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This paper describes the psychoanalytic treatment of a woman patient during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the setting was profoundly disrupted and was transferred from in-person psychoanalysis to telephone sessions. Drawing on Bleger's formulations on the construction of the analytic frame and on André Green's on the function of the framing structure in the construction and elaboration of phantasy life, the case study shows how, in the absence of the physicality of the setting, the most primitive anxieties about the symbiotic relationship with the mother were expressed and contained in the transference and countertransference in the analysis. The author offers some considerations about the notion of "background of the uncanny", derived from Yolanda Gampel, which draws attention to the challenges when both patient and analyst are inserted into the same traumatic wider context. It is suggested that the production of an art object by the patient during this period represents a step in the elaboration of the work of mourning and towards symbolization.

Repetition compulsion is a psychodynamic concept that explains an attempt to master trauma. This case study attempts to understand the possible meanings of symbol repetition that occurred in the ar...

Schematyczność, rozumiana jako powtorzenie, jest jednym z podstawowych kryteriow podziału literatury na popularną i wysokoartystyczną. Fascynująca wydaje się zatem tworczość pisarza – noblisty, ktora opiera się na obsesyjnie powtarzanych motywach, figurach i wątkach. W tworczości Patricka Modiano nieustannie powracają bowiem schematy powieści kryminalnej oraz klisze przejęte z tradycji literackiej, przede wszystkim francuskiej. Artykuł jest probą odpowiedzi na pytanie: dlaczego i w jaki sposob Patrick Modiano wykorzystuje schemat kryminalny? Wybrane utwory autora (Ulica ciemnych sklepikow, Zagubiona dzielnica, Dora Bruder, Żebyś nie zgubił się w dzielnicy) zostały poddane analizie w kontekście strategii charakterystycznych dla konwencji kryminalnej. Pozwoliła ona wskazać trzy najważniejsze funkcje kryminału w tworczości Modiano; użycie schematu kryminalnego jako: odzwierciedlenia mechanizmow pamięci, skonwencjonalizowanej formy literackiej komunikacji oraz przedstawienia przymusu powtarzania. Przykład tworczości francuskiego noblisty pokazuje, jak kryminał przekracza granice literatury popularnej, co prowadzi nas do pytania, czy tradycyjne kategorie literackie są dziś jeszcze użytecznym narzędziem badawczym.

People often engage in self-repetition-repeating the same story, joke, or presentation across different audiences. While behaving consistently has generally been found to enhance perceptions of authenticity, 10 studies demonstrate that performers who are revealed to be self-repeating are perceived as less authentic. We find convergent evidence that this effect is driven by observers' implicit assumption that social interactions are unique. Self-repetitions violate this assumption, leading observers to judge performers as inauthentic because they are thought to be falsely presenting their performance as unique when it is not. We demonstrate this effect across multiple contexts (politics, entrepreneurship, tour guiding, and comedy), finding that observer awareness of self-repetition decreases perceived authenticity even in situations in which it is normative to repeat a performance and in which repetition is required. The decrease in authenticity is eliminated only when performers overtly acknowledge self-repetition, as performers are no longer viewed as falsely presenting themselves. Moreover, performers who fail to acknowledge their self-repetition are penalized similarly to those who explicitly lie that the performance is unique-an unacknowledged self-repetition is thus seen as a lie by omission. Finally, we recorded repeated job interview responses and found that observers who were unaware of the self-repetition could not discern tangible differences between unrepeated and repeated responses. However, when observers believed that they were viewing a self-repetition, they judged the interviewees as less authentic. Together, our findings provide insight into how people assess the authenticity of self-presentational behaviors and the implicit assumptions that influence social judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

This paper explores basic tasks involved in the supervisory process, and frequent problems in carrying out these tasks. Basic tasks include clarification of mutual expectations of supervisor and supervisee; the establishment of mutual trust as fundamental for countertransference analysis; "parallel process" exploration and clarification of explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions by both supervisor and supervisee. Frequent problems include the extent of initial evaluation of patients; problems of intervening "without memory or desire"; transference and countertransference diagnoses and interpretive consequences; clarification of affective dominance; interventive shifts with severe psychopathology, and realistic goals of patient, supervisee and supervisor. Limitations to supervision include specific psychopathologies, cognitive limitations, and a generally restricted capacity for empathy by the supervisee.

The present essay looks to add to the body of literature that seeks to clarify the nature of vengeance and evaluate it morally. However, unlike previous philosophical investigations of vengeance, my essay examines it not from the standpoint of impersonal justice but from the perspective of the one who seeks it, to determine whether it is good for the would-be avenger. The values I measure it by are fulfillment and self-knowledge. The paper has two major parts. In the first, I argue that vengefulness is motivated by two (potentially overlapping) ends: allaying a sense of vulnerability and preserving a positive self-conception. The emotional benefits of a vengeful disposition, I claim, come at the expense of self-knowledge. They are therefore unstable and prone to give way when vengefulness is translated into action. In the second part, I try to substantiate this claim by examining two criticisms of vengeance: that its pursuit can diminish the avenger by consuming him and that it is self-defeating. Framing vengefulness within broader psychoanalytic accounts of the repetition compulsion and projection, I endorse versions of both criticisms that tie vengeance’s failure to provide fulfillment to some of the ways in which it occludes self-knowledge.

