Mark Winborn's Blog, page 17

Joseph Sandler - The Distance Between Theory and Practice

"To round this paper out I want to point to three of the many areas in psychoanalysis where the distance between theory on the one hand and clinical practice and experience on the other is particularly wide, and to take the liberty of suggesting possible directions of theoretical clarification or modification.

1. Drives and Motives

However important the instinctual drives may be in our psychoanalytic thinking—and they will certainly always occupy a central position—the need for psychoanalysts to defend the significance of sexual and aggressive wishes has led to the building of theories in which everything tends to be brought back to the drives. I am convinced that for most psychoanalysts such reductionism plays a less significant part in their analytic work than in their theory. What they are often much more concerned with are the variety of motives for the use of defences, for the construction and development of fantasies and transference, and for many other phenomena with which we concern ourselves as clinical psychoanalysts. Certainly sexual and aggressive drives provide highly important motives, but so do threats to our feelings of safety (to the 'integrity of the ego'), injuries to our self-esteem, feelings of guilt and shame, and threats from the real ('external') world. Above all, anxieties of all sorts provide motives which are of central clinical significance. I believe that we need to accept into our theory, for example, the proposition that the latent content of a dream or of a piece of transference behaviour can be an unconscious wish or fantasy created to deal with anxiety, pain, or any other unpleasant affect from any source, and not necessarily to 'discharge' libidinal or aggressive drive energies. Not all unconscious wishes derive from the instinctual drives. Even if they may have done so in the past, such wishes need not be impelled by drives in the present. They may have other causes and other motivating forces.

2. Conflict

For how long will psychoanalysts continue to speak of conflict between id and the ego, between id and superego, between ego and superego, when clinically we address ourselves to the person who is in conflict? Certainly he may experience conflict between a sexual wish and his conscience, but what this means is that he is in conflict about his wish to gratify a sexual urge and his wish to avoid feelings of having done wrong (see Sandler, 1974). Moreover, from the point of view of the sorts of conflict which are clinically significant, what we usually see (and, I hope, interpret) is conflict over derivatives of wishes or wishful fantasies that have been, at some time, acceptable to the person—we might say consciousness-syntonic—but have become, in the course of development, unacceptable, i.e. consciousness-dystonic. The best examples of such conflictual wishes in ordinary everyday analytic experience are transference wishes. These often represent (often quite complicated) ways of interrelating with objects that were once acceptable but had later to be defended against, as a result appearing again in the transference in disguised form. Thus a patient who, as a child, developed a strong clinging tendency, might have turned against this later on. The transference might show a heightened wish to reject or move away from the analyst, for purposes of defence, and the conflict behind this might be over the wish to cling. The impulse to cling, in its turn, might have been a way of dealing with anxieties about losing the mother, and it would be a great error, both clinically and theoretically, to equate it automatically with an oral instinctual wish. If we take such a view of conflict, then we should have no problem over analysing conflict in our patients with so-called narcissistic character disorders. Whether or not an early defect in object relationships exists, whether or not the pathology is rooted in the pre-oedipal years, childhood wishes (and solutions to the problems caused by these) bring about future conflicts during development, which are then adapted to in turn, and show themselves in the narcissistic adult.

In this connexion I should like to suggest that every solution (defensive or otherwise) to a conflict, because it solves a problem during development, acquires a peremptory and urgent quality, and the urge to impose it in the face of renewed or revived conflict becomes the content of unconscious wishes driven towards actualization. Such wishes may then cause further conflict that might well be reflected in the here-and-now of the analytic situation. As solutions to conflict, both early and late, for the most part involve relationships to real or fantasied objects, conflict over such solutions will tend to reflect itself in the transference, even in the most narcissistic of our patients.

3. Object relationships and transference

Classical theory holds that object relationships reflect the cathexis of the object with instinctual energies, or with aim-inhibited drive energies. The inadequacy of such a view must be self-evident, and although there may still be some who pay lip-service to formulations like the one just given, most analysts conceive of object relationships in some very different way. My own preference is to regard the object relationship, inasmuch as it involves some external person, as a valued type of interaction with that specific person, in which the object plays as big a part as the subject. Such an interaction may satisfy instinctual needs, but (at least equally) satisfies needs for security and familiarity, for reassurance and affirmation of one's own value and identity. Needs of this sort develop from what Mahler (Mahler et al., 1975) has called processes of separation-individuation, and the satisfaction of these needs through an interchange of signals with the object, a dialogue with the object, is a vital part of our existence. As development proceeds, the external objects (together with their distortions by wishful fantasies and defences) are internalized, and the resulting introjected objects form the basis for dialogues with the objects in unconscious fantasy life.

It may be relevant to our understanding of transference if we consider that introjects are constantly being externalized, in a sense being actualized, so that they can be related to as external objects rather than as internal ones. Such a tendency to externalize one's introjects is probably a fairly general one, and deserves closer investigation. It is a tendency which can be observed particularly well in the psychoanalytic situation and we regularly see attempts to force, manipulate or seduce the analyst into taking over the role of one or other introject so that an internal fantasy scenario involving a dialogue between self and introject can be enacted. This externalization is as much what we mean by transference as anything else, and the analyst's experience of, and reaction to, this externalization of the introject (extrojection?) is part of his countertransference. I believe that this is implicitly if not explicitly understood by many analysts, who take such processes into account in their work. From the point of view of our theory, however, we should recognize that it is a gross mistake to regard the externalization of inner object relationships, the unpacking of mental furniture as the patient settles into the analysis, as simply the direct or indirect fulfilment of unconscious instinctual wishes, once directed to a figure of the past, and now transferred to the analyst in the present." (pp. 41-43)

　

Joseph Sandler (1983). Reflections on Some Relations Between Psychoanalytic Concepts and Psychoanalytic Practice. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 64, pp. 35-45.

