33 research outputs found
Is there still a place for the concept of therapeutic regression in psychoanalysis?
No full textThe author uses his own failure to find a place for the idea of therapeutic regression in his clinical thinking or practice as the basis for an investigation into its meaning and usefulness. He makes a distinction between three ways the term ‘regression’ is used in psychoanalytic discourse: as a way of evoking a primitive level of experience; as a reminder in some clinical situations of the value of non-intervention on the part of the analyst; and as a description of a phase of an analytic treatment with some patients where the analyst needs to put aside normal analytic technique in order to foster a regression in the patient. It is this third meaning, which the author terms “therapeutic regression” that this paper examines, principally by means of an extended discussion of two clinical examples of a patient making a so-called therapeutic regression, one given by Winnicott and the other by Masud Khan. The author argues that in these examples the introduction of the concept of therapeutic regression obscures rather than clarifies the clinical process. He concludes that, as a substantial clinical concept, the idea of therapeutic regression has outlived its usefulness. However he also notes that many psychoanalytic writers continue to find a use for the more generic concept of regression, and that the very engagement with the more particular idea of therapeutic regression has value in provoking questions as to what is truly therapeutic in psychoanalytic treatment
Gardner-Webb Staffer Publishes Her First Novel
No full textBy day, she’s Annette Spurling, secretary for the communication studies and social sciences departments at Gardner-Webb University. But by night, she’s Margaret Falcon, horror-movie fanatic and author of the new murder-mystery “Triangle,” published last month by iUniverse, Inc. A gripping suspense thriller that keeps readers guessing until the very end, “Triangle,” Falcon’s first novel, is the product of nearly three decades’ patience and perseverance.https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/gardner-webb-newscenter-archive/3016/thumbnail.jp
Southern Ornamental Iron Works
No full textA photograph of a group of employees at Southern Ornamental Iron Works. In the back row is Ron Higgenbotham, Bill Prince, Jack Scroggins, Jack Robuck, Wildon Brusten, E. A. Smith, and Lukon Ward. In the second row is Floyd Smith, Bill Fry, Cyrus Jones, Herman Trinkle, J. T. Duning, Hal Grady, Clim Cable, Author Hart, Ed Bowen, C. F. Tubbs, and Olin Spurling. In the front row is A. J. Rud, M. C. Arnold, John Crouch, Jim McRike, Rufus Rinehart, R. G. Sielen, Lewis Thomasson, J. W. Blackwell, and Robert Wilson.https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/specialcollections_jwdunlopphotograph/1315/thumbnail.jp
'Characters' in psychoanalytic and interpersonal therapy: a comparison
No full textIn this paper the author considers how the therapist might listen to the characters talked about by his or her patients. In psychoanalytic therapy the emphasis is on listening to the patient’s characters as though they are located in psychic reality and as representatives of the transference relationship, whereas in interpersonal therapy (IPT) the patient’s characters are taken as inhabiting the realm of external reality. It is argued that clinical thinking in IPT would be enhanced by taking more account of psychic reality, which will make clearer the quality of external reality in which the patient’s characters are located. It is also argued that both therapies share an interest in enabling the patient to find characters which can serve as holograms of previously unexpressed affective experience
Can there be an analytic practice of a non-analytic therapy?