Dr. Oldoini’s compelling case of Greta, organized conceptually as it is around the themes of traumatic development and the repetition compulsion, calls to mind the neglected writings of Paul Russell. I invoke, and commend to the attention of the readership, Russell’s coherent and clinically useful theory of the repetition compulsion based on his concept of affective competence and the rendering of the repetition, over time, in the treatment process.

The Repetition Compulsion has been the source of much controversy and perplexity. From it's clinical introduction in 1914 in Remembering, Repeating and Working Through to it's metapsychological elaboration in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it has occupied a central position in Freud's thinking. Especially in regard to his later work, it can be seen to be intrinsic to his final dual instinct theory, his theories of the Death Instinct, trauma, memory, binding and action and to the clinical challenges and theoretical changes that led to the formulation of his second topography. This paper will trace the evolution of the concept in Freud and in certain post-Freudian authors, especially Edward Bibring, Winnicott and Scarfone.

Through reexamination of Freud's thinking on the "compulsion to repeat", including detailed study of his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), this paper brings to the fore a central tension in Freud's thinking on the roles narcissism and love in his foundational view of the person. While Freud conceptualizes the person as self-serving, aiming primarily to maximize personal satisfaction in accordance with the "pleasure principle," he develops an alternative view of the person as primarily loving, desiring to truly encounter the other and reality, even if painful, and guilty when he fails to do so (largely because of conflicting narcissistic/destructive aims). This basic loving desire is associated with Eros and the life instincts, which, counter to what is commonly thought, is what Freud ultimately posits as lying beyond the pleasure principle. From this perspective, narcissistic pleasures become associated with death. The paper goes on to show how while Freud struggled to conceptually ground the view of the person as contending with his desire to love and inevitable inner obstacles to it, Kleinian psychoanalysis takes this view as basic and develops it further. One significant development finds expression in ideas on how the desire to love is not only non-narcissistic, but, rather, is self-sacrificing. Clinical implications are noted.

This article presents ten lessons to help guide partner choice and relationships. A mismatch between ideal and actual partners can be very costly and stressful for both individuals and society. The famous injunction to “know thyself” is highly relevant in this context, as self-knowledge will affect partner choice. The ten lessons cover perennial themes: making the right choice; the pressure to marry; fear of loneliness; the dangers of neurotic co-dependency; trust; respect; forgiveness; constructive communication; shared and personal space; and the existential challenges of growing up (and old) together. Rather than looking for Mr. or Ms. Perfect we should look for Mr. or Ms. Good Enough. The couple system should be seen as an emotional container, within which each partner engages in mutual mirroring, holding and dialogue. Furthermore, when children come into the relationship, the partners need to be very careful not to focus on their demands at the cost of their own relationship. It is pointed out that the best way to raise healthy and happy kids is to maintain a healthy and happy partnership.

Psychoanalysis has always been full of diversity and controversy, in the theoretical field and especially in the plasticity and variety of its modalities and approaches. Yet all these theories are based on the premise that individuals compulsively repeat their old psycho-organic content, both in their personal lives and in analysis; the premise of Relational Family Therapy is that old emotional, behavioral and bodily complications must first be repeated before being fully processed so that something new can be created.

This paper considers Freud's 1920 text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in light of Jacques Derrida's critical commentary on it in The Post Card. Against the deconstructive reading that highlights the performative aspects of Freud's speculative remarks, David-Ménard reads Freud's theory of the death drive as an epistemological and experimental hypothesis necessary for giving an account of the complexity and diversity of the clinical phenomenon of repetition in psychoanalysis. Though the death drive never appears locatable as such in the various examples given by Freud, it is nonetheless accessible in the constellation of differences produced by traumatic dreams, children's games, etc.

This article argues that despite the genre status of the Mad Max films as post-apocalyptic sf, the driving force behind many of the images and concerns of the films derives from aspects of Australian history since colonisation. The article compares the way these themes appear in the Mad Max films to the way they are explored in ‘Crabs’, a 1972 short story by Australian writer Peter Carey. This story was later filmed as Dead End Drive-In, a film which itself draws on the aesthetic already developed through the Mad Max films. I use Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion to explore ways in which history is both remembered and deliberately forgotten through imagery that is dislocated from the past to the ‘future’ and thus in effect to a timeless, ever-present or ever-recurring time. The article also argues that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a space that is populated by a selected, heterogenerous group such inmates in a prison), describes the reality of the penal colonies forming the origins of settler A...

Sexual compulsivity is a developmental adaptation to neglect or abuse that leads to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional consequences as well as impairment in capacity for intimacy. Recovery from sexual compulsivity involves integration of various psychotherapy components needed to address underlying trauma, repetition compulsion, developmental roadblocks, compulsive behavioral reenactments, emotion dysregulation, and intimacy disorder. Effective treatment involves trauma work, symptom-specific treatment, and reconstruction of an erotic template or love map that reduces objectification, compulsion, and variance while affording opportunities for corrective emotional experience, skills development, and enhancement of choices for intimacy.

