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By revisiting the last years of a long psychoanalytic treatment of a female patient, a psychoanalyst reflects on her own development as a clinician and on the changes in her experience of psychoanalytic generativity. An increasing ability to understand patient's shifts between creativity and destructiveness brings about a different understanding of the process of mourning, while the shared aging of the analytic dyad highlights the difficulty of ending an analysis that has become a way of life.

The concept of Trauma in psychoanalysis has suffered from overuse and inconsistent use. A review of Freud's writings beginning with the Project indicates that from the perspective of the impact upon psychic processes, Freud held a more consistent view of the concept that, if recognized, can help avoid the often fruitless etiological debates of internal vs. external cause, intrinsic (drive) vs. extrinsic (reality) factors, etc. What is more helpful from a clinical perspective, is to view the various challenges that a given set of potentially trauma-inducing circumstances might pose for an individual, consider each individual's highly subjective mode of experiencing and responding to those challenges and take into account the supports offered in any instance by the specific familial, social or cultural surround. Each set of experiences that will be qualified as 'trauma' that any of us undergoes will to some extent be understood and integrated into our particular subjectivities according to our unique, subjective organizations of self, understandings of and position in the world.

This paper highlights some aspects of the conceptualization of trauma in psychoanalysis and introduces the three subsequent papers by Bernard Chervet, Jan Abrams and Howard Levine. It focuses on the interchange between external and internal reality, the construction of traumatic defensive organizations and the role of reparation and guilt in overcoming the repetition compulsion.

Beginning with Freud, throughout his work and in most if not all psychoanalytic formulations, the concept of trauma has been associated with the disruptive effects of excess excitation on psychic regulatory processes and psychic development. Foremost among these are the capacities for emotional containment and representation. The restoration, strengthening or acquisition for the first time of these capacities can take place intersubjectively in a successful analytic therapy and lies at the heart of the therapeutic action.

Drawing attention to the parallels between the artist’s and the psychoanalyst’s creative act, I will argue that the art of psychoanalysis, similar to the artistic, creative process, is constructing an environment that invites and sustains a certain disorienting chaos before sorting through and working out how to make use of one’s experiences. The psycho-analytic and artistic discourse both investigate the position from which something is generated: the contradictions and multitudes of this ‘self’ in the place of the designated ‘I.’ Psychoanalysis creates a holding environment that makes the undoing of our constructed selves possible, what Kristeva calls the making and unmaking of the speaking subject, and opens up ways to formulate our desires’ complexities and reconstruct an orienting sense of self, in Winnicott’s words: to postulate the existence of the self. The analytic experience teaches us to say yes to a certain hunger and embrace the appetite we thought of as too large, too gluttonous and uncomfortable. It helps us become more familiar with the apparitions of this hunger and makes them part of ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been said about death drive in Critical Theory. This concept was mainly read as an aggressive and/or destructive drive. As a consequence, there are two ways of finding death drive in critical theories: the classic mode represented by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and, more recently, Whitebook, in which death drive is seen as a factor that gives psychoanalysis its negativity face; or a way that leads to the despise of the nuclear function of death drive in psychoanalytic theory in name of normativity, as it happens in Fromm and Honneth. What I propose here is, from a comparison of both Freud's texts, 'Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through' (1914) and 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (1920), to present a new way of appropriating the concept of death drive to produce a current critical theory. This means not considering the Wiederholungszwang as simply an imperative for coercion, but also a repetition compulsion. By proposing this reading of death drive (as suggested by Freud in 1920), I believe it is possible to amplify the range of possible connections between psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, keeping the negativity side, but without losing its normativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been said about death drive in Critical Theory. This concept was mainly read as an aggressive and/or destructive drive. As a consequence, there are two ways of finding death drive in critical theories: the classic mode represented by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and, more recently, Whitebook, in which death drive is seen as a factor that gives psychoanalysis its negativity face; or a way that leads to the despise of the nuclear function of death drive in psychoanalytic theory in name of normativity, as it happens in Fromm and Honneth. What I propose here is, from a comparison of both Freud’s texts, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), to present a new way of appropriating the concept of death drive to produce a current critical theory. This means not considering the Wiederholungszwang as simply an imperative for coercion, but also a repetition compulsion. By proposing this reading of death drive (as suggested by Freud in 1920), I believe it is possible to amplify the range of possible connections between psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, keeping the negativity side, but without losing its normativity.

