THE VIENNA PSYCHOANALYST wants to give not only already internationally established psychoanalysts, but also still unknown psychoanalysts the opportunity to post a self-written and not yet published article on the FrontPage of our online magazine!
Our Users then can leave comments, ask questions or discuss the articles in our forum. Our aim is to provide an international platform where for the first time anyone interested in psychoanalysis can exchange ideas on certain topics.
Articles are welcome in German and/ or English.
If you are interested, please send your article to
leadingarticle@theviennapsychoanalyst.at
(For reasons of readability, the male form is used with personal names, however the female form is also always intended.)
The Book
With a book in mind as we were developing the symposium, the participants were invited to select any relevant topic, of their own choosing and personal interest, but that the material had to be new, original and unpublished. The resulting essays were to tell stories that integrated theory, practice and history. To the core Burlingham collection, we then added over a hundred archival photographs from Thomas Aichhorn in Vienna, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the Freud Museum London and other institutional and private collectors. The book was originally due to be published by Karnac Books. It remains in the History of Psychoanalysis Series, but was issued by Routledge in January 2019.
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Like so many New York stories, the Freud/Tiffany Project came from a chance encounter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. About 6 years ago, I met Michael Burlingham, the grandson of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, just when he had started to inventory the objects and documents in the estate of his father. That would be Bob Burlingham, Dorothy’s eldest son. As a teenager, Bob had taken hundreds of photos and placed the celluloid strips of his photo and film negatives, horizontally, into an album. >> continue
“If society is in danger, it is not because of man’s aggressiveness but because of the repression of personal aggressiveness in individuals” (Winnicott, 1991)
The word aggression is derived from the Latin word "aggredi" (deponent), which can be either translated as "charge, attack" or"advancing/charging forward (something)". The first translation indicates the hostility (destructiveness) associated with this term, while the other emphasizes its constructive potential. Both versions are legitimate interpretations of the term aggression. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes the discussion about aggression so delicate. Most people associate aggression solely with destruction and anti-social behavior. The perception of one´s own aggressive impulses causes feelings of fear or guilt that must be repressed, split off or compensated as of counteractions.
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Esther Menaker’s attitude toward and relationship with Anna Freud was quite the opposite of friendship, or even respect. Menaker was psychotherapeutically analyzed by Anna Freud because Menaker, like Anna Freud, had a strong interest in child analysis. In psychoanalysis, at the time, there was little interest in children at first because of a strong focus on questions of sexuality that were not considered relevant for children. As Menaker points out, “[t]he common attitude toward children was that whatever problems they might have, they would outgrow them in due time”. >> continue
The Vienna School of Psychoanalysis with its creator and main proponent Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) triggered significant interest in the U.S. and became particularly prominent when Freud visited the U.S. in 1909. Psychoanalytically interested Americans started to flock to Vienna after World War I until the Nazis took charge of the metropolis in 1938. By then, Sigmund Freud had already left the city and the country along with his daughter Anna (1895-1982) and many of their (often Jewish) friends and patients. >> continue
The golden age of Neuroscience has arrived while Psychoanalysis is still struggling with its bad reputation - Is Neuropsychoanalysis a threat or an ally in the fight for credibility? We interviewed Prof. Dr. Ariane Bazan, a leading researcher in Neuropsychoanalysis and professor of clinical psychology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. >> continue
Tatoi: one of the most beautiful forests of Attica at the foot of mount Parnitha, with 47,427 acres, located at a distance of ca. 20 kilometers north of the center of Athens.
MARIE BONAPARTE: Η ΠΡΙΓΚΙΠΙΣΣΑ ΤΗΣ ΨΥΧΑΝΑΛΥΣΗΣ
Κτήμα Τατοΐου: ένα από τα ωραιότερα δάση της Αττικής στους πρόποδες του όρους Πάρνηθα, έκτασης 47.427 στρεμμάτων, που βρίσκεται σε απόσταση 20 περίπου χιλιομέτρων, βόρεια από το κέντρο της Αθήνας.
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"Freud is upsetting: reducing one to whirlpool; & I daresay truly. If we´re all instinct, the unconscious, whats all this about civilisation, the whole man, freedom &c?” Virginia Woolf was in two minds about psychoanalysis which she perceived not only as threat and competition, but also as reference point. Perhaps Freud´s rational observations of the mind were too close to comfort for the troubled storyteller.