No full textThis paper explores the dilemma faced by many current analytic practitioners, particularly in the National Health Service. With the elevation of the idea of 'evidence-based practice' as the increasingly dominant mode of discourse, is it better to try to preserve one's analytic identity and practice by keeping to the psychodynamic model, or is there a case for seeking accommodation with other therapies, even if they are non-analytic? This paper describes the author's experience in pursuing the latter course, in learning a form of therapy called Interpersonal Psychotherapy. The author describes a piece of work using Interpersonal Psychotherapy, and then attempts to give a psychoanalytically informed reading of the same material. The aim is to suggest that although a perfectly adequate account can be given of this clinical work in terms of Interpersonal Psychotherapy, the therapeutic process can also be understood in terms of movements in the transference and in the patient's intra-psychic world. It is finally suggested that adding a psychoanalytic dimension to such a non-analytic therapy may enrich one's practice not only of these other therapies but also of analytic therapy itself
Contextualising Syriac anathema: bridging the gap between suggestions of comparison in late antique and nineteenth century Christian ritual practice
No full text‘Thus I beheld, at last, the goal of my journey from Luristan, and was not disappointed. Glorious indeed is this Kurdistan world of mountains, piled up in masses of peaks and precipices, cleft by ravines in which the Ashirets and Yezides find shelter, every peak snow-crested, every ravine flaming with autumn hints; and here, where the ridges are the sharpest, and the rock spires are the imposing, is the latest refuge of a Church once the most powerful in the East’.1Isabella Lucy Bird was one of a number of travel writers and missionaries, whose attraction to the allure of the Orient or whose sense of evangelical mission, had led them to traverse the mountainous and largely impervious regions of Northern Kurdistan in the Nineteenth-Century. Her travel diaries, like so many of the accounts of this Kurdish world of mountainous peaks and precipices, would describe a land of ‘antique heritage’, one which had been isolated as a consequence of its physical geography, and insulated from the influences of the Mesopotamian plains by the ‘fierce behaviour’ and ‘lawless habits’ of its marauding Kurdish tribes. 2 Up there in the mountains of Kurdistan was a window into what was perceived to have been a far older Mesopotamia; a landscape which in its antiquity “presented to the eye so many of the aspects of the biblical Eden”.3 Indeed, to travel through the environs north of the city of Mosul had been like ‘traversing lands of biblical scenes’, to view the mountains of Hakkari ‘like being carried back thousands of years on the wings of time’.4 This ‘Mesopotamia of the mountains’, would seem to have preserved a rich and evocative landscape for the imaginations of those familiar with the narratives and landscapes of Old Testament narratives, but as Bird and a number of other travellers were to imply, the isolation of this seemingly ‘antique’ landscape had also confined and thus preserved the remnants of an equally antique community, one which had professed a belief in Christ for Fourteen centuries.1 I. L. Bird, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, (London: John Murray, 1891), p.286.2 E. L. Cutts, Christians under the Crescent in Asia, (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1877), p.1.3 L. Coleman, Ancient Christianity Exemplified in the Private, Domestic, Social and Civil Life of the Primitive Christians (London: Lippincott, Grambo & Co.,1852), p.5664 A. Grant, The Nestorians or the Lost Tribes: Containing Evidence of their Identity An Account of the Manner, Customs and Ceremonies (London: John Murray, 1841), p.26 and p.54iiPrefaceAccording to journal entries and missionary reports, those remnants of an antique Christian community among the mountains of Hakkari were ‘a very different people’ to those who had professed a faith in Christ upon the alluvial plains of the Mesopotamian valley; both on account of the nuances which defined their various doctrines, and the seemingly primitive quality of their customs, rituals and speech. Where the promise of association with a European power had converted a large number of those living on the Mesopotamian plains to the doctrines of Catholicism, this forbidding and largely inaccessible landscape of mountain peaks and precipices had seemed to preserve fragments not only of a distinctly Oriental Church, but of a Church which had maintained tangible links to the earliest threads of Christianity in Mesopotamia.5 Bird’s journals would describe largely ‘unintelligible conversations’ peppered with a vocabulary similar to that which had been spoken by Christ, and a variety of customs which had been a ‘touching reminiscence’ of those to be found within Old Testament narratives: the fantastically romanticised accounts of a Victorian orientalist perhaps, but Bird was by no means alone in suggesting that she found there to be ‘something strikingly biblical’ about so many of the customs and rituals of these ‘mountain Christians’. 