Language and Psychoanalysis (E-Journal)
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Impressions and Transformations: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Effects of Early Linguistic Disruptions, Emotional Trauma, and of Testimony through the Study of Oscar Hijuelos’ Thoughts without Cigarettes
Get PDFThis article takes a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of Oscar Hijuelos’ Thoughts without Cigarettes. Hijuelos’ memoir is studied for the manner in which offers illustrations of the developmental significance of language and of the psycho-emotional and social effects that stem from its abrupt cessation. My work examines the significance of memory, as well as the transformative effects of writing: It is a look into the way in which this late writer’s narrative conceals the paradox that embraced the affective relation he held with his first and later objects of affection, as well as with his first and second tongue. This paper studies how life-long narratives are of much significance to academics and professionals interested in the area of language and psychoanalysis. Through the analysis of Oscar Hijuelos’ memoir I highlight the manner in which written testimonials often unveil writers’ known and unknown histories of object-relations, introjections, projections, transferences, repetitions and need for reparation. Equally important, this article considers the manner in which Hijuelos’ testimonials became the medium through which he articulated the perceptions of his experiences, and how such articulation created a space for him to eventually understand, transform and even attempt to heal from the dislocations and internal void that shaped and reshaped his hidden drives, life long needs and translingual subjectivity.
Guises of Desire
Get PDFHilda Reilly’s historical novel Guises of Desire offers her readers an absorbing fictional biography of Bertha Pappenheim, who is perhaps still better known as Anna O., the first and most famous patient of Josef Breuer’s and Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895). In an effort to contextualize the novel for modern readers, it is subtitled “The story of Freud’s Anna O”.
Reconstructing agency by shifting perspective in trauma narrative
Get PDFIn the treatment of sexual abuse victims reconstructing the abuse narrative from fragmented memories and gaining back a healthy sense of agency are major objectives of therapeutic interventions. Our analysis of the psychotherapy process in case of a sexual abuse victim analyzes in-session interaction in terms of joint construction of narrative by client and therapist in psychodynamic psychotherapy, focusing on the immediate effects of the therapist’s single interventions on the reconstruction of the client’s self-narratives. We discourse analyze the interaction of one audio recorded therapy session. We examine narrative perspective (NP) in the text using our discourse-based model of perspective. Our analysis reveals how — in the course of reconstructing the abuse narrative with the help of her therapist — a reconstruction of agency and patiency takes place through shifting the client’s NP. The client’s perspective of her own role as agent goes through gradual shifts as the interaction progresses. The therapist has a crucial role in the reconstruction process by influencing the client’s perspective shifting behavior through shifting NP in her own interventions. Implications for psychotherapy research and clinical practice are discussed
Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language, and the Future of Psychoanalysis
Get PDFThis edited volume is aimed at psychoanalysts belonging to different schools of thought. What all these analysts must have in common however is an interest in thinking through the importance of theories of metaphor and theories of fields as applicable in the context of psychoanalysis. It would not be a stretch to say that the basic concepts of ‘metaphor and fields’ are periodically reinvented by psychoanalysts of various persuasions who are not acquainted with each other’s work since they do not read or review the literature that is produce outside the school to which they belong.
The Examined Life
Get PDFTwo prisoners languish in adjacent cells, wishing to communicate with each other. They learn that the most effective way of doing so is by exchanging taps on the wall that divides their cells. The prisoners connect through the very partition that separates them. In this way, the philosopher Simone Weil writes of her thought experiment, “every separation is a link” (1952, p. 132).
Ambiguity, Equivocation, Unconscious
Get PDFIn his text L’étourdit, Lacan develops a tripartite definition of the equivocal, distinguishing between the homophonic, grammatical, and logical. Psychoanalysis, being the praxis of alleviating unconscious symptoms via the semblance that is language, depends upon the equivocity of language. This paper elucidates these three forms of ambiguity in their relevance to the clinic and the end of analysis.
Aggression And The Telos Of Learning: A Psychoanalytic Study Of Significant Host-Foreign Language Acquisition
Get PDFWith a focus on descriptions provided in Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory, Alice Pitt’s “Language on Loan” and Alice Kaplan’s French Lessons, this article analysis the psycho-emotional situation of significant language learning for both: child and adolescent monolingual migrants, and host-foreign language students studying abroad. It is an examination of the unconscious meaning behind linguistic relocations. This work pays close attention to the manner in which acquiring a new language unveils subjects’ affect and history of learning. It looks into host-foreign language immersions and acquisition in relation to our human nature, universal needs and responses to host-foreign language immersions and learning. Drives and defenses behind young language migrants’ embodiment of a new language are discussed through questions of desire, identifications and need for individuation. Central to this paper is also the exploration of how significant learning, as a cognitive-emotional experience, is tied to differing forms of aggression. This work asks: What can migrants’ and foreign language students’ desire to learn host- second languages tell us about their inner realities and about the meaning they knowingly and unknowingly attach to an acquired host-foreign language? How may host-foreign language acquisition aid in learners’ psychic growth? To what extent does significant learning become a module in young subjects’ process of self-reinvention? And finally, and at the heart of this article, how is significant language acquisition tied to crises, identifications and matricide?
Cleft Tongue: The Language of Psychic Structures
Get PDFI willingly accepted the challenge of reviewing Cleft Tongue: The Language of Psychic Structures for Language & Psychoanalysis. The book was written by Dr. Dana Amir, a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, poet, literary scholar and lecturer at the University of Haifa (Israel).
Retelling the Stories of our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience.
Get PDFIn Retelling the Stories of our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience, David Denborough presents a well written, detailed and easy to follow account of an alternative form of psychotherapy. Guided by his personal and professional experiences2, this Australian therapist informs his general audience of the significance of understanding affective occurrences and of bearing witness to stress evoking events through the act of writing and sharing.
The Iconic Order of the Autistic Communication-Speech Disorders
Get PDFThis paper is devoted to the study of autistic speech from the perspective of iconicity. Language is a major means of human I-not-I interaction and communication. When there is affinity between content and the form designating it, this form (linguistic units and their organization) is said to be iconic to that content. Looking at the various modes of linguistic iconicity (from the phonetic level to the entire discourse, and from identity and continuity to modes of resemblance and analogy), milestone autistic denominators are detailed and analyzed as they occur in an authentic diary written over three years by a woman with autism. This article offers a look at echolalia; pronoun management; perception of affinity as exemplified in the use of kinship terms; content words vs. grammar markers, neologisms and other phenomena. These findings are then integrated to show that mutism is the most authentic – and iconic – mode enacting the traumatic autistic rupture of the delusory symbiotic state. In this premature frail encapsulation the counter-iconic use of language is in itself a pseudo use. By treating both language (phones, words, idioms, discourse, etc.) and people as things, the verbal oddities of autistic speakers authentically iconize the inauthentic inanimate stance.