Language and Psychoanalysis (E-Journal)
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In Treatment
Get PDFThe French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously remarked in his Seminar VIII, Transference, that “Love is giving something you do not have to someone who does not want it”. These themes of love, and the frustration of giving something to someone who does not want it, resonate throughout the HBO original series, In Treatment, produced and directed by Rodrigo Garcia. In Treatment (which ran three seasons from 2008-2010), turns its gaze towards the psychoanalytic practice of psychologist Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne). Each episode centres on a particular session of Paul’s many patients over the “week”. The series originally aired as a five night a week series on HBO, Monday through Friday, with a total of 43 episodes in the first season. We see Paul in his sessions with his patients, and then, generally, on Friday’s episode, we see Paul in a kind of supervision, or control analysis, so to speak
La Psychanalyse, Otage de ses Organisations? Du Contre-Transfert au Désir D’Analyste
Get PDFThis well written research by Robert Samacher has several important functions: It shows how and why so many well-meaning post-Freudians strayed away from Freud and fell for simplification. This turning away from Freud (ego-psychology) explains Lacan’s return to Freud. La Psychanalyse, Otage de ses Organisations?: Du Contre-Transfert au Désir D’Analyste is organized as follows: Part 1—The transmission of psychoanalysis in analytic institutions from Freud to today—includes four chapters. Chapter 1 is entitled The Birth of the Freudian Movement. Chapter 2 is called Psychoanalytic organizations and institutions in France after 1945 and it includes a detailed study of the École Freudienne founded by Solange Faladé. Chapter 3 focuses on Training analysis and the Pass, and Chapter 4 Cartels deals with the problem of identification in institutions, the question of the Plus ONE and Solange Faladé’s place in the wake of Lacan
Superego and Will to Dominate Over Ego: A Synthetic Approach to Ideology Through Encapsulated Skin-Ego
Get PDFThe study of superego and ideology within the context of bodily ego and skin as a psychic wrapping is vital to understanding the intersubjective aspects of those individuals who are living in a mal-attuned or extreme situation. This paper investigates superego’s will to dominate over the skin-ego to satisfy the id by itself and takes an intermediate position between id and external reality. The authors further attempt is to conceptualize superego formation in a skin model of ego development in a synthetic way and redefine ideology within the context of this conceptualization. The term Encapsulated Skin-Ego may explain how when the skin-ego is dysfunctional, a certain part of superego comes into being a psychic wrapping instead of the skin-ego and has left its developmental position. Consequently, the skin-ego takes refuge in the encapsulated skin-ego to be secure. In addition, ideology has a hegemonic character and wishes to control social symbols to continue its domination over people’s minds and bodies. Ideology tries to encapsulate the skin-ego and deprive it of natural sensations to lead it to an isolated corner ultimately to suppress the thinking ego. Two-case studies present the psychoanalytic application of the authors’ ideas.  
“Before the Door that Opens on my Story”: Samuel Beckett and Narrative as Detritus
Get PDFThe article weaves Lacanian psychoanalysis with narratology. It explores the Beckettian logic of narrative detritus in The Trilogy by examining stories, progressively “worsened” with every act of narration. Reading these obsessive-compulsive moments of narrative as failure, it sheds light on the various techniques and implications of this experiment that range from freezing a narrative into stasis to pushing it toward the limits of speculation and from forcing the narrative to revolve around its exterior to underlining its artifice through narratorial intrusions. The article focuses on the vestigial story-function to underscore the paradoxical status of Beckett’s narrative impulse and demonstrates how the drift of these narrations relocates storytelling from the subjective pole of the “I” to the opacity of language as a field of the Other and finally into the originary and the terminal silence that conditions narrative. The article reads Beckett’s assaults on the realistic narrative logic of the novel in tandem with an aporetic narrative logic that emerges from Lacanian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the Real, as opposed to realism
Emblematic Mechanisms and Psychoanalysis: Iconic-Conventional Convergence and Psychoanalytic Diagnostics
Get PDFIn the paper the parallels between the emblematic “mechanisms” of signification and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud as well as Carl Gustav Jung have been studied. The Austrian psychiatrist has discovered template schemes that become a visual delineation, the blueprint for developing his scientific vocabulary, methodology, classification of psycho-emotional behavioral types in mythological plots. The Eros and Thanatos images handling, the exploitation of mythical tales about Oedipus and Electra, Prometheus, Narcissus, and many other ones to specify the behavioral complexes denote the presence of “emblematic methodology” in the formation of psychoanalytic conceptions and categories. His interpretations of famous mythological plots are boiled down to emblematic reduction.
Carl Gustav Jung frequently selected symbolic notations as his research targets, which were a denotative space for expressing internal mental receptions and historic constellations of cultural axiology. In his writings we see the intention to assemble the concepts of image (iconic) and socio-cultural idea (conventional) into a sole compound that syncretically denote unity of meaning. Such an arrangement of iconic-conventional interdetermination is often significative elbowroom in Jung the decoding of which may allow to discern complex mental reflections. Notwithstanding the fact that he considers a symbol to be the standard unit of cognitive-cultural experience “conservation”, its functional semantics definition is fulfilled in emblematic patterns. This emblematic-cognitive form is not only a method of determining the initial images-ideas of the unconscious, “the mythological figures” of inner conflicts, typical experience of generations, but also the principle of justification and expression of his theory conceptual foundation. To a certain extent, it is an element of the Swiss psychologist’s scientific thinking style and language.
