American Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

This theoretical paper discusses three variations on the death drive, developed by Sándor Ferenczi. We present a brief history of the use of the term death drive among the first psychoanalysts and argue that, as early as 1913, the notion is used by Ferenczi and serves as a conceptual background for his thinking. During the 1920s, Ferenczi revisits part of this concept, focusing on what he identifies as a primacy of self-destruction. The destructive drive gains an adaptive character responsible for the mortification of parts of the individual, in exchange for the survival of the whole. In this variation, the tendency to regress also arises as the self-destruction drive and the acceptance of unpleasure involves a psychic "reckoning-machine." In the final variation, left unfinished, the death drive at times receives new names, like drive for "conciliation," and at others, the very idea of the death drive is criticized.

Nowhere do we see the beauty of our struggles so clearly as in the world of dreams. This past year saw the passing of one of our most creative and inspiring poets of the world of dreams, Paul Lippmann. In this paper, I speak from and about the world of dreams, recognizing ways in which they call to our attention aspects of experience which, unparsed, leave us caught emotionally. Considered will be the dream itself, its forms and functions, ways in which our emotional tangles within the dream space become visual pictograms. Bion suggested that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to enhance the capacities for feeling, thinking and dreaming. The dreaming process is enhanced by and in the psychoanalytic session. Through the dream work of analyst and analysand, dream elements become more fully elaborated into meaningful symbols that enrich the evolving narratives within the sessions. I will also consider ways in which psychosocial perspectives and psychoanalytic field theory have enhanced our understanding of and ability to make sense of our dreams, providing an enlarged playing field beyond the reconstructive efforts of early psychoanalysis.

The present transcript follows an online discussion held on April 3, 2022, between Ian Miller, author of Clinical Spinoza: Integrating His Philosophy with Contemporary Therapeutic Practice (2022), and Endre Koritar.

The paper analyzes Ferenczi's contributions to contemporary debates on gender. It does not strictly adhere to what he wrote about masculinity and femininity, where he reveals himself as a man of his time, with the some of the prejudices of his time. Instead, the paper highlights the utraquistic method and the pluralist monism of Ferenczi, whereby he appears as an analyst who remains in synch with current problems. Against the purity of dualisms, Ferenczi embraced multiplicity, mixtures, and the transit between different spaces, beyond divisive frontiers. In terms of method, it resonates with Judith Butler's proposals, with the ideas defended by Paul Preciado and by Queer theory.

A deep understanding of the subjective experience of time in traumatized individuals may require a comprehensive framework that takes into account both psychoanalytic and phenomenological contributions. Referring to the retroactive interpretation of past experiences, the concept of Nachträglichkeit is critical to analyze how trauma can be signified in the form of the après-coup, in which the original traces of traumatic experiences are signified only at a later time. Trauma alters the temporal sequence of past, present, and future, thus leaving the psyche in a time-shifted dimension, where the shadow of the past extends over the present, and the unbearable present hinders growth and development. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate how trauma can disrupt the temporal nature of subjective experience by reshaping the meaning of psychic events. Ultimately, trauma treatment aims at inscribing the person's experience into a unified and coherent self-narrative.

This paper offers a new take on friendship, its specific qualities, how it is subjectively experienced and changes over the course of a patient's life and how it might serve as catalyst for positive change in the therapeutic process. The premise is based on the Aristotelian definition of friendship as a friendship of virtue, as well as on insights stemming from intersubjective thinking, and observations about horizontal relationships in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. A review of the scant psychodynamic and psychoanalytic literature on friendship is presented and the author notes its marginal place in the lexicon compared with other more extensively studied relationships. Three clinical cases are presented to illustrate the potential of "friendships of virtue" as paths toward positive transformation in the course of treatment.

Beginning in 1920 and in keeping with Freud's sustained encouragement, the first two generations of European psychoanalysts initiated a progressive mental health movement by offering very low cost and free psychoanalytic services that were in harmony with Austrian social democratic and socialist political leaders' commitment to societal reforms in light of the economic and social inequities after the First World War. This synthesis of biographical and autobiographical accounts of early Freudian, Ego Psychology and Neo-Freudian theorists' contributions highlights their consideration of the effects of social injustice as central challenges to the development of psychological growth.