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A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis by Fred Busch At a book talk at the University of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore a few years ago, an eager student asked Professor Jonathan Lear, "Why does psychoanalysis take so long?" In conclusion, Busch's latest volume offers an inspired elaboration of Freud's clinical legacy, and demonstrates the ongoing applicability and richness of Freud's later theorizing. Busch has done a yeoman's work for Freud's contemporary reputation, illustrating his substantial, ongoing relevance to clinical praxis, and Mark Solms is also committed to this project, albeit from a different perspective. While Solms's many contributions integrating neuroscience and psychoanalysis are beyond the scope of this review, his reformulation of the structural model in "The Conscious Id" (2013) is directly relevant to Busch's argument in I A Fresh Look i . [Extracted from the article]

The papers collected in this series were originally presented at the 83rd Oral History Workshop during the American Psychoanalytic Association's meetings in February of 2021. The topic of the workshop, "The Social Voices of Psychoanalysts: The 1960s and 1970s", was chosen because over the last several years, members of the psychoanalytic community had been debating the question of the role of psychoanalysts in a deeply divided political, social and cultural environment governed by an individual that many, both analysts and non-analysts, viewed as a dangerous and unstable leader. John Martin-Joy presented Erik Erikson's "Reflections on the Dissent of Contemporary Youth" (1970), and Daniel H. Jacobs reviewed Andrew Peto's "On Crowd Violence: The Role of Archaic Superego and Body Image" (1975). Their papers were discussed by Nancy Chodorow drawing on her experiences as member of this generation as well as her training in both sociology and psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance of Spielrein's 'destruction thesis', as presented in her seminal paper, "Destruction as a Cause of Coming Into Being" (1994/1912), which includes: the element of a destructive component residing within sexuality; the resulting conflict arising between two fundamental biological drives; that of self-preservation and species-preservation, and the psychological consequences of the aforementioned conflict and its potential for paving the way for personal transformation in choosing between 'sex vs survival', is discussed with reference to sexuality, personal identity, notions of loss, and psychotherapy. Although Freud and Jung, as discussed here as well, were initially reluctant in accepting the biological considerations Spielrein was proposing for psychoanalysis, both overcame that reluctance, and her contributions to Freud's death instinct, Jung's concept of the anima, an understanding of transference and counter-transference, have come to be acknowledged and thus she is considered to be an early pioneer in the development of psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the myriad roles and activities of art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris in psychoanalysis. Topics covered include his founding and editing of the journal "The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child," which advocated research into infant and child development, his contributions as an honorary member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI) and the papers he wrote on psychoanalytic drive theory and ego psychology.

