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Psychology
Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
see Psychoanalysis and Religion and Freud
The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychoanalysis edited by Ethel S. Person, Arnold M. Cooper, Glen O. Gabbard (American Psychiatric Association) is the only textbook of its kind in this distinguished field. Both a clinical guide and a reference book, this essential text focuses not only on psychoanalytic theory and treatment but also on developmental issues, research, and the many ways in which theoretical psychoanalysis intersects with contiguous disciplines.
The editors, recognized experts in the field, have brought together a remarkable 39 distinguished contributors whose broad-based interests make this textbook a unique reference for interdisciplinary psychoanalysis. The textbook is organized into 6 parts:
Part I, Core Concepts—Introduces basic concepts, such as motivation, the dynamic unconscious, the importance of early relationships, internalization, object relations theory, intersubjectivity, and sex/gender.
Part II, Developmental Theory—Addresses the developmental orientation in contemporary psychoanalysis, developmental theories and their relationship with other disciplines, attachment theory/research, and the psychoanalytic understanding of mental disorders.
Part III, Treatment and Technique—Defines what a psychoanalyst is and how he or she is trained; and presents virtually every treatment and technique, from transference/countertransference, treatment theories and their technical consequences, and interpretation, resistance, and process to termination/re-analysis, psychopharmacology, child analysis, and ethics.
Part IV, Research—Describes the burgeoning research in psychoanalysis, focusing on outcome, process, developmental, and conceptual research.
Part V, History of Psychoanalysis—Traces the history of psychoanalysis, showing how individual personality, world events, and cultural differences have led to varieties of discoveries and perspectives.
Part VI, Psychoanalysis and Related Disciplines—Details the relevance of interdisciplinary sources to Freud's ideas and the influences of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, the arts, politics, international relations, and neuroscience.
Written with a minimum of professional jargon, this in-depth work also includes an extensive glossary and name and subject indexes.
No other psychoanalysis textbook is as comprehensive in scope with such a broad array of contributors as The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychoanalysis. This up-to-date reference will find a wide audience not only among psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, educators, and students but also among professionals in allied disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, literature, the arts, philosophy, politics, and neuroscience.
The editors and contributors to this remarkable compendium
demonstrate that psychoanalytic approaches—at times in combination
with psychopharmacological therapy—continue to play a vital role in
the treatment of specific psychiatric disorders.
About the Author
Ethel S. Person, M.D., is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the
Arnold M. Cooper, M.D., is Stephen P. Tobin and Dr. Arnold M.
Cooper Professor Emeritus in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry at
Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., is Brown Foundation Chair of
Psychoanalysis and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences, and Director of the Baylor Psychiatry Clinic,
at Baylor College of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst
at the Houston/Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in
Cultural Zoo: Animals in the Human Mind and Its Sublimations
edited by Salman Akhtar, Vamuk Volkan (International Universities
Press) Our cousins the animals, swarm, creep, fly, swim and crawl
all about us, even sharing our houses and infesting our bodies. We
hunt them, breed them, clothe ourselves with them and eat them for
dinner (as they sometimes do us). They populate our literature,
myths, religions, arts, our language and its metaphors, and they
haunt our unconscious fantasies and our dreams. The profoundest,
fiercest, and most intimate urges and feelings within us are our
animal passions and instincts. The parade of animals that accompany
us through life is held up for review and appreciation in these
delightful essays, all of which share a dedication to the
understanding of human life and culture through
the lens of psychoanalytic theory in its manifold diversity. This
book is a major contribution to culture and psychoanalytic
literature. From the prehistoric art of
Contents
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Bond Between Man and Animals
Dreams of Animals
Human to Animal Transformations in Literature
Animals in Children’s Stories
Artists and Beasts
Animals, Music, and Psychoanalysis
Animals and Religion
An Annotated Visit to the Cinematic Zoo Immigration
National Identity and Animals
Mental Zoo: Animals In The Human Mind And Its Pathology edited by Salman Ahktar and Vamik Volkan (International Universities Press), a psychoanalytic study of the role played by animals in the human mind, is a huge contribution to the understanding of a segment of mental life never before studied in such depth and focus. The results are spectacular. The subject matter, besides being immensely informative, is riveting. This book, besides deepening the psychoanalytic situation, extends applied analysis another level, from the inanimate to man’s next of kin. The spectrum of animals studied is dazzling, provocative and always thought-provoking. It is psychoanalytic, each animal viewed from philia to phobia, from unconscious to conscious effects, thorough at every level.
Every contribution resounds with its relevance to clinical work and every day observations. The scholarship is historical, prehistorical, even paleontological, ranges over myths, religious worship, rituals, language, folklore, symbols, art and always clinical data, from Freud’s to our own with a special bounty to dreams and nightmares. Detailed clinical examples capture the richness of the intrapsychic and interpersonal places that animals inhabit in our psyches. The book encompasses the role of animals not only in normal development and psychopathology but also in history and mythology. Mental health professionals will listen to their patients with new sensitivities after the Mental Zoo introduces them to this fascinating menagerie. Several of the chapters will be classics. The book as a whole is more than a compendium; it’s an encyclopedia.
