Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and Loveleen Tandan will most likely win best picture, so I am posting it first. It has ten Academy nominations and took the Golden Globe. While it would not be my choice for best pic, I did thoroughly enjoy this movie! It is more accessible than my pic, and it is a beautifully adapted, shot, edited, and scored feel-good movie that is not sappy (even with orphans and true love and one-dimensional villains), not sappy because it is punctuated with violence, and chase scenes, a little suspense and a little luck, and because… it is beautifully adapted, shot, edited, and scored. Besides, everyone (except the Indian Regis Philbin) roots for the underdog, as does sometimes even the Academy. And there is no underdog like Jamal (Dev Patel) as contestant, as beautifully understated as one could wish. Also, thanks to cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, garbage heaps and colorful rags become works of art.
Orphaned brothers Jamal and Salim Malik survive by their wits in the slums of Bombay (Mumbai). The older brother Salim (Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala,as teen)is ruthless, calculating, and practically amoral. Salim repeatedly betrays Jamal, then saves his brother’s life (eyes, really), then betrays his brother some more, then redeems himself. Jamal, on the other hand, has ‘a never ending love’ for Latika, whom he encounters on the streets after having just lost his mother. His childhood love, just like his determination (for an autograph), revealed early on, is tenacious.
The hell of growing up on the streets is contrasted to the Taj Mahal as “heaven.” It is probably no coincidence that the opera upon which young Jamal happens is Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Jamal’s lyre is his truthfulness (“too truthful” says his less brutal interrogator), a purity of love to which Latika (Freida Pinto,as teen)must be drawn, just as the audience is drawn to Jamal. But a viper, first Mamam (Ankur Vikal), then Javed (Mahesh Manjrekar), takes Latika, and Jamal returns to the underworld (of gangsters) to rescue her. On the TV show “Millionaire” Jamal, as well, “dared more than any other man ever dared for his love” [Edith Hamilton]. But, Slumdog Millionaire is full of surprises, and this film, “bizarrely plausible,” will make you laugh out loud when you hear the last game show question. I enjoyed the twists on the allusions to Greek mythology, Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, and perhaps even Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Only the Dickensian aspect stays true to its inspiration.
Based on the book Q & A by Vikas Swarup, this is a story about more questions and answers than those asked by a game show host: About the death of his mother, Jamal says, “I wake up every morning wishing I did not know the answer to that question.” Other salient questions: the relentless “Where is Latika?”and the incredulous “You still believe in Salim?” with feel good answers: “… safe” and “God is great.” Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) has done a wonderful job putting the stories into a seamless yet jolting screenplay. I wanted to dance during the closing credits along with the clearly joyful cast. But this film inspired no self reflection.
-Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
FILM: "SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE"
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
TBIPS TRAUMA WORKSHOP SERIES III: Witnessing
Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc. (T-BIPS)
Co-sponsored by Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc
TRAUMA SERIES WORKSHOP:
Healing Haunted Lives
Part III. Treating Trauma Survivors: Healing through Witnessing
Presenter: Bruce Reis, Ph.D.
DATE: Saturday, February 7, 2009
TIME: 9:00 a.m.-12:15 pm and 1:15-4:30 p.m. (Refreshments: 8:45-9:00 a.m.)
LUNCH: 12:15-1:15pm: Boxed lunch will be available by reservation for additional $10
(bring-your-own bag lunch, optional).
If boxed lunch is required, please RSVP with $10 check no later than February 1st.
LOCATION: Tampa Bay Crisis Center, One Crisis Center Plaza (on Bearss Ave, just west of I-275 and west of Florida Ave),Tampa, Florida 33613
PROGRAM FEE: $75 [$25-students/candidates] (includes 6 CE credit hours).
Registration deadline February 1, 2009.
(Add additional $10 if register after Feb 1st)
Add $10 for lunch.
AM Presentation:
In the healing of trauma in the analytic interaction, witnessing is explored as a basic function of analysis with severely traumatized individuals. We will understand the concept of witnessing and how the term is variably applied, as well as look at its multiple forms (e.g. enactive and performative). These modes of communication convey "truths" that are not always available in words, but are communicated via the transference-countertransference matrix. Process notes from an ongoing treatment will illustrate the method of listening to absences within the trauma narrative and the importance of "being-with" a patient in moments of traumatic reactivation.
PM Presentation:
The afternoon presentation will include the viewing of the film "Fearless," starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez, about survivors of a plane crash, and will serve to kick off discussion about survivor fantasies, guilt, and disconnection.