This paper proposes the existence of a series of developments in Bion's later writings that were obliquely indebted to his utilization of mystical texts and esoteric techniques, which it is proposed he deployed as resources for revitalizing traditional psychoanalytic theory and practice. To support this hypothesis, evidence is adduced to support the contention that Bion was covertly inspired by Jungian ideas, which he utilized as a catalyst for developing his own theoretical and clinical innovations. In this context Jung is identified as a contemporary avatar of esoteric ideas and practices transposed into a psychoanalytic register. It is further proposed that certain elements in Bion's later writings effectively constitute a defacto 'esoteric matrix' developed out of a bricolage of mystical and esoteric texts, which he utilized as tools to augment and enhance his own lines of thinking. By way of conclusion, some tentative comparisons are made between elements of Late Antique theurgy and their corresponding analogues encountered within late Bionian psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of memory in psychoanalysis. To begin with, I identify two contrasting models of the remembered past in Freud, a type of recollective memory that consists of repressed but retrievable mnemic experience, and an active conception of memory, what I call re-descriptive memory, comprising an imaginative sense of the past. I develop the hypothesis of re-descriptive memory through a discussion of the scriptural analogy of memory and the uncanny mnemic-trace. In the final part of the paper I elaborate further on the act of remembering by linking the sense of the past to a sense of conviction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prejudice could be defined as an irrational sense of superiority, an ironic expression of an unconscious feeling of inferiority that claims paradoxically that one human identity is worthier than another. Implicit prejudice would suggest the unconscious nature of a bias within an individual, whereas complicit prejudice would suggest a shared bias within a family, or group, or even a whole society. The two (implicit and complicit) are intimately connected, of course, and how they influence each other can be explored. The cultural disease called prejudice has been with us forever and there is no cure in sight. Psychoanalysis itself is not immune to it, and "physician heal thyself" must be considered, even as the psychoanalyst puts pen to paper. Prejudice is an expression of hatred that the science of psychoanalysis tries to study on the most granular level, so that each individual human ego can understand, possess, and embrace its barbaric animal nature without disowning, and attacking in the other, what it dares not see in itself and call its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on American Psychoanalytic Association presentations with Ann Adelman and Stephanie Brody on psychoanalysis during Covid, the author explores the disruption to our everyday, taken-for-granted being-in-the-world of others, now supplanted by a new virtual world of presence that is nested within larger societal dislocations. With the stark foregrounding of the visual and auditory, and deprived of other sensory, bodily dimensions, comes an uncanny aura that signals shocks to our existential grounding. Exploring the uncanny similarities of our new virtual world with Hitchcock's Rear Window , Sartre's "look of the other", Lacan and Zizek on anamorphic distortions, and our omnipresent visual immersion in societal violence and fragmentation, this paper weaves connections to our contemporary existential challenges. We are penetrated by anxieties of isolation, loss, threat, and death—and we long to find our way back home within a brave, new world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The female nude in photography has a complex history in Freud's Vienna. This paper examines photographic images of nude women and girls in the published art-historical studies of classical sculpture. Books on the "sciences" of health and well-being by authors like Carl Heinrich Stratz and Paul Schultze-Naumberg reproduced many photographs of nude women and children, especially young girls. Such visual material comes to bear on Freud's case-history of "Dora" as well as other contemporary writings on psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay examines Freud's complex relationship to occult forms of communication, or "thought transference," as he was establishing his discipline and its theory of transference. After examining a failed séance that Freud held in his own apartment, the essay argues that Freud's envy and anxieties surrounding telepathy and mind-reading are continuous with his concerns about the presence of media and communication technology in the psychoanalytic scenario. After demonstrating that psychoanalysis has traditionally ignored the presence of such media, or relegated them to the realm of mere metaphor, the paper argues for a revision of the conception of the analytic dyad as an analytic triad: clinician, patient, and medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tend to think subjectivity, and the subject, as somehow discrete and distinguishable, self-defining, even self-sufficient. The subject as owner of his own essence, capable of charting his own course, willful, and at least in potential free. An unethical self-deception according to Levinas (1935/2003). A dangerous delusion according to Adorno (1966/1973). Because the subject of self-awareness and freedom is also the subject of sovereignty, given to, and molded by, what Foucault (1975/1977) called power/knowledge matrices. A socially constructed and yet somehow self-experiencing existent. An abstract, and yet deeply felt location of being. This paper is an attempt to journey closer to the heart of this paradoxical, conflictual condition. It does so by putting certain ideas developed in social theory in discourse with Psychoanalysis. First, I follow Michel Foucault in his use of the notion of homo economicus as a means for theorizing the condition of the subject of neo liberalism and his preoccupation with life as enterprise and parenting as investment. I trace a parallel psychoanalytic trajectory seeming to address a similar kind of subject, a trajectory that, I suggest, finds its expression in attachment theory and relational Psychoanalysis. I follow Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities to suggest that the subject of nationalism, homo nationalis, reflects nationalism in his own particular sense of self and preoccupations, most of all with an unstable experience of inside and outside, unclear boundaries and interminable conflict, maintained in an always fragile balance. I trace a parallel collective-subjective construction in the original conceptions of Psychoanalysis, with its models of territorial conflicts, both within and between subjects. In both cases, I argue, even as it continues to make claims of discovery, Psychoanalysis reflects and serves the dominant zeitgeist of its time. I follow Giorgio Agamben in his attention to the ancient Roman concept of homo Sacer in an attempt to imagine subjectivity otherwise than as a hapless reflection of the social power constellations of its place and time. I suggest that we think of subjectivity as a border concept, and of the subject as a threshold, something defined in-between, as an in-between, in relation to, rather than in itself - a frontier, an endless interaction, an imagined, fleeting location through which things continue to pass but never quite reside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text "Sabina Spielrein: to Love, to Die, to be Reborn" discussed the life and work of Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942), a Russian–Jewish early pioneer of psychoanalysis and pediatrician, an original clinician and scholar, who is still mostly remembered for her connection to Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and not for her groundbreaking contributions to the development of Freudian theory and practice. It also provides a context to the 1913 publication of Spielrein's "Traum von 'Pater Freudenreich'" in the IPA journal Internationale Zeitschrift für ärtzliche Psychoanalyse. Sabina Spielrein analyzes the dreams of Lene, a patient sent to her by Sigmund Freud. Lene's experience as a professional opera singer lends to Spielrein's analysis, referencing works by Mozart and Wagner as well as memories of past father figures and identifying Freud himself as the archetypal dream character of "Father Freudenreich." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the career of Russian aristocrat and painter Sergius Pankejeff as a patient of psychologist and neurologist Sigmund Freud. It mentions that the dream of Pankejeff inspired Freud to name him "Wolf Man," in which the interpretation of Freud on the dream had consequences for his analytic theory. Freud would assert a primal scene that psychoanalysis need to explore and that would prove to be essential for the psychic development of the patient.