Contents
1. Animals in Psychiatric Symptomatology
2. Rat People
3. Horses and Horsewomen
4. The Wolf in the Consulting Room
5. Man’s Best Friend
6. A Journey with Homo Aves through the Human Aviary
7. Snakes and Us
8. Spider Phobias and Spider Fantasies
9. The Cat People Revisited
Love And Hate: Psychoanalytic Perspectives by David Mann (Brunner-Routledge)
Love and hate seem to be the dominant emotions that make the world go round and are a central theme in psychotherapy. Love and Hate seeks to answer some important questions about these all consuming passions. Many patients seeking psychotherapy feel unlovable or full of rage and hate.
What is it that interferes with the capacity to experience love? This book explores the origins of love and hate from infancy and how they develop through the life cycle. It brings together contemporary views about clinical practice on how psychotherapists and analysts work with and think about love and hate in the transference and countertransference and explores how different schools of thought deal with the subject. David Mann, together with an impressive array of international contributors represents a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Kleinian, Jungian, Independent Group, and Lacanian, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists.
With emphasis on clinical illustration throughout, the writers show how different psychoanalytic schools think about and clinically work with the experience and passions of love and hate. It will be invaluable to practitioners and students of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and counseling.
Contents
1. In Search of Love and Hate. Love - Paradox of Self and Other.
2. The Capacity for Love.
3. Love and Hate in the Analytic Encounter with a Woman Therapist.
4. Love, Hate and Personality.
5. 'The Origins of Love and Hate' Revisited.
6. Freeing Eros in the Playroom of Therapy - The Interface of Hate and Love: Sexualization,
Abstinence and the "Celibate" Countertransference.
7. The Importance of Being Able to Be Hated as a Pre-requisite for Love.
8. Misanthropy and the Broken Mirror of Narcissism - Hatred in the Narcissistic Personality.
9. The Mother's Hatred and the Ugly Child. Love and Hate in the Therapeutic Encounter.
10. "When Love Begins to Play a Role, There are only Disputes and Hatred" - Confusion and
Limits in the Treatment of Narcissistic Patients.
11. No-one to Hold the Baby - The Traumatized Individuals Incapacity to Love.
12. The Love/Hate Couple in the Primal Scene - The Problem of Dyads and Triads in
Relationship Therapy.
13. Love and Hate: A Fusion of Opposites - A Window to the Soul.
14. Following in the Footsteps of Ferenczi, Balint and Winnicott: Love and Hate in a Setting
Open to Body - and Action - Related Interventions.
Resolution Of Inner Conflict: An Introduction To Psychoanalytic Therapy by Frank Auld, Marvin Hyman, Donald Rudzinski (American Psychological Association) In the several years since the publication of the first edition of this book, psychoanalysis has undergone continuing and expanding changes in theory and practice. These changes have included an increased emphasis on so-called preoedipal issues, attention to object-relations theory and practice, the conceptualization of psychoanalysis as a "two-person" psychology, and the ex-tension of psychoanalytic thinking into areas of practice that are not psycho-therapeutic. Although we have not given up our "conservative" view of psycho-analysis, we attempt in this work to describe, discuss, and evaluate the more recent trends appearing in the psychoanalytic community. We urge each reader of this introduction to familiarize herself or himself with these trends in order to judge their merit or lack of merit.
Myriad factors determine the nature of each psychoanalytic moment, making each moment unique and, therefore, not susceptible to a manual-guided way of dealing with it. Moreover, regardless of how fervently one believes in a particular theory or conceptualization, the specific action one takes (or does not take) in any one situation will depend on one's experience, intuition, empathy, and all those other idiosyncratic skills and abilities that make up the art of doing psychoanalysis.
Because the practice of psychoanalytic therapy is an art, it cannot be learned by reading a book or manual. Thus, besides acquiring familiarity with the literature of psychoanalysis, each practitioner who learns to do psychoanalytic therapy also has to avail himself or herself of extensive supervision and consultation with experienced colleagues—for a considerable time. The many illustrative vignettes we include in our discussions of various aspects of psycho-analytic therapy should not, therefore, be viewed as showing actions to be mechanically used in seemingly similar situations. Nonetheless, we have increased greatly in this revision the number of those illustrative vignettes because we believe that by our concretizing with examples the sometimes abstract issues presented, the reader will more easily comprehend the point we are discussing. We think a verbal picture is worth a thousand words.
