John E. Gedo - Böcker

In an effort to expand the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, John E. Gedo and Arnold Goldberg delineate and order the various generally accepted systems of psychological functioning, considered here as "models of the mind." The authors provide a historical review of four major models of the mind: the topographic model, the reflex arc model, the tripartite model, and an object relations model. They then investigate the possible hierarchical interrelationships of such models. Each model is shown to represent a different facet of mental functioning and is thus employable on an ad hoc basis. The models are shown not to cancel on another out but to allow for theoretical complementarity. Gedo and Goldberg apply their theory to four classic psychoanalytic case studies to demonstrate its effectiveness: Freud's Rat Man, his Wolf Man, the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, and a case of arrested development. For each of these cases the authors show how it would have been both possible and advantageous to apply a variety of different theories as facts about each continued to accumulate.

In this intellectual memoir, Gedo paints a portrait of American psychoanalysis, its popular peak and its failure to face the complexity of its task, and thus its retreat to schismatic conflict. Interwoven is an accessible presentation of his intellectual work.

Psychoanalysis was once considered primarily a humanistic enterprise. The psychoanalyst was a philosopher and an artist, adept at deciphering the communications and intrapsychic behaviors of the unique individual. He or she could rely on intuition alone to obtain good results. In this provocative study, John E. Gedo asserts that biological information is essential to successful and comprehensive psychoanalysis. Gedo presents his case in three sections. The first is devoted to the controversies surrounding psychoanalysis as a discipline. Beginning with an overview of Freud's enduring contributions to the field, Gedo discusses the importance of both mental contents and reliable, measurable psychobiological data-suggesting that hermeneutics alone cannot yield valid hypotheses. Part 2 addresses each of the major topics of a comprehensive theory of mind, focusing on the accessibility of biological information. This information, he believes, makes an educated exploration of principal questions about behavioral regulation a viable enterprise. The final section integrates these theories into a comprehensive biological hypothesis about behavior and psychoanalytic treatment.Providing psychoanalysis with a tenable scientific framework, Psychoanalysis as Biological Science should be read by all professionals and students in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology.

In Conceptual Issues in Psychoanalysis, John Gedo's mastery of Freudian theory and broad historical consciousness subserve a new goal: an understanding of "dissidence" in psychoanalysis. Gedo launches his inquiry by reflecting expansively on recent assessments of Freud's character. His acute remarks on the intellectual and personal agendas that inform the portraits of Freud offered by Frank Sulloway, Jeffrey Masson, and Peter Swales pave the way for his own definition of psychoanalysis in historical context. Then, in topical studies on Sandor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, and Heinz Kohut, he explicates the commonalities that bind together three generations of dissidents, each of whom undertook to supplant the edifice of hypotheses erected by Freud with alternative theories. Interspersed with these essays are quite insightful studies of Lou Andreas-Salome and David Rapaport, whom Gedo sees as "epistemological referees" attempting to reconcile viewpoints unique to their generations.In the second part of the book, Gedo argue that analysis now has the opportunity to move beyond this pattern of dissidence followed by mediation by drawing on observational research about infancy and early childhood to validate or refute its clinical hypotheses. In these chapters, Gedo offers critical commentary on recent efforts to extrapolate from infant research to the psychoanalytic theory of development. Only then does he offer his own measured estimation of the "legacy of infancy and the technique of psychoanalysis." This review of "the challenge of scientific method" as it bears on analysis culminates in concluding chapters that probe the status of analysis as a hermeneutic discipline and the contribution of analysis to "vocabularies of moral deliberation."