Jeffrey Santinover - Jungian View of Masculine Psychology

Introduction

"The Jungian view of masculine psychology reflects several fundamental divergences from the conceptions of classical psychoanalysis. Roughly, Jung's theories promise fulfillment, in psychological terms but in a religious spirit, of wishes that psychoanalysis deliberately refrains from attempting to fulfill. A follower of psychoanalytic method is offered and hopes for understanding; a follower of Jung's "analytic psychology" is offered and seeks salvation. Traditionally, the area of greatest interest for psychoanalysis has been the neuroses, characterized by repression and defense within an already essentially unified self. Of greatest interest to Jungian psychology has been the more severe psychotic, borderline, and narcissistic pathologies—as well as issues of religious experience—where the central problem concerns the achievement of a stable, unified self (Satinover, 1980, 1984, 1985a, 1985b).

Although most Freudians, and many Jungians as well, consider these differences so fundamental as to preclude any attempt at cross-fertilization, there has been some convergence recently in areas of interest and in approach. As psychoanalysis has expanded into those areas of interest to Jung—into earlier, more primitive, and more severely disturbed states of the psyche, as well as into religion and creative processes—its conceptions have begun to resemble those of analytic psychology. Indeed, where they are familiar with his work, psychoanalytic writers on narcissism and psychosis are often sympathetic to Jung. And, Jung's salvational tone is echoed in, for example, the late works of Kohut (1977, 1984). In Britain, Jung was well regarded by the object relations theorists (Fordham, 1984), and currently the Kleinians and Jungians in London are quite congenial. As I have argued elsewhere (Satinover, 1985), when Jung's ideas are rephrased in less mystical terms, and their homiletic intent set aside, what emerges is a striking anticipation of many current psychoanalytic ideas concerning narcissism, psychic splitting, and fragmentation of the self. Although he presented it as a general psychology, Jung's theory is in fact a highly intuitive description of the primitive ego coupled with a mode of cure in a religious spirit.

The Transformation of the Masculine

Like Freud before him, Jung presumed innate masculine and feminine components to exist in the personality. He saw masculine development as needing to progress from an exclusive identification with these masculine elements toward an integration of the feminine. In his view, the achievement of this wholeness would also consist symbolically in a death of the "hero," the archetype upon which he considered conventional masculine identity to rest.

Jung believed that ancient mystery cults into which a man might once have been initiated, as for example the ancient Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris, furthered development of the personality in a way analogous to modern psychotherapy. Thus, in a culture such as ours where, he believed, masculinity characterizes the "ego" or "consciousness" (in the sense of a dominant set of attitudes, values, goals, and presuppositions), the unconscious is feminine. This ego, or ego state, can be dissolved by controlled immersion in the unconscious. The ego is subsequently transformed through the integration of previously unconscious, and to a large extent "feminine," impulses. In earlier ages, this process was an essential component of the esoteric aspect of religion, especially in the mid-life initiation rituals. It was symbolized in myth by the death of a hero-god within or at the hands of the mother goddess, commonly involving his dismemberment and/or castration, and his subsequent resurrection, glorification, and immortalization.

Jung thus presents his ideas about masculine development as pertinent to adult maturation during normal development, an instance of the "psychology of the second half of life." But from the psychoanalytic point of view the great myths of the phallic, castrating mother-goddess and her dying and reborn son bear a striking resemblance to issues of preoedipal development and psychopathology. Although Jung came to present his ideas as an adult-developmental psychology, they also reflect preoedipal psychology in regression—especially regression in the service of the ego. As psychotherapy has widened its scope, it increasingly has had to recognize the ubiquity of these preoedipal problems which are, indeed, widespread enough to be considered the norm.1

There is good reason why the problems of selfhood first constellated in early childhood should reappear at a mid-life transition. Individuation, as Mahler, Pine, and Bergman (1975) describe it, is the process by which the individual, "unit" self is established. Individuation as Jung means it is the process by which, under the aegis of a growing sense of its mortality, the self is relinquished. A powerfully defended phallic sense of omnipotence, reinforced by a reaction formation against castration anxiety, is perhaps particularly characteristic of the "normally" heroic male identity (more so than is a true "shattering" of the Oedipus complex). Coming to terms with a mortality to which he must passively accede, and the consequent regressive reemergence of both his preoedipal struggles with omnipotence and his oedipal fears of castration, can be, for a man, a poignant impetus toward a deeper acceptance of his femininity." (pp. 149-150)

　

Jeffrey Satinover (1986). The Myth of the Death of the Hero: A Jungian View of Masculine Psychology. Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 73D, pp. 149-161

Michael Miller - The Emotionally Engaged Analyst

"The analysis of the meaning of a patient's symptoms, conflicts, transferences, and resistances has been at the heart of psychoanalytic treatment since its inception. In recent decades psychoanalytic theorists have added to the ways in which we appreciate a patient's conflicts and transferences the narrative meaning that patients consciously and unconsciously construct to understand and to contextualize their subjective experience and their relationships to others (Schafer, 1976, 1992; Spence, 1982). Modern psychoanalytic thinkers advanced the analysis of meaning still further by contributing the idea that the analyst participates in the construction of the patient's narrative (Gill, 1982; Loewald, 1960; Mitchell, 1988). Indeed, the ways in which the analyst contributes to the analytic interaction have occupied center stage in the literature for many years.