Psychodynamic processes are ubiquitous. They are operative in every aspect of the human experience, even though they may, by virtue of being unconscious, not be obvious or readily discernible. Often, the process finds expression by being embedded in some momentous life event which so overshadows it that the dynamic can find expression without the observer realizing it. Traumatic events present just such an opportunity for a person's dynamics to be covertly expressed and still remain out of awareness. Although it is important for the practitioner doing psychoanalytic therapy to be alert to the circumstances of trauma, it is equally important for other professionals working with traumatized persons to recognize the dynamics that lie behind the client's way of ex-pressing his reactions to trauma. These expressions are, of course, shaped by the client's inner conflicts. It is for these reasons that we have included a new chapter on the application of psychoanalytic theory to clinical services other than psychotherapy, including discussions of psychodynamic sequelae of trauma and of other instances in which an understanding of psychodynamics can prove useful.
Those familiar with the original edition of this book will note that there is much that has not changed in this revision. In reviewing what we wrote previously, we were struck by how much was still relevant and important in conveying what seem to us to be the basics of psychoanalytic therapy. We hope that the reader will derive as much gratification as we have in studying and discovering these essential principles that have retained their value and importance over the past century of psychoanalytic history.
Psychosis and Near Psychosis: Ego Function, Symbol Structure, Treatment by Eric R. Marcus (International Universities Press) Psychosis and Near Psychosis offers a psychoanalytically-based approach to an integrated treatment of psychosis and near psychosis, achieved by organizing psychotherapy, medication, hospital and milieu interventions into a powerful therapeutic tool. The author navigates confidently between psychiatric and psychoanalytic approaches, between biological evidence and psychological assessments. According to Dr. Eric Marcus, since the past, so-called heroic psychoanalyses with psychotic patients have clearly been shown to fail, the time is now ripe again to discuss psychosis in terms of the broadened psychoanalytic theory, with the support of medication and a better understanding of the neuropsychological factors involved. This book, which maps out mental illness in concrete and innovative ways, will interest all researchers and clinicians eager to find the best means, both practical and theoretical, to initiate satisfying psychiatric therapies.
Winnicott: Life and Work by F. Robert Rodman (Perseus Publishing) A brilliant and fascinating biography of the most important psychoanalyst since Freud and Jung. This beautifully written and long-awaited biography is the first full-scale life of the great British psychoanalyst, a major figure both in psychiatry and as a principle influence on the leading child development experts of our time, including Brazelton, Spock, and Stanley Greenspan.
A pediatrician turned analyst, D. W. Winnicott
rose to prominence in the stormy days when the followers of Anna Freud were
battling those of Melanie Klein for the right to be called Freud's true
intellectual heirs. This rich, witty, and insightful story probes the
autobiographical sources of Winnicott's influential concepts, such as the
"holding environment" so crucial to psychotherapy and the "transitional object"
known to every parent as the "security blanket." Winnicott's astonishing career
involves many of the great figures in psychoanalysis and psychology, not just
Klein and Anna Freud but the whole eccentric
Readers of Oliver Sacks, Janet Malcolm, and Peter Gay, as well as anyone
interested in the great explorers of human nature, will find this book
passionately absorbing.
The Kleinians: Psychoanalysis Inside Out by Janet Sayers (Polity Press) is a compelling account of the extraordinary revolution in psychology pioneered by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and nine of her colleagues and followers, including Susan Isaacs, Joan Riviere, Wilfred Bion, Frances Tustin and Hanna Segal.
Drawing on her experience as a professor, writer and therapist, Janet Sayers tells the story of this revolution through an account of the personal and public lives of its main architects, their families and patients. The result is a lively mixture of biography, psychoanalytic theory and individual case studies. The author begins with Klein's pioneering extension of Freud's theories to the analysis of very young children. This led to her claim that from birth onwards children internalize figures from their outer world, resulting in an interaction of inner and outer factors which then govern our psychology. Sayers shows how, sometimes with bitter controversy, this radical insight was variously developed, and is still being developed by Klein's followers, thereby enormously enhancing our understanding of the creative and destructive factors shaping our everyday lives.
The Kleinians continues the engaging biographical approach of Sayers's previous successful collections, Mothering Psychoanalysis and Freudian Tales, and will be appealing and informative to all those interested in psychology -- to students and specialists (in psychiatry, psychotherapy, counseling and social work), and to general readers alike.
Centents:Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction: Inside Out Chapter 2: Melanie Klein: Discovering Inner Reality Chapter 3: Susan Isaacs: Children's Phantasies Chapter 4: Joan Riveriere: Gendered Masquerades Chapter 5: Adrian Stokes: Ballet and Art Chapter 6: Herbert Rosenfeld: Schizophrenics and Gangsters Chapter 7: Wilfred Bion: Individual and Group Analysis Chapter 8: Esther Bick: Infant Observation Chapter 9: Frances Tustin: Anorexia and Autism Chapter 10: Hanna Segal: Symbolism and Psychosis Chapter 11: Ronald Britton: Exclusions and Elegies Chapter 12: Conclusion: Further Integrations Notes Index
Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context by Meira Likierman (Continuum) Melanie Klein is probably the most controversial and influential figure in British psychoanalysis. She left Germany in 1926 and settled in London where she soon quarreled with Anna Freud. Klein pioneered the psychoanalysis of children and applied her insights on the infantile origins of unconscious drives to adult analysis. In this critical, yet sympathetic, study Meira Likierman provides a new and searching assessment of the work, life and lasting influence of this brilliant figure.