Anchoring his schema in the belief that nonorganic disorders are disturbances in adaptation explicable within a depth-psychological framework, Gedo posits two broad categories of functional disorder: "apraxias" that represent any failure to learn adaptively essential skills, and disorders of what her terms "obligatory repetition." Within both categories of disorder, Gedo avers, the vicissitudes of mental functioning are understandable in terms of regression to relatively archaic modes of function and the reversal of regression and return to expectable modes of adult function.It follwos from Gedo's understanding of how and why the mind becomes disordered, that diagnosis utilizing psychoanalytic principles can only be based on the succession of transference constellations encountered in treatment, since these constellations invariably pinpoint the developmental impasses in which maladaptive repetitive patterns and the failure to learn basic psychological skills are rooted. For purposes of understanding a variety of apraxic and repetitive disorders, Gedo equates such basic skills not only with the three major psychobiological attainments he has invoked in the past, but with the development of adequate perception, cognition, affectivity, and communication skills.Beautifullu organized, lucidly written, and richly illustrated with case vignettes, The Mind in Disorder is not only the thoughtful yield of an outstanding clinician's three decades of experience. It is also the first psychoanalytic book since Otto Fenichel's masterwork of 1945, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, to take the issue of how we conceptualize psychopathology as its central focus.

Gedo's pathbreaking exploration of the psychology of creativity incorporates first-hand material drawn from his extensive clinical work with artists, musicians, and other exceptionally creative individuals. Using this body of clinical knowledge as conceptual anchorage, he then offers illuminating reassessments of the artistic productivity of van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin, and Caravaggio, and the literary productivity of Nietzsche, Jung, and Freud.

In The Biology of Clinical Encounters, Gedo utilizes recent findings in neuroscience and cognitive psychology to elaborate his conception of psychobiology and to consider its implications in clinical analysis. He pursues this challenging undertaking in several directions. He illuminates the way in which psychobiology enters into his hierarchical model of mental functioning, and goes on to examine three clinical syndromes - phobias, obsessions, and affective disturbances - in which biological considerations are particularly important. Of special note are chapters examining the implications of a biological approach for clinical psychoanalysis. Gedo explores the notion of transference that grows out of attentiveness to psychobiological factors, elaborates the concept of therapeutics that follows from looking beyond mental contents, and discusses the problem of assessing clinical evidence produced by analyses informed by a psychobiological orientation. Drawing on his own analytic work of over three decades, he compares analyses conducted with a psychobiological orientation with the outcome of analyses conducted earlier in his career with a more traditional psychological approach. A stimulating introduction to the interpenetration of the biological and the psychological in clinical work, The Biology of Clinical Encounters is quintessential Gedo: scholarly in conception, elegant in tone, provocative in import, and illuminating, always, of fundamental issues about the status of psychoanalysis as a science of mind.

Impasse and Innovation in Psychoanalysis offers a rare perspective on the technical difficulties and creative responses to them that typify clinical psychoanalysis. The four seminars at the heart of this volume are not case reports in the usual sense. Rather, each seminar revolves around the challenges of translating an understanding of difficult process issues into an effective therapeutic response. What emerges in each case is a vivid picture of an analyst's subjective experience in conceptualizing and managing a particularly demanding treatment, supplemented by data about the patient's history and free associations and enlivened by seminar leader John Gedo's challenging questions and clinical commentary.Each seminar is framed by Mark Gehrie's introduction and commentary, the latter addressing the interplay of theory and technique in the preceding case. Gehrie's commentary is then followed by Gedo's notes, which are keyed to specific points in the seminar transcript. Gedo not only clarifies issues left in doubt by the original discussion but offers his own second thoughts about the clinical material and its technical handling.The uniquely dialogic format of this volume brings different voices to bear on issues at the forefront of the evolution of clinical psychoanalysis. Edifying reading for practicing analysts and analytic therapists, Impasse and Innovation in Psychoanalysis is a wonderful teaching tool, introducing candidates, residents, and students to the demands of coping with stressful transferences and enactments and sparkling, throughout, with Gedo's wit and wisdom.

