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Further Bibliography
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Where the author’s name is underlined there is a
direct email contact. To request
other papers click here
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Donald Meltzer: Talks,
unpublished papers and fragments from later years click here
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Begoin, J.
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Depressive
Position, Otherness and Integration in the Psychotherapeutic process
This paper is centered around what J. Bégoin considers a turning
point in Dr. Meltzer's thinking around 1986: his emphasis on the concept of
the aesthetic conflict in the encounter between the baby and its
environment and the aesthetic level of interaction between analyst and
patient. A link is made between this
concept and the author's particular interest in the understanding of the
nature of mental pain and the defences that are put up against it. A neat
and brief mention of the meaning of the unborn parts of the personality
appears in the second part of the paper which ends with an illustration
from the analysis of an adolescent boy of the importance of dreams to
understand the patient's search for a beautiful encounter with the analyst
as the basic therapeutic factor.
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Begoin, J.
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The Violence of Passion and
the Mysteries of Love
I want to deepen the
signification of the differentiation between the “enigmatic object” as
Donald MELTZER has described it and the “mysterious object” that remains
always, more or less, the loved object. This differentiation is based, in my opinion, on the
definition, nature and evolution of passions.
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Borensztejn, C.L, Kohen, N.G., Neborak, S.,
Nemas, C., Ungar, V. Ungar
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Baby observation as a basis for patterns in clinical work
Our objective in this work is to develop our ideas on baby
observation as a tool in the process of becoming a psychoanalyst. We shall
present a list of concepts that appear on the threshold of associations to
the word observation. They are perception, interpretation, attention,
description and writing down. We shall study the relationship between
observation and each of these terms.
With regard to the delimitation of the field of observation, we've
noticed that some workers use the phrase 'Baby observation ', whilst others
talk of 'Observation of the dyad
mother-baby' or of the 'mother-baby link'. We think that this diversity of
nomenclature is a sign that something is still in need of definition in
this field. We suggest the hypothesis that a new object of observation has
been created through the work carried out.
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Botbol, M.
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A Window onto Wuthering Heights
“What terrible characters!” “So sordid!”, “How evil!” “It’s a really
tough novel”...were some of the comments made when we read (or re-read) the
book for the seminar. “It’s an extraordinary book”, said Meg on
starting.The aim of this summary is to try to systematise (for me) and
transmit (to others) some of the rich experience and evocative themes
approached in the seminar.
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Botbol, M.
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Daily Beauty and Daily Ugliness
This work explores Iagos’s statement “ If Cassio do remain/He hath a
daily beauty in his life/That makes me ugly” (Othello, Act V, Scene
1) which Meltzer quotes saying : “Iago is not referring to Desdemona or Bianca.
The “daily beauty” is an inner beauty of innocence and good will...” (Sincerity, p. 561). It analyses the
characters of Iago and Cassio as exponents of ugliness and beauty
respectively.
Dailiness is usually
“aproblematic”, and the theoretical path begins with a reflection on
the analyst’s daily life. A brief incursion into the
field of aesthetics describes the development of the concept of beauty and
its antithesis, ugliness. From the
theoretical frame of the aesthetic conflict, and inside the consulting
room, it speaks about “interest”, “the beauty of method” and “vulgarisation
of taste as defence”, making some technical considerations.From the
definition of health as “a way of living in autonomy, in solidarity and in
joy”, it ends with some thoughts about analysts’ mental health
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Brookes, S.
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Washington Square: an unconscious contract
This article offers a reading of Henry James’s short novel
‘Washington Square’ in the light of some thoughts of W. R. Bion’s about the
association between arrogance and its ‘corresponding stupidity’ arising as
a defence against psychic pain. The novel provides a soberly realistic and
tragic picture of the deleterious effects of this defence on intrapsychic
and personal relationships.
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Campart, M.
