Speak for Your Self: Psychoanalysis, Autotheory, and The Plural Self

Philosophy in Review, 2013

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1994

Empl ay ing Lacan's conception of desire, this paper explores the distinction between self and subjectivity as it emerges in the psy choanalytic situation. Challenging the notion of the self as a sin gular, coherent, and bounded entity, I demonstrate, through a review of Dora's case, that the "Freudian subject" is a cast of characters, a loose net of contextual, contradictory, and shifting identifications enveloping not a discrete core, but its very absence. Knowledge of men sometimes seems easier to those who allow themselves to be caught up in the snare of personal identity. But they thus shut the door on the knowledge of man. LEVI-STRAUSS (1962, p. 249) An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Spring Meeting of Division 39, American Psychological Association, Chicago, 1991. I would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Dr. Nathan Adler, a teacher, a mentor, and a friend whose wisdom and wit I greatly miss. Many thanks also to Dr. Max Loewenstein for his editorial help.

In the last two decades North American and European cultures have seen a consistent rise in the number of random mass shootings uniformly committed by socially isolated white males. This paper hypothesizes the source of white male violence and locates it in the details of the parental relationship with the son, focusing on the quality of the father’s response to the son’s normative attachment needs. To this end the author begins by recounting his experiences in graduate and post-graduate programs, fore-grounding the final two years of a psychotherapeutic training program in which his initial interest in Psychodynamic theories is tempered with the Poststructuralist ideas of Michel Foucault as they are described by Stephen Madigan in his Narrative Therapy (APA Press, 2006). In Part One, the author recounts his early application of Freudian theories to contextualize his childhood dominated by the Patriarchal abuse enacted by his father, eventually expressed in graduate research through a psychoanalytic critique of depictions of child characters in 19th century fiction. This criticism aspired to advocate for the rights of traumatized children through the creation of a liberatory critical narrative, as the Postcolonial critique has done for people of color, as the Feminist critique has done for women, as Queer Theory has done for homosexual men and women; it questioned the nature of white male power at the heart of each of these discourses’ complaints by asserting male aggression is not inherent but is rather learned within the first social system of the family. Following the rejection of his ideas in the English literature program he brought his research interests to a post-graduate psychotherapeutic program grounded within the Structuralist frame of Freudian theories. In Part Two, the author details the restrictive sense of self narrated into existence by the Freudian theories of his program trainers who pathologized his choice to refer openly to his childhood history of domestic trauma, which he advocates all adults who were abused as children be allowed and encouraged to do. His psychotherapeutic trainers’ aggressive rejection of his ideas led to his dismissal from this program; consequently, his sense of becoming a subjugated docile body is revisited through elaboration of Freudian theories, yet his self-narrative later evolves into a revitalized subjectivity in the Poststructuralist frame becoming reanimated and re-authored through Narrative Therapy techniques.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2010

From the advent of Descartes' cogito philosophical approaches to identity centred on the possession of consciousness and the conscious actions of the mind as the defining feature of the self. Further to this the work of Hegel, and that of subsequent scholars, developed the social aspect of identity; demonstrating that identity is not inherent, dependent on an individual trait such a consciousness, but is defined socially through, at its most basic level, the interaction between a 'self and other '. 1 Whilst both these approaches remain crucial in building an understanding of identity, they fall short in grasping the nature of the self in its entirety. This is because they overlook the aspects of identity that exist external to, and in complicated relation with, the operations of consciousness. In order to account for the existence of these non-conscious elements of identity, thinkers such as Freud and Jung, posited a dualism between the conscious elements of identity and those existing in the unconscious: 'the first shibboleth of psychoanalysis.' 2 It is important at this stage to affirm that this dualism speaks not only of the separation of identity into conscious and unconscious but also, since we have seen via Hegel that conscious identity is social, the division between the unconscious and society.

This introduction to a selection of Laplanche's essays, organised around the theme and figure of the other, traces Laplanche's return to and critical development of Freud's theory of seduction as the basis for a revised metapsychology of the otherness. The other of seduction for Laplanche is not the sadistic abuser of Freud's model of infantile sexual trauma, but the adult agent of nurturance in the fundamental anthropological situation of what Laplanche calls 'primal seduction'. This is an adult with an organised sexuality and an unconscious in a primal situation where the radically dependent infant has neither. In this situation the reciprocal relation of nurture and dependency is also the carrier of a unilateral and unconscious transmission from adult to infant of what Laplanche calls enigmatic signifiers, exciting and agitating overdetermined elements within the adult messages of love, nurturance and protection. The essay traces how this primacy of the adult of primal seduction relocates and reworks the fundamental psychoanalytic concepts of of the drive, the ego, memory and its relation to fantasy, transference, repression and the repressed unconscious itself.

Self: an approach to a theoretical construct of a transpersonal psychology of self to other This paper, the first of three, offers a journey made by the psychological self as it travels from philosophical speculations found through the period of German Idealism to early proposals in classical and humanist psychology, then on to Attachment theories and developments of a neurobiology of emotional development, embraced within the framework of the family triad. The study overall, approaches a contemporary perspective on psychological theory and growth stages. The current paper covers a period of development running through Storm and Stress, German Idealism, and Weimar Aesthetic traditions. This preparatory period for the emergence of contemporary psychology runs from around 1800 and the concept of the unconscious, a focus of these times, became well known to the German speaking world then to a lesser degree to Anglophone regions. French and English rational thinking precluded studies of the subconscious and Naturphilosophie, the ontological ground explored here. As proponents of the subconscious and psychology per se, a scientific model also appears through this period. The subconscious, as a necessary agency, comes to support a creative interactive psyche, commonly found within psychological theory. With this in mind Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Carus, Hartmann, Fechner, Wundt, and Goethe, are explored as those presenting support for the appearance of Freud and Jung.

RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 2010

In this paper, we will look at two important voices in contemporary psychoanalysis, Didier Anzieu and Christopher Bollas, who from a theoretical perspective have tried to devise new genres to express their thinking. The result of this is hybrid texts that com-bine autobiography, essay, case study, fiction, comedy and poetry. In their theoretical work, Anzieu and Bollas have examined creativity and processes of thinking, predomi-nantly from the perspective of object-relations psychoanalysis, although both are known as eclectic thinkers, who do not belong to just one school of psychoanalysis.

Neuropsychoanalysis, 2010

In current research, the self, or the "first-person perspective," is often studied in terms of its cognitive functions (agency, "mindreading," body representation, etc.). As clearly shown by Decety (2002), these studies are based on the assumption that mental processes must be "described in terms that make it clear that they are achievable by one brain." It has been well established, however, that though one human brain is necessary, it is not sufficient for the development of a psychic subject capable of mental processes. Indeed, to do so, the brain must be connected with a particular language system, which is external and exists prior to the birth of each human brain. Psychoanalysis demonstrates that such a process not only yields human individuals who consider themselves as autonomous egos with a cognitive representation of the external world, but that these humans also suffer a particular "lack" or "want," which makes each of them a desiring subject. Regardless of the conscious representations of the "self," the psychic life (including cognition) of this subject is governed by the repeated-though vain-search for a repressed object that cannot be represented. The contribution of psychoanalysis to understanding what constitutes the "self" was first indirectly demonstrated through the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients. The study of psychiatric or neurological pathologies, in particular psychosis (Cotard, Fregoli, and Capgras syndromes) or the right hemisphere syndrome (in particular, somatoparaphrenia) confirms these findings. This paper represents a contribution to the understanding of subjectivity through a psychoanalytic perspective on the Fregoli syndrome and somatoparaphrenia.