When Freud met Virginia Woolf she was still resisting the raison d´être of psychoanalysis and described the doctor as “a screwed up shrunk very old man” who seemed “inarticulate: but alert”, “an old fire now flickering” with “immense potential”. This ambivalence would remain at the center of Virginia Woolf´s stance on psychoanalysis. The field was too rational, too objectified for the author´s romanticized approach to her work and self-image. To Freud, creativity was not an abstract concept but strongly linked to an artist´s biography. He took the mystery, the unexplained out of the equation and instead tried to interpret the underlying motives of the creative processes. It knocked the artist´s persona off its pedestal and, consequently, the impact wounded the egos of not a few writers. After all, the truth is rarely as exciting as the eccentric stories artists tend to weave around their lives. Virginia Woolf, however, was not only the victim of her own ego: "Virginia´s need to write was, among other things, to make sense out of mental chaos and gain control of madness. Through her novels she made her inner world less frightening. Writing was often agony but it provided the ´strongest pleasure´ she knew" (Psychiatrist Peter Dally, 1999)
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Well over twenty-five years ago, the extremely helpful Dr. Solnit and I agreed mutually that the seven-year-process of psychoanalysis was complete. But, just knowing it is for you that I am writing, the thoughts and memories have again started to flow unhampered. Perhaps it is no coincidence that I am back in Connecticut, which is rare in my life, and is where I always saw Dr. Solnit. Of course, I do not mean “saw,” since I was on the couch, and never observed his face during the forty-five minute sessions.
Lying there, I faced only the photo of someone I assume to have been my doctor’s son kayaking in rough water, and, on the back of the closed office door, on a bulletin board, among other things, a postcard of the main street of Skibbereen, in southwest Cork in Ireland. From early in my treatment I talked to Dr. Solnit frequently about that town and its surrounding region, since my wife and I spent our honeymoon in 1976 fishing on the Ilen River near Skibbereen and subsequently created our family’s paradise in a nearby coastal village. It was after at least a year of analysis that Dr. Solnit asked me why I had not identified and recognized the scene of the postcard.
Skibbereen, he explained in his avuncular voice, was where he and Dr. Joseph Goldstein and Anna Freud went to buy groceries whenever they were together in the nearby village of Baltimore, where they collaborated on research and writing. Subsequently, my wife and daughters and I went to find the exact house where Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham lived. The only person who could locate it for us was an elderly shopkeeper, a wizened lady who simply said, “Oh, you mean the two German sisters.”
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When a lay person is psychoanalyzed, one of the astonishing surprises is the discovery of the unpredictable way that things happen. You professionals may say that sequences of thoughts and events are, in fact, predictable, or at least understandable, or, if neither of those, analyzable. But those of us who think we are doing unusually well simply when we have sufficient cognition to deduce that, if our opponent at tennis hits a deft drop shot over the net, deliberately manipulating it to fall softly at the front of the forecourt, we have to run like hell in order to reach the ball and still have a chance to win the point, are far less apt to know in our everyday lives why one event or feeling has led to another. If some further intuitive recognition of cause and effect inspires us to return the taunting drop shot at a sharp angle and win the point, we are surprised to discover ourselves that much more astute. We laypeople, you see, are unlikely to know why we respond as we do to a lot in our lives. The reasons for reactions more profound than those in a game of tennis elude us.
You ask, perhaps, why my analogy is coming from tennis. It is above all from your questions, at least in my experience, that those of us who believe in the analytic process make the greatest progress. We will get to the tennis issue later.
When I say “a lay person,” I mean people like me, one of those highly educated, sufficiently fortunate, neurotic individuals who chooses to be psychoanalyzed in the most traditional sense of the word. To amplify on what that sentence means, I will explain my own particularities to you.
Let’s start with “highly educated”:
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„Only if the mother holds her baby for unique enough and trust it enough to fulfill her conscious and unconscious wishes, will she be able to disregard temporarily her own narcissistic needs after birth, because these desires are now moved onto the baby.“ (Brazelton and Cramer 1991 zit. n. Schleske 2008, 22)
Until now Pregnancy as well as maternity were little to barely investigated in terms of introspection for woman.
Since the mother is subjected to big changes in physical and psychological sense during the time of pregnancy, it is of great importance to pay more attention to pregnancy. For this reason, I conducted a study on dreams of pregnant women for a scientific work. The dreams of pregnant women serve as an aid to reach the unconscious conflicts, wishes, fears and needs in the time of pregnancy. In this article I will only briefly discuss my study and place the emphasis on the importance of pregnancy for woman.