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Matching Modes of Teaching
with Modes of Learning
The paper was written following a talk by Donald Meltzer called
`Matching Modes of Teaching with Modes of Learning’ given at a conference
in Malmo in
1995. It reviews the theory of
learning to think evolved by Bion and Meltzer, relating it to the context
of contemporary pedagogical theory, and discussing its application to
school education. The paper also
pursues the implications of the 1983 report by Donald Meltzer and Martha
Harris, Child, Family and Community: a psycho-analytical model of the
learning process. It includes a
sketch of the findings of an education programme in Piedmont, Italy,
which has been conducted on these principles.
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Cassese, S.F.
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The promise of dawn: some reflections
I illustrate the
relationship between the aesthetic conflict and pseudo-maturity through a
literary example based on the life and works of Romain Gary. Subsequently
I examine two other important
aspects using clinical material. These are:
- firstly, the
quality of the original mother-baby relationship which gives rise to a
pseudo-mature personality (shown with an example of infant observation);
- secondly, the
transition from pseudo-maturity to the building up of a separate identity
in the course of psycho-analytic psycho-therapy (with reference to the
transference and emerging from the claustrum).
Finally, I discuss some theoretical aspects, in particular the
evolution of the concept of pseudo-maturity and intrusive identification in
Meltzer’s work and compare Meltzer’s
concept of pseudo-maturity with Winnicot’s concept of false self.
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Castella, R. and Farre, L.
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Exporing the identificatory
dimension of intrusive identification – life in the Claustrum
Following the analysis of an schizophrenic patient and that of a
drug-addict allows us to make conjectures about the way entry into the
Claustrum takes place, the
sufferings that are borne and the satisfactions it procures. The
peculiar thought organisation in this type of patients is to be noted : a
strong mixture of arrogance, stupidity and the permanent infiltration of
lies. We tackle the technical
aspects involved in the attempt to stimulate the desire to come out of
their closed Claustrum, to have access to the transference relationship and,
with the acceptance of dependence,
be able to develop. Those technical aspects consist, on the one hand, in
promoting the emergence of claustrophobic anxieties through the detailed
description to the patient of the world he inhabits, and on the other hand,
sustaining a permanent dialogue where - in the Socratic fashion- the
production of thought, its contradictions, the loss of coherence and
harmony (Arcesilao of Pitanea) and the infiltration of falsehood are
examined.
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Foulds, M.
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An appreciation of the work of
Donald Meltzer
Report on a seminar led by Neil Maizels
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Freeden, I.
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A troll in the consulting room
A clinical paper that gives an account of analysis of two patients.
The first – a psychopathic woman – has been enabled to lead a successful
academic and social life, but is a failure in terms of psychic integrity.
The second is a post-autistic girl who has made considerable developmental
progress. The account of the first five years of her therapy has been
published in The Journal of the British Association of Psychotherapists,
1999, no. 36 under the title: ‘The
Claustrum and the Reversal of the Alpha-Function: the case of a
Post-Autistic Adolescent Girl’.
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Hindle, D.
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A developmental view of the
psychoanalytic method
Report on Meltzer conference in Florence February 2000
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Hulks,
D.
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Adrian Stokes and the changing
object of art
PhD thesis 2002
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Kluwer, R.
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A new view of the as-if
syndrome: the unborn
The As-if syndrome is a manifestation of the experiential mode of
autistic-adhesive (contiguous) reactions (Ogden). We also find them in the
adult in connection with neurotic
and psychotic components. They are
due to the catastrophic experience of separation of bodily unity in the
first weeks or months of life. The syndrome has multifarious forms of
expression and is difficult to recognise because of its
"nothingness" or non-existence.Conspicuous characteristics are:
the subject is inexistent and unlimited; in place of projective there is
adhesive identification, so that not a potential space but two-dimensional
surfaces constitute the world; as a result inverse thought is employed and
there is the continual threat of confusion about subject and object;
instead of feelings sensations, motor faculties and excitation are
accented. There is no containment and thus no inner processing of
experience, so that an impoverished inner personality development exists,
accompanied by the outward impression of normality and good functioning.
