Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies – serie

The book is a volume of the collected works of sixteen different authors. They reflect the contemporary meaning of C. G. Jung’s theory on many fields of scientific activity and in a different cultural context: Japanese, South American and North American, as well as European: English, Italian and Polish. The authors consider a specific milieu of Jung’s theory and his influence or possible dialogue with contemporary ideas and scientific activity. A major task of the book will be to outline the contemporary—direct or indirect—usefulness and applicability of Jung's ideas at the beginning of the twenty-first century while simultaneously making a critical review of this theory.

Agnon’s Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional objects of his life, in particular his “father-teacher," his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, whom he left when she was very ill, and about whose death he felt guilty all his life, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after his mother, and his adopted motherland, “the Land of Israel." Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to sublimate his emotional pain into works of art.This biography seeks to investigate the unconscious emotional forces that drove his stories, his ambivalence about his family, and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”

This book presents an analysis of the social aspects of Carl Gustav Jung's thought and its followers, the interpretation of the phenomena of contemporary social life (social imagery) from the perspective of the main categories of this thought (archetype, unconscious, collectivity, mass society, mass man). It also contains an attempt of their application for understanding contemporary social and political phenomena (e.g. Brazilian sebastianism, Balkan conflicts, virtual-imagery sphere of communication, figures of imagery in popular culture, and others). The authors examine the relationship between Jung’s and Jungians' (E. Neumann, J. Hillman, J. L. Henderson) conceptions and many accompanying them (e.g. Frankfurt school, Bachelard’s philosophy, American cultural psychoanalysis) and the background of contemporary social psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology.

The Freudian Exodus redefines the traumatic experience that Freud argued was the origin of Judaic monotheism, the murder of Moses. Focusing instead on the Babylonian Exile, the study explores a series of topics understood as the aftershocks of that cultural trauma. Among these are the nature of anti-Semitism, Christianity’s vexed relationship to Judaism, the fantasmatic status of subjectivity, the cultural function of Torah, and Freud’s escape at the end of his life from Nazi-controlled Austria. The in-depth analysis of these topics aims for a new understanding of psychoanalysis, conceived more as a philosophy than as a mode of therapy.

In Wittgenstein on Freud Reexamined, psychoanalytical therapy is interpreted with the Wittgensteinian term language-game. Both terms are embedded in their different practical horizons of use, rich in content, and share a familiar context of everyday language. This book is an extensive and detailed investigation of the primary sources. An original perspective on psychoanalytical therapy emerges from rereading Freud and Wittgenstein through the primacy of language in their work. The possibility of significantly expanding the use of language-games results from a careful examination of the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein’s ambivalent attitude toward psychoanalysis appears in a new light.

This book offers a philosophical and cultural critique of modern cynicism as an ideological approach to nihilism, rather than a mere attitude of skepticism or pessimism. Tracing cynicism from its ancient origins through Sigmund Freud, Ernest Becker, Søren Kierkegaard, and contemporary therapeutic culture, the book argues that modern cynicism functions as what Peter Sloterdijk calls an “enlightened false consciousness”: a posture that claims freedom, significance, meaning, and self-mastery while actually reinforcing self-deception, alienation, and despair. The book argues that as nihilism was developing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries, there were various answers given for how to contend with it. These approaches include Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and the various attempts to return to the rejected metanarratives and therapeutics of the past. Roberts argues that Freud’s approach to nihilism won out in American Society, as he sought to create a therapeutic that could cope with the meaninglessness and lack of moral direction that accompanies nihilism. Freud’s cynical therapeutic approach trains patients in ideological mistrust, while failing to provide adequate resources and alternatives for a meaningful life. The author shows how cynicism, modern therapeutics, and consumerism come together as strategies for coping with the collapse of traditional sources of meaning and authority. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, ideology critique, and existential philosophy, the book exposes how therapeutic rationality trains individuals in mistrust, narrows the field of meaningful alternatives, and conceives of freedom as adaptive self-management rather than self-becoming. The concluding chapters recover a Kierkegaardian alternative that reorients critique toward humility and the courage to face anxiety without retreating into cynical detachment. This work will be of interest to scholars and thinkers in philosophy, psychology, theology, cultural criticism, and social theory concerned with nihilism, modern subjectivity, and the moral consequences of therapeutic culture.