One aspect of the analyst's contribution to the analytic matrix that has resisted clear elaboration has been the analyst's emotional reactivity. Nearly every school of psychoanalysis today recognizes that the analyst's emotions play a role in the analytic interaction and contribute to the meanings derived from the patient-analyst dialogue. Nevertheless, controversy exists as to the nature and extent of that role. Although most psychoanalysts will acknowledge that the analyst's emotional reactions contribute to his or her empathy with the patient, providing the analyst with a window into the patient's subjective experience, some practitioners, such as Gray (1993), believe that the analyst's empathy should be restricted to informing the analyst about the patient's state of being, the patient's readiness for an interpretation, or the most affectively meaningful point of intervention. Schwaber (1981, 1996), reinforcing Gray's perspective, conceives of the analyst's empathy as a tool with which to identify a patient's subjective experience within the coconstructed matrix of the analytic interaction. Schwaber (1981) emphasizes that the analyst's empathy is a "mode of attunement which attempts to maximize a singular focus on the patient's subjective reality, seeking all possible cues to ascertain it" (p. ). She cautions the analyst to vigilantly guard against the imposition of his or her point of view.

Other psychoanalysts opine that the analyst's empathic resonance with a patient's subjective experience is a crucial transformative element in psychoanalytic treatment (Aron, 1996; Kohut, 1959, 1971; Lichtenberg, 1981; Schore, 1994, 2003b). These theorists believe that the analyst's emotional responsiveness goes beyond simple empathy with the emotional states of the patient. They argue that the analyst's expression of his or her emotional reactions provides a context of understanding within which patients feel safe and open to the analyst's interventions (Gedo, 1979; Kohut, 1977; Sandler & Sandler, 1978; Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987). Indeed, Gill (1982) sees the analyst's emotional participation as an essential component in the patient's formation of the transference.

Some contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, however, counter that an analyst's emotional engagement of a patient is an expression of the analyst's unconscious emotional conflicts (e.g., Chused, 2003), or that the analyst's emotional reactivity leads to a traumatic reification of the patient's unconscious fantasies and fears (e.g., Schafer, 1999). Relational analysts, on the other hand, strongly advise that the analyst's emotional engagement of the patient is an essential element of analytic treatment. Aron (1996), Davies (1998), Jacobs (1986), Levenson (1983), Mitchell (1988, 1993), Ogden (1995, 1997), and Renik (1996) posit that unless the patient and the analyst enter one another's emotional world, as active participants in creating and interpreting one another's lived experience, the relational matrix that constitutes the curative element in psychoanalytic treatment fails to emerge. Without an emotionally engaged analyst, treatment is never fully realized.

This essay aims to clarify the nature of the contribution that the patient's and the analyst's emotional reactivity makes to the psychoanalytic enterprise. The theory of emotion to which we as analysts implicitly or explicitly subscribe is a key factor influencing the way we understand what the role of our affective experience in psychoanalytic treatment is. The way we conceptualize emotion determines in great measure what we can conceive of doing with a patient's emotional experience as well as our own. I will show that with each successive advance in our theoretical understanding of emotion the analyst's emotional participation becomes more central to the analytic process, opening new avenues of therapeutic relatedness and intervention. I will explain how the meanings that the patient and the analyst employ to interpret their subjective experience and their interaction are determined in significant ways by the exchange of emotions between them. To this end, I will review two major contemporary theories of emotion (the cognitive appraisal approach and the functional/discrete analysis) and describe their influence on modern psychoanalytic theory and practice. I will then introduce a new approach to emotion based on dynamic systems theory." (pp. 3-4)

"With each advance in our knowledge about the nature of emotion, psychoanalysts' understanding of the role of emotion in the psychoanalytic practice has progressed. As analysts came to understand the relationship between the schemas of emotion and the schemas of declarative knowledge, practitioners began to use their emotional reactivity and their empathic resonance with the patient in new ways. They saw their own feelings and reactions to the patient's emotional states as windows into the patient's subjective, emotional experience, much of which was developmentally unformulated, defensively sequestered, or not well articulated. In symbolically representing in images and words the analyst's empathic resonance and emotional reactivity, the analyst transforms the patient's emotions into meaningful feelings. These feelings in turn not only inform the patient about the meaning of his or her emotional experience but also about the nature of his transferential connection to the analyst.

As the adaptive function of emotional behavior became more clearly articulated, psychoanalysts became aware of the way their own emotional behavior affected the emotional states of the patient. Analysts began to regulate, contain, and metabolize the patient's emotional experience through the way they themselves emotionally processed and expressed their experience of their own and the patient's emotional behaviors. The exchange of emotional behaviors between the patient and the analyst was now recognized as the context within which the meanings that characterize the nature of the therapeutic interaction emerged.

Dynamic systems theory casts emotion in a truly interactive context, enabling analysts to appreciate the coconstructed nature not only of the meanings attributed to the analytic interaction but also of their own and the patient's emotional states as well. Psychoanalysts can now trace the emergence of their own and the patient's emotions from the exchange of emotional behaviors between them. As the emotions of the patient and the analyst self-organize in reference to the emotional behaviors of the other, the ways the patient and analyst constitute, regulate, and interpret their emotions directly impact the construction of emotion in both persons. As the patient and the analyst work to optimally adapt to the nature of their relationship, the emotional states and behaviors of each of them are simultaneously impacted and changed. Concurrently, their emotional exchange gives their relationship an emotional tone that in turn constrains the emotional states and behaviors accessible to them, the meanings available to interpret their emotional relationship, and the types of therapeutic interventions and transformations open to the analyst. The analyst can now formulate his or her interventions and interpretations to take advantage of the ways in which emotion, meaning, relationship, and context interact in the formation of subjective experience. Mutative change is always systemic, effecting changes in all components that constitute the emotional relationship between the patient and the analyst. The emotional engagement of the patient and the analyst thus constitutes the essence of the therapeutic action in psychoanalysis.