This article explores the value of expanding the imagination of the patient to create therapeutic change. It examines how and why Embodied Imagination, a technique of dreamwork developed by Robert Bosnak, is able to achieve such an expansion. Describing this structured practice in detail, the article explicates how Embodied Imagination helps the patient recontextualize early implicit memories and change repetitive, dysfunctional patterns, essentially affecting the repetition compulsion. Among many factors, the patient develops more flexible and fluid thinking and greater ability to learn from experience, fostering the development of new positive patterns. Confirming neuroscience research is offered, including the neurological underpinnings of the imagination and the capacity to change. Connections are also made among Embodied Imagination, implicit memories, and creativity. Dreams of both the author and her patients illustrate the technique and show how and why Embodied Imagination can create thera...

This paper centres on Habermas's judgement that when Freud assesses psychoanalysis as a natural science, this constitutes a scientific self-misunderstanding. The author discusses Brenner's conviction that Freud's view is not a misunderstanding but is true for psychoanalysis and rejects his conclusion. In the author's view, Freud's assessment of psychoanalysis must be seen as a misunderstanding whose basis lies in its subject. Unconscious figures assert themselves under the repetition compulsion in the same manner as natural laws, each of which asserts itself beyond individual consciousness. It was the discovery of the unconscious that led Freud to conceive of psychoanalysis as a natural science and it seems that this conception is rooted in the structural identity between unconscious and natural processes. Freud's misunderstanding of pseudo-nature as nature seems to be indebted to his energy concept. As it is impossible to deduce psychic energies and their distribution by means of the psychoanalyt...

The purpose of this study is to identify the expression methods of uncanny images shown in contemporary fashion through the visual expression methods of plastic arts. The study results are as following. First, there is a concept-forming element of 'The return of Repressed', which is a psychological mechanism for generating uncanny sets to the component of 'repression' and 'return'. 'Repression' herein consisted of 'unconsciousness', 'the other', and 'anxiety', while the re-turn was composed of 'trauma' and 'repetition compulsion'. Second, there are visual expression methods of the uncanny in contemporary art. The subject of 'repressed things' was expressed as grotesque and having a terrible look. 'Fragmented body' was analyzed as 'dismantling' by mutila-tion, 'combination' placing cut body parts in other places, and 'damage' suffering from an illness or accident. 'Fear of death' was shown as 'anatomy' reminiscent of death and 'iconography of dea-th' meaning return of the dead. 'Post-human' was a surrealistic being such as a monster and mechanized human, and was analyzed as 'gene variation' and 'cyborg'. Third, the methods of vis-ual expression of the uncanny reflected on contemporary fashion was analyzed as 'fragmented body', 'fear of death', and 'post-human'. 'Fragmented body' appeared as the object reminiscent of the fragmented body, 'dismantling and combination of the body', and 'damage of the body' through the distortion of the clothing construction principle. 'Fear of death' visualized the charac-teristic elements of the subject reminiscent of death as 'iconography of death' and 'symbolic object of death' through the motif. 'Post-human' was the description of the subject beyond the body's function and form, and was shown as 'gene variation' and 'cyborg'. Key words: contemporary art(), contemporary fashion( ), sigmund freud( ), the return of repressed( ), uncanny( )

False allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace can be made for a variety of reasons, some of which may fall into the realm of ‘factitious’ claims. Factitious sexual harassment claims are those in which the plaintiff's wish for victim designation is a major driving force behind the claim. Being aware of potential internal and external incentives in these evaluations may be of assistance to the mental health expert when considering alternative explanations for the plaintiff's perception of events. This article proposes the use of psychodynamic principles to aid the forensic evaluator in considering the conscious and unconscious factors that may be operating to contribute to the development of a false sexual harassment claim. The concepts of repetition compulsion, displacement, denial, misattribution and reaction formation will be used as a framework to explore potential internal incentives operating in a plaintiff to bring about such claims.