Objectives:
1. Participants will learn the specific qualities of traumatic narration that make impossible a coherent account of massive trauma.
2. Participants will be able to differentiate enactive from performative forms of witnessing in the clinical encounter.
3. Participants will have an appreciation for the unique role that transference-countertransference plays in the witnessing process.
Continuing Education Credits: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essentials Areas and Policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint sponsorship of The American Psychoanalytic Association and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians and takes responsibility for the content, quality and scientific integrity of this CME activity.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this educational activity for a maximum of 6 hours in category 1 credit towards the AMA Physicians' Recognition Award. Each physician should only claim those hours of credit that he/she actually spent in the educational activity. Disclosure information is on record indicating that participating faculty members have no significant financial relationships to disclose.
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society has been approved by the Florida Dept. of Health to provide Continuing Education Accreditation to Psychologists (Provider # PCE-46, Exp. 5/10) and Clinical Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Mental Health Counselors (Provider # BAP 423, Exp. 3/09). The Society certifies that these courses meet the requirements of the Board on an hour-per-hour basis for continuing education credits.
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Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc TRAUMA SERIES WORKSHOP:
HEALING HAUNTED LIVES PART II. REGISTRATION FORM
Saturday, February 7, 2009 Presentation by Bruce Reis, Ph.D. WITNESSING
First Name: Last Name: Degree: License #:
Address: City: State: Zip:
Telephone:( ) **E-mail Address**
Are you requesting continuing education credit? Yes ____No____ (ALL SHOULD REGISTER!) Are you purchasing lunch? Yes ___ No ____ (if yes, add $10)
Please return Registration by SATURDAY, February 1, 2009: Mail check (made out to T.B.I.P.S.) and form to: 300 S. Hyde Park Ave, #220, Tampa,FL 33606;
Call Heather Pyle (813) 857-9044 or Lycia Alexander-Guerra (813) 908-5080 for further information.
Pre-registration is optional - all welcome at the door! If boxed lunch is required please RSVP no later than February 1, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Ludic Moments at Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society?
On Saturday, January 24, 2009 the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytc Society hosted Al Brok, PhD on "Ludic Moments,Serious Experiences: What can analysts learn from Charlie Chaplin?" Brok hoped to draw a parallel between the "aesthetic therapeutic contract between analyst and patient" and the artist's (in this case Charlie Chaplin) communication with his audience, and referred to the "here and now interaction" of a "two person" psychology. [Ludic, by the way, comes from Latin word for play, here, meaning playful.] He hoped to illustrate the use of play in the working alliance or relationship, and was able to give, after protracted film clips of Chap[lin movies, a helpful clinical example.
Playfulness is afforded when there is a background holding environment (including that of reality)and when the analyst does not allow into the foreground facts and theories which impinge upon the moment. Being in the moment means listening without active investment in theory, though analyst may be simultaneously matching theory from background to what emerges in the foreground as the foreground is activating what is significant. Brok spoke of discovering what one had not been looking for contrasted to finding what one expected. (He did not mention the possibility of two persons creating something new.)
Brok thought that Chaplin's seriousness in his films decreased the capacity for his audience to enjoy the films; that the potential space had been overwhelmed by the literality and concreteness. Brok cautioned that analysts must be careful not to vitiate the possibility for play with a too tenacious adherance to only what is serious, nor to obfuscate the serious by defending against it with play.
While preferring to comment on the political and social climate during Chaplin's career rather than his private life [we were referred to psychoanalyst Stephen M. Weissman's excellent, recent biography Chaplin: A Life for the latter], Brok made a very interesting point about Chaplin's move from silent film to talkies. He likened silent film to the intuitive, preverbal mother-infant interaction and talking (spoken language) to the identification with the father (ala Lacan), i.e., once Chaplin was able to identify with his father, his films took on language and seriousness.
If I recall correctly, this is differenct from Weissman's bio, where Weissman, notes that Chaplin's more serious films spoke directly to Chaplin's private life, e.g. that Chaplin might have understandably wanted to murder Joan Barry in real life -- her paternity suit and the sensationaized trial-- but that only in film, Monsieur Verdoux, could Chaplin, a lady killer, literally kill ladies. The trial in Monsieur Verdoux also allowed Chaplin's side to be heard as it was not heard in real life. Weissman saw Chaplin's identification with his father as lion comique throughout his Little Tramp portrayals, but it was with Limelight that Chaplin was able to forgive his father, and recognize his mother's participation, in the demise of the marriage and in Chaplin's own chaotic, bereft childhood, afterwhich Chaplin was finally able to become paterfamilias. Brok, incidently, saw Limelight as Chaplin's anxiety about his own marriage to a much younger woman, and both an Oedipal victory for Chaplin as well as a stepping aside (of Calvero) for a younger man to have the much younger heroine.