6 Austin Layard, a contemporary and fellow traveller, would similarly assume that their ignorance of the ‘superstitions of the Church of Rome’ and their ‘more simple observances and ceremonies’, may ‘clearly be traced to a more primitive form of Christianity’; one which in its simplicity, seemed uniquely untouched by the ecumenical councils and creeds which had elsewhere defined the Christian faith during the centuries of its founding.75 Where the missions of the Catholic Church had been entirely confined to the urban areas of the Mesopotamian plains, particularly Amida or modern day Diyarbakir, the mountains of Kurdistan were seen by those 19th Century missionaries and explorers to be the last refuge of a Nestorian, and Oriental Christianity, one which had preserved links to a more primitive expression of the faith.6 Bird, (1891), p.242. The same assumptions were also made of those Jewish communities living within the remote and mountainous world of Kurdistan. Owing to the rugged nature of the area, as well as the al constant threat of brigandry on the few and potentially perilous roads which penetrated this otherwise inaccessible world of mountain peaks, the Jews of Kurdistan were assumed to have preserved a primitive, though somewhat debased expression of a more ancient Judaism. Those few Jewish travellers who visited Kurdistan in the 19th Century, such as I. J. Benjamin, would describe their regret at the shallow knowledge expressed by these communities in matters of Jewish Law, especially when compared with their relatively near metropolitan communities of Baghdad and Damascus, but also their excitement at the seemingly ancient practices and customs with which they expressed their Jewish faith. Benjamin writes of his excitement at having witnessed one seemingly biblical custom in particular, suggesting, ‘where I went during harvest time, I found a custom strictly observed by the Jews which brought to my mind the precepts of the bible. Neither the ears of corn, nor the grapes, nor fruits are wholly collected, but the portion of the widows and orphans is always left, it is even allowed to go into a ripe cornfield to break the sheaves, and there and then to boil the corn in water, but the ears of corn must not be cut, neither may they be carried away’. Practices such as these had derived from ancient oral traditions, and had been transmitted from generation to generation, rather than in learned abstract precepts. See I. J. Benjamin, Eight Years in Asia and Africa (Hannover: 1863), pp.130-131. For a more recent assessment of the ancient Biblical and Talmudic customs assumed to have been retained by Kurdistani Jews, see J. J. Rivlin, Sirat Yehude hat-Targum (Jerusalem 1959), pp.47-56.7 A. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains: A Narrative of an Expedition to Assyria, (London: John Murray, 1867), p.184. Theirs was an ancient story- one which spoke of the legacy of a man whose doctrines had rocked the Christian world in the Fifth Century. His name was Nestorius, a Patriarch of Constantinople, whose doctrines had attempted to negotiate some of the provocative questions facing the Christian church in its formative period, quite controversially, how one was to understand the humanity of Christ, and how one was to refer to his relationship to the Virgin Mary. At the firstiiiContextualising Syriac AnathemaAfter the lapse of a long history defined by schism, excommunication, Muslim conquest and more recently Catholic mission, here was a Church and a community high up in the mountains of Kurdistan whose ways spoke of the legacy of an entirely independent and ancient Oriental Christian tradition, one which had been born in the theological environment of Late Antiquity, and as a consequence, at least in part, of adhering to the beliefs of a ‘heresy’. Its preservation was deemed to have been nothing less than ‘a matter of wonder’; a story of almost unprecedented ancient Christian survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. 8 Yet, the romanticised narrative of these missionaries and explorers would also allude to another, rather more unfortunate reality: one which would describe how an antique Christian community, surrounded on all sides by the geographical impediments of a mountainous terrain as much as the human encumbrance of theological difference, had also been gradually worn down and steadily debased by the passing of time and as a consequence of its solitude. The commentary of Isabella Bird would describe a Christian community ‘at its lowest ebb’, ‘absolutely sunk in ignorance’ with ‘no exposition of the Bible and all worship performed in the ancient Syriac tongue’, whilst the notes of reverend George Percy Badger would similarly imply that its Bishops were ‘generally illiterate men, little versed in scripture, and thoroughly ignorant of ecclesiastical history. They [those bishops] scarcely ever preach, and whilst all of them can, of course, read the Syriac of their rituals, few thoroughly