Excerpt:
Klein's last paper, published posthumously in 1963, has little trace of the grim conclusions that emerged in parts of the 1957 envy theory, particularly as implied in the notion of a gratuitous envy of the good, fulfilling object. In this last work, devoted to the subject of loneliness, Klein's outlook returns to a more compassionate, poignant appraisal of the human psyche. She gives further emphasis to the constitutional misfortune of the infant born with a weak ego, and shows how someone who is thus disadvantaged by nature, is ill-equipped from the beginning to cope with the considerable hardships and pains of the world. In a much more mellow tone, Klein's last paper leaves us more with sympathy than disapproval for humankind. She vividly conjures a state of fundamental human weakness in the face of turbulent instincts and internal conflict, and shows this to be inherent in the condition of living. She also traces the origin of such painful conflict to the realities of life and death that necessarily loom over every struggle for survival. At the same time, less is made in Klein's last paper of the wanton savagery, envy and destructiveness that she had always ascribed to the instinctual motivational system of the developing individual.
The subject of the last paper befits its mellow tone. Loneliness, defined as the `yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state' is a human inevitability in a mind that is shaped by object relations from birth, and that depends on them thereafter. In this last paper, life is seen as a quest to allay loneliness, and much of what motivates us is regarded as our yearning to have a sense of being mentally accompanied on our life's journey. We long to develop a mind that is understood and recognized, both by others and by ourselves.
The experience of loneliness does not end with this. At every stage, the object-seeking human infant is bound to re-experience the spurn and disappointment of loneliness. In the paranoid-schizoid position, `paranoid insecurity is one of the roots of loneliness'. The infant feels alone in a hostile world, and, furthermore, needs to struggle with the process of psychical integration. Since this never feels completed, the individual never reaches a state of experiencing `a complete understanding and acceptance' of his emotions. And it is not only others who are felt to be incapable of offering such a whole understanding. The individual remains with a permanent sense that aspects of the self, though intensely experienced within, continue to elude self-understanding. This partial selfalienation creates a sense of incompleteness, a yearning for unavailable aspects of the self and a resulting inner loneliness. In the depressive position, ambivalence and grief may leave the individual isolated with, and threatened by, the degree of his own hatred. The individual feels unworthy and deserted by a good object which keeps eluding his secure grasp, externally through absences, and internally through aggressive destructions.
She suggests that the individual's loneliness is exacerbated when a `harsh super-ego has engendered a very strong repression of destructive impulses'. Just as her own super-ego does not condemn humanity harshly in this last work, she advises that a judgemental super-ego does not promote a healthy development in the child. She thus advocates a tolerance towards children's destructiveness, even though she does not mean by this that parents must be submissive. She suggests that ‘the parents, by accepting the child's destructive impulses and showing that they can protect themselves against his aggressiveness, can diminish his anxiety'.' She also warns that a harsh superego in the child is undesirable because it `can never be felt to forgive destructive impulses’, and so encourages the denial of aggressive emotions instead of an appropriate processing of them.
This note of tolerance infuses also Klein's theoretical conclusions, and is accompanied by an added emphasis not on the malevolence of an envious disposition, but on a constitutionally tragic predicament - the weak ego at birth:
If, however, the ego is very weak, which I consider to be an innate feature, and if there have been difficulties at birth and the beginning of life, the capacity to integrate -to bring together the split-off parts of the ego - is also weak, and there is in addition a greater tendency to split in order to avoid anxiety aroused by the destructive impulses.
Such fundamental disadvantages are of crucial consequences. They lead to `an incapacity to bear anxiety’ that is of `far-reaching importance'. They result in a lesser ability to integrate experiences and work through early anxieties. By comparison, the ability to introject the good breast with some security is now described as a `characteristic of some innate strength in the ego'.' It immediately sets in motion a benign cycle, since `a strong ego is less liable to fragmentation', and more capable of `achieving a measure of integration and a good early relation to the primal object'. Therefore, destructive impulses are mitigated, which lessens the harshness of the super-ego. The growing child has a greater tolerance of deficiencies in the object and the world, which, in turn, ensures a `happy relation to the loved object', as well as a valuation of the mother's `presence and affection'. Within such a propitious early situation, introjective and projective processes are likely to function well and reinforce feelings of closeness and of understanding and being understood, all of which mitigate loneliness.