Lacan and Winnicott are both profoundly psychosocial thinkers who shared an interest in the modern psyche and the alienation often considered endemic to it. From Freud, Lacan took the theory of narcissism (Borch-Jacobsen, 1991), which he developed into a wide-ranging critique of the psychosocial constitution of the modern subject. Winnicott, on the other hand, trained his eye on the environmental conditions necessary for feeling authentic, or 'real,' and the experiences that might produce alienation from this 'true' self, and encourage the formation of a narcissistic 'false' self (Donald W. Winnicott, 1990). In this context, Lacan and Winnicott's shared interest in the metaphor and function of the mirror, which has long provided an entry point for clinical and academic comparisons of their work, is a key point of orientation. This article seeks to explore and unpack the relationship between Lacan and Winnicott's interest in narcissism, alienation and the mirror, locating their thinking in relation to dominant philosophical conceptions of subjectivity and sociological understandings of modernity, dating from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Situating Lacan and Winnicott on this terrain throws their theories of the mirror into relief in important ways. Not only is the 'modern' character of psychoanalysis foregrounded, the contribution it can make to social transformation is also affirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles on psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis teaches that the goal of mourning is for the bereaved eventually to be able to accept the death of a loved one. It may therefore come as a surprise that what religious Jews call Mourner's Kaddish makes no reference whatsoever to death, the deceased, or the bereaved. Instead of having anything to do with the mourning process, this ancient prayer requires the bereaved to utter nothing but words of exaggerated praise for the "great name" of the "Holy One." Psychoanalytically speaking, mourning is displaced because Yahweh needs narcissistic supplies. An "inability to mourn" plagues the history of the Jews–down to the present day. Well into the twentieth century this sort of thinking was maintained in American Reform Judaism's editions of the Union Prayerbook, which encourages congregants to believe in an afterlife of the spiritual soul, which is, again a denial of the finality of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a psychoanalytic analysis of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle as an exploration of obsessional neurosis, the paranoid-schizoid position and the bourgeois family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wilfred Bion briefly discussed Chinese writing some dozen times, attributing to it various counter-intuitive features. A review of these passages suggests they were part of Bion's larger effort to evoke the challenges of bridging communication gaps with patients, where Bion held that the very means of communication itself was at issue. Chinese also helped evoke a sense of mystery in listeners who, like Bion, knew no Chinese. The main source of Bion's Sinology, an influential 1908 essay by Ernest Fenollosa, was broadly discredited by the 1950's, yet Bion propounded it in five countries through the 1970's. Psychoanalysis, not linguistics, was his subject as he used a mystifying intellectual fantasy (of a Chinese cognitive Other) to discuss incomprehension—a state of unknowing common to clinical impasse and to a philosophical mindset. That Bion induced (deliberately or not) a receptively confused mental state in listeners as he discussed written Chinese, is consistent with discerning observations of Bion's presentations by Leo Rangel and Donald Meltzer. Bion's claims about Chinese are largely false; more interestingly, they are largely incoherent, yet he used them again and again. That they have evaded critical scrutiny these fifty years may be due to the same effects they produced in performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leon Wurmser (1931–2020) produced an extensive body of work covering a wide range of theory and psychoanalytic practice. Yet, little has been written on him, perhaps because he is not easily subsumed in traditional academic categories. This essay studies one of the most challenging aspects of Wurmser's oeuvre, namely his polyglot invocation of culture as a means for the deeper expression of psychoanalytic understanding. I explore the logic to Wurmser's exposition of literature, philosophy, and other arts, arguing it goes beyond commonplaces about relationships between psychoanalysis and culture. In fact, Wurmser presents a call to the psychoanalytic world, and, indirectly, lay reader, that multi-lingual "torches" are more than embellishments, but necessary spurs to attentiveness and attunement. Making this case invites the integration of Wurmser into further discussion of the place of humanistic learning in psychoanalytically informed introspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am interested in meaning and how to determine and interpret it in both cultural anthropology and clinical psychoanalysis. In this essay I explore differences and similarities between the project of ascertaining meaning in the two different practices, using the semiotic scheme provided by Charles Morris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life and career of Bernard Paris, the foremost scholar of Third Force Psychology and its applications to literary study, are reviewed. Paris is praised for the openness with which he writes about his personal struggles and for the depth of his insights into literature. In his autobiographical writings, Paris shows how his reading of Karen Horney, in conjunction with his experience of psychotherapy, allowed him to replace his allegiance to George Eliot's self-effacing Religion of Humanity with a sounder value system. The utility of Paris's focus on the tension between rhetoric and mimesis in literary works, as well as his use of the concepts of the implied author and the authorial personality, is underscored. The legitimacy of analyzing the childhoods of literary characters and of considering the author as a historical person is defended as an enhancement of Paris's synchronic approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the apparent more nuance discernment that Hans Loewald's work offers that Sigmund Freud himself seems so hesitant to dig into. It discusses how Loewald focuses on the foundations of psychoanalytic theory, emphasizing what should be the central inquiry, that is, it is not just possible for psychoanalysis to conceive reality for itself, but in fact essential and intrinsic to its nature and goals. It explains how psychoanalysis can be kept as a rich tool for improving reality.

