Language and Psychoanalysis (E-Journal)
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The Selfer, Personality in a Virtual Paradigm: An Ethnomethodological Study on the Subject of the Selfie
No full textIn view of the emerging behaviors facilitated by digital innovations, this article proposes an insight of the development of identity in the virtual paradigm. The task is to inscribe the selfie phenomenon in an exploratory manner within a pertinent theoretical framework that allows apprehending its aspects in terms of value and relationships. Using a qualitative ethnomethodology (Semantic Analysis Based on Images), it’s sought to locate certain narrative of the body in a context of interdisciplinary exchange in relation to a hypothetical category; namely the Selfer. Compiled sources derived from psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, cybernetics etc. offer to inscribe these new phenomena into theories of mediation and the Subject. The ethnomethodology employed here considers selfie-narrative as a deployment of the body image. The interest lies in understanding motivations and consequences as individuals and societies through discursive consciousness. A group of three components were derived from the collected data: Self, The Ideal Virtual Collective Self (IVCS) and the Symptom. The results are presented as a narrative analysis of the participants’ discourse. This study considers selfies as trans-aesthetic objects with notable elicitation of self-impressions, based on a critical analysis of the participants’ testimonies. The findings of this study are relevant in a social context in terms of exploring the effect of selfies on mental health, psycho-dynamics and semiology
\u27Overcoming\u27 the \u27Battlefield of the Mind\u27: A Psycho-Linguistic Examination of the Discourse of Digital-Televangelists Self-Help Texts
Get PDFThis article offers a psychoanalytically informed discursive analysis of the teachings of two leading Christian digital evangelists in the field of Christian ‘Self-help’ texts: Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen. Meyer and Osteen both have global popularity and multimedia presences. Influenced by psychosocial theory, we combine linguistic analysis with the ideas of Kleinian and post-Kleinian object relations. Exploring Meyer’s and Osteen’s media usage, we argue that digital and online tools have enhanced their connective ability with their immense audiences. It is argued that such discursive spaces create new psychosocial possibilities and contradictions for their messages of emotional health and self-governance through a combination of scripture and psychological approaches common in secular self-help communication. Both preachers focus on changing ‘language’ and ‘thought’, employing techniques and scripture that require the believer to excessively self-focus, and this process revolves emotionally around the construction of images of an omnipotent, good God and the mind as a spiritual battleground between ‘good’ objects (God) and ‘bad’ (Satan)
The Spanish Tragedy Redux
Get PDFAn object-relations concept of transmission of turbulence illuminates the phantom structure of Thomas Kyd’s Elizabethan metatheatrical play The Spanish Tragedy and my response to it. In 1972, interpreting the arbor imagery and the rhetoric of reversal and self-cancellation in the play, I wrote, “Kyd is his father attacking himself in the womb he is in”. After researching my suppressed family history, this peculiar sentence suggested to me unconscious knowledge of a run of murders in my family line, going back to the 1760 Long Cane Massacre of Irish settlers by Cherokee Indians in what is now South Carolina; continuing in the 1799 murder of Major William Love near what is now Harpe’s Head, Kentucky; the suicide of my maternal grandfather in Philadelphia in 1931; and culminating in a Mafia-style execution of my father near Cleveland, Ohio in 1943. Objectification of violence drives Hieronimo and informs this essay
Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice
Get PDFLewis Kirshner’s recent study Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice presents a highly readable and long-needed synoptic account of the diverse meanings and conceptualizations of intersubjectivity informing current psychoanalytic practice. Kirshner notes that the term ‘intersubjectivity’ was not commonly invoked in psychoanalytic theorizing before 1980, yet from the 1980’s onwards its use has increased dramatically. The concept of intersubjectivity within psychoanalysis is most closely associated with the interpersonal turn that has roots in Sandor Ferenzci’s early critique of the analyst playing a neutral or objective role in interpreting the unconscious meaning of symptoms and Harry Stack Sullivan’s critique of Freud’s concept of anxiety as predominantly a signal anxiety to the ego indicating the imminent emergence of hitherto repressed ideas into conscious awareness
William and William; the birth and death of subjectivity in the works of William Shakespeare and William S. Burroughs