In this very significant change for the woman fantasies over the unborn child start and are often quickly displaced because they trigger anxiety. Likewise occurring desires that are connected to the unborn baby are displaced too, as these can also cause fears of the unknown. During this time, the needs of the mother shift to the baby.
It so happens that during pregnancy many women have more dreams during their sleep. The dream represents the repressed desires and fears that remain unconsciously in the waking life. Jörg Baltzer (cf. 2008, 77), a German gynecologist, writes about this, that more nightmares occur during pregnancy, mainly reflecting the responsibility of the woman to the partner and the child. He is also of the opinion that every pregnancy, regardless of how much it was desired, is never free of conflicts; these conflicts are reflected in the dream.
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Developing his theory of sexuality, Freud made a profound contribution to the reconceptualisation of the process of maturation, as well as of the boundaries that separate the sphere of childhood from the sphere of adulthood. Deriving from the Freudian account of maturation and combining Freud’s models with his own postmodernist philosophy of language, Lyotard further develops a new perspective to deal with those phenomena.
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In his essay “Emma: between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,” [In “Emma: between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis” Lyotard deals with Freud’s case of “Emma”. She traces her fear of shops to an incident at age of twelve when she entered a shop, saw two shop assistants laughing, and ran out of the shop in a panic attack. Freud traces this scene to an earlier traumatic event which was repressed by Emma – when Emma was eight years old; a shopkeeper had fondled her genitals through her clothes]. Lyotard makes a distinction between the childhood phrase-affect and the articulated phrases of adulthood. In his own words, the phrase-affect, which is a “pure” affectivity ‘anthropologically speaking, […] is bound up with childhood’ [Ibid., 44].
The childhood phrase-affect not just lacks the instance of “I”, it also lacks the instance of addressee. Thus, the phrase-affect is a “presence” which is addressed to no one, neither as a question, nor as a reply.
Therefore, the phrase-affect lacks the instances needed for the participation in circulation of common sense, which embodies in the adults the capacity to articulate. This capacity is required to link phrases with each other.
The phrase-affect is non-significant, neither destined, nor referenced. Besides the “pure” childhood phrase-affect does not involve a demand, because a demand is an expectation of linking. But, in spite of the fact that it is deprived of all fundamental characteristics of phrase, Lyotard insists that it is sufficient to call this “presence” a phrase, hence to claim that it is a constitutive part of speech.
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Many of us know Lou Andreas-Salomé for her relationships with prominent representatives of German intellectual life like Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud. The following quotation of Freud made me realize the fact that she not only practiced as a psychoanalyst, but also rendered contributions to the psychoanalytic theory. Freud wrote on the occasion of her death in February 1937: "The last 25 years of life of this extraordinary woman belong to psychoanalysis, to which she contributed valuable scientific papers and which she practiced."
Similarly esteeming Freud wrote about her work "My Thanks to Freud": "It has certainly not happened often that I have admired a psa. [psychoanalytic] work, rather than to criticize them. I need to do it this time. [...] If it were possible to, what she has been pictured here with the finest brushstrokes make it coarsen to tangibility, one might have taken definitive insights into possession. "
Unlike Freud exceptionally great appreciation of her work, the psychoanalytic contributions of Lou Andreas-Salomé – according to Inge Weber and Brigitte Rempp (1990) were living in the shadows. Wrongly, in their opinion, "... especially since her ideas to narcissism and to femininity resonate in contemporary psychoanalytic literature."
Lorrain Markotic also wrote in the American Imago 2001: "That Andreas-Salomé´s writings have received so little attention is especially regrettable in light of the many ways in which they anticipate current discussions" (p 813). He feels her particular contribution lies in the area in the theory of development of the self.
To give you the opportunity to get a picture of Lou Andreas-Salomé´s psychoanalytic work, I want to present you her - as the most significant contribution regarded work - theory of narcissism. In her 1920 in Imago published essay Narzissmus als Doppelrichtung [“The Dual Orientation of Narcissism”] she writes that for her narcissism was "... our piece of self-love that accompany through all stages...". (Andreas-Salomé, 1920, p.191) She understands narcissism as Freud does, as self-love that transforms into object-love and, if needed, could be focused back on oneself. For Lou Andreas-Salomé narcissism is a limiting concept, over which our understanding and recognition may not be enough. For her narcissism is synonymous with the unconscious.
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