The context within which the analyst works, from this dynamic systems perspective, is a complex emotional system that is both stable and constantly in flux. As the analyst manages the multiple interacting influences on the analytic process and on the emotional states and interpretations that carry the analytic dialogue while simultaneously experiencing the effects of his or her own adaptations to the patient's emotional behavior, new ways of monitoring, influencing, and interpreting the patient-analyst interaction are required. These therapeutic processes, configured in a dynamic, interactive, and continuous manner, form the analytic context to be illuminated with clinical material in the companion paper to this essay (Miller, in press)." (pp. 19-20)

Michael L. Miller (2008). The Emotionally Engaged Analyst I. Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 25, pp. 3-25

Rushi Ledermann - Narcissistic Disorder

"Before discussing the treatment of narcissistic disorder I shall outline my view of its nature, since I believe that this syndrome differs from other personality disorders. Some points will recur which I made in my previous papers on the subject (LEDERMANN 10, 11). Psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists are well-known to disagree, in some respects, about the nature of narcissistic disorder. Both consider it to be a disorder of the self, but they work with different concepts of the self. I see pathological narcissism as the opposite of what narcissism means in ordinary parlance. The Oxford English Dictionary defines narcissism as the ‘tendency to self-worship, absorption in one's own personal perfections’. That seems to me to describe the defence or facade in people who suffer from narcissistic disorders. The actual disorder is, in fact, the opposite of self-worship. It is the inability to love oneself and hence the inability to love another person. As I said in my previous papers, narcissistic patients suffer from severe defects in their object relations which make them appear self-absorbed. They are fixated on an early defence structure which springs into being in infancy—when, for whatever reasons, there is a catastrophically bad fit between the baby and the mother, frequently compounded by the lack of an adequate father and by other inimical experiences in childhood.

Babies, thus deprived, grow into persons who lack trust in other people. They replace mature dependence by spurious pseudo-independence and delusions of omnipotence. They experience their lives as futile and empty, and their feelings as being frozen or split off. In severe cases these patients feel themselves outside the human ken and suffer from a terror of non-existing. This terror and emptiness are frequently covered over by a superficially smooth social adaptation, sometimes by feelings of aloofness and superiority, at times even by grandiose ideas about themselves.

In my previous papers I have discussed how Fordham's theory of deintegration and of the earliest defences of the self in infancy has helped me to understand the origin of narcissistic disorder. I speculated that with such early defences the process of deintegration is defective from the start. This leads to a badly formed ego that, in my view, is an essential feature of narcissistic disorder. I was interested to see that Kohut also speaks of selfnuclei not yet stably cohesive in what he terms borderline patients (quoted by Schwaber 15, p. 468). It is remarkable how close he comes to Fordham's theory of ego formation, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to elaborate this point.

A baby who, in phantasy, does away with the mother has the experience of, one might say, being himself baby and mother, lonely and omnipotent. He does not expect any good to come from the outside world and cannot put his trust into anything good that even an unsatisfactory mother provides. Moreover, as he has abolished his noxious mother in infancy, he sometimes feels as if he had killed her. If his mother is incapable of being a mother to him and appears to be impervious to his demands, or if an inborn defect in the baby makes it impossible for him to use her motherliness, then the delusion that he is murderous gets reinforced. Such a baby, of course, lacks the foundations for object relations which are based on his relationship to his mother. It is not surprising that such patients have enormous resistance against relating to the analyst. I have further postulated that a baby with stunted oral deintegration also suffers from pathological deintegration at the anal stage of development. Moreover, deintegration at the anal stage is not object-related because he has ‘abolished’ the object. The healthy mother of a healthy infant, as it were, detoxicates her baby's angry faeces that, in phantasy, he expels into the part-object, the breast. The narcissistically damaged baby has intense destructive impulses. But as he cannot (in phantasy) discharge them into the mother he expels them into what he experiences as nothingness or outer space. There they are uncontained, undetoxicated and they become enormously threatening. This, it would appear, is why narcissistic patients feel so bad and so persecuted and at the same time deny their personal hate. This unrelated aspect of the anal phase reinforces the experience of the stunted oral phase: that of arid power." (pp. 303-304)

Rushi Ledermann (1982). Narcissistic Disorder and Its Treatment. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 27, pp. 303-321

Hyman Spotnitz - The Maturational Interpretation

Editors Note: Hyman Spotnitz is the founder of the school of Modern Psychoanalysis

"The growth of understanding about the curative factors in analytic psychotherapy is reflected in changing emphases in interpretation. It was originally thought that what healed a person was the recall of memories. Treatment was then regarded as incomplete unless, in Freud's words, "all obstacles in the case are explained, the gaps in memory are filled out, and the original occasions of the repressions discovered." When it became evident that the memories were less important than that which prevented their recall, interpretations were made to overcome these repressive forces, manifested as resistance. Later, resistance was recognized as an important source of interpretive data because it told the story of the ego's development. Interpretations stressed the constrictive influence that resistance had exerted and the need to modify it. The analyst worked to resolve resistance in order to create more favorable psychological conditions for ego functioning. Explanations were oriented toward the integration of the ego and the acquisition of insight.

