Search

There are observable realistic factors – economic, legal and political – that contribute to initiating and maintaining international conflicts, including starting wars. Behind such factors there are also various psychological elements. This paper recalls correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and Freud's pessimistic response to the question "Why War?" and explores this question from the point of view of large-group psychology. The term "large group" describes thousands or millions of people, most of whom never see or even know about each other as individuals, but who share many of the same sentiments and the same realistic or fantasied ancestral history. This paper defines a concept, "large-group identity", and describes how protecting it plays a key role in maintaining and even initiating war-like situations or wars. This paper also considers the psychological make-up of a decision-maker with political power who encourages war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to an article by Joseph Aguayo that was published in the previous issue about the psychoanalytic study on memory and desire.

Freud's work establishes a link between an excessive amount of excitation, the infant's experience of helplessness, and trauma. The idea of excess emphasises a quantitative element, not reducible to the field of representation. In this paper I explore the notions of excess and closure in relation to two clinical examples. A patient who lived through experiences of excess and flooding is contrasted with another patient whose experience of excess is expressed through withdrawal. The complex process of elaboration and working through in their analyses takes place by bringing together affect, representation, sensorial and somatic experiences, dreams, associations and enactments as they are gathered and given meaning après coup through analytic work. Two concepts were central to the understanding of what took place in the analyses: excorporation and figurability . The paper emphasizes the place of temporality in creating a triadic space in an analysis as it relates the here and now with the there and then in the work of après-coup . The paper also traces the roots of this modern approach that relates the analyst's work of regression, time, and the creation of a triadic space to Freud's metapsychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysts may incorporate many of Melanie Klein's important contributions (e.g., on preoedipal dynamics, envy, and projective identification) without transforming their basic analytic approach. In this paper I argue that adopting the Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasy is transformative. While it is grounded in Freud's thinking and draws out something essential to his work, this notion of phantasy introduces a radical change that defines Kleinian thinking and practice and significantly impacts the analyst's basic clinical approach. This impact and its technical implications in the analytic situation are illustrated and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central aim that animates this paper is to present and discuss the idea of thirdness or analytic third in psychoanalysis, from its origins to the concepts formulated by André Green and Thomas Ogden. The contributions of Winnicott, Reik and the Baranger couple are discussed, as are their influences to contemporary psychoanalysis. In order to promote the clarification and to distinguish different psychoanalytic conceptions of the third, ten figures referring to the meaning of thirdness that appear in different theories are presented, without necessarily their being mutually exclusive. As a final consideration, the article seeks to reorder in four dimensions the ten figures originally presented, emphasizing the central elements in Ogden and Green's constructions. These dimensions are at the same time conceptual and clinical, insofar as they create possibilities of operating the idea of thirdness in the transference/ countertransference dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translations of summary This article offers an entirely new way of addressing middle age or mid-life. It uses the neologism maturescence to denote this process's metapsychological feature, and it proposes a meta-psychology of maturescence in order to allow a 'direct understanding of maturescence' instead of the 'indirect understanding of maturescence', which psychoanalytic literature generally alludes to. The paper examines somatic processes specific to male and female climacterics and is focused on to the tension between the soma and the body. It examines the drive increase that Freud posed in climacterics and the somatic climacteric imbalance that begets specific drive activity demanding psychic work, with very different pathways depending on the individual's specific working-through activity. It discusses what happens to the individual when he/she is no longer able to procreate and begins to age; why this process is equivalent for individuals who had children and for others who could not or did not. This somatic event provides a universal constant from which it is possible to understand any individual variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the paper entitled, "Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst," by G. Civitarese. Topics discussed by the author include Civitarese's interest to the works of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, the use by Civitarese to the terms "psychic transformations" and "transformations in hallucinosis," and the difference and kinship between dreams and hallucinations.

Bion describes transformation in hallucinosis ( TH) as a psychic defence present in elusive psychotic scenarios in which there is a total adherence to concrete reality: as the hallucinatory activity which physiologically infiltrates perception and allows us to know reality, setting it off against a background of familiarity; and then, surprisingly, as the ideal state of mind towards which the analyst has to move in order to intuit the facts of the analysis. When hallucinosis is followed by 'awakening', the analyst gains understanding from the experience and goes through a transformation that will inevitably be transmitted to the analytic field and to the patient. In this paper I illustrate Bion's concept and underline its eminently intersubjective nature. Then I differentiate it from two other technical devices: reverie, which unlike hallucinosis does not imply the persistence of a feeling of the real, and Ferro's transformation in dreaming, i.e. purposeful listening to everything that is said in the analysis as if it were the telling of a dream. Finally, I try to demonstrate the practical utility of the concept of transformation in hallucinosis in order to read the complex dynamics of a clinical vignette. Though not well known (only two references in English in the PEP archive), TH proves to be remarkably versatile and productive for thinking about psychoanalytic theory, technique and clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author shows that human beings have two quasi-instinctual primitive tendencies - namely, the compulsion to confess and the compulsion to judge (to condemn or to absolve). These compulsions are originally unconscious and become conscious during the course of the analytic process. The compulsion to judge is a natural consequence of the compulsion to confess. These two tendencies are intensified by the analytic situation. The patient has a compulsion to confess to the analyst and to himself, and likewise the analyst has a compulsion to confess to himself and to the patient. The patient therefore has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge the analyst as good or bad while, on the other hand, the analyst has a compulsion to judge himself as good or bad and to judge the patient as good or bad. The task of analysis is to make both patient and analyst conscious of their compulsions to confess and to judge (to condemn or to absolve). The compulsion to judge in the analyst, particularly if unconscious, may give rise to mistakes in diagnosis, technique, treatment, and the assessment of analysability. The requirement of analytic neutrality in the analyst constantly conflicts with his compulsion to judge. If we are profoundly involved in our patient's dramatic conflict, we are bound to pass a judgement (condemnation or absolution); however, when we judge, we are not neutral and therefore become incapable of intellectual consciousness of the patient's conflict. Conversely, if we do not judge, we are neutral, but are then relatively uninvolved in the patient's conflict and are hence virtually unable to achieve emotional consciousness. The author attempts to show that neutrality cannot and must not be a preconstituted attitude in the analyst, but can and must be a point of arrival following a profound, intensely felt existential experience based on an attitude of non-condemnation and non-absolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]