"George Hagman looks anew at psychoanalytic ideas about art and beauty through the lens of current developmental psychology that recognizes the importance of attachment and affiliative motivational systems. In dialogue with theorists such as Freud, Ehrenzweig, Kris, Rank, Winnicott, Kohut, and many others, Hagman brings the psychoanalytic understanding of aesthetic experience into the 21st century. He amends and extends old concepts and offers a wealth of stimulating new ideas regarding the creative process, the ideal, beauty, ugliness, and -perhaps his most original contribution-the sublime. Especially welcome is his grounding of aesthetic experience in intersubjectivity and health rather than individualism and pathology. His emphasis on form rather than the content of an individual's aesthetic experience is a stimulating new direction for psychoanalytic theory of art. With this work Hagman stands in the company of his predecessors with this deeply-learned, sensitively conceived, and provocative general theory of human aesthetic experience." Ellen Dissanayake, author of Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began and Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why.

This memoir is a story of loss and gain, of alienation and reconciliation, and of how such experiences go into the making of a psychoanalyst. In sharing his own very troubled family history, his decade as a Carmelite monk, his marriage and career as a psychoanalyst, Gargiulo shows how the diverse pieces of one’s life can fit together into something that is meaningful and real. This is one person’s life - but it relates to us all. “We are bound together, each of us,” the author writes, “in our living, our troubles and our joys. As we hear another's story, we are, simultaneously, writing our own autobiography.”

"A self-declared 'critical admirer' and final confident of Bruno Bettelheim, David James Fisher succeeds with as balanced and nuanced a portrayal as seems possible of the character, the lifetime contributions, and the final justifications of a most controversial psychoanalytic eminence. Bettelheim was at once the center of major professional polemics, and at the same time, the psychoanalyst who, after Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson, has had the greatest impact on the wider culture of the twentieth century. Fisher's book is highly recommended reading for all concerned with the interplay of ideas and personas in the evolving history of the psychoanalytic place in the scheme of human development." Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D., Emeritus Professor and former Chair, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. "These sparkling personal essays on Bettelheim, a pathbreaker of modern ego psychology, who has been savagely attacked and deprecated since his death seventeen years ago, restore the man and his work in historical, clinical, and human context for the contemporary clinician and informed reader.Fisher has done a splendid job of bringing this complex, fascinating figure to life." Peter J. Loewenberg, Ph.D., Professor of History and Political Psychology, University of California at Los Angeles, former Director of Education, New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. "David James Fisher has written a moving, personal portrait of Bruno Bettelheim as thinker, writer, and friend. His story of Bettelheim during the last two years of his life makes for riveting reading, as does his balanced view of both Bettelheim's personality and his many contributions to psychoanalysis and the treatment of disturbed children. Fisher's work is a valuable volume in the history of psychoanalysis in America, and a wonderful narrative about this enormously complex man." Joseph Reppen, Ph.D., Editor, Psychoanalytic Psychology and Chair, Council of Editors of Psychoanalytic Journals.

Little discussed by psychoanalysts and almost unknown outside the profession, a small but distinguished group of psychoanalysts were or are mystics: Otto Rank, Erich Fromm, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Hans W. Loewald, Wilfred R. Bion, James S. Grotstein, Neville Symington, and Michael Eigen. All favoured an extrovertive mysticism that perceives unity throughout physical reality. Several saw creativity as an application of mystical consciousness to the physical material of artwork, artefact, or, more generally, culture.

This text is an innovative exploration of philosophy and madness in the context of the critical engagement of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology with Freudian psychoanalysis. Included is a play in which, after a mental breakdown, Martin Heidegger undergoes psychoanalytic treatment from Dr. Medard Boss. Boss is essentially caught between two intellectual giants: his patient, Heidegger, who challenges him to evolve beyond traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, and his mentor, Freud, who acts as a “ghostly” consultant in facilitating Heidegger’s return to health. The dialogue of the play consists of actual quotes taken from the major thinkers themselves, which enhances the authenticity of this fictitious production. In addition, the theoretical perspectives of Freud, Heidegger, Boss, and Ludwig Binswanger are included to enhance the readers’ background knowledge. In the process of disclosing these brilliant theorists, this book uncovers what each orientation has to offer the others.

Society and contemporary culture unquestionably assign much importance to the search for quality. So can this kind of research include the mind? In his analysis, Luigi Longhin examines the causes of mental illness and psychic-mental suffering, the notions of individuality, social violence, and utopia; and he suggests a collaboration between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis, within a correct epistemological approach. The relationship between epistemology and psychoanalysis is examined. The objectivistic and relativistic shift in contemporary epistemology, and the problem of the responsibility of the techno-scientific system are emphasized. Why such a privileged connection with philosophy? The contribution of philosophy is primarily epistemological. However, both epistemology and psychoanalysis run a risk; whilst epistemology runs the risk of being a knowledge which does not know, psychoanalysts run the risk of pursuing scientific knowledge without knowing its foundations. Hence there is a need for collaboration between the two forms of knowledge: the philosophical-epistemological and the scientific-psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis works in two directions: on the one hand, it tries to eliminate the negative components of the mind, on the other hand, it tries to develop the trusting and creative parts of the self.