Such patients are incapable of taking up a position, assume no
responsibility and use speech as evacuation.Just as autistic children are
not quite born (Tustin), the patient presented here has obviously remained
unborn in his self.
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Krims, M.
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Men’s anxiety about love in Love’s
Labour’s Lost
Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost has an
unusual dramaturgic structure for a comedy. It begins with a king's
preoccupation with death and ends with a queen in mourning for her father.
In between, the characters court each other in typical comedic style but
their courtship then ends most unconventionally: they part without
gratifying their love for each other. I intend to show how anxiety in the
male characters contributes to this outcome and that a reading of the
subtext suggests that this anxiety is caused by an unconscious linkage of
love with aggression and death. Finally, I shall show where this linkage
appears rather transparently just beneath the surface of the text.
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Maizels, N.
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I’m Miss Red! Reworking a
premature weaning with a lonely young girl
This paper reconsiders the complex biological, emotional and
sociological process of weaning - a topic which, surprisingly, has received
relatively little attention in psychoanalytical theory. Through a clinical
example, the possibility of a premature and 'false' weaning is considered,
along with the vicissitudes of a reworking, later in life. Transference and
countertransference aspects of the case are given particular importance.
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Maizels, N.
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Inoculative identification and
bandigung in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train
Following on from Freud’s speculation about the necessity for the
destructive instinct to be ‘tamed’, this paper explores the idea of mental
equivalent to the process of inoculation.
This process, tentatively referred to as inoculative identification,
requires that an external figure is unconsciously chosen to represent an
internal instinctual danger and is ‘allowed’ to invade the psyche. The integrative/constructive aim of this
is to strengthen the recognition of danger to good, life-promoting internal
objects. But there is always the
risk that destructive narcissism will ‘take advantage’ of this push for
greater integration and encourage a total takeover of the personality by
the invading element. Hitchcock’s
film Strangers on a Train is used to provide an example.
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Maizels, N.
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What could be better than
nuclear warfare? A quest for eirenarchic survival
In a previous
paper (Maizels, 1985) I suggested a model of intrapsychic conflict which I
now wish to apply, speculatively, to a group or ‘global’ level. My hope is to generate some new ways of
thinking about our anxieties of nuclear warfare and the destruction of life
on Earth, and about alternatives. Many psychoanalytical thinkers seem to
believe that the task of attempting to understand World War in terms of
unconscious processes is inappropriate—that psychoanalysis lies strictly in
the domain of thoughts about the transference in the ‘here-and-now’ of a
two-person relationship and its repeated, observable patterns. Those who
have ventured to speculate have ‘bee-lined’ straight for Freud’s ‘death
instinct’...
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Maizels, N.
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The wrecking and re-pairing of
the internal couple in Othello and The Winter’s Tale
A model of the progress of
the internal parents from a
violent, combined object (Klein), with little differentiation, through to a
combining harmonious and differentiated couple,
some examples from Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale are
discussed. Some suggestions for the clarification
and elaboration of these ideas are considered in the light
of these examples, as is some related clinical material. There is also the hope of an
enhanced understanding of the Shakespeare.
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Maizels, N.
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Dreams grown false…the
`cannibalization’ of alpha fnction and `cancerous’ mental growth in
suicidal states of mind
The capacity for the
imaginative reception of feeling states, through symbolisation and dream
thoughts, and for their transformation into a creative and alive
responsiveness, was named "alpha function" or "alpha
process" by Bion.
From some clinical dream
material and a short story by Sylvia Plath, entitled The
Wishing Box, the author outlines an
unconscious process that may attack and "devour" the perception
of emotional meaning. This has a drastic, but disguised effect on
creativity and the capacity for love - replacing meaningful symbols with a
flashy, but precocious, contrived and emotionally-sterile sheen of
anti-symbols - a kind of mental cancer.
Both patient and analyst may
become fascinated or stupefied by this 'impressive' imitation of genuine
alpha process, unless the latter recovers a thirst for sincere emotional
contact and nourishment. Then, the difference can be conveyed, with words
that feel alive and hand-made to resuscitate that thirst in the patient.