Hailed as "important book certain to stir extended psychoanalytic debate" (American Journal of Psychiatry) on publication in 1979, Gedo's Beyond Interpretation set forth a radically new theoretical framework and clinical agenda for modern psychoanalysis. The theoretical framework revolved around Gedo's reconceptualization of human personality as a hierarchy of personal aims culminating in a "self-organization." The clinical agenda followed from the need for interventions that regularly went "beyond interpretation" in helping patients cope with primitive illusions, failures of integration, and traumatization. In this extensive revision of the 1979 text, Gedo refines his original formulations in light of the empirical findings and clinical advances of the past 15 years.

In this remarkable survey of "the communicative repertory of humans," John Gedo demonstrates the central importance to theory and therapeutics of the communication of information. He begins by surveying those modes of communication encountered in psychoanalysis that go beyond the lexical meaning of verbal dialogue, including "the music of speech," various protolinguistic phenomena, and the language of the body. Then, turning to the analytic dialogue, Gedo explores the implications of these alternative modes of communication for psychoanalytic technique. Individual chapters focus, in turn, on the creation of a "shared language" between analyst and analysand, the consequences of the analytic setting, the form in which the analyst casts particular interventions, the curative limits of empathy, the analyst's affectivity and its communication to the patient, and the semiotic significance of countertransference and projective identification.Gedo does not proffer semiotics as a substitute for metapsychology. He is explicit that communicative skill is always dependdent on somatic events within the central nervous system. Indeed, it is because Gedo's hierarchical approach to communication builds on our current understanding of a hierarchically organized central nervous system that his clincal observations become insights into basic psychobiological functioning. Grounded in Gedo's four decades of clinical experience, The Languages of Psychoanalysis points to a new venue of clinical research and conceptualization, one in which attentiveness to issues of communication will not only foster linkages with contemporary neuroscience, but also clarify and enlarge the therapeutic possibilities of psychoanalytic treatment.

This volume addresses the methodological problems inherent in using individual biographies as vehicles for advancing the understanding of creativity. In addition to discussing general problems, this volume contains illustrations of the application of a variety of psycho-biographical strategies. The research from these sample biographies demonstrates the manner in which biographical data may be turned into scientific propositions. The most important new idea in the book (which is in many ways a primer of psycho-biography) is the distinction made between biographical methods primarily based on an empathic approach to the data and what the authors call conceptual methods that rely on deduction from some theoretical schema. To date the literature has been entirely lacking in guidelines for the biographer interested in the psychological dimensions of his/her task and, by extension, the creativity researcher as well. This book is intended to fill this gap.

Gedo's pathbreaking exploration of the psychology of creativity incorporates first-hand material drawn from his extensive clinical work with artists, musicians, and other exceptionally creative individuals. Using this body of clinical knowledge as conceptual anchorage, he then offers illuminating reassessments of the artistic productivity of van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin, and Caravaggio, and the literary productivity of Nietzsche, Jung, and Freud.

Anchoring his schema in the belief that nonorganic disorders are disturbances in adaptation explicable within a depth-psychological framework, Gedo posits two broad categories of functional disorder: "apraxias" that represent any failure to learn adaptively essential skills, and disorders of what her terms "obligatory repetition." Within both categories of disorder, Gedo avers, the vicissitudes of mental functioning are understandable in terms of regression to relatively archaic modes of function and the reversal of regression and return to expectable modes of adult function.It follwos from Gedo's understanding of how and why the mind becomes disordered, that diagnosis utilizing psychoanalytic principles can only be based on the succession of transference constellations encountered in treatment, since these constellations invariably pinpoint the developmental impasses in which maladaptive repetitive patterns and the failure to learn basic psychological skills are rooted. For purposes of understanding a variety of apraxic and repetitive disorders, Gedo equates such basic skills not only with the three major psychobiological attainments he has invoked in the past, but with the development of adequate perception, cognition, affectivity, and communication skills.Beautifullu organized, lucidly written, and richly illustrated with case vignettes, The Mind in Disorder is not only the thoughtful yield of an outstanding clinician's three decades of experience. It is also the first psychoanalytic book since Otto Fenichel's masterwork of 1945, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, to take the issue of how we conceptualize psychopathology as its central focus.