In this last work Klein depicts a human individual who is lonely from infancy onwards, in the sense of battling firstly to integrate himself, and then to keep his good object. And while loneliness is viewed by her as a lifelong reality, she realizes also the special plight of old age. She was herself writing in old age, and obviously with some of her own loneliness in mind. Grosskurth describes her last days as physically difficult. Klein complained about progressive osteoarthritis and excessive tiredness, but otherwise noted that `the children give me much joy'. This joy was specifically due to her beloved son Erich, who had been so important at the start of her career, and who now also enabled her to experience the pleasures of grandmotherhood. When shortly after this Klein's extreme fatigue was discovered to be partly caused by a cancer of the colon, she was obliged to go into hospital. She was visited there by her colleagues, and Grosskurth notes that `Hanna Segal, Esther Bick and Betty Joseph came to see her regularly'. Betty Joseph was also aware how much Klein was still able to relish her remaining days. At the same time, Klein retained her strong-willed, impetuous aspect, stubbornly rejecting the hospital night nurse, whom she disliked. Judging this behaviour in the light of her own theory, it seems that by this stage she understandably projected a death-bearing, bad internal object on to the night nurse. Klein died in hospital, but does indeed appear to have been both lucid and emotionally engaged with others to the last.
Perhaps the secret for her ability to accept her life's ending can be glimpsed in some of the thinking in the loneliness paper, which was actually completed for presentation a year before her death. When reflecting on the predicament of old age, Klein suggests that the optimal way to endure it is through `gratitude for past pleasures without too much resentment because they are no longer available'." Just before death, as immediately after birth, the human individual needs to cherish the good in order to counter a primal grievance against an unfair world. However, Klein does not leave us with an idealized picture of a grateful old age. She notes pragmatically that sometimes `preoccupation with the past' is a defense adopted `in order to avoid the frustrations of the present'." Sometimes old-age nostalgia represents gratitude for good memories, but at other times, boring ruminations about the past represent a defense against acknowledging present lacks and frustrations.
Klein's writing thus ends with a lonely human being, rather than an envious destroyer driven by original sin. This is not to suggest that she disowned her earlier insights into human aggression. But her outlook now intimated that we are the victims of the worst part of our nature. This is why loneliness is partly tragic, since some of it is brought on the individual by himself, and by the destructive processes that have made it impossible to keep within a safe good object. Because of this, loneliness gives added impetus to our search for social ties. It creates a `great need to turn to external objects', and so drives some of our quest for object relations.
It is the extent of our need for others and our ceaseless quest for kindred spirits in the world, that are partly responsible for the intensity of our disappointments. Others are never as fully available to us as we wish them to be, nor indeed are we as available to them as we would like to think. In Klein's mature thinking, our destructiveness is triggered when we are unable to tolerate such disappointments, rather than out of a selfish need to obliterate others in order to remain alone. Klein's work on loneliness thus conveys to us her meaningful last thoughts. And while there is no evidence that she intended to revise the content of her earlier theoretical framework, nor amend her sober vision of human cruelty and destructiveness, she concludes by advocating a scientific, morally neutral appraisal of these.
This has substantial implications towards how Klein would have viewed clinical technique. There is little indication that she would have favoured a punitive or suspicious approach, the kind in which the patient's supposedly perverse and destructive motivations are foremost in the analyst's mind. For some reason, such harshness did creep into the technique of some psychoanalysts, mistaken by them for an essentially Kleinian feature. Yet there were others who noted this distortion and objected to it. Already in 1936, Riviere complained that `The very great importance of analysing aggressive tendencies has perhaps carried some analysts off their feet, and in some quarters is defeating its own ends.' '3 In a similar vein, Spillius noted in 1988, when discussing Kleinian technique, that `most of the papers of the 1950s and 1960s, especially those by young and inexperienced analysts, tend to emphasize the patient's destructiveness. Spillius rightly emphasizes that this tendency represented `a step backward from the work of Klein herself. It is possible that a harsh technique resulted in part from some of the typical insecurities that have always beset professional psychoanalysts. In their struggle to work in depth and to retain a properly neutral stance, some young analysts may have adopted clinical harshness as a form of rigour, as if rigour should reside in the severity of the analyst's outlook, rather than in the degree of awareness that is created for the patient. Whether or not this has indeed been the case, it is also possible to understand why it was Klein's rather austere vision that sometimes fuelled such anxious approaches to the patient's psychic life.
There is, indeed, no denying that a melancholy element casts a shadow on many of Klein's formulations. However, it never reaches the status of a conclusion on human nature. Klein certainly spells out the savagery of human destructiveness forcefully, but in the end, sees it as poised in battle against life instincts. She also sees it as dependent on factors that are beyond individual control, among them the constitutional capacity of the ego to withstand the pains and frustrations of life. To this is added the importance of external factors, which may aid or exacerbate initial weaknesses. There is no general message in this about whether humanity is destructive or benign, only the idea that it needs to be thinking was to point out how this battle might begin and evolve, and suggest factors, both internal and external, that contribute to its outcome.Mankind's Oedipal Destiny: Libidinal and Aggressive Aspects of Sexuality edited by Peter Hartocollis (International Universities Press) Based on symposium papers from an International Psychoanalytic Symposium at Delphi, held in 1996. Coverage includes: sexuality in nonneurotic structures, new perspectives on the Oedipus complex, women's twofold Oedipus complex, moral masochism and the affect of resentment, and the concept of libido in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing.