More recently, growing knowledge of the communication function of resistance has stimulated other approaches to interpretation. As yet, these have not dispelled the misleading notion that therapeutic change issues primarily from objective understanding of one's behavior. In the professional literature, interpretation is still most commonly associated with such words as "call attention to," "convince," "point out," "alert," "demonstrate," "prove," "confront," and "unmask." But the use of interpretation primarily for veil-lifting purposes is waning, with the recognition that other aspects of the treatment relationship are often more significant than the development of self-understanding. The patient usually acquires self-understanding, but it is rarely the decisive factor in the case. Objective understanding of his behavior does not invariably make it easier for him to change it. Of course, the therapist has to understand what motivates the patient, but does not intervene just to transmit his insight. Scientific understanding is the raw data for therapeutic understanding; that is, some knowledge of what is going on in the patient which is conveyed to die patient if and when it will unlock the door to personality change. Instead of trying to overcome resistance by explanation the therapist uses interpretation to create the precise emotional experiences which will resolve the problems. When the analyst operates in this way insight emerges as a byproduct of the connections established between the impulses, feelings, thoughts, and memories of the patient and his words.

In many cases I find it helpful to operate on the hypothesis that interpretation is consistently employed for maturational purposes. The treatment itself is conceptualized as a growth experience. The problems which motivate a person to undergo treatment are attributable, in some degree, to inadequacies in his interchanges with the environment from conception onward. These interchanges—physiochemical and biological as well as psychological—occur with different configurations of environmental forces which, in a sense, constitute maturational teams. During infancy, mother and child form the team. When the oedipal level is reached, die child's maturational interchanges are more specifically with his family. Then the societal team takes over, and the reciprocal processes encompass an expanding circle of peers and adults.

The candidate for psychotherapy is a person who is unable to deal comfortably with the exigencies of his life because he sustained some damage in these early maturational interchanges. He commits himself to a series of supplementary interchanges with a therapeutic object because he suffers from the effects of failures, or memories of failures. Deleterious experiences with his natural objects caused fixations or arrests in growth. In attempting to cope with them, he developed maladaptations, certain repetitive patterns which drained off into circuitous processes energy that was required for maturation.

Consequently, he enters treatment with two distinctly different types of problems. One, his maturational needs were not met. Two, his maladaptation patterns prevent him from effectively assimilating the experiences that would reduce these needs. The operation of these patterns blocks maturation.

Maladaptations are not totally reversible, but it is sufficient for the analyst to intervene to loosen their compulsive grip and to nullify the effects of the original blockages. If he does this, the patient usually requires little help in obtaining and assimilating experiences that will meet his maturational needs.

In theory, therefore, the therapist does not intervene to reduce maturational needs directly; nor does he address himself to maladaptations (defenses) that do not interfere with maturation. Rather, he intervenes to lay the foundation for new growth by freeing the patient from the stranglehold of pathological maladaptations. As these patterns are aroused and reactivated in the transference relationship they are studied until the analyst understands how they were set up and why they come into play in a given situation. He relates to the patient in terms of this understanding but does not formulate it verbally to the patient unless the latter desires an explanation that will facilitate his talking and cooperative functioning. In that case, an interpretation is indicated. By and large maladaptive patterns are dealt with when they have been reactivated with sufficient intensity to be reducible." (pp. 166-167)

Hyman Spotnitz (1966). The Maturational Interpretation. Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 53C, pp. 166-169

June Singer - Five Ways of Misusing the Concept of Archetypes

"It is through focusing attention on the numinosity of the individual archetypes and the multiplicity of their imaginal expressions, and through losing sight of the context in which they are embedded, that the crucial concept of the archetype tends to be misused. The misuses are ubiquitous: analysts, analysands, and students of Jung are all vulnerable to the possibility of falling into some of the traps which this difficult concept lays out. In this paper I shall be content to explore five ways in which the archetype can be misused. These are (1) categorisation, (2) reduction, (3) reification, (4) pathologising, and (5) interpretation.

(1) Categorisation. To categorise in terms of archetypes is to divide the realm of the collective unconscious into convenient pigeonholes, placing everything relating to the feminine in man in the ‘anima’ compartment, everything having to do with masculine power and drive in woman in the ‘animus’ compartment, and everything to do with children into the category of ‘one's emerging potential’, or, if the child is especially precocious or in some other way unusual, making use of the ‘divine child’ category. There are also the ‘helpful animals’, and ‘the shadow’, which in its more virulent forms becomes ‘the Satanic’. And of course, there is the ‘self. While the ‘self’ is a representation of the archetype of wholeness, when misused it becomes, like any other of the archetypal concepts, one element of the psyche striving for its recognition among the other elements.