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Maizels, N.
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Book reviews
Exploring the work of Donald
Meltzer: a festshrift, ed. A. Hahn and M. Cohen
Inside Lives by M. Waddell
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Maizels, N.
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Working through, or beyond the
depressive position?
The author explores some conceptual and technical issues in relation
to the terms "Depressive Position" and "The Working Through
of the Depressive Position", and in so doing, suggests a new concept —
"The Spiritual Position".
It is proposed that this spiritual position has achievements, such
as a capacity for "meta feeling", and defences, which are
somewhat different, although related to the mourning and reparation of the
working through of the depressive position. Particular attention is
paid to the development of the "whole-object Father" in the
formation of an "observing-ego-in-feeling", and to the
development of the "whole-object Mother" (Nature) in the
formation of a "metamorphosic", feeling, philosophy of Life.
Together, these formations give the mind a "heart", which may
come under attack from an omniscient, Tiresias-like internal object. Some
clinical material is used to illustrate these achievements and defences,
and to highlight the difference of emphasis (as compared with the working
through of the depressive position) that they imply.
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Maizels, N.
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An imaginary Freud-Bion
meeting
A humorous fiction
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Maizels, N.
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Trees of Knowledge in Hardy’s Woodlanders:
some questions for Bion
The author
provides a description of the various ways in which one person succeeds, or
fails, in getting to know another person, which is derived from ideas
implicit in Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Woodlanders. Hardy’s ideas are compared to, and
contrasted with, Bion’s concepts of ‘reverie’, ‘negative capability’ and L,
H, and K links. It is suggested that
Hardy provides a model which integrates knowing and loving, and which might
have important implications in the psychoanalytic treatment of patients
with severe narcissistic disturbances, and which might help to augment
Bion’s concept of maternal reverie.
Some case material is used to emphasise aspects of this concept that
could be further illuminated by some of
Hardy’s ideas which are implicit in his novel.
It is concluded that, in
some psychoanalytic treatments, under great countertransference pressure,
‘negative capability’ can be used defensively, to cover the lack of a deep
emotional interest in locating lost or damaged good internal objects in the
patient, where it is not infused by a state which Hardy calls ‘watchful
lovingkindness’, and which is essential to the concept of maternal reverie.
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Maizels, N.
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Self-envy, the womb and the
nature of goodness
A reappraisal of the death instinct.
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Negri, R.
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Foetal personality and very
early evidence of autistic features
(Video presentation). A preliminary study of five couples of
non-identical twins, observed monthly during their prenatal life starting
from the twelfth week, then weekly after birth up to their second year of
age, has allowed me to individuate/note the characteristics of a specific
foetal personality.
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Oelsner, R.
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Before and after the break-up
Brief study on the capacity of the self to dream and to oppose the
understanding of dreams. It is not usual to find psychoanalytical work about the break-up
of treatment, and yet such a study can
illuminate an otherwise dark spectrum of analytical technique as
well as of psychopathology. The paucity of works of this nature can perhaps
be explained by our desire to be optimistic about our task and keep hoping
that we have the capacity and the tools to carry a treatment through to a
good ending. What constitutes a good ending
is of course a debatable subject, but the break-up of the analysis certainly is not, and it
therefore leaves us troubled in our desire to cure or at least to
understand.
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Oelsner, R.