Despite the technical brilliance and philosophical resonance of his dramas and novels, Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959) remains a neglected figure in AngloAmerican Germanistik. Jahnn positioned himself as a literary outsider both in his earlydramas, inwhich heexploresthemesinvolving brutality andhomoeroticism,as wellasinhislifeasanexileandpacifist.Jahnn'sunfinished novelfrom1929revolves around the eponymous anti-hero Perrudja, who is defined by his own outsider status. The world's richest man, with no knowledge or memories of his parents, he lives alone in the mountains of Norway, isolated by his great wealth and unfulfilled romantic yearnings.Perrudja (1929) is a bewildering novel consisting of constantly shifting narratological strategies that make it difficult to retain the roten Faden of the primary narrative. This red thread is essentially the story of how Perrudja pursues romantic absolution by seeking the hand of Signe, the most beautiful woman in the Gespenstertal. Having obtained her hand but failed to consummate the marriage, Perrudja then seeks to convert his great wealth into a pan-national political movement that will promulgate one last war, after which a peaceful utopia will be inaugurated.Jahnn both establishes Perrudja as an anti-hero and warns the reader against identifying too strongly with his anti-hero in the opening pages of the novel. He introduces his protagonist as a man possessing "viele starke Eigenschaften, die dem Menschen eigen sein konnen-eine ausgenommen, ein Held zu sein" (7). This inability to act heroically will define the conflicts to which Perrudja is subject throughout the novel. Jahnn continues this meta-narrative by stating that "wir gros Unrecht tun, indem wir einen Masstab aufrichten, der nur die Gestalt abbildet, die wir sein mochten, eine Puppe, ein Gotze, auch wenn wir ihn Gott nennen" (8), thus warning the readerthatPerrudjawill fail tolive up toany expectationsthathesetsfor himself orthatthereaderbringstothetext.Bydoing so,Jahnn humanizes Perrudja's inability to act heroically, through an apriorisubversion of genre expectations.In this essay, I argue that Perrudja's status as outsider is the performance of a repetition compulsion that has its roots in trauma. This trauma, which inhabits Perrudja's unconscious, is symbolically rendered in his consciousness via his self-identification as a "gelbe Blume," an identification that condemns him not only to loneliness and alienation, but also to compulsive neurosis. Perrudja repeatedly performs his own alienation within a homosocial triangle, in which, despite obvious material advantages, he always plays the role of vanquished rival. It is only with respect to his special relationship with animals that Perrudja is able to overcome the ritualized compulsive repetition of repressed trauma and to live authentically.This study fills a gap in studies of Jahnn, as no scholar has examined Perrudja's adult neuroses from the perspective of childhood trauma. While Joachim Wohlleben and Breon Mitchell situate Perrudja in the canon of international modernism, Thomas Freeman concerns himself with how Jahnn demonstrates his fascination with myth within the structure of the novel, while reconciling opposing creative and destructiveforcesviahisSchopfungsprinzip(Mythisch31).Dirck LinckseesPerrudja asan "Anti-Entwicklungsroman" (183) in which theauthor givestheherono familial background because he considers the family structure to be an agent for the "Domestizierung zur schlechten Vernunft" (170). In Die Kunst der Uberschreitung, Reiner Niehoff investigates Jahnn's tendency to transgressmoral, societal, and literary convention. Roger Kingerlee, on the other hand, reads Jahnn's anti-hero as a failed model of masculinity and a "critique of male destructiveness" (360). Kingerlee refers to Perrudja's "traumatic upbringing" (253). However, none of these scholars investigates the roots of that trauma in order to elucidate Perrudja's adult neuroses, which I aim to do in the following. …

Although Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate presents a careful analysis of why the fight over climate change will have to take on our current system of capitalism, her lack of psychoanalytic knowledge undermines her efforts to promote positive social change. Since she does not take into account the reasons for which people engage in self-destructive acts and fantasies, she is unable to explain why we continue to march towards our own environmental self-destruction. Using the Freudian concepts of masochism, the death drive, and the repetition compulsion, I argue for a psychoanalytic model for social activism against climate change and neoliberal capitalism.

Chapters 11 and 12 discuss potentially far-reaching consequences of the clustered-minds multiverse for psychological phenomena as well as experimentation in the social sciences (Part IV of the book). Chapter 11 starts with the phenomenon of repetition compulsion from psychoanalysis; specifically, and without wanting to downplay the sadness of those experiences, it asks the question how a neurotic person might be able to ‘manipulate’ his environment so successfully as to always get the ‘right’ people involved in his life doing the ‘right’ things to him so that certain experiences can be repeated. As will be shown, an answer to this question is feasible within the framework of the multiverse. The chapter continues with the exciting phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecies in several spheres of life and will discuss explanations for those phenomena that have been proposed in the literature, e.g., multiple equilibria in game theory and economics. The clustered-minds multiverse will turn out to offer a general framework containing those phenomena as well as some of the explanations that have been suggested for them.

The performance of Sanctuary exists on a spatio-temporal liminal tightrope, dangling precariously somewhere between the past, present and future. The laws, wars, histories and tensions of Somalia, Zimbabwe, Northern Ireland, Britain and Ireland play domineering roles in this performance. The processes, privileges and discriminations of each territory are inscribed on the performers’ embodied territories and the potential for their futures. The performers tell their personal testimonies of past events in stylised and rehearsed sequences communicating directly to the audience. One of the dominant motivations and outcomes for this production, from process to performance, is the potential for affect and transformation on the audience, as well as for affective and transformative experience for the performers while they share their personal histories.

To begin with, Heart of Darkness has always been challenging for every critic who feels the urge to take either pro-colonialist or contra-colonialist positions. However, herein the main focus would be set less upon the binary stances regarding the protagonist and his leanings toward the natives. Based on the indissociability of the psychological-cum-cultural operations, this study lends itself best to an amalgam of Freudian together with Bhabhian theories such as the dreamwork, repetition-compulsion, mimickry and hybridization. That is to say, it deserves attention to see the colonialist ideology through the dissecting lens of psychoanalysis. Besides, Tiffin’s subversive counter-discourse would provide a valuable source to this study. The present study aims to explore the underlying motive for Marlow’s narration and his interaction with the natives free from a slippery evaluation of the narratives prime facie. Since any consideration of the native-settler relation without taking the mutual impact of one on the other would only reveal a limited angle to the events, Marlow’s narration will be less concerned with the Hegelian subject-non-subject dichotomy than the intersection of both, however disguised. Of particular note is that such intersection gives rise to the ensuing ambivalence at the heart of the text, Marlow’s account of events, thence the clash of perspectives, whether fictional or critical, can be discerned. Eventually, this hybrid ambivalence casts the text into a hybrid existence that would account for the narrators’ neurosis on the one hand and the contradictory critiques on the other.

