American Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

This contribution begins from Winnicott's introduction of the incommunicado self in his paper on communication to suggest that interiority and the psyche come to constitute the infantile world through the earliest environment and through solitude. The capacity to be with others and to be alone originate in an earlier state where communication both makes no sense and yet contains the origin of the life source through the baby's bodily experience of self and world. The world beyond the baby enables this through an other's care. I link this with Bion's position on loneliness and his recognition that people may choose to live in contact with the unsynthesized and incoherent. Encouraging the unsynthesized, the formless, and the inexpressible in our patients offers ways of being an analyst that for me is the legacy of Winnicott and Bion.

Analytic awareness of the process of meaning-making involves tracking premonitions and intuitions to their sources. As precursors of symbolic processing, premonitions are essential elements in any relationship, including the analytic relationship. They provide unconscious communication that informs and amplifies internal and external body and object relations. These relations facilitate depth and dimensionality between and within persons. They also enable the representational processes to establish psychic structure. When traumatized, a person can lose faith in these processes and defend against relationship. Exploring precursors of the emotional experiences of hope and dread enables the analytic dyad to re-vitalize lost potentials and the representation of experience. A clinical example is given to demonstrate the application of these ideas.

The author discusses the idea that psychoanalysts could benefit from a common paradigm, not necessarily a single theory, but a general frame through which to view their work. Focusing on perception as a basic modality of psychic life, in combination with the system-environment approach, could provide this common baseline. The text explores how this approach relates to the work of Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, emphasizing the interconnectedness of systems and their environments, the role of perception, and the concept of a contact barrier. The notion of tangential interlocking is proposed as a way of illustrating how the system Freud called perception-consciousness is the contact-barrier common to all the psycho-somatic functions of interest to psychoanalysis.

This essay was inspired by the experience of observing a newborn baby and the mother on a weekly basis for an entire year. I explore the receptive function of the maternal body whose mirroring acts created the intermediate area between her and her baby facilitating for what I call imitative playing. The concept of imitation came to mind because of its physicality. The reason for naming it 'playing' lies in its quality: I am trying to capture something about the perceptual and communicative capacity of the body. Born out of affective mutuality of the dyad, it is a corporeal elaboration of their union, the primary physical aliveness, that could be an observable element of personalization, a precursor in the journey to symbolism. The direct observation of infants is not sufficient to arrive at the ideas that I have suggested without psychoanalytic knowledge, the substance that I have imbued with what I perceived. In Winnicottian language this could be described as psychoanalytic apperception. I think it stems from an analyst's visceral self that gives life to psycho-analytic concepts as well as transforms an analysand's non-verbal expressions into communications.

This paper revisits D. W. Winnicott's famous account of his patient Piggle to examine the profound nature of her response to the birth of her baby sister in the light of the concepts of object constancy and absence. The author speculates that recent scholarship revealing the mother's Holocaust family history enables us to hypothesise that Piggle's infancy might have been marked by her mother's psychic absence. This contributed to difficulties in the establishment of object constancy leaving her vulnerable to more extreme responses to later absences, such as at the birth of her sister. The focus of Winnicott's interpretations at an Oedipal level is critiqued as is the significance of the psychoanalysis-on-demand setting of the work.

This paper focuses on a convergence of late Bion's (1970) and late Winnicott's (1969a, b) discovery and technique. Both authors describe a special state of mind which adds formlessness, un-differentiation to regression as a major mechanism of psychic change. Bion describes this state mainly in the analyst, while Winnicott focuses on this state of mind in the patient. The combination of both approaches brings us in contact with an essential phenomenon of psychoanalysis which seems difficult to reach and contain without the psychoanalytic frame and in which both analyst and patient play a complementary role.