(2) Reduction. It is often said that Jungian psychology is not reductive. Perhaps, compared with orthodox psychoanalysis, it is not. But consider carefully: although Jungians may not regularly reduce psychic phenomena to their origins in infantile sexual traumas or to events in the individual's early life within the family, how often among Jungians is a particular mode of individual behaviour explained by ascribing it to the activation of a particular archetype? One might say, for example, that the Goddess Hera is ruling the individual when societal values are being defended, that Athena is in the ascendancy when a woman values her intellect over her sensibility, or that Aphrodite is operating when erotic passions rule. In this way, the psyche is reduced all too often to a pantheon of quarrelling gods and goddesses (the names we give to archetypal images) contending for possession and control of the human soul. In these circumstances the ego has about as much chance of autonomy as had Leda when Zeus swooped down from heaven in the form of a swan and raped her before she knew what was happening to her. Of course, she leaned back and enjoyed it. This Ledaesque abandoning of responsibility in the face of the god (read ‘archetype’) is one of the effects of what has been called ‘the new polytheism’. This ‘new polytheism’ is not to be mistaken for a development beyond the sense of that primordial oneness which held our forefathers in awe and which can still fill some people with cosmic wonder. Far from it. The ‘new polytheism’ seems to me to be, rather, evidence of the degeneration of a god concept that became institutionalised as the summum bonum, the highest good, in a world where evil is all too apparent.

(3) Reification: to make of something abstract a real, concrete, or literal thing. Not only have the gods and goddesses been turned into behaviour-pattern formations, but even their mythical abode has received the projections of the human psyche. In the process, an archaic view of the heavens has been concretised. Astrology provides an example. This pseudo-science was recently taken to task in a book review titled ‘The case against psychic rape’:

Almost a year has passed, thank God, since I have been asked: ‘What's your sign?’ The locution itself seems finally to have succumbed to the wearing effects of mindless repetition, and now it lies, junked with ‘rap session’ and ‘telling it like it is’, wherever rusty language lives its second halflife in mothballs, But the reflex that provokes someone to ask a stranger for his astrological sign has not, I'm afraid, been effaced. At its most benign, the impositions of a cosmological summary upon the character of a newly-met human being constitutes a denial of the person's singularity, a mindless reduction: ‘Oh, Scorpio, I get it, you’re selfish.’ At its worst, the intrusion constitutes simple theft of whatever a person wishes to reserve: irony, surprise, inconsistency. Not the least pleasure of life is to outfox predictability and inexorability, and so, to be construed as not more than a fulfilment of an inventory of characteristics assigned to one of twelve astrological rubrics is to be ruthlessly compacted (WOLFF 9).

I, too, feel that to assign the motivation for particular and individual behaviours to archetypal patterns is to risk losing the precious and unique qualities of the individual human spirit. I believe that the forming and shaping of human personality is integral to the process of individuation. This process is constantly moving in the only way it can—in patterns which reflect all that we, as individuals, bring with us into the world; in all that we encounter and that has impact upon us in the environment and in our own being—as an effect of the dynamics between the two. To place a fixed characterisation upon the mobile complexity that is the human organism is to attempt to freeze in time something that moves through a continuum of experience. The archetypal images may portray the psyche, but only as a photograph portrays a living, moving person.

(4) Pathologising. This is the fourth example of the misuse of the archetype, and it is related to the human propensity to categorise what we see and experience. It is generally asserted that Jungian psychology is based on a growth model of psychotherapy, rather than a pathology model. However, the practice of categorising behaviour in terms of archetypes may lead to the very thing Jungians criticise when rejecting the pathology model of psychotherapy on the basis that it focuses primarily upon the symptom, in that it groups a number of symptoms under the rubric of a psychiatric syndrome which is labelled, and for which it then proceeds to prescribe an appropriate method of treatment. In the pathology model, we ear often about how to treat depression, or schizophrenia, or manic depressive illness. We hear correspondingly rarely about how to treat people, suffering human beings, who are in a process of growth that is constantly changing—a process in which the person may be suffering from that disturbance of equilibrium which is a necessary accompaniment of the process of transformation. It is quite possible to lose sight of the uniqueness of the individual, and the special way in which this individual related to the environment, in our efforts to ‘diagnose’ a particular archetypal configuration. By describing a certain type of behaviour as puer aeternus, for example, we are classifying a person as immature and self-centred, as one who has never quite managed to accept adult responsibilities. Consequently, we have certain expectations of how such a person will react to situations. Our expectations cannot fail to be communicated in some way, either directly or through unconscious channels. The person so designated, so categorised, then says to himself, ‘Well, what can you expect of me, a puer aeternus?’ Thus the patient is almost encouraged to identify with the archetype. Little wonder that he becomes fixated there! So archetypal diagnosis, like any other type of diagnosis, has a tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(5) Interpretation is another activity which, when improperly offered, may occasion the misuse of the archetype. We know how it is to awaken from a dream having been deeply moved, feeling a sense of awe, or excitement, or intense longing. There is something left with us which completely mystifies us and shakes us to the very core. Then the analyst, or friend, or even the dreamer, feels called upon to fill the gap by amplifying the image with some related myth or fairy tale. When this is ill-timed it can have the effect of drawing the dreamer's energy away from the feeling-tone of the image, and transferring it to the source of the archetypal associations." (p. 7-9)

June Singer (1979). The Use and Misuse of the Archetype. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 24, p. 3-17

Michael Parsons - Psychoanalysis as Vocation and Martial Art

"This paper started as an attempt to clarify for myself my reaction to two books. But I soon realized I was doing something which J. Sandler (1983) has urged on us, which is to uncover our own implicit, unarticulated views on the nature of analysis. So it has turned into an account of what one analyst has so far discovered psychoanalysis to be. None of us can know for certain what it will come to mean for us in the future. But we may hope to continue striking at some form of internal analytic makiwara, and waiting to learn from a patient, as our swords cross, how to interpret his energy from within a still broadening spirit.
Starting from a consideration of two books, The Case for a Personal Psychotherapy by Lomas (1981) and The Standing of Psychoanalysis by Farrell (1981), I develop the idea of psychoanalysis as a vocation. This means it is not only something the analyst does; it is also an expression of his being. Similar ideas are traced in the work of Rank and Lacan. However, these two made the mistake of seeing this as a liberation from technique and basic principles. By contrast I contend that analysis as a mode of being is only to be achieved through constantly grounding oneself in these. I illustrate this position with examples from the traditional martial arts of China and Japan which have unexpected resemblances to psychoanalysis."  (p. 461)
Michael Parsons (1984). Psychoanalysis as Vocation and Martial Art. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 11, pp. 453-462

Conference Announcement - Art and Psyche Conference - NYC July 19-22

There is still time to register to attend the Art and Psyche Conference!