This collection of short stories and essays call into question the medical-scientific narrative, its understandings of psychoanalysis and madness, and the identity, purpose and ethics that flow from and sustain its narrative. These stories are gathered from meetings with people on in-patient units and in private practice. Emphasis is placed on the centrality of the Freudian unconscious in the process of listening, understanding and responding in the analytic discourse. Collectively, they reintroduce the identity of the analytic practitioner as the shaman of contemporary times, a mind-poet who sees the world through a magical –as opposed to a scientific- visionary experience.

This book proposes a new approach to the problem of aesthetic experience in Western culture. Noting how art world phenomena evoke conventional psychoanalytic speculations about narcissism, the authors turn the tables and “apply” aesthetic questions and concerns to psychoanalytic theory. Experimenting with Freudian and post-Freudian concepts, they propose a non-normative theory of the psychic drive to address and embrace deep tensions in the post-Renaissance aesthetic project, the rise of modernism, and the contemporary art world. It is argued that these tensions reflect central conflicts in the development of patriarchal civilization, which the emergence of the aesthetic domain, as a specialized range of practice, exposes and subverts. The postmodern era of aesthetic reflection is interpreted as the outcome of a complex narcissistic dialectic of idealization and de-idealization that is significant for the understanding of contemporary culture and its historical prospects.

This book psychoanalyzes a small Mexican city to figure out how the city makes sense of both herself and her many Others in the face of constant change. It puts the city on the couch and works through her past and present relationships, analyzing issues surrounding sexuality, the compulsion to repeat, transferences and desires.

This book explores the theoretical and technical aspects of Modern Kleinian Therapy with borderline, narcissistic, and psychotic patients who are in great psychological conflict and who struggle to find stable footing in the relational world. These are the patients who are most taxing and troubling for all therapists as they suffer greatly in life but tend to leave a great deal of suffering in their wake.Throughout the book, the reader is provided a close up clinical view of what really takes place in psychoanalytic treatment with psychologically disorganized, predatory, or internally terrorized patients who often can barely begin or maintain a therapeutic relationship as they experience it as emotionally threatening, dangerous, and unbearable. Aspects of Kleinian theory are highlighted through examining very personal verbatim accounts from patients of their internal emotional experiences. And, Kleinian concepts and techniques are clinically demonstrated. Change is shown to be possible in situations that initially seem unchangeable and acceptance is shown to be reachable in situations that initially seem unbearable. While success can be fleeting or unreachable, the author shows how to best find the potential for therapeutic success and to learn from the failures or modest achievements so common with more difficult patients. In that sense, this book serves as inspiration and hope to all therapists working with borderline, narcissistic, and psychotic patients.

Psychiatry or psychopathology finds itself in a state of imbalance. The reason: the impossibility to unite biological and psychological factors. Effectively, this leads to the psychic reality being largely ignored. And yet psychiatry as a human science will have to acknowledge the psychic reality: the human capacity to symbolise reality. This book demonstrates that phenomenology, hermeneutics and Lacanian psychoanalysis support this view, whilst also drawing on Cassirer’s theory of symbolization. In the domain of psychopathology, this convergence and the conceptual space it brings offer an opportunity to create cross-fertilisation, enlarging the Lacanian clinical perspective. It will result in a philosophical conception of man as animal symbolicum, an animal fallen prey to language. In sum, the book renders a contribution to Lacanian psychopathology, to the philosophy of psychiatry and to philosophical anthropology. It is of interest to psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers alike.

In A Question of Time, Joel Pearl offers a new reading of the foundations of psychoanalytic thought, indicating the presence of an essential lacuna that has been integral to psychoanalysis since its inception. Pearl returns to the moment in which psychoanalysis was born, demonstrating how Freud had overlooked one of the most principal issues pertinent to his method: the question of time. The book shows that it is no coincidence that Freud had never methodically and thoroughly discussed time and that the metaphysical assumption of linear time lies at the very heart of Freudian psychoanalysis. Pearl’s critical reading of Freud develops through an original dialogue that he creates with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and, specifically, with the German philosopher’s notion of temporality. Pearl traces the encounter between Freud and Heidegger by observing the common inspiration shaping their thinking: philosopher Franz Brentano, who taught both Freud and Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s mentor. The book travels down an alternate path, one overlooked by Freudian thought – a path leading from Brentano, through Husserl and onto Heidegger’s notion of time, which is founded on the ecstatic’ interrelation of past, present and future.