As an aside, Brok mentioned that, in his clinical example, he had chosen to be playful, to "go with clinical enactment...for therapeutic reasons." (I had a different idea about enactments, that they are inevitable, never chosen, and are understood only after the fact.)
I must do a better job of having TBPS allow time for discussion, for how else are we to play with the material and each other?
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Workshop Summary: Recognizing and Treating Dissociative Adaptations to Trauma in Adults
As I expected… there were differences clinically from within the psychodynamic point of view and I have some thoughts and feelings that I would like to share. I felt uneasy when he described the traumatic history and process with one of his patients, particularly the patient's feelings of fear and anger. I found myself needing to deal with my own personal traumatic issues and also reflected on my higher functioning severely traumatized patients. Others had expressed their thoughts and ideas while I was gathering my own. I thought of Kleinian ideas that are often forgotten in this country.
Klein was the first psychoanalyst who consistently took the time to deal with aggression and love in humankind. She was among the great analysts of her time who connected aggression with love in a common way during the most primitive of relationships of pre-oedipal life. She dealt with disassociative processes within the individual, a subject that comes to mind in dealing with severe trauma.
I found that the confusion within the traumatized patient and the patient's disassociation permeated the group at many levels, eliciting idealization or internalization to more unrealistic or unexpected feelings. A wide range of comments were offered about aggression, length of treatment, and enactment. I found our reactions thought provoking. Did we feel confused? Blocked in our thinking process? Were we trying to unblock the thinking on this type of patient …among other issues? Sometimes there can be a parallel process that occurs in those listening to and presenting patient material.
HORACIO ARIAS, MD
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Tampa Bay Institute for
Psychoanalytic Studies Cosponsored by
Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society
Healing Haunted Lives: Trauma Workshop Series
Part II: Treating Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse
6 hours CEU’s
Saturday, January 10, 2009
9:00am - 4:30pm
Crisis Center of Tampa Bay
One Crisis Center Plaza, Tampa, Florida
(Exit Bearss Ave WEST off I-275)
Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D.
Graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute; Member of the American, and the International, Psychoanalytic Associations; President of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc (T-BIPS); President of the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc; in private practice in Tampa, FL.
Treating Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Because trauma of children by trusted caretakers often requires a child to compartmentalize (dissociate) the experience in a way that it is frozen in time, unavailable to symbolized (language) processes, narrative and interpretation alone are insufficient for healing. Instead, it is enactments within the therapeutic dyad that bring to light the horrific past experiences, and these must be symbolized and integrated with other aspects of the self. Reconfiguration and introjections of new relational paradigms create the possibility for healing.
Healing Haunted Lives: Trauma Workshop Series: This is a 4-part series in common sense language to familiarize and assist clinicians in recognition and treatment of those who have undergone unspeakable traumas. Part III features Bruce Weiss (Feb. 7, 2009) emphasizing treatments, and Part IV, Ghislaine Boulanger (March 7, 2009), and her work with adult onset trauma, Wounded by Reality.
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Continuing Education Credits: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the essentials Areas and Policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint sponsorship of The American Psychoanalytic Association and The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians and takes responsibility for the content, quality, and scientific integrity of the CME activity.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this educational activity for a maximum of 6 hours in category 1 credit awards for the AMA Physicians’ Recognition Award. Each physician should only claim those hours of credit that he/she actually spent in the educational activity. Disclosure information is on record indicating that participating faculty members have no significant financial relationships to disclose.
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society has been approved by the Florida Dept. of Health to provide Continuing Education Accreditation to Psychologists (Provider #PCE-46. Exp 5/10) and Clinical Social Workers, Marriage and Family Therapists, Mental Health Councilors (Provider# BAP 423. Exp 3/09). The Society certifies that these courses meet the requirements of the Board on an hour-per-hour basis fro continuing education credits.