The article looks at bricolage as an activity of the ego and explores its role in the consulting room. It argues that the use of bricolage is completely compatible with evidence-based practice and that the psychoanalytic work undertaken between patient and analyst relies on said modality of thought. Ego is seen as a psychical agent with the capacity to apprehend internal and external reality. It notes that an understanding for bricolage may be as important as respect for scientific processes.

The article discusses the career of anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber as a psychoanalyst. He had been an active lay psychoanalyst from 1920 to 1923 in San Francisco, California. Aside from being a psychoanalyst, Kroeber also served as a the head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Kroeber grew up and studied in New York City. He also received most of his knowledge about psychoanalysis in New York.

A preface to the periodical "American Imago" is presented.

The article focuses on the lack of reliable, relevant observations needed to test psychoanalysis theories and points of view. It emphasizes that theory-neutral clinical observations are not available to test conflicting psychoanalytic theories. It cites the similarity of the history of psychoanalytic with the history of philosophy. It details the rational grounds for altering a theory.

The article reflects on the challenges of being a psychoanalyst. The fundamental principle is regard for otherness, the analyst's profound and genuine respect from the marrow for the authenticity of the patient's self as a unique other, a singular other's self as valid as the analyst's own. One of the most insidious occupational hazards of doing analytic work is the analyst's coming to believe that she or he could live the patient's life better than the patient can.

Correspondence with Fliess initiates in Freud an evolutionary process, equivalent to that which will produce, when it is invented, the psychoanalytic situation. The first letters set up the themes that will be the subject of Freud's self-analysis, particularly in the dream of "Irma's injection." These letters finally evoke the circumstances of the break between Freud and Fliess and the unconscious causes of their disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the correlation between difference and psychic space. Event that results to a process of spatialization; Goals of an insight-oriented approach to treatment; Question governing the interpretation of the transference.

Introduces a series of articles on the perennial psychoanalytic theme of the complex interplay between outer and inner worlds.

Examines the inclusion of the essay 'A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,' by psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, in the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in Great Britain. Reason behind the inclusion of the essay in the publication; Details on the essays included in the publication entitled 'The Subliminal Consciousness'; Discussion on the essay of Freud.

Evaluates the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play 'Hamlet.' Interpretation of the play during the Restoration and through the mid-18th century; Assessment on the book 'Shattered Assumptions'; Main characters of the play.

In a short text published 1916, Freud discusses his patient's neurotic obsession to imagine his intimidating father without a head and with a face on his belly. Freud notes that the hallucination reminds him of the iconography of the ancient myth of Baubo, who is said to have lifted her skirts and exposed herself to the goddess Demeter. Being up to date on archaeological literature, Freud knew that, since 1904, the name had been associated with the peculiar iconography of a group of Hellenistic votive figurines discovered at Priene, modern-day Turkey. What does it mean for Freudto match a turn-of-the-century paternal hang-up "exactly" to ancient figurines showing a grotesque female body? Freud's fits the patient's obsession squarely within his Oedipal master-myth but appeals to a little-known myth about female exhibitionism in order to illustrate it. This paradoxical parallel prompts us to reconsider the relationships within his work between the individual and the general, the ancient and contemporary, and analysis and archaeology-and what role gender plays in all of these. The following essay reads Freud's text in the context of contemporary archaeological debates on Baubo and female obscenity and draws attention to the investments archaeology and psychoanalysis shared in understanding themselves as inheritors of ancient (and implicitly male) rationality. Taking up Freud's interest in J. J. Bachofen's theories of early matriarchies, the essay further suggest that Freud's "Parallel"-essay mobilizes what he himself and many of his contemporaries considered an irrational and female way of thinking as part of a new scientific approach to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writes with strong hostility against the basic misreadings of Freudian psychoanalysis which prevail in some modern quarters of child analysis. Overview of the Anna Freudian understanding of childhood and the unconscious; Objections to the ideas such as those of the present and past unconscious which have no theoretical or therapeutic validity.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Reflections on Truth, Tradition, and the Psychoanalytic Tradition of Truth," by Hanna Segal in the Fall 2006 issue.

A response by Hanna Segal to a letter to the editor regarding her article "Reflections on Truth, Tradition, and the Psychoanalytic Tradition of Truth" in the Fall 2006 issue is presented.