No full textWe open with the question of subjectivity as it is presented in Hamlet; the focus then moves to the breakdown of subjectivity as experienced in extreme situations and clinical psychosis. Gabel’s idea of continuity from psychosis to ideology (false consciousness) is used to show that William S. Burroughs is in fact a theorist of global ideological pathology. The concept of reification allows us to combine the voices of Gabel and Burroughs. This is not a study of what has been said about Burroughs or Shakespeare, our concern is with the future of the City, not the nature of the finger that points towards it. The cycle of “William & William” refers to the birth and destruction of subjectivity as defined by “conditions such as these”
Exploring the Language of Body Boundaries in Person-Centred Psychotherapy
No full textThis study is based on the assumption that verbal expression of the body boundary personality is a dynamic personality state depending on immediate social demands rather than a stable personality trait. By drawing Fisher and Cleveland (1958), the exposure and internalisation of social values, and behavioural expectations represent the most important influence in the formation of body boundary finiteness, and also the development of psychological disturbances (Rogers, 1951, 1961). Given this relationship between body boundary formation and Roger’s influence on the development of body psychotherapy, this correlational study explored the use of words and changes in body boundary finiteness of twelve patients attending person-centred psychotherapy. Changes of personality expressions were assessed by measuring the strengths of associations between barrier imagery, as measured using the Body Type Dictionary (BTD) (Wilson, 2006), and the general semantic content, as measured using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count text analysis program (LIWC) (Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007).
Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative
Get PDFIn an era priding itself on transparency but inundated by lies, a reading technique that demonstrates the unveiling of secrets belongs to the zeitgeist. Originally a dissertation for a doctoral degree in French from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, this brilliant book by the psychoanalyst and literary detective Esther Rashkin has the classic form of six chapters, plus an Introduction, a conclusion, notes, and an index
The Phenomenology of Language and the Metaphysicalizing of the Real
Get PDFThis essay joins Wilhelm Dilthey’s conception of the metaphysical impulse as a flight from the tragedy of human finitude with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding of how language bewitches intelligence. We contend that there are features of the phenomenology of language that play a constitutive and pervasive role in the formation of metaphysical illusion
Moving closer. A Conversation Analytic Perspective on how a Psychotherapeutic Dyad Works on Closing their Encounters
Get PDFThis pilot study analyzes a blank space of research: How is the actual therapeutic session closed and how do single closings contribute to the over-all process of therapy? Data corpus is a completely transcribed single short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy. All 28 closing sequences were fully analyzed with Conversation Analysis. The over-all structure of therapy is unfolded in closings in three ways: i) as a joint activity with ‘audible’ steps, describable as scheme of closing, ii) as alignment organization that reveals three closing types: compact, stretched and commented closings. (These types can be seen as manifest realizations of an implicit communicative problem, the coda dilemma: How to close a session with open topics?) And iii) thirdly, therapist and patient typically display their interactional affiliation towards the therapeutic process with joint evaluation of therapeutic help (JETH). Clinical relevant learnings of this study are: i) closing section is to be unilaterally initiated by the therapist while the patient actively suppresses open topics, ii) therapist has deontic authority only and his action is subject to approval, iii) psychotherapeutic dyad establishes a social relationship by projecting closing and iv) therapy is co-actively and locally produced when expansions after closings are taken as a comment on the therapeutic situation
Theory at all Points: A Methodological Quest for Psychotherapy Research
Get PDFThere is the common believe that data and theory are two distinct poles on the same scientific continuum. This notion is enriched with ideas from the fields of psychoanalysis, sociology and conversation analysis. The description of conversational reality in accordance with the knowledge of psychotherapeutic theory is exemplified through the analysis of a therapy transcript. A special spotlight is shed on the dyads’ use of the recipient signal “mhmh” and its various functions within the talk. Most prominently, the therapist uses this token to reinforce the patient as long as she follows his idea of how she might get better. This small insertion therefore functions as a conversational marker of handling a therapeutic theory. Conversation analysts think of talk as a subject not pre-determined by theoretical believes of the participants. This changes in the analysis of therapeutic talk, which is pre-structured, at least by the professional theories of the therapist. For a proper analysis of the conversation two systems should be taken into account. On the one hand Harvey Sacks’ idea of ‘Order at all points’ and on the other hand the methodological idea of ‘Theory at all points’. This combination leads to a description of conversational reality while taking theories into account