Program
Treating Patients with a History of
Childhood Sexual Abuse
Morning 9:00am-12Noon
Phenomenology
• Relational Paradigms in Treatment
• Enactments
• Clinical Presentation
Lunch
Afternoon 1:00pm-4:30pm
Treatment:
• Making procedural declarative
• Integrating Experience
• New Relational Paradigms
Learning Objectives
1. Participants will better understand the
cognitive impairments, physiological
responses, and relational adaptations
manifest in survivors of childhood
sexual abuse, and how these affect
treatment negotiation.
2. Participants will learn to identify roles
enacted by patient and therapist
with survivors who use dissociation
and projective identification.
3. Participants will learn to utilize
enactments to make explicit what
had been dissociated.
Complete, clip and mail form with check to TBIPS: 300 S. Hyde Park Av #220, Tampa, FL 33606
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Treating Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse - Lycia Alexander-Guerra, MD
Saturday, January 10, 2009 Registration 8:30am, Workshop 9:00am-4:30pm
Name_____________________________________________________________________ Degree______
Address______________________________________ City _______________________State___ Zip_____
E-mail _________________________________ Phone __________________
Registration Rates for Jan 10, 2009 one workshop only:
Regular ___ $75 (by Jan 2) Student/Candidate ___ $25 (by Jan 2)
___$90 (after Jan 2) ___ $35 (after Jan 2)
Lunch ___ $10 (optional, lunch provided with advanced registration and payment by Jan 2)
Program Learning Objectives
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
"Seven Pounds"
Living in a town to which "The Reader," "The Wrestler," or even "Milk" have not yet arrived, I recently found myself, encouraged by friends and by the casting of Will Smith, at a movie I might otherwise have missed. Despite murmurings of a "twist," I found it very predictable (the movie, after all, opens with Smith telling you what his plans are, and then unfolds quite clearly with his guilt in flashbacks, and, in others, with cancer, and renal failure, and heart trouble, and blindness) and so I was more than a little shocked to hear so much sniffling around me. Sure, as guest Nancy Merchand stated in an episode of TV's Homicide: Life on the Street (and I may be paraphrasing) "A rare gesture in an uncivilized world," but do people not even consider what anti-gift the impact of suicide has on those around them? And when a man gives his heart to a woman, isn't the romance lost when this is concretized? To kiss becomes cruel.
Shylock demands his pound of flesh, but Smith's character seems to believe seven pounds are required for recompense of seven deaths. While some have said this film is about the search for redemption, I agree with Rafer Guzman that the film is morally confused. Each has the right to seek his own path, but guilt, grief, and depression all demand treatment, not idealization. Director Gabriele Muccino and writer Grant Nieporte missed the boat on this one. And did others miss that the brother accused Smith of taking something from him, or that Smith had made money as an aeronautics engineer? I, too, may have missed the boat on this movie, or, at least, wished I missed the boat to the movie theater.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
First Thoughts on the First African American President-Elect of the USA
I was struck by the poignant remarks of Democratic strategist, Donna Brazile, whose home in DC is along the walking path to the home of Fredrick Douglas, a former slave, abolitionist and woman’s suffragist. Brazile’s home is close as well to the capital building where the 44th President of the United States of America will take his oath of office in January 2009. She noted that that the steps of the capital were built by enslaved Africans. Last year, Congress passed a bill to name the Capitol Visitor Center Room “Emancipation Hall” to commemorate the contribution of the enslaved workers. Donna said that she envisioned that those workers laid each brick with skill and optimism and in January, their hope will be made manifest.
I was also struck by a news reporter who saw the source of the enthusiasm of the governments world-wide to work with an Obama-led America to their anticipation that they will be able to become partners in the work. Higher education researchers tell us that employers want their college-educated workers to master 21st century skills,” aka, “soft skills.” Soft skills are certainly familiar to the psychoanalytic community—collaboration, inclusion, analysis, collectivity, mutuality, engagement, listening, creativity in problem solving and so on. The world leaders and those they lead seek and anticipate having their voices and visions not only at the table, but empowered to speak and shape our collective future.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
TBIPS' TRAUMA WORKSHOP SERIES, Part I: Dissociation
De-personalization; De-realization; and De-contextualization
The most provocative part of any presentation is, for me, the clinical, which, in addition to who says (left-brain) what to whom, includes relationship, the implicit, and, a lot of right-brain knowing, and not-knowing. For ethical reasons, I can only marginally report on who says what to whom. Still, discussing ideas, not a particular case, excitedly lights up the curious brain.