Research demonstrates that placement stability is highly correlated to better emotional and cognitive outcomes for looked after children. Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. From the beginning and built into the psycho-educational model was the requirement for supervision, built in as a reliable container. Foster carers, exposed regularly and sometimes continuously to the young person's behaviour are by extension witnessing the traumatic events too. Some foster carers have been separated from their own parents without the necessary attunement of other adults, or may have unresolved experiences of abuse or neglect themselves. However, in contemporary fostering practice, there are often very limited resources to help foster carers process this experience for themselves or to think about the experiences of the looked after children who are living with them.

SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

A triptych of clinical cases binds together a new frame for understanding the relationship vacuum that lies at the heart addiction to drugs. Beginning with a case anecdote about an amphetamine user who was troubled with an underlying psychotic condition, and much taken with David Bowie’s song Space Oddity, the case draws attention to the emptiness in which the client's social relations were conducted. Bion's thoughts on the challenge of linking drug addiction and psychosis are refracted in his personal copy of Rosenfeld’s (1965) book Psychotic States, where Bion made copious notes in the margins and coined the term ‘concentration for annihilation’. Some of these notes throw new light on Bion's approach to working with psychotic fixation which he derived from working with clients using drugs as well as those who were suffering psychotic states. Particular attention is given to one of Bion’s clients whose repetition-compulsion appeared to create what we might think of as a ‘psychotic vacuum’. In the final c...

This paper is an exploration of anger and its potential to impede or facilitate creative or analytic process. Conceptually I consider anger in terms of cognitive-affective linking and unlinking, and transference-countertransference enactments, and the repetition compulsion as an encoded “second language,” with reference to neuroscience research findings. At its experiential center, this paper tells the story of a story that could not be told about anger in a distressed clinical process.

This essay is an interpretation of Nietzsche’s enigmatic idea of the Eternal Return of the Same in the context of his life rather than of his philosophy. Nietzsche never explained his ‘abysmal thought’ and referred to it directly only in a few passages of his published writings, but numerous interpretations have been made in secondary literature. None of these, however, has examined the significance of this thought for Nietzsche, the man. The idea belongs to a moment of ecstasy which Nietzsche experienced during the summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria, in the Swiss Alps. Like Dante, in ‘the middle of life’, he walked down the wooded Alpine slope and entered his own Inferno. On the anniversary of long-buried loss and pain, his psyche was temporarily flooded by archetypal imagery. This event is interpreted in the light of Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion, the uncanny, and the oedipal confrontation with the unconscious. From the turbulent and frightful experience, a symbol of transfiguration emerged in the shape of Eternal Return. Its likeness to Mandala, a Jungian archetype of wholeness and the self, is striking. In the years that followed, Nietzsche produced his greatest works that assured him an unassailable place in Western philosophy. And yet, there was something disturbing about this dream-thought, and Nietzsche shuddered at any mention of the thought. Linking it with the head of Medusa in his unpublished notes, he hinted at its petrifying quality. The beguiling beauty of Medusa makes her an ambiguous symbol of exhilaration, as well as terror. Under her captivating gaze, a hero’s journey towards selfhood becomes a journey into the night of madness.

Psychodynamic theories emphasize unconscious dynamic processes and contents that are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. Empirical studies in normative and clinical populations are beginning to elucidate the neural basis of some psychodynamic concepts like repression, suppression, dissociation, and repetition compulsion. S. Freud wrote that human behavior is influenced by unconscious processes, which work defensively to manage socially unacceptable ideas, motives, desires, and memories which might otherwise cause distress. Suppression, the voluntary form of repression proposed by S. Freud, is the conscious process of pushing unwanted information out of awareness and is thus more amenable to controlled experiments than repression. Dissociation is a psychological state in which certain thoughts, emotions, sensations, or memories are separated from the rest of the psyche. The repetition compulsion is one of Freud's most seminal and important ideas and is a primary tenet and guiding force of current psychodynamic counseling approaches.

This chapter examines the cyclone as a metaphor for cycles of displacement in the novel Macadam Dreams by Afro-Caribbean woman writer Gisele Pineau. Sherratt-Bado links Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of catastrophic Caribbean historical cycles with Sigmund Freud’s concept of the repetition compulsion, adapting these for the context of Guadeloupe. The chapter analyses Pineau’s depiction of the material and psychological effects of neocolonial trauma within the fictional shantytown Savane Mulet. Sherratt-Bado considers the intertwined relationship between ecological and human cycles of destruction within the text. The chapter posits that the inhabitants of the Savane Mulet slum repeat destructive behavioural patterns instead of reconciling themselves to past trauma and moving forward—until an intergenerational group of women band together to break out of these cycles.