Art and Psyche is an international conference organized by the Art and Psyche Working Group Sponsored by the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, The International Association of Analytical Psychology and the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. Also cosponsored and hosted by New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development: Department of Applied Psychology and Department of Art and Art Professions.

The conference focuses on the creative collaboration between depth psychology and the arts. Traditional lectures, presentations, workshops, experiential activities, and breakouts will feature presentations by painters, musicians, poets, actors, photographers, psychotherapists, analysts and expressive arts therapists. Ten minute sparks of images and ideas will flash throughout the conference.

The opening day of the conference will offer designed tours of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Asia Society Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its Watson Library, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There will be walking tours of the Masonic temple and the High Line, viewings of subway station murals in The Arts For Transit program, and selected art and psyche videos at NYU. Maps of galleries and subway art will be provided.

The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) and the Kristine Mann Library (KML) will offer open houses for those interested in the arts, symbolism and psychology.

The Thursday night public program with the award-winning poet Mark Doty on Walt Whitman, and Donald Sosin on his score for the film Manhatta, will includea panel with composer Jorge Martin and photographer Deborah O’Grady. A Saturday night Dream-Over, an overnight spent at the Rubin Museum, will be offered.

73 presenters are scheduled over the 4 days of the conference, including Fisher King author Mark Winborn who will be offering a multi-media presentation based on his book Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey which explores the psychological foundations of the blues music genre.

Complete program information, registration and hotel information can be obtained at the Art and Psyche website.

Andrew Samuels: Post-Jungian Schools of Analytical Psychology

"To find one's way around in the contemporary Jungian world is not easy. Jung's standing as a psychological thinker and analyst, rather than guru or prophet, is reinforced by analytical psychologists and the writings of the post-Jungians. It no longer rests solely upon Jung's legacy of the twenty volumes of the Collected Works and his commensurate charisma. In a way, Jung needs the post-Jungians as much as they need him if his work is to be extended into the future. The prospect for analytical psychology is a shared concern and the inheritance has become a many-stranded skein of thought which has inspired, influenced, challenged, and in some instances infuriated, those who followed.

We should note the extent to which post-Jungians have felt able to challenge or attack Jung's work, often arguing with him on the basis of stringent criticisms from non-Jungians as well as adapting and integrating parallel developments in other approaches to psychology.

In his book Jungian Psychotherapy: a Study in Analytical Psychology, Fordham states that ‘a very little has been written on the development of the various schools of analytical psychology that have grown up’(Fordham, 1978, p. 53). I decided to respond to this, bearing in mind Fordham's assertion (p. ix) that ‘analytical psychology is a discipline in its own right… its ideas and practices can be assessed without regard to the persons who initiated them’.

Unlike the Freudians, post-Jungians have not formed into officially recognised schools, though the process has certainly taken place informally and there are groups in existence with common views. Dogmatism and conflict between groups has not been avoided.

To talk of Jungians, of post-Jungians and of schools of Jungians, is in itself a contentious matter. Jung stated that there simply was one Jungian—himself. He said he had no ambition to start a school of psychology. I imagine he had in mind an attempt to avoid what he considered Freud's excesses of rabbinical authority and the whole painful early history of psychoanalysis which involved so much personalia. Furthermore, as the ideologue of individuation with its stress on each person becoming himself and differentiating from others, not to mention his observation that a person's psychological type and personality play a part in dictating what he believes, Jung was bound to want to leave it up to the personal capacity of an individual as to how ‘Jungian’ he would be. However, as Henderson points out, ‘there is now a basic Jungian body of knowledge which does not permit unlimited experimentation or theorising’. And he goes on to say that Jung ‘abhorred systematisation of any kind and this was a reason why his school took so long to be formed (Henderson, 1975, pp. 120-121)....." (pp. 345-346)
　

"In formulating my own classification I have wanted above all to provide a model that will allow for individual differences while describing post-Jungian schools with sufficient coherence to be of use in the twin aims summarised by Goldenberg—to provide access into post-Jungian developments for outsiders and to enable a higher degree of structuring, ordering and mutual reflection in internal debate.

My hypothesis is that there are indeed three main schools. We can call these the Classical School, the Developmental School and the Archetypal School. My method is to select three aspects of theoretical discussion and three of clinical practice to which all analytical psychologists relate and I hope to demonstrate that it is the ordering and weighting of these that underpin the evolution of the schools.

The three theoretical areas are: (1) the definition of archetypal; (2) the concept of self; (3) the development of personality.

The three clinical aspects are: (1) the analysis of transference-countertransference; (2) emphasis upon symbolic experience of the self; (3) examination of highly differentiated imagery.