 
Experience of Joy and Sadness in Alexithymic Emotional Discourse
Get PDFAlexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing emotions. Suffering from a deficit in the cognitive processing of emotions, alexithymic individuals are unable to symbolize their emotions. Even though emotional elaboration is one of the core aspects of alexithymia, it has not been thoroughly investigated. Few studies have reported quantitative features of alexithymic’s discourse. However, the qualitative properties of alexithymic emotional discourse and the difference in symbolization between positive and negative emotions remain to be investigated. This study aims to examine how individuals with alexithymia symbolize their subjective emotional experiences by defining the characteristics of their discourse related to positive and negative emotions. A sample of 9 clinically alexithymic individuals rated on the TAS-20 was interviewed about a typical experience of joy and sadness. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Themes associated with sadness revealed that alexithymic individuals tend to avoid contact with sadness. They also perceived sadness as an imposed state by external events. Themes associated with joy revealed that this emotion seemed easier to share with peers. Moreover, joy seemed easier to express and symbolize for alexithymic individuals than sadness. This comprehensive description of alexithymic emotional discourse allows to better understand the symbolization of emotions according to their valence and to better recognize alexithymic ways of expressing emotions
The Après-Coup, Après Coup: Concerning Jean Laplanche Problématiques VI. L’Après-Coup
Get PDFHere the author examines the question of après-coup (afterwardsness) in psychoanalysis, commenting in particular on Jean Laplanche’s book, Après-Coup. The author appreciates Laplanche’s determination to avoid either a positivist interpretation of après-coup (as a “delay-action bomb”, as simply a delayed psychic effect) or an hermeneutic interpretation that makes of it a post-factum re-signification of past events. Yet at the same time, the author shows that Laplanche’s solution—which assumes an initial trauma to the subject, who must “translate” an ambiguous and enigmatic message originating from an adult other—ends up being, in effect, a clever combination of the two approaches, positivist and hermeneutic, that Laplanche was trying to avoid. Laplanche advances a much too linear theory, placing “the other” (that is, the desire of the adult) at the beginning of the process, while Lacan’s approach to après-coup opens up far more complex and disturbing perspectives for psychoanalysis. The author, having shown the limitations of Laplanche’s result (“the primacy of the other”), proposes his own interpretation of après-coup, wherein it would connect, in a unique way, the cause and the sense of the psychic world: a subsequent event in some way makes the sense of a preceding event function as the cause of later psychic phenomena or symptoms
Core Conflictual Relationship: Text Mining to Discover What and When
Get PDFFollowing detailed presentation of the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT), there is the objective of relevant methods for what has been described as verbalization and visualization of data. Such is also termed data mining and text mining, and knowledge discovery in data. The Correspondence Analysis methodology, also termed Geometric Data Analysis, is shown in a case study to be comprehensive and revealing. Quite innovative here is how the analysis process is structured. For both illustrative and revealing aspects of the case study here, relatively extensive dream reports are used. The dream reports are from an open source repository of dream reports, and the current study proposes a possible framework for the analysis of dream report narratives, and further, how such an analysis could be relevant within the psychotherapeutic context. This Geometric Data Analysis here confirms the validity of CCRT method
Therapists Have a lot to Add to the Field of Research, but Many Don’t Make it There: A Narrative Thematic Inquiry into Counsellors’ and Psychotherapists’ Embodied Engagement with Research
Get PDFResearch frequently addresses a gap between practice and research in the field of psychotherapy. Castonguay et al (2010) suggest that the practice of many full-time psychotherapists is rarely or nonsubstantially influenced by research. Boisvert and Faust (2005) ask ‘why do psychotherapists not rely on the research to consistently inform their practice?’ and suggest that concerns ‘have echoed through the decades’ about psychotherapists’ failings to integrate of research and practice. This study focuses on therapists’ (counsellors and psychotherapists) reasoning about their engagement with ‘research’ as described in dissertations and in personal, anonymously presented documents, research journals and interviews included. The study focuses on the stages which generally are referred to as ‘data analysis’, which in this study refers research stages where interpretation typically is required with synthesising and analysing in mind. Turning our attention to the therapists’ ‘narrative knowing’ about research during these stages where generating own new knowledge is put to the forefront, have highlighted a complex relationship involving epistemological discrepancies, real or imagined, between practice and research. It also highlighted gender issues, culture and commonly held constructs about what constitutes a ‘counsellor’, which we believe influence therapists’ presence in research. We decided to include the citation “Therapists have a lot to add to the field of research, but many don’t make it there” in the title to illustrate some of the complexity. The study is based on a Professional Doctorate programme, which engages with psychologists, counsellors and psychotherapists in practice-based research. In addition to drawing from dissertations already in the public domain students and graduates from the doctoral programme were invited to contribute their own embodied experiences from ‘doing’ a data analysis. The paper suggests a hybrid for narrative analysis, discussing the options to (re-)present narratives guided by a combined interest into the unique, personal whilst also looking for ‘themes’ within and across these narratives
Where Words Trap the Mind: The Bewitchment of Psychotherapy
Get PDFWhen psychotherapists reify the concepts they are using to describe human experiences, both therapist and patient are likely to end up with befuddled thinking, and become unable to grasp the lived experience of the emotional turmoil the patient is struggling with. In this context, proper use of language is of vital importance, and the first task of the psychotherapist is to think clearly about the words she uses. This essay attempts to clarify some of these issues, and to discuss their relevance to the practice of psychotherapy