The Freudian notion of repetition compulsion is marked, in its inaugural conception, by a negative connotation, that of a return of the same, which does not give the measure of the multiple facets of this register. Raising repetition to the rank of one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Lacan uses Kierkegaard's text entitled "La reprise" to point out the renewal, of fecundity that the movement towards repetition can induce. This article aims at underlining how much the creative dimension of repetition finds a particularly vivid illustration in the field of music, a domain that makes regular and varied use of the term "reprise". This article takes up themes deployed in a series of conferences during the academic year 2021/2022 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Psychopathologie, associating musicians – Vincent Ségal – psychoanalysts -Marc Morali, Corinne Tyszler, Olivier Douville- and music lovers, Mario Choueiry, and leaving a large place to musical listening. This study, beyond a reading of the repetition as an expression of the death pulsion, studies the way in which we can hear and put to work this Freudian notion through its manifestation in the musical register. It is a question here of exploring the question of repetition in the sphere of popular music but also in jazz and classical music in order to apprehend its articulation with the very movement of creation. In so-called popular music, and mainly in rock music, the cover consists, not in imitating but in proposing a version, more or less faithful or distant, of an original piece. Listening to this cover causes a particular satisfaction in the listener who can identify it. Usually considered as a tribute to the pioneers or the mark of a debt towards the elders, the cover version is however above all an attempt, impregnated with hostility, to erase the origin. This is how covers come to not only supplant the original pieces but also to repress them, to make them totally forgotten. Jazz is also attached to covering standards, not only as a necessary learning exercise, but as a way for those who try to impose their own style and thus gain recognition. The cover of standards can be the occasion to make hear the blind spot of a piece of origin or to make resurface a trait of identity unknown to itself. Within the context of classical music, the progression of a work is also regularly done through the repetition of a theme that always knows how to renew itself through slight displacements. Finally, the contemporary repetitive music pushes, perhaps to its height, this creativity inherent to the effects of the repetition. Pleasure, repression, origin, hostility, imitation and identification: these terms are closely linked to psychoanalysis, which only uses the concept of "repetition". It is however usual to hear oneself on the divan taking up the story of a dream that of a memory, or even to take up a new slice of analysis. This opens up the opportunity to question the creative function of repetition within analytic practice. Introducing the musical dimension of repetition into the analytic treatment leads us to question the specific talent it implies in the practitioner. Repetition only becomes creative through a shift in interpretation that can be found in the poetry of language, where the practitioner gains by approaching musical interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La notion freudienne de compulsion de répétition est marquée, dans sa conception inaugurale, d'une connotation négative, celle d'un retour du même, qui ne donne pas la mesure des facettes multiples de ce registre. Élevant la répétition au rang d'un des quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Lacan se soutient du texte de Kierkegaard intitulé « La reprise » pour pointer la dimension de renouvellement, de fécondité que peut induire le mouvement vers la répétition. Cet article s'attache à souligner combien la dimension de créativité de la répétition trouve une illustration particulièrement vive dans le champ musical, domaine qui fait un usage régulier et varié du terme de reprise. Cet écrit reprend des thèmes déployés dans une série de conférences tenues au cours de l'année universitaire 2021/2022 à l'École Pratique des Hautes Études en Psychopathologie, associant musiciens – Vincent Ségal – psychanalystes – Marc Morali, Corinne Tyszler, Olivier Douville – et mélomanes – Mario Choueiry – et laissant une grande place à l'écoute musicale. Cette étude, au-delà d'une lecture de la répétition comme expression de la pulsion de mort, appréhende la façon dont on peut entendre et mettre au travail cette notion freudienne par le biais de son expression dans le registre musical. Il s'agit ici d'explorer la question de la reprise dans la sphère des musiques populaires contemporaines mais également dans le jazz et la musique classique pour en appréhender l'articulation avec le mouvement même de la création. Dans les musiques dites populaires contemporaines et principalement le rock, la reprise – ou « cover » dans sa version anglaise – consiste, non pas à imiter mais à proposer une version, plus ou moins fidèle ou éloignée, d'un morceau original. L'écoute de cette reprise provoque une satisfaction particulière chez l'auditeur qui sait l'identifier. Considérée habituellement comme un hommage rendu aux pionniers ou la marque d'une dette envers les aînés, la reprise est pourtant avant tout tentative, imprégnée d'hostilité, d'effacement de l'origine. C'est ainsi que des reprises en viennent