The Scope of their deliberation is remarkable. They focused on one of the moot important theoretical and clinical problems of psychoanalysis, whether Freud's view of the Oedipus complex as the nucleus of neurosis and the organizer of adult Sexuality is still valid. The book is essential for all those who wish to know where psychoanalysis stands today.
Mankind's Oedipal Destiny: brings together Some of our moot eminent and creative psychoanalytic minds from all over the world to examine the Oedipus complex. Each essay deserves reading, whether for incisive reformulation and reflection upon theory, for pertinent, thoughtful case diocu55ion, or for delightful and Surprising analysis of classical drama or philosophy (and even Japanese iconography), often for all three together
This work, lovingly assembled and edited by Peter Hartocollis, offers us a generous banquet of interpretations, reinterpretations, visions and revisions of the Oedipus complex. Making no attempt to hide the complexity, to create an "Oedipus Simplex," the book enlarges our vision of what psychoanalytic theorizing can be. It is an important volume for analytic readers, written by some of the leading analytic thinkers today, and is particularly important in bringing together clinical, literary and mythological material.The Kleinians: Psychoanalysis Inside Out by Janet Sayers (Polity Press) is a compelling account of the extraordinary revolution in psychology pioneered by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and nine of her colleagues and followers, including Susan Isaacs, Joan Riviere, Wilfred Bion, Frances Tustin and Hanna Segal.
Drawing on her experience as a professor, writer and therapist, Janet Sayers tells the story of this revolution through an account of the personal and public lives of its main architects, their families and patients. The result is a lively mixture of biography, psychoanalytic theory and individual case studies. The author begins with Klein's pioneering extension of Freud's theories to the analysis of very young children. This led to her claim that from birth onwards children internalize figures from their outer world, resulting in an interaction of inner and outer factors which then govern our psychology. Sayers shows how, sometimes with bitter controversy, this radical insight was variously developed, and is still being developed by Klein's followers, thereby enormously enhancing our understanding of the creative and destructive factors shaping our everyday lives.
The Kleinians continues the engaging biographical approach of Sayers's previous successful collections, Mothering Psychoanalysis and Freudian Tales, and will be appealing and informative to all those interested in psychology -- to students and specialists (in psychiatry, psychotherapy, counseling and social work), and to general readers alike.
Centents:Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction: Inside Out Chapter 2: Melanie Klein: Discovering Inner Reality Chapter 3: Susan Isaacs: Children's Phantasies Chapter 4: Joan Riveriere: Gendered Masquerades Chapter 5: Adrian Stokes: Ballet and Art Chapter 6: Herbert Rosenfeld: Schizophrenics and Gangsters Chapter 7: Wilfred Bion: Individual and Group Analysis Chapter 8: Esther Bick: Infant Observation Chapter 9: Frances Tustin: Anorexia and Autism Chapter 10: Hanna Segal: Symbolism and Psychosis Chapter 11: Ronald Britton: Exclusions and Elegies Chapter 12: Conclusion: Further Integrations Notes Index
Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context by Meira Likierman (Continuum) Melanie Klein is probably the most controversial and influential figure in British psychoanalysis. She left Germany in 1926 and settled in London where she soon quarreled with Anna Freud. Klein pioneered the psychoanalysis of children and applied her insights on the infantile origins of unconscious drives to adult analysis. In this critical, yet sympathetic, study Meira Likierman provides a new and searching assessment of the work, life and lasting influence of this brilliant figure.
Excerpt:
Klein's last paper, published posthumously in 1963, has little trace of the grim conclusions that emerged in parts of the 1957 envy theory, particularly as implied in the notion of a gratuitous envy of the good, fulfilling object. In this last work, devoted to the subject of loneliness, Klein's outlook returns to a more compassionate, poignant appraisal of the human psyche. She gives further emphasis to the constitutional misfortune of the infant born with a weak ego, and shows how someone who is thus disadvantaged by nature, is ill-equipped from the beginning to cope with the considerable hardships and pains of the world. In a much more mellow tone, Klein's last paper leaves us more with sympathy than disapproval for humankind. She vividly conjures a state of fundamental human weakness in the face of turbulent instincts and internal conflict, and shows this to be inherent in the condition of living. She also traces the origin of such painful conflict to the realities of life and death that necessarily loom over every struggle for survival. At the same time, less is made in Klein's last paper of the wanton savagery, envy and destructiveness that she had always ascribed to the instinctual motivational system of the developing individual.
