Should be of considerable interest to a wider public, since it proposes a radical reformulation of psychoanalytical theory which, if accepted, would render outmoded almost all the analytical jargon that has crept into the language of progressive, enlightened post-Freudian people.-Charles Rycroft, The New York Review of Books Schafer's arguments have considerable cogency. The tendency to over-theorize so that the translation of abstractions into the language of ordinary discourse between analyst and patient has become increasingly difficult is a fault; Schafer goes a long way towards redressing it, and his efforts to include meaning and the person in the form of his language is an achievement.-Michael Fordham, The Times Higher Education Supplement
This is a book that should satisfy a longfelt need. Freud's writings comprise a small library. To know how the founder of psychoanalysis defined his original terms, how he changed or amplified them in his later writings; to have his exact statements at hand on all possible psychoanalytic questions will be of considerable assistance to students and practitioners alike. Some analysts, known as specialists in Freudian quotations, have been receiving constant requests to supply references to those who sorely needed them. This book will safeguard them from the penalty of specialization, and will place all Freudiana within easy reach of professional and non-professional researchers.
This book examines the importance of language and writing in psychoanalytic theory and practice, offering an understanding of how language works can give a deeper insight into the psyche both in clinical practice and everyday life. Bringing together psychoanalytic insights that hinge on the language of "difficult cases", this collection also includes contributions dedicated to meta-study of psychoanalytic writing. The first chapter shows how music includes tonal regions that deploy existing rules and syntax, alongside atonal ones dominated by caesuras, pauses, and tensions. The second chapter discusses the malignant ambiguity of revealing and concealing typical of incestuous situations, pinpointing how the ambiguous language of incest "deceives by means of the truth,". The third chapter brings in Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando in order to illustrate two types of gender crossing. Distinctions defined by the linguist Roman Jakobson help in the fourth chapter to offer an integrative description of obsessive-compulsive phenomenon as an interaction between metaphoric and metonymic dimensions, as well as with a third, psychotic dimension. The fifth chapter focuses on what is called the "screen confessions" typical of the perpetrator’s language. George Orwell’s "newspeak" is used here to decipher the specific means by which the perpetrator turns his or her "inner witness" into a blind one. The final chapter uses Roland Barthes’ concepts of "studium" and "punctum" to discuss the limits of psychoanalytic writing. As a whole, this book sets the psychoanalytic importance of language in a wider understanding of how language helps to shape and even create internal as well as the external world. Drawing on insights from psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as from linguistics and cultural theory, this book will be invaluable for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and bibliotherapists, as well as anyone interested in how language forms our reality.
Consider a poem as the literary critic reads it; consider the language of an analysand as the psychoanalyst hears it. The tasks of the professionals are similar: to interpret the linguistic, symbolic data at hand. In Language and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis, Marshall Edelson explores the linguistics of Chomsky, showing the congruence between Chomsky and Freud, and comparing linguistic interpretations in the psychoanalytic situation with interpretations of a Bach prelude and Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man."
Greenberg creates a meeting ground for two strains of inquiry. One has to do with Freud's early neurological writings and his career as a research scientist; the other with the origins of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth-century intellectual culture, particularly in theories of language. Aphasia studies encompass inquiry into language, brain, and consciousness, and, ultimately, the entire question of mind-body relations. The study of language disorders that result from brain damage shows the thirty-five-year-old Freud as a bold researcher who encountered in the sources he used some of the important ideas that would ultimately evolve into psychoanalysis.
From long before the Trojan War to the ethnic cleansings of our own century, people have often used their potential to treat other human beings as things. It is this treatment of another person as a thing rather than as a human being that the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr. Sheldon Bach, sees as a perversion of object relationships and that forms the background of this powerful book. Perversion is a lack of capacity for whole object love, and while this includes the sexual perversions it also includes certain character perversions, character disorders and psychotic conditions. Dr. Bach's clinical work has led him to conclude that sexual perversions are generally inconsistent with whole object love. Therapeutic experience suggests that the pathways to object love may be strewn with outgrown and discarded sexual perversions. But whether a sexual perversion per se exists or not, the issue of how it happens that one person can degrade another to the status of a thing is an issue of importance not only for the psychoanalysis of character but for our larger understanding of human nature as well. Perversions are attempts to simplistically resolve or defend against some of the central paradoxes of human existence. How is it possible for us to be born of someone's flesh yet be separate from them, or to live in one's own experience yet observe oneself from the outside? How are we able to deal with feelings of being both male and female, child and adult, or to negotiate between the worlds of internal and external stimulation? People with perversions have special difficulty in dealing with the ambiguity of human relationships. They have not developed the transitional psychic space that would allow them to contain paradox, making it difficult for them to recognize the reality and legitimacy of multiple points of view. Thus they tend to think in either/or dichotomies, to search for dominant/submissive relationships and to perceive the world from idiosyncratically subjective or coldly objective perspectives. In this
between linguistic and psychoanalytic concepts necessarily arises. Until now this question has been examined mainly by psychoanalysts, from their own perspective, but here it is investigated by a linguist, who systematically explores two domains. The first is related to the sign and symbol, where the meeting of Freud, Saussure and Hjelmselv occurred; whereas in the second, that of the signifier, Saussure reappears escorted by Lacan. But Freud is not far away, since the.
The body, of both the patient and the analyst, is increasingly a focus of attention in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially from a relational perspective. There is a renewed regard for the understanding of embodied experience and sexuality as essential to human vitality. However, most of the existing literature has been written by analysts with no formal training in body-centered work. In this book William Cornell draws on his experience as a body-centered psychotherapist to offer an informed blend of the two traditions, to allow psychoanalysts a deep understanding, in psychoanalytic language, of how to work with the body as an ally. The primary focus of Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy situates systematic attention to somatic experience and direct body-level intervention in the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It provides a close reading of the work of Wilhelm Reich, repositioning his work within a contemporary psychoanalytic frame and re-presents Winnicott’s work with a particular emphasis on the somatic foundations of his theories. William Cornell includes vivid and detailed case vignettes including accounts of his own bodily experience to fully illustrate a range of somatic attention and intervention that include verbal description of sensate experience, exploratory movement and direct physical contact. Drawing on relevant theory and significant clinical material, Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy will allow psychoanalysts an understanding of how to work with the body in their clinical practice. It will bring a fresh perspective on psychoanalytic thinking to body-centred psychotherapy where somatic experience is seen as an ally to psychic and interpersonal growth. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists, transactional analysts, body-centred psychotherapists, Gestalt therapists, counsellors and students. William Cornell maintains an independent private practice of psychotherapy and consultation in Pittsburgh, PA. He has devoted 40 years to the study and integration of psychoanalysis, neo-Reichian body therapy and transactional analysis. He is a Training and Supervising Transactional Analyst and has established an international reputation for his teaching and consultation.