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Adolescence, identity and
action
“Adolescence: the self at risk” is a paper in which the author deals
with what W.R. Bion called emotional turbulence as proper of the adolescent
phenomena. No psychic growth can take place without emotional turbulence, a
kind of leap into the unknown of which the outcome is undetermined and
therefore risky. If this turbulence occurs too early, in what normally we
regard as latency the outcome is a psychotic breakdown. Strong defenses
that hinder the occurrence of emotional turbulence arrest the growth of the
personality remaining in latency no matter the age. This occurs when the
self feels too much at risk in order to “let it go”. Adolescence proper can
only occur when the risk is run and the personality is brave enough to face
it. Whether the outcome will be emotional growth or a juvenile
schizophrenia can never be assured even if statistics encourage us to be
optimistic. Three clinical cases with drawing materials are presented. The
first one of an 8 year old boy who had a psychotic breakdown that revealed
a premature and unbearable turbulence. The second material is of a 19 year
old adolescent whose fear of emotional breakdown reinforced his obsessional
defenses causing a development arrest. The third material is that of a 14
year old adopted boy, undoubtedly amid an emotional storm manifested by a
severe polymorphous symptomatology whose outcome is yet to be observed.
Only this patient seemed to have taken the risk of getting into the stormy
situation which the author here describes.
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Plankers,
T.
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On Pre-formed Transference
Tomas Plankers outlines Donald Meltzer's concept of Preformed
Transference and its precursor within Freud's theory of transference.
Preformed transference prevents the development of transference in analysis
and isresponsible for standstills and interruptions. This is demonstrated
extensively in detailed clinical material. For the analyst the concept of
preformed transference aims at establishing more alertness for the chance
such a situation in analysis might offer, enabling the analyst to adopt a
firm position outside a pseudo-communication which might finally allow him
to find a new perspective on the forms of the patient's defence mechanisms,
their traumas and their personal involvement in them.
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Rhode, E.
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Coleridge as Therapist: life
before words
The insight that what may appear to
be other and even alien to the self may be a familiar within the self
(perhaps in the form of Bion’s imaginary twin) informs the fascination that
many artists of the Romantic period had with infancy, with lunacy, with the
deranged states associated with drugs and with the cultures that once
unfortunately used to be called ‘primitive’ and are now sometimes named
‘preliterate.’ But what is familiar within the self is also ‘other,’
sometimes extremely so and in tantalising sense: it may be cryptic or speak
to us with the tongues of the dead (which is a biological way of describing
the otherness of eternity). This mode of communication is like markings on
a stone: In what ways, if any, is it meaningful?
I wrote this piece many years ago – and Richard Mayne published it
in Encounter (1988). It came into being at a time when I was trying to
‘understand’ child patients, or the child in adult patients, and gaining
courage and delight from family life. The writings of Coleridge, especially
his Notebooks, stole into my life in a way that I don’t remember.
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Rhode, E.
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The image in form: symposium
paper on Adrian Stokes (1994) www.pstokes.demon.co.uk
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Sanders, K.
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Meltzer and the Influence of
Bion
British Journal of Psychotherapy 22(3) 2006 pp 347-361.
The aim of this paper is to set out in sequence the evolution of
Meltzer’s ideas and the influence on them of Bion’s. It has been the
combination of his own explorations of the intrusive form of projective identification
with the non-intrusive form in Bion’s theory of thinking and with his
theory of groups that came to define for Meltzer the essence of two of the
three Post-Kleinian metapsychologies: `geographical and epistemological´
while in Bion’s theory of affects he found the key to a third: the
`aesthetic.’
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Sanders, K.
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Sexual problems in general
practice
In general practice an appeal for help with a sexual problem can be
taken as a continuation of the attempt to lessen the confusion between the
infantile and the adult. Often the patient comes hardly expecting a
psychological approach, but having recovered from their surprise I have
found the differentiation of infantile sexuality from adult a useful
starting point. More difficult are those in whom the problem is
psychosomatic : symptoms such as recurrent cystitis, inexplicable menstrual
disorders, or hypochondriacal anxieties about the genitalia or the breasts, may indicate that an emotional problem
has quit the mind and become a type of action or behaviour.
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Sandler, P.D.
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A Sixth Basic Assumption
Clinical experiences
form the empirical basis that seems to back the hypothesis of this study.
It appertains to the realm of psychoanalysis proper and of applied
psychoanalysis. It is dedicated to those colleagues interested in: i.
Dealing psychoanalytically with the so-called ‘crises’ of the
psychoanalytic movement; ii. Studying intra-group tensions; iii.
