Language and Psychoanalysis (E-Journal)
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Fixation and Needle Fixation
Get PDFTerminology is important in psychoanalysis. The words and language used by psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic theorists to describe particular phenomena are governed by the therapeutic or interpretative context in which they are used. The word ‘projection’, for example, means one thing in the ordinary social world and quite another for the psychoanalyst, patient or theorist. The same can be said of fixation and some addiction theorists are beginning to question the use of the term needle fixation because of its implied unconscious content. This paper proposes that needle fixation can be understood and articulated as a bona-fide fixation through the use of contemporary and traditional psychoanalytic theorists. The problem of language and terminology, identified by Fraser et al., (2004) no longer applies and the term ‘needle fixation’ stands both in its psychoanalytic usage as arrested development and the contemporary reference by addicts and addiction theorists to compulsive injection as needle fixation.
Multilingual Clients’ Experience of Psychotherapy
Get PDFThe present study focuses on the experiences of 182 multilingual clients who had been exposed to various therapeutic approaches in various countries. An on-line questionnaire was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data. The analysis of feedback from clients with multilingual therapists showed that clients use or initiate significantly more code-switching (CS) than their therapists, and that it typically occurs when the emotional tone is raised. Gender was unrelated to CS frequency. CS is used strategically when discussing episodes of trauma and shame, creating proximity or distance. CS allows clients to express themselves more fully to the therapist, adding depth and nuance to the therapy. The therapist’s multilingualism promotes empathy and clients’ own multilingualism constitutes an important aspect of their sense of self. Multilingual clients benefit from a therapeutic environment where multilingualism is appreciated, and where they can use CS.
Transience and Lack of Being
Get PDFThe essay aims at reading Freud’s essay “On Transience” through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The claim of the essay is that transience results from the subject’s inability to ensnare the present in its actuality. On account of the unbridgeable gap between the subject’s supposed initial perception and its symbolization, the world is present to the subject only insofar as it already belongs to the past. It follows that the subject can neither achieve coalescence with itself nor discover the world around him in a complete fashion. What is lost in the symbolized present is either fantasized in the past or anticipated in the future. In Lacan’s perspective, these fantasies are never fulfilled: the actual present is utterly impossible in the discursive reality of the human subject. In this way, the Lacanian thesis that every drive is a death drive is reaffirmed in this essay: since there is nothing outside the symbolic order for Lacan, the present in its actuality can only be associated with the death of the subject. Furthermore, the essay argues that the present as such is nothing other than an impossible event of temporal being which is, however, essential for the constitution of time.
Conversation Analysis – A Powerful Tool for Psychoanalytic Practice and Psychotherapy Research
Get PDFPsychoanalysis does not have an easy stand in documenting what “clinical facts” are. This paper proposes to use an established research tool such as Conversation Analysis (CA) in order to analyze how psychoanalytic conversation is performed in the consulting room. The vicinity of CA-approaches and psychoanalytic intuitions is documented by selected examples. We provide an outline of CA-research in psychoanalysis. Finally we debate whether psychoanalysis be science or hermeneutics; these positions are seen as two sides of a coin. One side is always in the dark. Metaphorically speaking, the future will have the task to bring this coin to an upright stand which can be managed only when the coin is given a thrilling turn by acknowledging that both, hermeneutics and science, in far reaching dimensions ignored the (micro-)social dimension of the psychoanalytic endeavor: conversation, talk-in-interaction. This will help to more clearly get in view what “clinical facts” are.
Signifying Truth: Augustine, Lacan, and a Theory of Language
Get PDFIn this paper, I will show how a retroactive reading of Augustine by Lacan can help us understand more clearly the process of the subject’s accession to language and inter- human relations on the path toward understanding. I will distinguish the Lacanian reading from the reductive Wittgensteinian reading, placing Augustine’s theory on language and learning in a broader context, particularly with regard to the process of subjectivization. Lacan explicitly read Augustine’s scenario of the jealous child in the Confessions, and devoted an early seminar to his theory of language and signification; I propose to take these readings seriously while showing that their psychoanalytic relevance extends further into Augustine’s theory of language and subjectivity than perhaps is normally recognized. Ultimately, though Lacan can help to clarify the stakes in which the linguistic subject is ontologically limited (and in which ‘corporeal’, symbolic reality is truth- deficient), this reading will help to show where Augustine’s theology has specifically informed his theory of language and its subject, and where its revisions must fail (or set out somewhere on their own).
