Leading articles

Understanding without words

Connections. “We cannot not communicate,” said Watzlawick. We communicate with our eyes, gestures, hands and breathing. Through the body we give words a physical form facilitating the transition from the unconscious to the conscious.

SENZANOME: SEI DOTTOR JEKYLL E/O MR. HYDE?
Processi di dispercezione della comunicazione nei social

“Ci capiamo senza parlare”

Connessioni. Non si può non comunicare diceva Watzlawick. Comunichiamo con gli occhi, con i gesti, con le mani, con i respiri. Attraverso il corpo diamo parole a configurazioni psichiche agevolando il passaggio dall’inconscio al conscio. >> continue

Treat it like a game. The 21st century is marked by a gamification of culture. With ludic technologies, virtual reality becomes real virtuality. From a psychoanalytic view, virtual identities promise complete autonomy at an unconscious level but there is an inherent difference between mere play and the ratio of a game. >> continue

Royal Visitors! Prince Charles and Camilla pay Vienna a visit on their European tour. With Freud’s emigration to Great Britain, psychoanalysis gained popularity in England. What connects psychoanalysis with the British Monarchy? A story about brave spies and eccentric princesses.


Alice of Battenberg (25 February 1885 – 5 December 1969)

Alice of Battenberg was perhaps Freud’s most famous royal patient along with Marie Bonaparte. Congenitally deaf, Alice was the mother of Prince Philip and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II. She and her husband Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark were forced to flee the country after a defeat against the Turkish army with Prince Andrew escaping execution only by a hair’s breadth with the help of Princess Alice’s royal relatives. The family moved to the outskirts of Paris, where Alice’s behavior became increasingly eccentric. The princess immersed herself in spirituality – religion and mysticism soon became crucial parts of her life. She was convinced she was in touch with Buddha and Jesus Christ and even claimed to have healing powers. She started to practice the art of hands-on healing to the point of exhaustion, was obsessed with occultism and believed herself to be saint-like. Eventually, Alice’s gynaecologist Dr. Lourus was consulted, who said she was showing signs of a psychosis and sent her to Dr. Ernst Simmel, a former colleague of Freud, to Tegel to undergo psychoanalysis – Dr. Simmels diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia. >> continue

1. Psychoanalysis on the Internet? A controversy

The use of the Internet is integrated into the daily life processes of large parts of society and affects not only social relations, but also areas of mental health and treatment (Eichenberg & Kühne, 2014), as well as psychoanalytic theory and practice (Migone, 2013). The term "e-mental health" focusses on the interrelations of digital media and mental health. Offers include a broad spectrum of clinical-psychological including psychodynamic oriented interventions, from prevention and self-help proposals through on-line counseling and online psychotherapy to rehabilitation measures (Eichenberg, 2011).

In addition to the psychodynamic online interventions and internet-based psychoanalytic treatment (see section 2), psychoanalysis also contains further interfaces on the Internet, which are only briefly discussed below (for a detailed overview see Eichenberg & Hübner, in preparation): 1. Psychoanalytic considerations on the impact of social media on the individual, relationships and society. For example, the importance of the Internet for the individual is elaborated in accordance with Thomas Ogden´s concept of the "third party" (Stadler, 2013), or communication programs such as Skype are interpreted as "the sinister third" (Dettbarn, 2013). 2. >> continue

Dear Readers!

THE VIENNA PSYCHOANALYST is pleased to present today the first article written by our editor Sabrina Zehetner.

Enjoy reading!

In an age of political conflicts and intense, public scrutiny on the internet, satire as Enfant Terrible has become ubiquitous. Looking back on a long history of ridicule and political dissent, satire - like psychoanalysis - discusses social taboos and human agency – satire on the couch.


Satire 2.0

The John Oliver Show, SNL, The Stephen Colbert Report, The Onion und Kate Beaton’s cartoons, the New Yorker and Charlie Hebdo – the list of modern satire is inexhaustible and multifaceted while the satirists’ motives are as diverse as their targets. It is not surprising that satire as a genre – as is the case with the majority of European cultural history – happens to be another child of ancient Greek poetry. At the English court, it was aristocrats such as the notorious John Wilmot (The 2nd Earl of Rochester) who could afford making fun of English royalty and its lifestyle. In its obscenity, however, these satirical works were in no way inferior to their modern successors. In France, the birthplace of the caricature, satirists the likes of Charles Philipon faced imprisonment for expressing dissent and criticizing royal agency. Later, during the French revolution, the genre played a significant role in empowering citizens through political engagement. As the court ceased to be the cultural center and the readership became increasingly heterogeneous, satire evolved into an independent art form. Finally part of the mainstream media, satire enjoyed great popularity and regular publication. The golden age of grand-scale satire written by the likes of Swift, Pope or Molière belongs to the past and gave way to Memes and Late-night-TV. In the digital age, where politicians find themselves under public scrutiny 24/7, leaders present the perfect target for satirists – paradoxically, the virtual reality both demands and persecutes authenticity. Good satire combines humor with informed critique. An audience only derives pleasure from satire when the irony is understood as such – if not due to opposing political views or misleading social critique, the genre ceases to be effective and even runs the risk of representing the very thing it set out to criticize. Why do we derive pleasure from an art form known for its obscenity and hostility? A number of modern critics refer to Freud, according to whom, the sadistic pleasure is gained through rhetoric violence while others link the release of aggression to the source of pleasure. Surprisingly, psychoanalysis has never properly addressed satire despite its topicality. >> continue

To develop an artificial mental apparatus - to make it sound great - is misleading for many, even an affront to some. These are reactions that psychoanalysis has known too since its beginnings. The cause for such opinions may lie in legitimate concerns about a possible misuse - keyword artificial intelligence - or perhaps the fear of revealing valid deep insights about us. The work of SiMA (Simulation of the Mental Apparatus and Applications) at the Vienna University of Technology, initiated by Prof. Dietmar Dietrich and led by Samer Schaat in the last three years, has already shown how useful the cooperation between psychoanalysis and computer technology is. Because of the development of an artificial mental apparatus, i.e., the simulation of a metapsychological model as an information-processing system in the computer, psychoanalytic theories are sharpened, evaluated and subsequently applied to the investigation of socially relevant questions, for example those of cooperative and environmentally friendly behavior. In order to achieve this, both the methods and the theories of psychoanalysis and Computer Science combines - a complement and cooperation, that is actually quite logical. After all Computer science is, on the one hand, the discipline that deals with information-processing systems - and as such, the mental apparatus can be viewed - and, on the other hand, psychoanalysis is the only discipline that offers a holistic model of the psyche.

Even the claim to an integrative and functional model in the development of a computer model of the mental apparatus is achieved by the metapsychology. By showing the causal interaction of basic individual and social (possibly conflicting) demands in a dynamic process, the metapsychological model provides a suitable framework to research the interaction of different factors. This allows not only thorough explanations of human thought and action, but also pointing out its complexity. Theoretically, this is a good prerequisite for a psychological science. Practically, however, psychoanalysis has often been accused of not being able to keep its high promises. >> continue