The subject of the last paper befits its mellow tone. Loneliness, defined as the `yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state' is a human inevitability in a mind that is shaped by object relations from birth, and that depends on them thereafter. In this last paper, life is seen as a quest to allay loneliness, and much of what motivates us is regarded as our yearning to have a sense of being mentally accompanied on our life's journey. We long to develop a mind that is understood and recognized, both by others and by ourselves.
The experience of loneliness does not end with this. At every stage, the object-seeking human infant is bound to re-experience the spurn and disappointment of loneliness. In the paranoid-schizoid position, `paranoid insecurity is one of the roots of loneliness'. The infant feels alone in a hostile world, and, furthermore, needs to struggle with the process of psychical integration. Since this never feels completed, the individual never reaches a state of experiencing `a complete understanding and acceptance' of his emotions. And it is not only others who are felt to be incapable of offering such a whole understanding. The individual remains with a permanent sense that aspects of the self, though intensely experienced within, continue to elude self-understanding. This partial selfalienation creates a sense of incompleteness, a yearning for unavailable aspects of the self and a resulting inner loneliness. In the depressive position, ambivalence and grief may leave the individual isolated with, and threatened by, the degree of his own hatred. The individual feels unworthy and deserted by a good object which keeps eluding his secure grasp, externally through absences, and internally through aggressive destructions.
She suggests that the individual's loneliness is exacerbated when a `harsh super-ego has engendered a very strong repression of destructive impulses'. Just as her own super-ego does not condemn humanity harshly in this last work, she advises that a judgemental super-ego does not promote a healthy development in the child. She thus advocates a tolerance towards children's destructiveness, even though she does not mean by this that parents must be submissive. She suggests that ‘the parents, by accepting the child's destructive impulses and showing that they can protect themselves against his aggressiveness, can diminish his anxiety'.' She also warns that a harsh superego in the child is undesirable because it `can never be felt to forgive destructive impulses’, and so encourages the denial of aggressive emotions instead of an appropriate processing of them.
This note of tolerance infuses also Klein's theoretical conclusions, and is accompanied by an added emphasis not on the malevolence of an envious disposition, but on a constitutionally tragic predicament - the weak ego at birth:
If, however, the ego is very weak, which I consider to be an innate feature, and if there have been difficulties at birth and the beginning of life, the capacity to integrate -to bring together the split-off parts of the ego - is also weak, and there is in addition a greater tendency to split in order to avoid anxiety aroused by the destructive impulses.
Such fundamental disadvantages are of crucial consequences. They lead to `an incapacity to bear anxiety’ that is of `far-reaching importance'. They result in a lesser ability to integrate experiences and work through early anxieties. By comparison, the ability to introject the good breast with some security is now described as a `characteristic of some innate strength in the ego'.' It immediately sets in motion a benign cycle, since `a strong ego is less liable to fragmentation', and more capable of `achieving a measure of integration and a good early relation to the primal object'. Therefore, destructive impulses are mitigated, which lessens the harshness of the super-ego. The growing child has a greater tolerance of deficiencies in the object and the world, which, in turn, ensures a `happy relation to the loved object', as well as a valuation of the mother's `presence and affection'. Within such a propitious early situation, introjective and projective processes are likely to function well and reinforce feelings of closeness and of understanding and being understood, all of which mitigate loneliness.
In this last work Klein depicts a human individual who is lonely from infancy onwards, in the sense of battling firstly to integrate himself, and then to keep his good object. And while loneliness is viewed by her as a lifelong reality, she realizes also the special plight of old age. She was herself writing in old age, and obviously with some of her own loneliness in mind. Grosskurth describes her last days as physically difficult. Klein complained about progressive osteoarthritis and excessive tiredness, but otherwise noted that `the children give me much joy'. This joy was specifically due to her beloved son Erich, who had been so important at the start of her career, and who now also enabled her to experience the pleasures of grandmotherhood. When shortly after this Klein's extreme fatigue was discovered to be partly caused by a cancer of the colon, she was obliged to go into hospital. She was visited there by her colleagues, and Grosskurth notes that `Hanna Segal, Esther Bick and Betty Joseph came to see her regularly'. Betty Joseph was also aware how much Klein was still able to relish her remaining days. At the same time, Klein retained her strong-willed, impetuous aspect, stubbornly rejecting the hospital night nurse, whom she disliked. Judging this behaviour in the light of her own theory, it seems that by this stage she understandably projected a death-bearing, bad internal object on to the night nurse. Klein died in hospital, but does indeed appear to have been both lucid and emotionally engaged with others to the last.
Perhaps the secret for her ability to accept her life's ending can be glimpsed in some of the thinking in the loneliness paper, which was actually completed for presentation a year before her death. When reflecting on the predicament of old age, Klein suggests that the optimal way to endure it is through `gratitude for past pleasures without too much resentment because they are no longer available'." Just before death, as immediately after birth, the human individual needs to cherish the good in order to counter a primal grievance against an unfair world. However, Klein does not leave us with an idealized picture of a grateful old age. She notes pragmatically that sometimes `preoccupation with the past' is a defense adopted `in order to avoid the frustrations of the present'." Sometimes old-age nostalgia represents gratitude for good memories, but at other times, boring ruminations about the past represent a defense against acknowledging present lacks and frustrations.