non seulement à supplanter les morceaux originaux mais également à les refouler, à les faire totalement oublier. Le Jazz s'attache également à la reprise de standards, non seulement comme exercice d'apprentissage nécessaire mais comme marque, pour celui qui s'y essaye à imposer son propre style et ainsi se faire reconnaître. La reprise de standards peut ainsi être l'occasion de faire entendre le point aveugle d'un morceau d'origine ou d'en faire resurgir un trait d'identité inconnu de lui-même. Dans le cadre de la musique classique, par des procédés multiples, la progression d'une œuvre se fait aussi régulièrement par le biais de la reprise d'un thème qui toujours sait se renouveler à la faveur de légers déplacements. Enfin, la musique contemporaine répétitive pousse, peut-être à son comble, cette dimension d'une créativité inhérente aux effets de la répétition. Plaisir, refoulement, origine, hostilité, imitation et identification : ces termes attachés à la reprise sont étroitement liés à la psychanalyse qui ne dispose que du concept de « répétition ». Il est pourtant habituel de s'entendre sur le divan reprendre le récit d'un rêve, celui d'un souvenir, ou bien même de reprendre une nouvelle tranche d'analyse. S'ouvre ainsi l'occasion d'interroger la fonction créatrice de la répétition au sein même de la pratique analytique. L'introduction de ce registre de la reprise dans sa dimension musicale au sein de la cure analytique conduit à interroger le talent spécifique qu'elle implique chez le praticien. La répétition ne devient créatrice qu'à la faveur d'un décalage que l'interprétation peut retrouver dans la poésie de la langue où le praticien gagne à se rapprocher de l'interprétation musicale. The Freudian notion of repetition compulsion is marked, in its inaugural conception, by a negative connotation, that of a return of the same, which does not fully reflect the multiple facets of this register. Raising repetition to the rank of one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Lacan uses Kierkegaard's text entitled "Repetition" to point out the renewal of fecundity that the tendency towards repetition can induce. This article demonstrates how the creative dimension of repetition finds a particularly vivid illustration in the field of music, a domain that makes regular and varied use of the term "repetition." This article takes up themes deployed in a series of conferences during the academic year 2021/2022 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Psychopathologie, associating musicians – Vincent Ségal – psychoanalysts – Marc Morali, Corinne Tyszler, Olivier Douville – and music lovers, Mario Choueiry, and leaving a large place to musical listening. This study, beyond a reading of the repetition as an expression of the death drive, studies the way in which we can hear and put to work this Freudian notion through its manifestation in the musical register. In this paper, we explore the question of repetition in the sphere of popular music but also in jazz and classical music in order to apprehend its articulation with the very movement of creation. In so-called popular music, and mainly in rock music, the covering a song consists in proposing a version, more or less faithful or distant, of an original piece – and not in imitating it. Listening to this cover causes a particular satisfaction in the listener who can identify it. Usually considered as a tribute to the pioneers or the mark of a debt towards elders, the cover version is however above all an attempt, impregnated with hostility, to erase the origin. This is how covers come to not only supplant the original pieces but also to repress them, to make them totally forgotten. Jazz is also attached to covering standards, not only as a necessary learning exercise, but as a way for artists impose their own style and thus gain recognition. The cover of a standard can be the occasion to make audible a blind spot in the original work, or to bring to the surface a trait of identity unknown to itself. Within the context of classical music, the progression of a work is also regularly done through the repetition of a theme that renews itself through slight displacements. Finally, contemporary repetitive music pushes, perhaps to its height, the creativity inherent to the effects of repetition. Pleasure, repression, origin, hostility, imitation, and identification: these terms that are related to repetition are closely linked to psychoanalysis, which only has at its disposal the concept of "repetition." It is, however, typical to hear oneself on the divan taking up the story of a dream or that of a memory; one can even "repeat" by continuing one's analysis after a break or termination. This opens up the opportunity to question the creative function of repetition within analytic practice. Introducing the musical dimension of repetition into the analytic treatment leads us to question the specific talent it implies in the practitioner. Repetition only becomes creative through a shift in interpretation that can be found in the poetry of language, where the practitioner is enriched by approaching musical interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of the symbol in psychoanalysis, exploring its origins, functions, and role in resolving conflicts within the human psyche. Topics include the distinction between the symbol-thing and the operating symbol, the role of conflict in symbolization, and the transphenomenal nature of symbolic functioning in various aspects of human experience.