In Logique du Fantasme, Lacan argues that the compulsion to repeat does not obey the same discharge logic as homeostatic processes. Repetition installs a realm that is categorically different from the one related to homeostatic pleasure seeking, a properly subjective one, one in which the mark "stands for," "takes the place of," what we have ventured to call "an event," and what only in the movement of return, in what Lacan calls a "thinking of repetition," confirms and ever reconfirms this point of no return, which is also a qualitative cut and a structural loss. The kind of "standing for" Lacan intends here with the concept of repetition is certainly not something like an image or a faithful description. No, what Lacan wishes to stress is that this mark is situated at another level, at another place, it is "entstellt," and as such, it is punctually impinging upon the bodily dynamics without rendering the event, without having an external meta-point of view, but cutting across registers according to a logics that is not the homeostatic memory logics. This paper elaborates on this distinction on the basis of a confrontation with what Freud says about the pleasure principle and its beyond in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and also takes inspiration from Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. We argue that Lacan's theory of enjoyment takes up and generalizes what Freud was after in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the Wiederholungszwang, and pushes Freud's thoughts to a more articulated point: to the point where a subject is considered to speak only when it has allowed the other, through discourse, to have impacted and cut into his bodily pleasure dynamics., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Stressed mice perseverate. Stressed humans perseverate. Freud described in what I had feel was his only true “science fiction thriller” – Beyond the Pleasure Principle – how traumatized patients perseverated, that is they persisted in repeating “un pleasure”. It is I think rather unlikely that the “Death Instinct” is at the etiologic root of these behaviors for either mice or for men. Rather it may be stress and neural circuits that favor the locus ceruleus, the amygdala, and the dorsal striatum. And in order to impact these pathways, it may be necessary to intervene at the moment of anxiety. This paper describes just such active interventions at moments of anxiety – interventions informed by psychotherapy but very much expanding the boundaries of where and how psychotherapy should be done. The work is described with two patients both of whom persisted in repeating “unpleasure”.

Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat – something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual, than the pleasure principle which it overrides. – S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , 1920, p. 23. Freud's 1920 monograph Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks a turning point in his idea of the most basic forces governing mental life. In it he asserts the existence of a genuine exception to the pleasure principle that he regards as sufficiently far-reaching to require a restructuring of the theory. The exception consists of people's compulsive repetition of previous experiences in the absence of any evident payoff: when people return repeatedly to horrific moments of their lives, as soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder might do in recurrently dreaming a catastrophic shelling in the trenches, they bring on an experience with no redeeming value, according to Freud. Called the repetition compulsion, the tendency toward these repetitions can override the pleasure principle. Freud extrapolates from the repetition compulsion to the existence of a death instinct, a trend toward quiescence and dissolution present in all living things: life first arose from inorganic material, and individual living entities return to that state at death. Death and inorganicity also represent the complete absence of stimulation; individuals verge on returning to that state on a smaller scale insofar as they strive toward the reduction of stimulation, the aim expressed by the pleasure principle and what Freud will present as its refinements. Finally, introducing a new dualism as the overarching dynamic of mental life, Freud conceives the death instinct as operating in opposition to the life instincts, which by the end of the monograph subsume both the sexual and ego instincts of his former schematic. The sexual and ego instincts, although thus grouped together, retain the potential for conflict Freud previously observed them to have (see Chapter 5). This work is, by Freud's own admission, one of his most speculative and far-fetched, especially the portion in which he derives and then justifies the death instinct and posits some of its consequences; the narrative is one of his most obscure. But psychological insight and intriguing turns of argument abound in its pages, which repay patient attention .

As a film maker, Lee Chang Dong stands out from most Korean film makers who work within the trappings of genre films. To be sure, Lee has also used the trappings of genre films, such as noire and melodrama, but primarily as a tool to communicate with film audience. In his most recent film "Poetry", Lee seems to have even stripped even the minimal trappings of genre film. Lee commands the audience to self-reflect and work towards their own conclusions by denying them the illusory identification on screen. In this way, Lee`s works are counter cinema. Lee achieves a distancing effect using such filmic apparatuses as hand-held camera, fantasy, mise en abyme, and returned gaze. Through these filmic apparatuses, Lee exposes the re-presentation of text and compels his audience to see the historical and political contexts of the text. In this study, I make the case that Lee Chang Dong`s film making is an act of repetition compulsion that cultivates ethical reflection, through symbolization of the invisible realities.

The article is devoted to an exploration of the neglect of the whole person in describing what takes place in analysis. Without reference to the whole person, the humanism within the analytic situation is frequently absent; the question of finding a way to live with one's vulnerabilities and traumas is not addressed. The author suggests two major reasons for this situation: the adherence to the canons of science of the enlightenment and the lack of attention given to the transformation of the repetition compulsion into one's narrative which necessitates living with narcissistic injuries, vulnerabilities, and helplessness. Clinical vignettes are offered to demonstrate the author's argument.

