, state terror in dictatorships, social violence such as racism, mourning and the avoidance of mourning. It shows that dictatorships share similarities in their techniques of manipulation, linguistic style and reference to history. They seek to exploit national myths through manipulative alienation. Myths are a central element of cultural memory, and their effect can be understood through a model of internal dialogue. This dialogue determines whether the regime's attempts at manipulation are successful.

The author reflects on the extension of the psychoanalytic clinic, showing how ideas, studies and discussions built up over several years have led various Latin American groups to put their thinking into action, by allowing themselves to be penetrated by issues of the city and directly relate to diverse territories. These studies have shown how psychoanalytic actions can take place in various types of encounter between subjectivities, highlighting their challenges as well as their effectiveness and power.

Although the capacity to mourn is ubiquitously acknowledged as critical for individual psychic functioning, the impact of this capacity on a collective social level has been examined to a very limited extent in the psychoanalytic literature to date. The two papers that take up this this topic thus bring various critical and complex issues to our attention. After reviewing and commenting on these papers, I discuss how these issues are particularly relevant today to society in general and psychoanalysis in particular. I believe that the ability to mourn is under siege in the Western world at present, with respect to both "macro" mourning that is, mourning for significant losses such as a beloved person, ideal, or country, and "micro" mourning or mourning for losses inherently and unavoidably implicated in choices we make in everyday life. These mourning processes are undermined by the impact of complex socioeconomic parameters on psychic functioning, as evidenced by various internal problems and symptomatology characteristic of our times. In turn, difficulties in mourning contribute to social problems including social injustice, wars and the climate crisis. As psychoanalysts we are called upon to address these issues in our clinical work as well as in our global community.

The author proposes ways of rethinking the concepts of the unconscious and time in the analytic setting, including the very existence of the unconscious. Freud (1915) stated that the success psychoanalytic thinking has in making inferences about the patient's unconscious makes the existence of the unconscious "incontrovertible." The author submits that this success does not establish the existence of the unconscious; rather, the inferences we think we make about the unconscious are inferences about consciousness itself - the totality of our experiences of thinking, feeling, sensing, observing, and communicating with ourselves. The author then offers thoughts about a second analytic concept, the experience of time in the analytic setting. He conceives of there being two inseparable sorts of experiences of analytic time that stand in a dynamic relationship with one another: diachronic time (clock time) and synchronic time (dream time). In diachronic time, time is sequential; one thing leads to another. In synchronic time, all time is contained in the present. In analysis, childhood trauma is experienced for the first time (in synchronic time) in the co-created subjectivity of patient and analyst.

Unquestioned vicious identifications with dubious (e.g. political) figures seem central in today's multiple crises. As in former dark times, when M. Klein described the dynamics triggered by an 'inner Hitler', the approach offered in this contribution is to explore present forms, which we meet in the consulting room. As will be shown, a crucial step in this process lies in working through those challenges in the countertranserence.

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.