On October 25, 2008 Richard A. Chefetz, MD, from New Directions in Psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Foundation, and the Advanced Psychoanalytic Training of the Washington School of Psychiatry opened the Trauma Series Workshop of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc with a paper on Dissociation. Chefetz used Bucci's definition of dissociation: the unlinking of normally associated elements of experience that nonetheless remain unconsciously, implicitly, bound and related. This unlinking is facilitated by failure of the brain to formulate referential connections between different elements of experience, the failure to provide the context necessary to [more]accurately interpret experience.
While dissociation is part of normal mental function, e.g. highway hypnosis, or the fact that the brain selectively allows little, at any one time, into conscious awareness, when the right (amygdala) brain is overwhelmed with emotion, the left brain (Broca's area) is hypoperfused such that the experience cannot be linked to potentially helpful narrative. In fact, during intense emotion, e.g. intense fright, one can be rendered literally speechless (a fact that can be used didactically-cognitively to vitiate the guilt of a survivor who could not protest at the time of the abuse and victimization). Right brain hyperactivity can intensify vulnerability and aggravate trauma by denying it symbolization through narrative. (Likewise, when the left brain is busy, we tend to notice less our painful feelings and bodily sensations.)
Trauma is an experience that changes one's world view, one's self view, one's subjectivity (a person's interpretation of thoughts, feelings, and sensations). The dissociative process protects the self from trauma, from, e.g. the disparate elements of both loving and fearing the unpredictable caretaker. But its fallout includes severely limiting one's affective capacity and it creates incoherence, coherence being necessary for self regulation.
Isolated affect, an attempt at regulation, is dissociation that maintains attachment. A child accommodates to prevent the needed caretaker's withdrawal. Security, i.e. sameness -what is predictable, coherent, familiar- is sought, even if it is painful, creates deadness, or requires the disappearance of the self. Chefetz notes that a therapist, by being helpful, can cause a shift in a patient's self state, from child to adult, but then, the adult, believing only children need (and get) help, paradoxically, goes into a panic.
Dissociative Identity ("multiple personality") Disorder challenges the therapist's idea of a unified, cohesive self. We are likewise challenged to tolerate our own varying self states, and our capacity, as well as the patient's, for anger, rage, sadism, collusion. Can we, for example, explore with the patient her/his request for physical closeness and sexual contact, its meaning, its potential betrayal if acted upon, and can we be trusted to set and maintain appropriate boundaries? Will we deny this capacity in ourselves and insist on being the 'rescuer,' or withdraw, or lose all awareness of the ways we are sadistic?
Chefetz reminds us to be be curious and open about what we are feeling in a given moment, and to remain 'experience near.' I will, on January 10, 2009 in Part II of the Trauma Workshop Series, talk more about dissociation, both in the therapist and patient, how to navigate and how to use it, as well as about how to recognize, after the fact, enactments and their usefulness, when working with adults who have survived severe physical and childhood sexual abuse.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Lew Aron, PhD in Tampa
Lew Aron visits Orlando-Tampa and shares with us his talk on
"Rethinking Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: What Does Feminism Have to Do With It?"
Lew Aron, PhD, a great, modern, psychoanalytic thinker and orator, visited Tampa on Saturday October 18, 2008 to share his critique on the historical evolution of psychoanalytic thinking, and on the contribution made to it by postmodern, deconstructive feminism. As we know from our clinical work, some beliefs have to be 'broken' to allow putting them back together in a new configuration. Never had I seen attendees at a Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society Scientific Meeting so abuzz with excitement as they embraced the iconoclastic thoughts put forth by Dr. Aron. Some of his points are as follows:
Aron urges that to understand the concept one must understand its context. When an author, Freud, for example, writes: whom is to be convinced by the paper, with whom is it in dialogue, with what is the author struggling?
After discussing how psychoanalysis today is in trouble (the aging out of analysts of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the paucity of candidates in training, the ever declining number of analytic patients), Dr. Aron notes how analysts can not even agree on the definition of what analysis is, nor on whom might benefit from it. There is an argument about the number of sessions per week, about sitting up or recumbency, about how much supportive work means it is no longer an analysis. Aron sees some of the arguments in history to be about economics and prestige.
Freud never differentiated between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but he did eschew hypnosis and suggestion, the latter having brought down his illustrious contemporary Charcot. Psychoanalysis has been so doctrinaire as to try to fit the patient to the theory/technique, instead of vice versa. Franz Alexander advocated for this flexibility and was summarily extricated from mainstream American psychoanalysis, accused of blurring the distinction between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and of ignoring psychoanalytic parameters (Eissler).
