Mark Winborn's Blog, page 8

Montana Katz - Contemporary Field Theory

  "Psychoanalysts experience the creative fusion that takes place working with a patient, especially when something surprising and transformative emerges in the process. Madeleine and Willy Baranger described analytic processes and what happens in them that affords this creativity and also what blocks it by developing the idea of a psychoanalytic field. In their innovative work, they drew from writers in other disciplines including sociology and philosophy amongst others. The psychoanalytic field as the Barangers described it included both participants and was considered a bi-personal field. The field, following this model, has its own unconscious processes and its own fantasies. The psychoanalytic field according to the Barangers is itself the proper object of interest in analytic processes and not the intrapsychic world of the analysand. At roughly the same time and thereafter until the present, other psychoanalytic field concepts were being developed in other parts of the world, some influenced by the Barangers’ work and some independent. For example, in North America relational fields, self object matrices, intersubjective fields and other kinds of fields were being used and written about. Also in North America, Robert Langs developed an approach to psychoanalysis that was influenced by the Barangers’ work and made use of the bi-personal field. In Italy, Antonino Ferro and others have been developing Bionian Field Theory which was also influenced by the Barangers’ work as well as that of Bion. There is a family of field concepts that are useful for clinical work and draw the practitioner back to the fundamentals of what psychoanalytic process is about."   Montana Katz, author of Metaphor and Fields (Routledge, 2012). Text above is description of presentation to take place at the Contemporary Freudian Society on Feb. 26, 2014.             
 

César Botella and Sára Botella - Psychic Figurability and the Unrepresentable

Back Cover Description: "The majority of psychoanalysts today agree that the analytic setting faces them daily with certain aspects of their work for which the answers provided by an analytic theory centred exclusively on the notion of representation prove insufficient.
On the basis of their experience of analytic practice and illustrated by fascinating clinical material, César and Sára Botella set out to address what they call the work of figurability as a way of outlining the passage from the unrepresentable to the representational. They develop a conception of psychic functioning that is essentially grounded in the inseparability of the negative,trauma and the emergence of intelligibility, and describe the analyst’s work of figurability arising from the formal regression of his thinking during the session, which proves to be the best and perhaps the only means of access to this state beyond the mnemic trace which is memory without recollection. 
The Work of Psychic Figurability argues that taking this work into consideration at the heart of the theory of practice is indispensable.Without this, the analytic process is too often in danger of slipping into interminable analyses, into negative therapeutic reactions or, indeed, into disappointing successive analyses."

César Botella and Sára Botella (2005) The Work of Psychic Figurability, London: Routledge.
















 
 
 

Looking Ahead - VII Latin American Congress of Jungian Psychology June 3-6, 2015

The VII Latin American Congress of Jungian Psychology will be held in  in Buenos Aires, Argentina                                   The theme of the congress will be Conflict and Creativity: Archetypal Bridges and Boundaries.

The link to the congress website provides all the necessary detailed information: www.clapjung.com.ar. The initial call for papers can be viewed here: www.clapjung.com.ar/abstracts.php. These webpages are in Spanish. Open the pages in Google Chrome for immediate translation.

2nd Reminder - The Psychoanalytic Fair NYC Feb 8, 2014

Psychoanalytic Fair: Unity and Diversity, February 8, 2014
Teacher's College, Columbia University

The Psychoanalytic Fair will bring together a large number of area psychoanalytic institutes under one roof to provide detailed information about their training programs. Interested students and the public at large will be able to conveniently collect this diverse information in one place. Participating institutes will provide brochures and will have representatives to answer questions. A distinguished panel of presenters will be speaking on the relevance of psychoanalysis in the 21st century and issues in psychoanalytic training. 
Lewis Aron, Ph.D. - A Psychotherapy for the PeopleRichard Reichbart, Ph.D. - Black Psychoanalysts SpeakSherry Salman, Ph.D.  -  Dreams of TotalityFrank Summers, Ph.D. - The Psychoanalytic VisionJamieson Webster, Ph.D. -  The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis
More information available here: http://psychoanalyticfair.org/about