understand it’.9 Indeed, the lower orders of the clergy were described as more illiterate still, with an education for the priesthood limited to what Badger would describe as a mere ‘perusal’ of the Syriac rituals, whilst Bird’sCouncil of Ephesus (431 C.E), we are told how Nestorius spurned the theological convictions which described the Virgin Mary as ‘Theotokos’, for Mary was not the mother of the second person of the trinity as such an appellation would suggest, but the mother of Christ’s humanity- the ‘Christotokos’. Christ therefore had two natures, one corporeal and one divine, both united in one hypostasis, and it had been his physical body rather than his deity which had died and suffered on the cross. For how could it be any other way, ‘How could a mother give birth to her creator?’ and ‘If God died then who had the power to resurrect him?’ Such were the questions which would fuel perhaps one of the most potent schisms to have divided the ancient Christian world, such were the teachings and doctrines which widened the breach between a Western and Oriental Christian tradition, and it was in the mountains of Kurdistan that the tangible legacy of this breach had been preserved. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that this association with Nestorius was, and indeed continues to be for the contemporary Assyrian Church of the East, an enduring contention, given the mostly derogatory use of the term since the fifth century. John Joseph would describe how the Eastern Christians of Kurdistan, though having once identified with the designation ‘Nestorian’, were inclined to refer to themselves and their doctrine as belonging to the ‘Church of the East’, having been made aware by Christian missionaries of the derogatory connotations which the term was intended to convey. Indeed, the accounts of a Reverend Justin Perkins would describe how the habit of referring them as such had once inspired the bishop Mar Yohanan to threaten ‘we shall soon be at war, if you do not cease calling us Nestorians’; while those of Asahel Grant reported that they disliked the term largely because they never derived either their doctrines or their rites from Nestorius. ‘Nestorius’, said they ‘was not our Patriarch, but the patriarch of Constantinople. He was a Greek and we are Syrians. We do not even understand his language, nor did he ever propagate his doctrines in our territory’. The so-called ‘Nestorian’ church, which, it needs to be emphasised, actually preceded Nestorius, separated from the mother church of Antioch in the fifth century at the Merkabha Synod of 424. For further reading on the contention of the designation ‘Nestorian’, see J. Perkins, Residence of Eight Years in Persia among the Nestorian Christians with Notices of the Muhammedans (New York: 1843), p.180; A. Grant, The Nestorians or the Lost Tribes (Amsterdam: 1841), p.171; J. Joseph, The Nestorians and their Muslim Neighbours, (Princeton: 1961), p.14.8 Layard,, p.184.9 See, Bird, (1891), p.228. and G. P. Badger, The Nestorians and their Ritual: with the Narrative of a Mission to Mesopotamia and Koordistan in 1842-1844, 2 vols. (London: Joseph Masters, 1852), I, p.61.ivPrefacecommentary would describe the ‘Patriarch’s sister and two or three nuns’ as exceptions to a more general rule of female ecclesiastical illiteracy.10 These written testimonies; of Bird and Badger, but also of a number of 19th Century European commentators, would seem to emphasise an unusual disconnect between the theology and traditions of the Nestorian church, and a people who had continued to profess and maintain them through centuries of ever-increasing ignorance. Indeed, ‘few could distinguish the particular points on which they differed from other Christians’ and ‘fewer still were able to give a reason for the faith which they professed’.11 Such had been the inefficiency of its clergy; such was the general ignorance of the wider community, that the bewildering preservation of this distinct body of professing Christians was assumed to have had less to do with a thriving ecclesiastical tradition or intellectual energy, than with a culture of rites, oral tradition and ‘elaborate’ rituals which had defined this community since Late Antiquity.12Survival had evidently come at the cost of this community’s once prodigious ecclesiastical and intellectual vigour, yet to use the analogy of a husk or a shell; a culture of rites and traditions was assumed to have nevertheless preserved both a handful of Oriental Christians and the fragile kernel of an ancient Oriental Church. Corruptions may have crept past its nurturing protection, and the passing of time might have caused the delicate and more complex aspects of its intellectual heritage to steadily perish, but Layard implied: there are ‘no sects in the East and few in the West which can boast of such purity in their faith’. 