Language Usage and Social Action in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Discourse Analysis of a Therapy Session Fragment
Get PDFA fragment of a therapy session is discussed using some of the tools of discourse analysis in an effort to demonstrate how speech acts serve as vehicles for the negotiation of roles and the transmittal of emotional/relational messages in the therapeutic dyad. In particular, issues of power asymmetry, proper function of the therapist, patient autonomy, and emotional attachment are subtextually communicated about through types of speech acts such as propositional triggers and utterances that are ambiguous as to their illocutionary and perlocutionary forces. The analysis of the speech acts in the session provides a microscopic identification of the expression of macro-level theoretical phenomena such as transference and counter-transference.
The Handbook of Conversation Analysis & Emotion in Interaction.
No full textReviewing Conversation Analysis (CA) “at the Century’s Turn”, Emanuel A. Schegloff predicted the “further development of our understanding of the organization of talk and other conduct in interaction itself” and to “register the particularities of its realization” (Schegloff 1999, p. 142). John Heritage (1999), additionally, foresaw a future where qualitative and quantitative approaches will “shift from basic CA to ‘applied’ analysis and back again” (p. 73).
Σύμβολου: An Attempt toward the early Origins, Part 1
Get PDFThis is the first of a two-part paper in which I would like to propose some possible hypotheses on the early origins of symbolic function, which is the most typical feature of human being, based on disavowal mechanism. Briefly recalling the main stages of the history of symbolism, it will be possible to lay out many of its theories within the framework that we wish to outline with this work, this first part of which is mainly concerned with the basic psychodynamic notion of disavowal and its possible applications, above all in regard to fetishism.
Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Using Holland’s DEFT Model as a Reader Response Tool in the Language Classroom
Get PDFLanguage students tend to struggle with literature because they find psychological and socio-cultural implications embedded in literary texts difficult to understand and discuss (Kramsch, 1996). This paper suggests that psychoanalytic literary criticism may offer a reading framework that could mitigate the struggle and allow for a deeper level of personal and social exploration of literary works. The DEFT model (Defense, Expectations, Fantasy and Transformation), as one type of reader-response approach to reading that draws on the psychoanalytic framework, might make the reading of literature easier because of its potential to offer to students strategies for finding a point of entry into the text. According to DEFT, the inability to find a point of entry into a new reading may be one of the reasons for finding a literary piece difficult, for ‘disliking’ or outright rejecting it. This qualitative study shows how the DEFT approach, originally created for native speakers but thus far little researched in relationship to non-native speakers, can be used to facilitate the reading of literary works in a language course.
An Exploration of Language-Based Multiplicity in Fluent Bilinguals
Get PDFThis study used projective tests to explore the language-based shifts in aspects of personality observed in fluent bilinguals. The Rorschach Comprehensive System (RCS) and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) were administered in Spanish and in English to 26 fluent Spanish/English bilinguals, and protocols were compared based on measures of affect, self-perception, cognitive complexity, and object relations. No significant differences were found between language protocols for most measures, nor did these measures relate to age of second language learning, relative use of English and Spanish, or participation in therapy. However, cognitive effort was significantly greater on English RCS protocols, and a strong correlation between level of acculturation and freedom of expression in English was found. Further exploration of the data revealed very important differences between most subjects’ Spanish and English protocols. Most notably, in 73% of the cases, RCS protocols differed so extensively by language that different key variable for cluster interpretation and diagnosis were indicated, and 42% of subjects’ modes of decision making (EB style) varied according to language. These findings are remarkable because these key variables are believed to measure constant, dominant and trait-like features of an individual’s psychology. The findings underscored the need for norms based on this population, and development of culturally-based constructs for interpretation of the RCS.