European emigrant analysts coming to the U.S. before WWII could afford more flexibility. But those who fled the Nazis, losing home, livelihood, family, may have recreated in the U.S. what had been lost, and so may have clung tenaciously to doctrine. Gill defined psychoanalysis as a therapy that when conducted by a neutral [as if exists] analyst leads to the unfolding (i.e. intrapsychic) regressive transference neurosis to be resolved by interpretation alone, or mostly.
Interpretation has been privileged as an active masculine penetration of the passive female unconscious (an idea which backs imperialism, colonialism, racism, homophobia, misogyny; and allows for conquering the inner world and beating down resistance, as one attendee noted). Likewise, autonomy has trumped dependency. Hartman and Rapaport argued for ego autonomy, i.e. analysis led to structural change; if take this parameter away, then one would rob patients of the ability to do for themselves. After all, successful outcome is measured by a patient's ability to continue in self-analysis, having internalized the analytic process and the analyst. Yet Wallerstein's 1954 study at Menniger "54 Lives in Treatment" showed the relationship to be mutative. (Kernberg, who ran the study, has noted that the main contribution of psychoanalysis to the world is psychoanalytic psychotherapy. [One attendee modified this to: it is psychoanalytic thinking that is its greatest contribution].) The implication: if psychoanalysis deals with the inner world and autonomy, then psychotherapy deals with behavioral change and transference cure.
Apparently, analysts have privileged autonomy, in part, because analysts like to be left alone! (Smith's study on the ideal patient). Autonomy is valued (but then how have a healthy dependent relationship, such as marriage?), and dependency feminized.
Freud's theories arose contemporaneously with the rise of antisemitism in Vienna. Freud feared people would say his ideas applied only to Jews. Rabbinical Jews idealized the studious, passive man, but, in a culture which conflated circumcision with castration, Germanic men did not want to be seen as passive and effeminate. Aron purports that when Freud said that the bedrock of psychoanalysis is the repudiation of femininity, Freud had to repudiate his culture's belief that Jewish men were feminine, passive, castrated. Using Greek mythology to bulwark his position, Freud advocated the opposite: a kind of 'I, like all men, am not passive, castrated or feminine (or homo erotically attracted to Fliess, nor willing to be so with Ferenczi) but, instead, I am Oedipus, aggressive, willing to murder (even my own father), attracted sexually only to women (even my own mother).' (Freud, if he believed it, he believed it to be universal.)
An important insertion: Freud never denied that sexual abuse occurred prevalently. He only denied that it was the etiology of hysterical neurosis. (Himself hysterical, he would be indicting his father.)
Freud had to defend this binary opposition between active/passive; male/female; (Goy/Jew) to save his science (psychoanalysis) and save himself. Historical acceptance of falling to one side of the polarity, this binary configuring, leaves no room for a third and the tension held between two polarities. Aron encourages us to refrain from investing in binaries, and encourages, instead, their deconstruction.
Accordingly, Aron cautions against the erroneous conflation of intensity of training with the intensity of treatment. Different from most of his contemporaries, Aron finds it a mistake to separate psychoanalytic and psychotherapy training. Instead, he recommends that candidates receive didactics and supervision, but that candidates learn for themselves the difference frequency (really the meaning of a particular frequency--loved, enslaved, dependent, special--to a particular patient) and intensity make for their patients, some seen on the couch, some in a chair. Most radically, he recommends that candidates choose their own therapy.
There seem to be only two things analysts agree upon: that there is an Unconscious (though not on what it is or how it works) and it is important to scrutinize the therapeutic relationship (though not on how or when). Aron quotes (L. Friedman) "monstrous" [like a gryphon or chimera?] to describe psychoanalysis. It does not fit one category well, not solely science, art, medicine, psychology, literature, cinema, quixotic, or cost-benefit soundness). Our fore thinkers were rebels, misfits, radicals, and reformists, living in a particular relationship to authority. Psychoanalysis has moved from the Golden Age of consensus, to pluralism.
[It's been a long, and temporally short, road.]
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Healing Haunted Lives: Trauma Workshop Series
- What really happens in dissociation? (Video)
- Attachment, Dissociative Process, and Psychotherapy
- Transference/Countertransference
- Enactment and Dissociation (Case presentation and discussion)
- Working with Intense Shame (Brief Case and Video)
- Affect and Dissociation: The Golden Thread
