The Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis

The Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Richard Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134901534
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Get Book Here

Book Description
It has become almost de rigueur in contemporary psychoanalysis to cite Freud's positivism-especially his commitment to an objective reality that can be accessed through memory and interpretation-as a continuing source of weakness in bringing the field into the postmodern era. But is it so simple to move beyond Freud and objectivism in general? Or is it the case that even the most astute recent theorizing aimed at this move-and guided by therapeutic sensitivity and a concern with epistemic rigor-still betrays a lingering commitment to objective reality? This is the intellectually exciting and exacting question that Richard Moore poses to his reader-and to the texts of four of the most influential psychoanalytic theorists on the scene today: Donald Spence, Roy Schafer, Robert Stolorow, and Irwin Z. Hoffman. Written with concentration and grace, The Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis begins with the ambiguities in Freud's founding commitment to a recoverable, objectively verifiable reality before examining the ghost of objectivism that confounds, in surprising and unexpected ways, Spence's, Schafer's, Stolorow's, and Hoffman's recent attempts to move toward narrativist and constructivist views of the analytic encounter. Following his penetrating survey of the contributions of these four major architects of contemporary psychoanalysis, Moore provides a glimpse of what an internally consistent postmodern metapsychology would actually look like. He approaches this task by exploring how our understanding of basic analytic concepts may ultimately be reconciled with the view that the creation of reality is an intrinsic aspect of any therapeutic encounter. Elegantly conceived and beautifully argued, this book guides the reader through the labyrinth of contemporary theory while holding fast to a critical stance toward its overarching goal: the elaboration of a truly thoroughgoing constructivism that is both therapeutically consequential and intellectually defensible.

Psychic Reality in Context

Psychic Reality in Context PDF Author: Marion Michel Oliner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429917635
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book skillfully combines autobiographical stories with clear psychoanalytical theories. During her childhood, the author experienced the Holocaust and was left understandly traumatised by it. It was her desire to confront this trauma that led her to psychoanalysis. For decades, the coherence of psychoanalysis seemed to be threatened by the conflicting thinking of many psychoanalytical colleagues about trauma and trauma affect, and also about the influence of external reality on the psychic reality discovered by Freud. However, the author counters this potential conflict with her innovative theoretical integration, combined with remarkable conceptual outcomes and treatment techniques. This book spans the author's work over the last fifteen years on the impact of external reality on psychic reality. During this period many analysts, especially in the English-speaking countries and Germany, where historic events loomed large in the lives of their patients, have turned from the exclusive emphasis on psychic reality to greater attention to the traumatic impact of external reality.

Fantastic Reality

Fantastic Reality PDF Author: Mignon Nixon
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262140898
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
A critical study of Louise Bourgeois's art from the 1940s to the 1980s: its departure from surrealism and its dialogue with psychoanalysis.

The Desire of Psychoanalysis

The Desire of Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Gabriel Tupinambá
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014283X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Desire of Psychoanalysis proposes that recognizing how certain theoretical and institutional problems in Lacanian psychoanalysis are grounded in the historical conditions of Lacan’s own thinking might allow us to overcome these impasses. In order to accomplish this, Gabriel Tupinambá analyzes the socioeconomic practices that underlie the current institutional existence of the Lacanian community—its political position as well as its institutional history—in relation to theoretical production. By focusing on the underlying dynamic that binds clinical practice, theoretical work, and institutional security in Lacanian psychoanalysis today, Tupinambá is able to locate sites for conceptual innovation that have been ignored by the discipline, such as the understanding of the role of money in clinical practice, the place of analysands in the transformation of psychoanalytic theory, and ideological dead-ends that have become common sense in the Lacanian field. The Desire of Psychoanalysis thus suggests ways of opening up psychoanalysis to new concepts and clinical practices and calls for a transformation of how psychoanalysis is understood as an institution.