With regard to theory, I think the Classical School would weight the possibilities in the order 2, 1, 3. That is, the integrating and individuating self would be most important, other archetypal imagery arid potentials would come close behind and the early experience of the individual would be seen as of somewhat lesser importance. (I imagine this to represent, in the most general terms, Jung's own ordering of priorities, hence the use of the word ‘Classical’). The Developmental School would weight these possibilities in the order 3, 2, 1. Importance would be given to the personal development of the individual, which would then involve a consideration of the self, then seen as generating its archetypal potentialities and imagery over a lifetime. The Archetypal school would consider archetypal imagery first, the self second and development would receive less emphasis. Thus the ordering would be 1, 2, 3.

Turning to clinical practice, the Classical School would weight the possibilities 2, 3, 1, or perhaps 2, 1, 3. I am not sure whether transference-countertransference or a pursuit of particularised imagery would come second to the search for the self. The Developmental School would order its clinical priorities 1, 2, 3, or possibly 1,3,2. Here again, I am sure that transference-countertransference would be considered a most important aspect, but I am not certain whether experiences of the self or an examination of imagery would rate second position. The Archetypal School would probably function in the order 3, 2, 1. That is, particularised imagery would be regarded as more useful than symbolic experiences on the self, and both would be more central than transference-countertransference." (pp. 351-352)

Andrew Samuels (1983). The Emergence of Schools of Post-Jungian Analytical Psychology. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 28, pp. 345-362

Britton & Steiner - Interpretion: Selected Fact or Overvalued Idea?

"We have tried to illustrate the formation of interpretation from the selected fact and the difficulty of differentiating this from an overvalued idea. Before we consider this distinction further it is necessary to describe briefly Bion's notions on interpretation and how they are dependent on his theory of preconceptions, of the container/contained, and of the cyclical movement from the paranoid-schizoid to depressive positions (PS D).

In a situation where meaning is not apparent and facts are accumulating, the relationship of one psychic particle to another is not determined until the analyst's attention is taken by something which thus becomes the selected fact, and there emerges a configuration as the other psychic particles cohere by virtue of their relationship to it.

This configuration of elements in relation to a selected fact is highly specific to a particular patient at a particular moment in his analysis. It provides the substance (the contained) for an abstract form (the container) which already existed in the mind of the analyst, of which this newly emergent configuration becomes the incarnation. This previously empty form or 'state of expectation' (Bion, 1962, was awaiting an exemplary situation to give it life. The 'empty form' was the background theory in the analyst's mind that found expression in this new formulation. These theories or expectant containers accumulate in the mind of the analyst and are derived from his general analytic theories, his own subjectively-based theories about people, his clinical experience of other patients, and his accumulating experience of this particular patient. 'Conception is that which results when a pre-conception mates with the appropriate sense impressions.' In this context it should be the analyst's mind primed with its theories which awaits as a receptacle for its expectations to be fulfilled by experience of the patient. This requires a capacity to wait, and if the analyst is unable to tolerate the uncertainty of not understanding he may turn to his theory as a source of reassurance and look for a patient to act as a container for the theory. Bion emphasises that the analyst's pre-conception has to act as a container for the realisation, and 'NOT' the other way round (Bion, 1962).

Bion's notion is that we move from a fragmentary psychic state (PS) to a coherent psychic state (D), and at each encounter with new experience we traverse this route. In analysis, therefore, both patient and analyst have to face periods of disintegration as new experiences are confronted before they are assimilated and understood. The initial disintegration represents a move towards PS, and this has to be contained before a true integration towards D can result. We think this is only possible where there is a sense of containment already in existence which provides a limit to the sense of fragmentation and incomprehension, so that it is not boundless, nullifying all meaning. Otherwise the experience is of 'nothingness', terrifying 'bottomlessness', or complete 'incoherence'. For many patients, for at least a good deal of the time, the analyst's presence and the setting provide this outer container. When this is not the case the situation is very fraught and often dramatic. Meaning is then sought, not to make sense, but to provide an alternative to the missing container.

We suggest that this is one reason why ideas become overvalued by either patient or analyst. They are used to buttress the fragile sense of stability in psychic space and are therefore required to have the qualities of permanence and substance. In such circumstances, interpretation may become a means of seeking security rather than of inquiry, and its constancy more highly valued than its truth. In this scheme of things there is no waiting for the evolution of the selected fact. The overvalued idea becomes the 'pre-selected fact', which is not emergent but mandatory in every psychic situation, compelling other psychic particles to orient themselves around it as if it were permanently the selected fact....

Two situations would seem likely to give rise to the intrusion of an overvalued idea into the analytic field, thus obscuring or preventing the natural evolution of the session: (1) the patient with an intolerance of uncertainty or doubt, who does not feel adequately contained in the analytic situation, presents material or interprets the analyst's behaviour in conformity with an overvalued idea, thus constricting the analysis within the confines of his existing mainly unconscious beliefs; (2) the analyst who relieves his fear of losing his analytic identity in a situation of uncertainty or confusion by attaching himself to an overvalued idea, for which he seeks confirmation in the patient for the beliefs which, unconsciously, he thinks are necessary for his psychic equilibrium.

In the first of these instances, the analyst's task is to discover the undisclosed defining hypothesis of the patient, i.e. the patient's overvalued idea, which may be unconscious. In the second, his task is to recognise his own overdetermined use of an idea and to try to understand his own behaviour. This may be unfinished business in his own analysis or it may be a specific countertransference to his patient, in which case the unravelling of this is part of the patient's analysis and may reveal a re-enactment of an unconscious object relation in the transference." (pp. 1076-1077)

Ronald Britton and John Steiner (1994). Interpretation: Selected Fact or Overvalued Idea?. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 75, pp. 1069-1078