Language and Psychoanalysis (E-Journal)
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From Bion to Delany: Samuel R. Delany’s “Modular Calculus” as an Example of Bionian Transformation
Get PDFLiterature furnishes a particular vertex to see reality through narrative fiction. In particular, science fiction literature, which creates a fantastic situation starting from realistic data (history, science, cultures), may be considered a kind of creative process. It uses heterogeneous things and “integrates” them into a homogeneous, new and comprehensible product. Science fiction writing allows the objects of the real to be reprocessed in terms which are thinkable at the current moment. Using the terminology established in psychoanalysis by Wilfred Bion this reprocessing work is a transformation. According to Bion we can hypothesise that the writer of the science fiction literary work serves as a “container” and the science fiction novel, considered a different way to represent reality and not just a simple editorial product, serves as a alpha-function to make concepts that were not previously thinkable or understandable. Between the 70s and the 80s the writer Samuel Delany theorized and put into practice the use of a literary model called “modular calculus”. This model allows the literary work of making something unthinkable into thinkable. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how modular calculus is a particular type of Bionian transformation, and how the science fiction novel can play the role of alpha-function, transforming unthinkable concepts into thinkable ones
Education, Action: Child as Method
Get PDFIn this review, I assess Erica Burman\u27s (2018) book, Fanon, Education, Action: Child as Method, an important and timely contribution to critical developmental psychology, which reads and critiques the work of Frantz Fanon
Encapsulated Skin-Ego and Anti-Corporeal Manichaean Myth of Femininity in Transmission
Get PDFWe propose, within the context of a Skin Model of Ego Development (SMED), that Didier Anzieu’s work of the skin-ego is a useful entry point into understanding the Manichaean mythic view of femininity as creating an encapsulated skin-ego, that tends to enclose the feminine object in a defensive-isolative capsule, through culturally transmitted ideals, shaped by misogyny. Utilizing this perspective, the unconscious and the myth are seen as being, in general terms, intertwined and expressed in epidermal psychoanalytic dialogue. As a result, the psyche and the body are radically split from one another through the dysfunctioning of the skin-ego that is an asexualized phantasmal-mythic dome of ‘womanhood’, which preserves misogynistic norms and ideals and blocks any possibility of femininity as a subjecthood. Moreover, a culturally transmitted myth-fueled psychic alienation is conveyed through a linguistic mythic time machine, which, in turn, results in transmitting a mythic mindset from one generation to another. In this sense, it is of utmost importance to mention that dysfunctional skin-ego leads to dysfunctional thinking ego therein the result is the isolated mind. Encapsulated thinking ego rejects embodiment, spontaneity, and connectedness with anything that has to do with emotional life. To enrich our discussion, the Matrix movies are used to discuss how the Manichaean system of thought is in motion and survives in transmission
A Computerized Text and Cluster Analysis Approach to Psychotherapy Talk
Get PDFThis paper illustrates an analytical approach combining LIWC, a computer text-analytic application, with cluster analysis techniques to explore ‘language styles’ in psychotherapy across sessions in time. It categorizes session transcripts into distinct clusters or styles based on linguistic (di)similarity and relates them to sessional progression, thus providing entry points for further qualitative exploration. In the first step, transcripts of four illustrative therapist-client dyads were scored under ten LIWC variables including ‘analytic thinking’, ‘clout’, ‘authenticity’, ‘emotional tone’, and pronoun types. In the next step, agglomerative hierarchical clustering uncovered distinct session clusters that are differently distributed in each dyad. The relationships between these clusters and the chronological progression of sessions were then further discussed in context as contrastive exemplars. Applications, limitations and future directions are highlighted
Group Art Therapy, Aesthetic Experiences of Difference and Belonging