Freud and Beyond

Freud and Beyond PDF Author: Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0465098827
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
The classic, in-depth history of psychoanalysis, presenting over a hundred years of thought and theories Sigmund Freud's concepts have become a part of our psychological vocabulary: unconscious thoughts and feelings, conflict, the meaning of dreams, the sensuality of childhood. But psychoanalytic thinking has undergone an enormous expansion and transformation since Freud's death in 1939. With Freud and Beyond, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black make the full scope of twentieth century psychoanalytic thinking—from Harry Stack Sullivan to Jacques Lacan; D.W. Winnicott to Melanie Klein—available for the first time. Richly illustrated with case examples, this lively, jargon-free introduction makes modern psychoanalytic thought accessible at last.

Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing

Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing PDF Author: Barnaby Barratt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317382218
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
How do we know our mental life, and how is our mental life altered by our efforts to know it better? Originally published in 1984, this title attempts an epistemological and ontological discourse concerning the understanding of human mental processes, and it aims toward a definitive thesis on the dialectics of knowing and being in this work of psychological understanding. What this work reconfronts are questions pertaining to all psychology and to all human sciences. Yet much of its focus is on the understanding of unconscious mental contents, on the question of knowing and being in Freud’s psychology.

A People’s History of Psychoanalysis

A People’s History of Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Daniel José Gaztambide
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498565751
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
As inequality widens in all sectors of contemporary society, we must ask: is psychoanalysis too white and well-to-do to be relevant to social, economic, and racial justice struggles? Are its ideas and practices too alien for people of color? Can it help us understand why systems of oppression are so stable and how oppression becomes internalized? In A People’s Historyof Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, Daniel José Gaztambide reviews the oft-forgotten history of social justice in psychoanalysis. Starting with the work of Sigmund Freud and the first generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts, Gaztambide traces a series of interrelated psychoanalytic ideas and social justice movements that culminated in the work of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Ignacio Martín-Baró. Through this intellectual genealogy, Gaztambide presents a psychoanalytically informed theory of race, class, and internalized oppression that resulted from the intertwined efforts of psychoanalysts and racial justice advocates over the course of generations and gave rise to liberation psychology. This book is recommended for students and scholars engaged in political activism, critical pedagogy, and clinical work.

The Couch in the Marketplace

The Couch in the Marketplace PDF Author: H. Shmuel Erlich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429920377
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book bridges the conceptual and practical gap between a psychoanalytic focus on the internal world and the dynamics of external reality by examining an array of junctures in which the two perspectives combine to enrich each other. Starting from the inherent bias of the psychoanalytic immersion in working with the internal world, the book deals with a wide array of phenomena in which a binocular perspective is potentially contributing. One such bridge is exemplified by the Group Relations approach, which richly combines psychoanalytic insights with systemic ones. This unique merger is valuable in studying a variety of phenomena both within psychoanalysis and outside it. The work of the analyst in the psychoanalytic setting implies situating oneself on several boundaries - internal and external, love and admiration as well as death and destructive impulses - and the courage and sacrifice demanded by taking up this role. This binocular perspective has significant implications for the formation and maintenance of identity and particularly for the psychoanalytic identity.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory PDF Author: Jay R. Greenberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417003
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Get Book Here

Book Description
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.

Self Creation

Self Creation PDF Author: Frank Summers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135060894
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Insight" and "Change." The problematic relationship between these two concepts, to which the reality of psychoanalytic patients who fully understand maladaptive patterns without being able to change them attests, has dogged psychoanalysis for a century. Building on the integrative object relations model set forth in Transcending the Self (1999), Frank Summers turns to Winnicott's notion of "potential space" in order to elaborate a fresh clinical approach for transforming insight into new ways of being and relating. For Summers, understanding occurs within transference space, but the latter must be translated into potential space if insight is to give rise to change in the world outside the consulting room. Within potential space, Summers holds, the analyst's task shifts from understanding the present to aiding and abetting the patient in creating a new future. This means that the analyst must draw on her hard-won understanding of the patient to construct a vision of who the patient can become. Lasting therapeutic change grows out of the analyst's and patient's collaboration in developing new possibilities of being that draw on the patient's affective predispositions and buried aspects of self. In the second half of the book, Summers applies this model of therapeutic action to common clinical syndromes revolving around depression, narcissistic injuries, somatic symptoms, and internalized bad objects. Here we find vivid documentation of specific clinical strategies in which the therapeutic use of potential space gives rise to new ways of being and relating which, in turn, anchor the creation of a new sense of self.