Thomas Ogden - Psychoanalytic Dialogues

"This book is offered as an act of interpretation. Different psychoanalytic perspectives are much like different languages. Despite the extensive overlap of semantic content of the written texts of different languages, each language creates meaning that cannot be generated by the other languages now spoken or preserved in written form. The interpreter is not merely a passive carrier of information from one person to another; he is the active preserver and creator of meaning as well as the retriever of the alienated. As such, the interpreter safeguards the fullness of human discourse. Psychoanalysis, both as a therapeutic process and as a set of ideas, develops in the form of a discourse between subjects, each interpreting his own productions and those of the other." (p. 1)
  Thomas Ogden (1977) The Matrix of the Mind, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Leonard Shengold - The Vicissitudes of the Holiday Season

Editors Note: The following passage from Leonard Shengold does not contain glad tidings, instead it underscores the emotional salience of the current holiday season for many of our patients and those who work within the psychoanalytic realm.

Abstract: "For many patients, mixed feelings of promise and dread that can accompany the holiday season appear in consciousness faintly and fleetingly, usually in the form of bad expectations. But the “dreaded promise” (an oxymoron) of change can come to full life and is always potentially present, especially at separations, and is usually perceptible by the analyst. The dread can be accompanied by expectations full of wonderful promise. The promise of Christmas is followed by the promise of New Year's Day—a time for new beginnings and resolutions aimed at changes for the better. But, for some, happy expectations evoking change have in the past been succeeded by bad ones, and the revival of predominant dread can be cruel and repetitive." p. 1351

Conclusion: "The early psychic dangers of overstimulation, murderous rage, castration, and especially of separation from and loss of the internalized, godlike early parents, who promised eternal life and care in the Garden of Eden, are evoked by repetitious occasions, especially those that involve change. The Christmas/New Year's holidays can provide the psychoanalytic observer with specific, evocative instances of changes that always involve (and sometimes predominantly involve) catastrophic losses from the past. The resulting bad expectations, if not brought to responsible consciousness where they can become subject to the sufferer's will, possess considerable motivational power and can result in vicissitudes of rage directed toward the self or toward others, which can compromise maturational achievements in the present and can dim promising prospects for the future." (p. 1359)

Leonard Shengold (2007). The Dreaded Promise of Christmas and the New Year. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. 76, pp. 1351-1359.  

Pre-Publication Announcement: Shared Realities

Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond
Mark Winborn (Editor), Fisher King Press (forthcoming, early 2014)
Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond brings together Jungian analysts and psychoanalysts from across the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Jung’s concept of participation mystique is used as a starting point for an in depth exploration of ‘shared realities’ in the analytic setting and beyond. The clinical, narrative, and theoretical discussions move through such related areas as: projective identification, negative coniunctio, reverie, intersubjectivity, the interactive field, phenomenology, neuroscience, the transferential chimera, shamanism, shared reality of place, borderland consciousness, and mystical participation. This unique collection of essays bridges theoretical orientations and includes some of the most original analytic writers of our time (approximately 320 pages).
Contents:Introduction: An Overview of Participation Mystique
    Mark Winborn
Negative Coniunctio: Envy and Sadomasochism in Analysis
    Pamela Power
Trauma, Participation Mystique, Projective Identification and Analytic Attitude
    Marcus West
Watching the Clouds: Analytic Reverie and Participation Mystique
    Mark Winborn
Modern Kleinian Therapy, Jung’s Participation Mystique,
and the Projective Identification Process
    Robert Waska
Songs Never Heard Before: Listening and Living Differently
in Shared Realities
    Dianne Braden
Variants of Mystical Participation
    Michael Eigen
Participation Mystiquein Peruvian Shamanism
    Deborah Bryon
Healing Our Split: Participation Mystique and C. G. Jung
    Jerome Bernstein
The Transferential Chimera and Neuroscience
    François Martin-Vallas
Toward a Phenomenology of Participation Mystique and a Reformulation
of Jungian Philosophical Anthropology
    John White
Conclusion
    Mark Winborn.

William Meredith-Owen: Are Relational Assumptions Eroding Traditional Analysis?