Get PDFThis paper comes from a qualitative doctoral study which explored the impact of group art therapy on people affected by Parkinson’s. It specifically addresses the research question: How might participating in art therapy groups support wellbeing and better functioning for people affected by Parkinson’s? Art therapy is not a widely applied therapeutic intervention for this client population. The study was undertaken at the Catalan Parkinson’s Association which has a long-standing art therapy service integrated into the therapeutic rehabilitation programme. The language-based data gathered for analysis was from four focus group encounters with people affected by Parkinson’s (who had directly experienced group art therapy), family members and professionals from the multidisciplinary team working alongside the art therapist. A thematic network analysis (Attride-Stirling, 2001) was undertaken producing six global themes in response to the research question: self-construction; material action; an aesthetic group movement; new perspectives; artwork as legacy; physical transformation as a relational aesthetic experience. I first describe how the research participants joined the study, the rationale for the focus groups and their composition; followed by a detailed exploration of the six themes, relating them to wider literature and a discussion of their implications for practice
Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies
Get PDFRobert K. Beshara\u27s book could not have arrived at a more opportune time, when the atmosphere and leadership of certain individuals within certain countries have reinstigated harmful discourse against populations undeserving of it, and are left as targeted subjects in the end, backed into a corner with no way out. It is the subtitle that perhaps draws the reader more concretely to the direct material of the book: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies
Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context: Subjectivity, History and Autobiography
Get PDFStructure was a key signifier, and a logical quilting point, informing Jacques Lacan’s return to Freud, which amounted to his reinvention of the unconscious as structured like a language. Lacan read, and reinvigorated, Sigmund Freud’s classic texts primarily through the lenses of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology—not mentioning Hegelianism (via Kojève), surrealism, and mathematics as other equally important lenses. The structure of subjectivity was the central question for both Freud and Lacan. While the former understood psychic structure in terms of topography, the latter explicated it through topology. What then of the structure of Ian Parker’s recently published book
Sociality and Magical Language: Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis
Get PDFOn a certain reading, the respective theories of Freud and Nietzsche might be described as exploring the suffered relational histories of the subject, who is driven by need; these histories might also be understood as histories of language. This suggests a view of language as a complicated mode of identifying-with, which obliges linguistic subjects to identify the non-identical, but also enables them to simultaneously identify with each other in the psychoanalytic sense. This ambivalent space of psychoanalytic identification would be conditioned by relational histories. On one hand, this might lead to conformity within a system of language as a shared, obligatory compromise formation that would defend against the non-identical; magical language, typified in Freud’s critique of animism and in Nietzsche’s critique of “free will” guided by absolute normative signifiers (“Good” and “Evil”), would be symptomatic of this sort of defense. On the other hand, given other relational histories, it may produce the possibility for more transitional modes of identification, and thereby modes of language that can bear its suffered histories, and lead to proliferation of singular compromise formations. It is suggested that while the former is historically dominant, Nietzsche and various psychoanalytic thinkers contribute to conceiving of the possibility of working ourselves towards the latter
Presence and Lingering: Psychoanalysis in a Mindfulness Frame
Get PDFNowadays mindfulness has become a constituent element in various forms of psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis. This essay is my attempt to think about psychoanalysis and mindfulness together, from the starting point of Freud’s recommendation of “evenly hovering attention” as the essential psychoanalytic stance. I will look at how mindfulness and psychoanalysis could enrich each other, with a view to placing them within a framework of listening practice that might contribute to our understanding of psychotherapy
‘Extimacy’ (Extimité): From Structural Theory of Language to Affective Theory of ‘Ex-Centric’ Subject*
Get PDFThe following exposure of the RSI topological complexities, orienting all the possible (inter)subjectivity, plays on the following two pairs of polarities: external/internal and linguistic/affective (it may be added: structure and topology). Lacan introduces the third possibility of human experience: “extimacy”, linking what is both excluded and intimate. The concept is the lacking link leading from structuralist approaches to language to thoroughly affective subjectivity of any speaking being. Spinosa’s geometrical, highly dynamic system and his “differential calculus of affects” may account for the part that the vicissitudes of drive play in human existence as rooted in the deeply “extimate” sources