13Badger’s detailed and valuable study sought to study them to understand and record the 19th Century face of a Christian creed which had seemed remarkably untouched by the interference of the Church of Rome, but if this isolated Christian community; its rites and its rituals were indeed antique, then what might these 19th century patterns of Christian religiosity tell us about the more ancient identity of this distinct and Oriental church? The scope of this study’s enquiry intends to illuminate one aspect of this ‘primitive’ culture of rights and rituals in particular; a pattern of Nestorian religious behaviour all but ignored or at least dismissed by the memoirs of Victorian explorers, as little more than the unfortunate and unsavoury expressions of the least enlightened. Indeed, just as missionaries and writers like Badger and Bird, Grant and Layard began publishing their romanticised memories of a primitive Christian Orient, a variety of the manuscripts10 ‘not a woman could read, and in the whole Nestorian region they were absolutely illiterate with the exception of the Patriarch’s sister and two or three nuns’, Ibid, p.6111 Badger, (1852), II, p.2712 Badger, (1852), I, p.6313 Layard, (1867), p.184vContextualising Syriac Anathemamany had brought with them, started to contribute to an understanding of the ‘antique’ patterns of Nestorian religious behaviour. Some alluded to formal aspects of the Church; including references to its liturgy, the principles of its theology and a variety of rich accounts of the lives of those who furnished its hagiography. But, amongst these literary traces of Nestorian Orthodoxy, were the literary traditions not only of a far more colourful but generally more complex pattern of religious belief and behaviour. 14 Collected and composed within small compendiums, these manuscripts from the environs North of Mosul described a frightening and fundamental reality: an ancient and well-documented Mesopotamian belief, that humans shared their world not only with visible and familiar expressions of creation but with a multitude of almost unfathomable and powerful supernatural entities. Consisting of various angels, myriads of spirits and entire hordes of evil demonic counterparts, these inexhaustible legions of supernatural beings not only inhabited this remote and rugged world of mountain peaks but exerted a powerful potential within it, often with important repercussions for the daily lives of their vulnerable and unsuspecting human neighbours. 15 The whim of a malevolent demon was considered sufficient to afflict a variety of the otherwise inexplicable and insufferable misfortunes, from illness and infertility, to the distressing and unexpected outcomes which arise in one’s personal and business affairs, whilst any one of a huge number of God’s angels might potentially bestow all kinds of unexpected blessings and divine favour. It was this dynamic of exchange between the material and supernatural worlds, between man and his afflictions and the supernatural inclination to inflict them, which many of these manuscripts sought to ritually negotiate and artificially manipulate, to allay and to counteract, but also to invite with either benevolent or rather more malevolent intent. 16 But to what extent were these patterns of religious behaviour; practised until as late14 By ‘colourful’ and ‘complex’, I have tried to avoid labelling them as ‘Unorthodox’ or even ‘less orthodox’ for not only are these terms culturally self-serving, but one cannot necessarily be certain of the extent to which these patterns of religious behaviour were indicative of deviant practices or part of an accepted religiosity. For Hunter’s description of these practices as ‘less Orthodox’, see E. Hunter, ‘Saints in Syriac Anathemas: A Form-Critical Analysis of Role’, Journal of Semitic Studies, 32:1, (1987), p.83.15 Nine manuscripts and Codices are available to the scholar at present, including; Mingana MSS Syr. 316, 583 (Selly Oak Library); British Library MS Or. 6673 (British Library); Sachau MS 95 (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin); Sachau MS Oct. 553 (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin); Cambridge MS Add. 3086 (University Library), Harvard MD Syr. 159 (Houghton Library, Harvard College). 16 It is perhaps with an understanding of the active verb (‘asr) ‘ܪܣܐ', so frequently articulated by the authors of these texts that one might begin to interpret this aspect of Nestorian religious behaviour, preserved in the mountains of Kurdistan. Indeed, in a world where the problems of disease, inexplicable misfortune and even the mundane frustrations like the stubbornness of an unruly cow were understood according to the demonic inclination to cause mischief and misery, these manuscripts sought to offer an equally potent supernatural solution, one which contractually bound (ܪܣܐ) but also physically incarcerated the malevolent and malicious entity with the terms of its efficacious utterances. As the modern day contract binds the signees to the terms which have been agreed and stipulated, the incantation of these texts demanded that the identified demon or malignant spirit comply with the will of its author, albeit according to the threat of potential reprisal rather than the written agreement of the offending entity. In much the same way as authority of the law and the promise of reprisal ensures that each signee honours the terms of a modern contract, so the divine power of a variety of angels, archangels and on occasion even God himself, ensured the efficacy of these incantations againstviPrefaceas the Nineteenth-Century, part of the fabric of rites and rituals assumed to have defined this Christian community since Late Antiquity?17 To what extent were these codices of written recipes for ritual incantation, indicative of an ecclesiastical dialogue with the divine and the demon, which had extended throughout the centuries? 