Clinical work shows again and again what large role the affect of resentment (alias unforgiveness) plays in psychopathology. It is not a simple affect and can be recognized as one important way of trying to solve early and late conflicts, but one that leads to a constant renewal of such conflicts. It has therefore a peculiar and special relationship to repetition compulsion. It is not only with patients that we encounter its intense and drive-like power of motivation, but we hit upon its presence in families and in social institutions. Political leaders owe their power of persuasion often, maybe mostly, to the skillful play on widespread and sometimes contradictory resentments; their own often palpably burning resentment may serve as a magnetically sensitive instrument resonating to the popular and multiply caused sense of resentment. Furthermore, it was Nietzsche and Scheler who drew attention to the degree of resentment which animates the morality of the West, particularly that of Christianity. Antisemi...

Luisa is seen as deeply disconnected from her own thoughts, feelings, and initiatives, as reflected in both the therapist's and patient's experience of disconnection from each other. Examples are given of Luisa's idealization of her family, her polarized thinking, and her repetitive patterns of interacting as evidence for the presence of a repetition compulsion. The author's understanding of the dynamics of this compulsion is presented by referring to Tomkins' decontamination script, in which the repetition of painful affects is not conceptualized as the goal, but rather as the unanticipated consequence of a failed strategy. The central features of a decontamination script are described, namely that it manages the affect of disgust, in which the core experience is that good scenes that have turned bad, and that it entails a maximizing–minimizing strategy in which an attempt to decontaminate an exaggerated sense of badness is made by seeking nothing less than perfection, and is thereby doomed to fail. The ...

Terror, fascination, uncertainty: a reading of freud’s essay das unheimliche - Freud begun writing Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny, 1919) while he was writing Totem and Taboo, and concluded it interrupting his writing of Jenzeit der Lustprinzip (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920). Das Unheimliche is seen as a chapter of a larger work, whose other chapters are the two over mentioned works and those on Leonardo (1910) and on Michleangelo (1914). Das Unheimliche is considered the expression of Freud’s attempt to overcome an obstacle which prevented him to formulate the law of repetition compulsion: the obstacle rising from his experience of the works of art of Italian Renaissance and of their opening the internal space of uncertainty. It is maintained that the contemporary significance of Freud’s work lies in the result of that attempt. KEY WORDS: uncanny, terror, art, new, uncertainty

The viewing of the film "The Counterfeiters" (2007), allows some considerations about the theme of authenticity in therapeutic relationships. This paper proposes differences between falseness and authenticity. Falseness should not necessarily be thought of as reciprocal of authenticity, because falseness can also have an authentic function. It's proposed, therefore, that authenticity should be considered as a process, while falseness as one of many factors of the process. The process of repetition compulsion (Freud, 1920) shall be considered the reciprocal of the process of authenticity. Key Words: Authenticity; Falseness; Process; Function; Factors.

Based on a six-year doctoral research, the author carries out a historical, epistemological and paradigmatic assessment of the controversial concept of the death instinct. The author analyses this notion's speculative nature; its relation with the second principle of thermodynamics; the feasibility of a return to an inorganic state; the death drive's metaphorical and isomorphic uses, as well as its theoretical and doctrinaire approaches; its relationship with repetition compulsion and masochism; the influence of Freud 's scientific background on its formulation; and its context-dependent meaning. Although this paper stems mainly from the theoretical aspects of the study, it also offers some clinical thoughts on the basis of a clinical vignette. The author stresses the underlying healing aspects of repetition in the analytic situation. Next, he presents concise comments on his empirical research on the current professional usage of the death drive in the Spanish psychoanalytical community. This research covered more than 27% of Spanish psychoanalysts (IPA) and psychotherapists (EFPP). The essay's conclusions point to the ambiguous character of the death drive concept and its literal unacceptability and the absence of consistent arguments for its acceptance.

The relational marital paradigm presumes that those partners who trigger the strongest impulses of attraction and passionate feelings of love in each other are those who are most likely to marry. However, with time these feelings also awaken memories of the most horrible conflicts and nightmares experienced in the family of origin. The subconscious intention is that the primary drama will, this time, be resolved with more positive outcomes. Relational marital therapy, therefore, sets a new milestone in understanding. It is a different approach to therapeutic practice that is based on the therapeutic relationship/alliance, which addresses and resolves the deepest psychobiological states and affects and brings new potential for better quality of relationships.