The essay exposes, recognizes the astonishing originality, and showcases the shortcomings of Christoph Türcke's Philosophy of Dreams, which offers a theory of the origin of religion inspired by both psychoanalysis and critical theory. Among the objections raised are the speculative nature of the enterprise, which is not sufficiently based on empirical data, the lack of knowledge concerning the transition from apes to humans, the impossibility for hallucinations to be the basic doxastic act, the exaggerated focus on dread, which is only one form of the numinous experience, and on the repetition compulsion, which could hardly prove as creative as the author assumes particularly concerning the origin of sacrifice, and the confusion of genesis and validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss the idea of psychoanalysis as a successful healing process from the standpoint of a broader understanding of the politics of care for the other. On this basis, and following María Acosta's concept of "grammars of listening," I propose psychoanalysis as a political project for overcoming trauma in both individual and collective history in such a way that it can also be considered in political terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) intricately weaves together collective past alongside individual present, developing a cohesive understanding of trauma in the American identity. This paper draws on an interdisciplinary methodology informed by trauma theory in order to argue that The Human Stain is as invested in the individual history of Coleman Silk as it is in the collective trauma of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate the concept of repetition compulsion in the Freudian work, with the purpose of bringing clarifications to the complexity that surrounds it. The method used was the theoretical research on psychoanalysis, and the Sisyphus myth was used to make correlations with the studied concept, because in it were found models of repetitive behaviors and Greek mythology always shows itself as a rich source of reflections about the human. Three moments present in the dynamics of the compulsion to repetition were correlated with three others found in the Sisyphus myth, because they have common elements that describe, in the first instance, transgressions and excesses; in a second, compulsive and inexorable repetitions; and finally, in a third, possibilities of restoration of order and redemption. Thus, we came to considerations about the repetition compulsion that describe it as a mechanism associated with the encounter of the psychism with the excessive, disconnected and traumatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chaos, birth, extinction, regeneration, betrayal—these traumatic events introduce and define the myths of creation, ranging from the universe to any country or institution. They enable mankind to build his own knowledge of the world, to gather thoughts and feelings, and to ensure that a creative order is maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary engages with Pauley’s (this issue) clinical case through a brief discussion of the transitional object and a questioning of the author’s new concept the negative transitional object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the pathologies of Polish memory through Melanie Klein's psychoanalytical theory. Bielik-Robson suggests that the majority of what is seen as historical memory in contemporary Poland is no memory at all but a compulsion to repeat, reminiscent of the dark ritual of an ever-returning trauma. It is of course risky to extrapolate from psychoanalytical methods to collective subjects, but this essay attempts to describe the assumptive subject of the Polish collective as a Kleinian ‘angry infant' in the paranoid-schizoid position. This arrested development results in a falsely passive experience of dependency as well as a complete inability to work through trauma. To develop this ability, however, t [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a decade, through re-working a composition based on a sepia photograph, Arshile Gorky (ca. 1904–1948) tried to give form and represent that which by definition defies forms and shatters one’s capacity for representation. Having witnessed the systematic ethnic cleansing of his people as a child, Gorky began a ‘journey’ in his attempt to comprehend his traumatic ordeal through Art. In 1926, with the safety of a constructed name and life, the artist started working on ‘The Artist and his Mother’ series. Focusing on the two versions of Gorky’s early painting and using relevant aspects of psychoanalytic theory, the paper explores his work through a psychoanalytic lens. Psychoanalytic theories on extreme traumatisation along with psychoanalytic notions of temporality will be utilised in an attempt to follow the artist’s struggle to re-create and rework aspects of his traumatic history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The legal concepts of emotional and volitional impairment in SVP evaluations are vague and ill-defined. This article reviews the legal terms of emotional and volitional impairment as they have been contemplated in extant SVP statutes, SVP case law, logical constructions, and limited empirical studies. To bridge the gap between psychiatry and the law, a broad, theory-based heuristic framework is furnished for understanding emotional and volitional impairment at a deep psychological (and intra-psychic) level. Specifically discussed are the concepts of transference, repetition compulsion, fixation, cathexis, regression, identification with the aggressor, and the object-relations and self-psychology concepts related to a loss of possession of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author compares the two manuscript versions of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, composed in April/May 1919 and by August 1920 respectively, with each other and with the printed editions. In the first version the idea that all drives are urging to death is already present; however the term 'death drive' is not. Here, Freud attempted to take account of the clinical observation that in traumatic neurosis unpleasurable experiences are repeated and that there is a