18The questions alluded to in this preface are significant echoes of those similarly posed by Sir Herman Gollancz and his enquiry of three Syriac codices, known collectively in their 1913 publication as ‘The Book of Protection’. Indeed, in many ways the genesis of this investigation; these codices had all alluded to the premise of a similar dynamic of interaction between ‘men’ and the ‘supernatural’, all had contained a selection of varying ritual recipes with which to command the attention of the divine or to contractually bind those demonic entities synonymous with a variety of human maladies, yet for Gollancz, the true value of these texts and indeed the premise of his enquiry, was to be discerned not just from the ideas they articulated but from the language in which those ideas had been couched. To use the words of one contemporary review, ‘every kind of literature has, as it were, a language of its own; none so pronounced as that of charms and conjurations, for very old material is preserved with great tenacity, and corruptions will be transmitted from generation to generation…the more barbarous the words, the more efficacious they are deemed tothe invisible forces of adversity, all of whom are called upon to enforce cosmological justice, should the demon or malignant spirit in question be inclined or tempted to transgress. It was an and expedient solution- one which assumed that any human being, albeit one with the knowledge of divine names and celestial words of power might fight back against the supernatural cause of any adversity by commanding the culprit to stop. Within their incantations we find words believed to have been spoken by God as part of the act of creation, as well as divine names which, as formal representations of the divinity on earth, were assumed to offer the practitioner an earthly manifestation of its power. These words held much more than simple, worldly semantic meaning. These words could do things, for they were earthly articulations of divinity. Recite them correctly, as so many of these incantations do, and one might wield the divine power with which they were imbued, ensuri
Mindscapes: Laura Riding's poetry and poetics /
No full textTese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão.Esta tese propõe uma leitura revisionista da poesia contemporânea através do exame do caso de um dos mais esquecidos escritores norte-americanos do século XX: Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991). O objetivo é demonstrar que Riding não apenas possuía uma poética definida e singular, mas que ela permanece uma das instâncias mais extremas e paradoxais do modernismo anglo-americano, a ponto de Riding abandonar a escrita da poesia em 1938. Recorrendo a conceitos de "formação do cânone" bem como às noções de "discurso" e "função do autor", em Foucault, investigo a construção do cânone da poesia moderna anglo-americana, recuperando o contexto e as circunstâncias da ocultação de Riding. Enquanto cubro os "discursos" poéticos em circulação na primeira metade do século XX-o "imagismo" de Pound, a "dissociação da sensibilidade", "impersonalidade" e "tradição" de Eliot, a "unidade orgância" e "ambigüidade" da Nova Crítica-ofereço um panorama crítico de modernismos alternativos sendo articulados à época. Minha intenção é demonstrar que os poemas de Riding são expressões vigorosas de um escritor para quem "a mente pensando se torna a força ativa do poema", para usar a apta formulação de Charles Bernstein. Entre minhas descobertas sobre as várias e complexas razões que levaram à não-canonização de Riding estão a hegemonia da Nova Crítica, o exílio voluntário de Riding da cena literária (onde são feitas ou desfeitas as reputações), sua recusa em ser antologiada, bem como em ser explicada em termos críticos que não os dela. Todos esses fatores, mais a "dificuldade" de sua poesia, contribuíram para fazer de Riding "a maior poeta esquecida da poesia norte-americana", como escreveu Kenneth Rexroth. Ajudado pelos insights de dois importantes críticos de poesia norte-americana, Charles Bernstein e Marjorie Perloff, defendo que a "poesia da mente" de Riding-onde o que está em jogo é que o que pensamos ser a nossa realidade-representa uma mudança radical no paradigma da poética modernista: de uma poesia centrada na imagem para uma poesia centrada na linguagem. Focalizando a experiência consciente e o tempo duracional do pensamento presente em seus poemas, concluo que as "pensagens" de Riding têm o objetivo preciso de constatar um fato universal: enquanto seres humanos e pensantes, estamos numa condição permanente chamada linguagem