Abstract (p. 593 ): “The author designates as ‘traditional’ those elements of psychoanalytic presumption and practice that have, in the wake of [Michael] Fordham’s legacy, helped to inform analytical psychology and expand our capacity to integrate the shadow. It is argued that this element of the broad spectrum of Jungian practice is in danger of erosion by the underlying assumptions of the relational approach, which is fast becoming the new establishment. If the maps of the traditional landscape of symbolic reference (primal scene, Oedipus et al.) are disregarded, analysts are left with only their own self-appointed authority with which to orientate themselves. This self-centric epistemological basis of the relationalists leads to a revision of ‘analytic attitude’ that may be therapeutic but is not essentially analytic. This theme is linked to the perennial challenge of balancing differentiation and merger and traced back, through Chasseguet-Smirgel, to its roots in Genesis.
     An endeavour is made to illustrate this within the Journal convention of clinically based discussion through a commentary on [Warren] Colman’s (2013) avowedly relational treatment of the case material presented in his recent Journal paper ‘Reflections on knowledge and experience’ and through an assessment of Jessica Benjamin’s (2004) relational critique of Ron Britton’s (1989) transference embodied approach.”
From Conclusion (p. 609): “I still find myself inclined to resist this complete erosion of the symbolic realm. However, in the spirit of eschewing nebulousness and pretension, I would not claim for it any further remit beyond what is embodied in our (implicit) assumptions about the mother and the father, their intercourse, and our relationship to that. It is this that has given rise to the structured landscape of triangulation8 that has been a part of our psyche’s culture since Genesis and which ‘analytic attitude’ based clinical practice has shown we can reliably expect to encounter in the transference. A quintessential expression of this viewpoint was given by Roger Money-Kyrle (1971) in his last paper, aptly entitled ‘The aims of psycho-analysis’, the chief of which he defines as helping ‘the patient understand, and so overcome, emotional impediments to his discovering what he innately already knows’.”
William Meredith-Owen (2013) Are Waves of Relational Assumptions Eroding Traditional Analysis? Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 58, pp. 593–614.

Psychoanalytic Fair - Feb 8, 2014 Columbia University, NYC

Psychoanalytic Fair: Unity and Diversity, February 8, 2014
Teacher's College, Columbia University

The Psychoanalytic Fair will bring together a large number of area psychoanalytic institutes under one roof to provide detailed information about their training programs. Interested students and the public at large will be able to conveniently collect this diverse information in one place. Participating institutes will provide brochures and will have representatives to answer questions. A distinguished panel of presenters will be speaking on the relevance of psychoanalysis in the 21st century and issues in psychoanalytic training. 
Lewis Aron, Ph.D. - A Psychotherapy for the PeopleRichard Reichbart, Ph.D. - Black Psychoanalysts SpeakSherry Salman, Ph.D.  -  Dreams of TotalityFrank Summers, Ph.D. - The Psychoanalytic VisionJamieson Webster, Ph.D. -  The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis
More information available here: http://psychoanalyticfair.org/about

Stefano Bolognini on Psychoanalytic Empathy

Editor's Note: Stefano Bolognini is the current President of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the first Italian to be elected to that position.

"I have chosen to focus on certain specific elements, since my interest is to highlight some fundamental points which I shall briefly summarize:

- Empathy is a complex state which is not limited to concordance with the patient’s conscious ego-syntonic experience (the hypothesis of gross “simplifiers”), nor with a specific conscious or unconscious part privileged by a particular theory (such as Kohut’s “wounded narcissistic self”). On the contrary, it requires space and suspension for an elaborate identification with the various areas and internal levels of the patient. - Empathy cannot be planned because it comes about through occasional, undeterminable openings of the preconscious channels of the analyst, the patient or both.

- The analyst’s training gives him on average an advantage over most other people in being able to create the intra- and interpsychic conditions suitable for the development of empathic situations with greater ease and in a more elaborate way. - Empathy has nothing to do with kind-heartedness or sympathy, because it may come about through a type of identification which in itself is not particularly flattering or gratifying, made possible sometimes by the specific resonance with corresponding “undesirable” areas in the psychoanalyst or his negative feelings.

- Psychoanalytic empathy includes the possibility to accede over time and through the working through of the countertransference to the reintegration of split-off components, whose existence is not only hypothesized – in the manner of engineers around a drawing board – but experienced and recognized by the fully aware analyst.- If the conscious is the natural seat of the organization and formalization of experience “in the light of the ego”, the preconscious is the place for the exploration of the experience of one’s own self and that of others." Stefano Bolognini, accessed from his personal blog - http://bolognini2011.wordpress.com/the-complex-nature-of-psychoanalytic-empathy-a-theoretical-and-clinical-exploration/
His thoughts on this subject are explored in greater depth in his 2004 book Psychoanalytic Empathy (Free Association Books).