Affect, Representation and Language

Countertransference and Oedipal Love, 2021

In this essay, the author will explore the use of countertransference in the therapeutic process, with particular emphasis on Oedipal love. We begin with countertransference as conceptualized by interpersonal psychoanalytic theorists, who immediately pointed out the technical relevance of the therapist as a person, and the importance of the use of the therapist's feelings, thoughts, life experiences, and states of mind in the therapeutic relationship. Just as dreams, slips of the tongue, peripheral thoughts, and physical gestures are useful in reading the patient's unconscious experience, accepting, examining, and exploring countertransference become useful in reading the analyst's unconscious experience. The author will then identify a more radical and contemporary conception of countertransference as representative of the analyst's unconscious receptivity to the patient within the enactments in which transference and countertransference reciprocally affect each other. Finally, the author will concentrate on the Oedipal feelings experienced by the therapist and their importance in treatment. A clinical case will illustrate the clinical ramifications of these hypotheses.

The journal of Language and Psychoanalysis is a fully peer reviewed online journal that publishes twice a year. It is the only interdisciplinary journal with a strong focus on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of language and psychoanalysis. The journal is also inclusive and not narrowly confined to the Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

Exploring continuity from organic codes and natural signals to cultural sign and symbol systems, this paper is undergirded conceptually by a semiotic tree depicting an ascending hierarchy of semiotic forms. Originating in underground roots from a medley of organic codes, the human use of codified meanings surfaces in the trunk, (in Latin Caudex or Codex), our simplest semiotic instrument. Ascending branches represent natural and man-made signals, and indicative and denotive signs, rising to more complex fully symbolic abstract forms in various sign systems. Each level corresponds to a different mental organization, determining the quality and nature of subjective experience and knowledge, epistemology and information being closely tied to semiotic and semantic factors. The psychoanalytic method focuses on unconscious phenomena descending interpretively below the limen of linguistic consciousness generating a semantic field that exposes multiple levels and kinds of meanings. This positions us optimally to observe different semiotic organizations, a multi-coded spectrum of human enacted and mediated meanings that is best systemized along developmental lines (Aragno 1997/2016). Freud's decoding the grammar of dreams enables the linguistic interpretation of condensed and displaced pictographic representations of a deeply unconscious 'Primary Process' semantic bridging biological and psychological processes that are ongoing throughout life. A multilayered model of mind reframes theoretical understanding around epigenetic and morphological principles that are applicable to phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. From this revised meta-theoretical base, this paper illustrates how language absorbs and often serves deep unconscious functions, as well as, conversely, elevating abstract cognition and conscious articulation, presenting examples that are specific to a dialogue designated as the " talking cure. " A bio-semiotic multiple-code model of mind is based on progressive stages in the development of Symbolization, a cerebral faculty unique to our species, distinguishing us from all other animals, without which we could neither speak nor conceive of " Mind " at all. Conscious 'Mind' emerges through a signifying act, assigning a name to a 'person' or 'thing' that can be represented within, in its absence: This simple concept has far reaching cognitive/psychological consequences impacting on all organizations of experience and knowledge.

Ethnicities, 2011

After noting how psychoanalysis has fragmented into theoretical and methodological clusters lacking a common language, the author proposes a unifying nomenclature for clinical psychoanalysis. Specifically, he suggests psychoanalysts, regardless of theoretical orientation, frame psychoanalytic relationships, bring presence to their patients, and engage them. These methods facilitate transformation most commonly by bringing features of the unconscious into consciousness. They also disrupt patients’ internalization processes—phenomena synonymous with what Fairbairn (1941) called the “schizoid background” (p. 250), Klein (1946) “schizoid mechanisms” (p. 99), Steiner (1993) “psychic retreats” (p. 1), Kernberg (2007) the “narcissistic spectrum” (p. 510), and Summers (2014) “narcissistic encapsulation” (p. 233). The author provides a clinical vignette demonstrating how framing, presence, and engagement describe psychoanalytic work, and concludes by discussing how such nomenclature could enhance psychoanalysts’ capacity to communicate with one another while also making the field more accessible to the general public.

2021

In this rich and prolific book Amir brings to our attention the many aspects of the relations between psychic processes and the principles of language. She casts a light on regions that are outside the reach of verbal expression or even clash with any effort at articulation. Her clinical innovations, anchored in her profound understanding of the mazes of psychic syntax, make a daring and original addition to the psychoanalytic canon.' -Prof. Aner Govrin, Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis,

Forum der Psychoanalyse, 2002