Klein's writing thus ends with a lonely human being, rather than an envious destroyer driven by original sin. This is not to suggest that she disowned her earlier insights into human aggression. But her outlook now intimated that we are the victims of the worst part of our nature. This is why loneliness is partly tragic, since some of it is brought on the individual by himself, and by the destructive processes that have made it impossible to keep within a safe good object. Because of this, loneliness gives added impetus to our search for social ties. It creates a `great need to turn to external objects', and so drives some of our quest for object relations.
It is the extent of our need for others and our ceaseless quest for kindred spirits in the world, that are partly responsible for the intensity of our disappointments. Others are never as fully available to us as we wish them to be, nor indeed are we as available to them as we would like to think. In Klein's mature thinking, our destructiveness is triggered when we are unable to tolerate such disappointments, rather than out of a selfish need to obliterate others in order to remain alone. Klein's work on loneliness thus conveys to us her meaningful last thoughts. And while there is no evidence that she intended to revise the content of her earlier theoretical framework, nor amend her sober vision of human cruelty and destructiveness, she concludes by advocating a scientific, morally neutral appraisal of these.
This has substantial implications towards how Klein would have viewed clinical technique. There is little indication that she would have favoured a punitive or suspicious approach, the kind in which the patient's supposedly perverse and destructive motivations are foremost in the analyst's mind. For some reason, such harshness did creep into the technique of some psychoanalysts, mistaken by them for an essentially Kleinian feature. Yet there were others who noted this distortion and objected to it. Already in 1936, Riviere complained that `The very great importance of analysing aggressive tendencies has perhaps carried some analysts off their feet, and in some quarters is defeating its own ends.' '3 In a similar vein, Spillius noted in 1988, when discussing Kleinian technique, that `most of the papers of the 1950s and 1960s, especially those by young and inexperienced analysts, tend to emphasize the patient's destructiveness. Spillius rightly emphasizes that this tendency represented `a step backward from the work of Klein herself. It is possible that a harsh technique resulted in part from some of the typical insecurities that have always beset professional psychoanalysts. In their struggle to work in depth and to retain a properly neutral stance, some young analysts may have adopted clinical harshness as a form of rigour, as if rigour should reside in the severity of the analyst's outlook, rather than in the degree of awareness that is created for the patient. Whether or not this has indeed been the case, it is also possible to understand why it was Klein's rather austere vision that sometimes fuelled such anxious approaches to the patient's psychic life.
There is, indeed, no denying that a melancholy element casts a shadow on many of Klein's formulations. However, it never reaches the status of a conclusion on human nature. Klein certainly spells out the savagery of human destructiveness forcefully, but in the end, sees it as poised in battle against life instincts. She also sees it as dependent on factors that are beyond individual control, among them the constitutional capacity of the ego to withstand the pains and frustrations of life. To this is added the importance of external factors, which may aid or exacerbate initial weaknesses. There is no general message in this about whether humanity is destructive or benign, only the idea that it needs to be thinking was to point out how this battle might begin and evolve, and suggest factors, both internal and external, that contribute to its outcome.Mankind's Oedipal Destiny: Libidinal and Aggressive Aspects of Sexuality edited by Peter Hartocollis (International Universities Press) Based on symposium papers from an International Psychoanalytic Symposium at Delphi, held in 1996. Coverage includes: sexuality in nonneurotic structures, new perspectives on the Oedipus complex, women's twofold Oedipus complex, moral masochism and the affect of resentment, and the concept of libido in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing.
The Scope of their deliberation is remarkable. They focused on one of the moot important theoretical and clinical problems of psychoanalysis, whether Freud's view of the Oedipus complex as the nucleus of neurosis and the organizer of adult Sexuality is still valid. The book is essential for all those who wish to know where psychoanalysis stands today.
Mankind's Oedipal Destiny: brings together Some of our moot eminent and creative psychoanalytic minds from all over the world to examine the Oedipus complex. Each essay deserves reading, whether for incisive reformulation and reflection upon theory, for pertinent, thoughtful case diocu55ion, or for delightful and Surprising analysis of classical drama or philosophy (and even Japanese iconography), often for all three together
This work, lovingly assembled and edited by Peter Hartocollis, offers us a generous banquet of interpretations, reinterpretations, visions and revisions of the Oedipus complex. Making no attempt to hide the complexity, to create an "Oedipus Simplex," the book enlarges our vision of what psychoanalytic theorizing can be. It is an important volume for analytic readers, written by some of the leading analytic thinkers today, and is particularly important in bringing together clinical, literary and mythological material.
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