In Conceptual Issues in Psychoanalysis, John Gedo's mastery of Freudian theory and broad historical consciousness subserve a new goal: an understanding of "dissidence" in psychoanalysis. Gedo launches his inquiry by reflecting expansively on recent assessments of Freud's character. His acute remarks on the intellectual and personal agendas that inform the portraits of Freud offered by Frank Sulloway, Jeffrey Masson, and Peter Swales pave the way for his own definition of psychoanalysis in historical context. Then, in topical studies on Sandor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, and Heinz Kohut, he explicates the commonalities that bind together three generations of dissidents, each of whom undertook to supplant the edifice of hypotheses erected by Freud with alternative theories. Interspersed with these essays are quite insightful studies of Lou Andreas-Salome and David Rapaport, whom Gedo sees as "epistemological referees" attempting to reconcile viewpoints unique to their generations.In the second part of the book, Gedo argue that analysis now has the opportunity to move beyond this pattern of dissidence followed by mediation by drawing on observational research about infancy and early childhood to validate or refute its clinical hypotheses. In these chapters, Gedo offers critical commentary on recent efforts to extrapolate from infant research to the psychoanalytic theory of development. Only then does he offer his own measured estimation of the "legacy of infancy and the technique of psychoanalysis." This review of "the challenge of scientific method" as it bears on analysis culminates in concluding chapters that probe the status of analysis as a hermeneutic discipline and the contribution of analysis to "vocabularies of moral deliberation."

Impasse and Innovation in Psychoanalysis offers a rare perspective on the technical difficulties and creative responses to them that typify clinical psychoanalysis. The four seminars at the heart of this volume are not case reports in the usual sense. Rather, each seminar revolves around the challenges of translating an understanding of difficult process issues into an effective therapeutic response. What emerges in each case is a vivid picture of an analyst's subjective experience in conceptualizing and managing a particularly demanding treatment, supplemented by data about the patient's history and free associations and enlivened by seminar leader John Gedo's challenging questions and clinical commentary.Each seminar is framed by Mark Gehrie's introduction and commentary, the latter addressing the interplay of theory and technique in the preceding case. Gehrie's commentary is then followed by Gedo's notes, which are keyed to specific points in the seminar transcript. Gedo not only clarifies issues left in doubt by the original discussion but offers his own second thoughts about the clinical material and its technical handling.The uniquely dialogic format of this volume brings different voices to bear on issues at the forefront of the evolution of clinical psychoanalysis. Edifying reading for practicing analysts and analytic therapists, Impasse and Innovation in Psychoanalysis is a wonderful teaching tool, introducing candidates, residents, and students to the demands of coping with stressful transferences and enactments and sparkling, throughout, with Gedo's wit and wisdom.

In The Biology of Clinical Encounters, Gedo utilizes recent findings in neuroscience and cognitive psychology to elaborate his conception of psychobiology and to consider its implications in clinical analysis. He pursues this challenging undertaking in several directions. He illuminates the way in which psychobiology enters into his hierarchical model of mental functioning, and goes on to examine three clinical syndromes - phobias, obsessions, and affective disturbances - in which biological considerations are particularly important. Of special note are chapters examining the implications of a biological approach for clinical psychoanalysis. Gedo explores the notion of transference that grows out of attentiveness to psychobiological factors, elaborates the concept of therapeutics that follows from looking beyond mental contents, and discusses the problem of assessing clinical evidence produced by analyses informed by a psychobiological orientation. Drawing on his own analytic work of over three decades, he compares analyses conducted with a psychobiological orientation with the outcome of analyses conducted earlier in his career with a more traditional psychological approach. A stimulating introduction to the interpenetration of the biological and the psychological in clinical work, The Biology of Clinical Encounters is quintessential Gedo: scholarly in conception, elegant in tone, provocative in import, and illuminating, always, of fundamental issues about the status of psychoanalysis as a science of mind.