IT'S ALWAYS THE SAME PATTERN. I produce a proposal for a conference, slamming out the major idea and chief evidence in five to seven hundred words. Before writing the paper--or as a means of putting off writing the paper--I then "prepare": I read, I take notes, I look at books of theory regardless of how tangential they might be, I read things I've read before (rather than re-reading the notes I took on them the first time). Somewhere in this process I'll also re-encounter the primary text, sure I'll discover that winning quotation, that richly overdetermined moment when new insights will tumble forth, a new and strong(er) theory will emerge, a definitive problem will have been identified. Once I've convinced myself that I've drunk deeply enough of the Pierian spring in question or when the conference is coming so close that I'm beginning to feel hysterical, I write the paper. Ten pages, double-spaced; no more, no less. Then I compare the completed conference paper to the original proposal to find exactly the same structures of thought, the same argumentative ideas keyed to the same moments in the text. It turns out that I had been ready to write from the beginning, but that after almost twenty years in the profession I cannot, will not, remember that I was ready to write. The combination of imposter syndrome (where I must read everything in order not to be caught out) and procrastination (where I must absorb without generating) has produced the habitual, compulsive detour of over-researching before producing my own text. Do not hear me to speak against the importance of deep reading, responsible research, or an overall resistance to the commodity production machine that can sometimes be academia. Rather, it's the psychological texture of all of this that I want to mediate on. For as soon as I write those words "habitual, compulsive detour," the subject matter of my thoughts also becomes their method: I am compulsively and habitually taken to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and to Peter Brooks's argument about narrative as the mandatory detour we take from the inexorability of the end, of death, in order to produce through the death drive a "finished" narrative, a story or a thesis that finds completion on its own terms (Brooks). In this sense, my procrastination is my compulsive circling around the terminus of my own essay, my own completed offering. I will not die until my sacrifice is mature or until my gift is ready for exchange, my symbolic debt perfectly imagined. And to do this I must ignore--or rather forget--that the work of thinking has already been done. I must repeatedly and compulsively ignore that my new note-taking often replicates word for word what my earlier notes said, making me less like Wordsworth's organic poet and more like Poe's raven. In short, I must experience again and again the ways in which forgetting is a crucial part of research, or writing, and of writing later--that is, of procrastination. But am I really talking about procrastination here? Don't those words "habitual" and "compulsive," words that I said took me directly to the repetition compulsion, also take me away from procrastination and into the very heart of what I want to say? Isn't the Freudian mechanism really a strategy for getting the job done, for meeting the deadline? As my colleague Matthew Rowlinson has suggested, the agency of forgetting in procrastination is a strategy to replicate the pleasure of reading the material again, as if for the first time. Procrastination is in some respects a guilty pleasure, if "guilt" can be said to accrue around the responsible doing of one's job as researcher and thinker. Perhaps then there is no such thing as procrastination. Or, that "procrastination" as we use the term is misleading, for if we ask what we are doing under the sign of "procrastination" we find that we are often doing things that enable the completion of the primary task. For example, producing this essay in its first (oral) version shamed me into completing another piece of work that was due weeks before this one and that I had used "the procrastination talk" as a means of avoiding. …

Because it ... den[ies] the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: "In reality, who am I?" Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth I was ... being transformed into a young woman with a future. What I was most interested in was myself and what I would become. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not Introduction In World Memory, a collection of essays on trauma, memory, and witnessing in global contexts, Jill Bennett and I argued that trauma studies has been circumscribed by its predominant focus on Euro-American events and experiences and particularly the Holocaust. We called for a transformation of the field from a monocultural discipline grounded in a psychoanalytic methodology to a "mode of enquiry that can inform the study of memory within a changing global context." To facilitate this transformation, we advocated that trauma scholars engage with "the multicultural and diasporic nature of contemporary culture," and that postcolonial critics engage with trauma studies to develop frameworks for analyzing the traumatic legacies of colonialism (5). Our concern was not simply that trauma studies was impoverished by failing to address non-Western memories of trauma and loss. Rather, we were concerned that opportunities for understanding the historical traumas and sufferings of other cultures as transmitted through truth commissions, literature, film, and visual art were being denied by the Western orientation of trauma studies. If "trauma's address beyond itself" was indeed, as Cathy Caruth proposed, to function "as a means of moving out of a 'historical isolation,'" it would be necessary for literary and cultural critics to engage with diverse testimonial practices and cultural languages of trauma (11). In recent years, trauma studies has become increasingly global, although there is still, arguably, limited dialogue regarding the core concepts and frameworks of postcolonial theory and trauma theory. In this essay, I pursue the project of "wording" trauma studies through a reading of Tsitsi Dangarembga's recent novel The Book of Not (2006), which addresses issues of trauma, colonialism, and denial during the violent transformation from white-minority rule in Rhodesia in the 1970s to an independent Zimbabwe in the 1980s. This novel, a compelling contribution to the contemporary literature of trauma, expands the canon beyond Western experiences, introducing new voices, subjectivities, and legacies of colonial trauma. At the same time, it enables critics to ask to what extent Western trauma theory provides a productive lens through which to address issues of postcolonialism, racism, and identity. As I write in April 2007, stories about the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, the desperate state of its people, and the brutalities being perpetrated against opponents of the Mugabe regime feature regularly in the international media, a potent reminder of how the unresolved legacies of colonial trauma haunt the global future. Along with novels such as Yvonne Vera's Stone Virgins (2002), The Book of Not is part of a recent flowering of Zimbabwean women's writing, that is concerned with, among other things, the war of liberation and its after-effects. (1) Much of the historical and fictional literature of the Zimbabwean war has been written by men and has obscured women's experiences of war (Lyons 26). Whereas Mothers of the Revolution presents oral testimony from Zimbabwean women involved in the war, Dangarembga innovatively uses irony, humor, and farce to dramatize the absurdities of racism in a colonial society and the impediments to witnessing it, thereby bringing into visibility what is unspeakable in (post)colonial Zimbabwe. The novel dramatizes the narrator's struggle to break out of a repetition compulsion, manifested in her obsessive desire for recognition, which continually leaves her deflated and depressed. …