kind of compulsive repetition that is inaccessible to analysis. On the other hand he extended his perspective far into biology. Already in the first version Freud withdrew the notion that all drives urge to death, restricting this urge to self-preservative drives. The second manuscript version of BPP represents a further stage of reflection - primarily in the sixth chapter that was inserted into the older text. The author highlights that Freud now gave up the idea of the first version that self-preservative drives are urging to death and ascribed this urge to a special group of drives: the 'death drives'. As their counterpart only at this point did he introduce Eros, which encompassed both the sexual and the self-preservative drives. The concept of Eros enabled him to come to terms with phenomena of union, whether at the level of cells, organisms or human beings, including sexual reproduction, which had resisted accommodation to his notion of autoerotic infantile sexuality. It is a main finding of this paper that the process of theoretical reflection, leading to several changes of concept, is reflected in the printed text as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Connelly's 2002 crime novel, City of Bones, follows an investigation by LAPD Detective Harry Bosch into the unsolved murder of a 12 year old boy, registered missing in 1980. Bosch's investigation to uncover the circumstances that led to the boy's murder, and therein uncover the hidden identity of the killer, is transposed against 'the struggle everyone had to find meaning after such a catastrophic event, literally witnessed first-hand through television'1. An early entrant in what quickly blossomed into a rich tapestry of cultural material critically (and not so critically) engaged with the politics of 9/11 and the unfolding war on terror, City of Bones questions the extent to which an absolute truth can be arrived it in the narrativisation of a trauma by its immediate experiencers. Moreover, in a narrative of crime where the political imperatives of the LAPD consistently assert control over trauma's narrativising -- a consequence of which is an unfolding sequence of further traumatic deaths -- City of Bones explores how the imperatives of a political hegemon may militate against trauma's abatement by hijacking post-trauma narrativisation to create a record of trauma that confers legitimacy upon the recurrence of violence as the response to trauma. Read within the post 9/11 context into which the novel emerged, my paper contends that City of Bones offers an allegorical microcosm of the Bush administration's efforts to manage the narrativising of 9/11 into a position directly relational to the 9/11 attacks; a position from which revanchist counter-violence emerged as a legitimate response to the trauma of 9/11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud attempted 'to describe and to account for the facts of daily observation in our field of study' (1920, p. 7), in particular concerning destructive clinical phenomena that confront us in the analytic situation: traumatic neuroses, melancholic states, negative-therapeutic reactions, masochism, repetition compulsion and so on. The author demonstrates in the first section how Freud's own resistance - later self-diagnosed - to recognizing these unwelcome facts was expressed in the terminological and conceptual ambiguities of the death drive hypothesis then introduced, ambiguities that to some extent continue to impede the reception of its clinical usefulness to this day. As soon as Freud had demonstrated the connection with clinical practice more directly in The Ego and the Id (1923), some contemporaries adopted it as a helpful clinical concept, while others believed that they could (and must) refute it. The second part outlines its reception in the 1920s and 1930s, which was part of an international discussion that was, of course, initially conducted mainly in German. The beginnings of an important further development of the death drive hypothesis are described in a separate section because it originated from Melanie Klein's earliest experiences in analysing children in Berlin in the early to mid-1920s. She referred at that time to an 'evil principle', and in 1932 published her view of the death drive hypothesis, which was further developed in subsequent decades by her and her followers in London. In this period, conditions changed dramatically: in Germany Freud's books (among others) were burnt, crimes against humanity were instigated and psychoanalysis ceased to exist in this country. Almost all the analysts who published on the death drive had to emigrate. From then on, entirely different discourses took place in the various regions. In Germany, the death drive hypothesis was (largely) disregarded or rejected for decades after the Holocaust. Frank demonstrates how the uncritical recourse in relevant works to this day to an article by Brun in 1953 that considered the death drive to have been comprehensively refuted on the basis of (apparently) comprehensive literature research can be understood as a symptom. Pursuing some reflections by Beland (1988) and Cycon (1995), the author expounds her thesis that in Germany the clinical usefulness of the death drive hypothesis could not be considered as long as destructive impulses were still an immediate social reality. According to the author's observations, in stating that there had been a 'definite reaction formation against death drive hypotheses', Brun had unintentionally made an accurate diagnosis. It was not until the realization of inevitable perpetrator identifications ('Hitler in us') in this country became (more widely) possible that a concern with the death drive hypothesis could also resume. In the final section, the author takes up one line of this development and traces how some German analysts in the 1980s came into contact with Kleinian developments that had since occurred and how these found and find their way into their analytic working. She closes by asking whether it might be appropriate to consider Melanie Klein's concept of an evil principle - along with the pleasure and reality principles - as a less ambiguous one for the phenomena under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]