Investigating possible factors implied in the so-called diminishing numbers
of ‘gifted younger professionals looking for analytic formation’
(Wallerstein and Kernberg, 1984); iv. Investigating possible factors
implied in the feeling that there is a diminishing quantity of people
looking for analysis. The paper was written before a kind of ‘Hitler’s
bestiality reborn’ obtruded in the form of a bin laden with invitations to
the basest drives of man. Bion observed that groups are forged in shared
hallucination; therefore, they are a fertile soil for wars against reality
(Bion, 1961, 1965). My experience shows that groups provide social loci to
shelter a psychotic feature, described by Bion (1965)) as a factor in
hallucinosis, namely, the phantasy of superiority, a function of primary
narcissism (Freud, 1914), primary envy (Klein, 1957), expressing a freezing
in the paranoid-schizoid position. Its outcome is contempt of truth and life[i].
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Ungar, V.
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Transference and the aesthetic
model
Each
model of the mind comes out of the constant combination of certain
elements that are related to each
author's conception of the mind and
theory of early emotional development. In this work Donald Meltzer's trajectory through S. Freud's, M. Klein's and W.
Bion's ideas is used as a model.
The
aim of the work is to articulate Meltzer's conception of transference with
the aethetic approach - present throughout that author's work - so as to put
forward a possible aesthetic model of the mind. Starting from the idea that
theories grow from meeting obstacles, the possible difficulties that might
have been encountered in the operation of the Kleinian-theological model
and might have become the launching points for the new model suggested are
revised.
This aesthetic model would have a specific concept of truth and
would also have a bearing on the working practice in psychoanalysis, such
as the style used in
interpretations, based fundamentally on the possibility of observing
and describing while also taking into account the content of the
interpretations.
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Williams. M.H.
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Underlying pattern in Bion’s Memoir
of the Future (International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1983)
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Williams. M.H.
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Bion’s The Long Week-End (Journal of
Child Psychotherapy, 1983)
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Williams. M.H.
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The Tiger and `O’ (Free
Associations, 1985)
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Williams. M.H.
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Knowing the Mystery (Encounter,
1986)
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Williams. M.H.
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Looking with the mind: psychoanalysis
and literature (Encounter, 1990)
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Williams. M.H.
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Inspiration: a psychoanalytic and
aesthetic concept (British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1997)
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Williams. M.H.
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The Aesthetic Perspective in the Work
of Donald Meltzer (Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations,
1998)
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Williams. M.H.
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Psychoanalysis: an art or a science? (British
Journal of Psychotherapy, 1999)
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Williams. M.H.
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The three vertices: science, art and religion (British
Journal of Psychotherapy,2005)
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Williams. M.H.
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Discovering symbolic identity through life-drawing
(paper presented at a conference at Oxford in 2004 on the theme
of `Drawn from experience’). A
symbol-making situation is one which enables some communication with
internal objects to take place; it allows them to demonstrate the meaning
of the feeling or conflict; and start the process of thinking and
understanding…
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Young, E.
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On the analyst’s capacity to
bear love
An essential but neglected element of the
Oedipus myth lies in the fact that the birth of the baby is considered
dangerous. Therefore the child is cast out, deemed a curse rather than a
blessing. Bion brought to our attention, following Freud's recognition that
the Oedipus myth reveals essential components of sexual development, that
the separate elements of a myth could be recognized in an analytic session
and provide coherence. I believe that this element - the casting out of the
infant Oedipus - appears in psychoanalytic material and, when perceived,
lends meaning to psychoanalytic events. In
this paper, I would like to explore this aspect of the Oedipus myth, which
I believe is revealed in the conviction some analysands hold that
their aliveness, as represented by contact with the analyst in the analytic
session, is catastrophically dangerous to both. This conviction may
originate when the infant fails to meet an object receptive to projective
identification as specified by Bion, the relationship designated as
container/contained. The infant, its contents rejected by the container, is
expelled. This leads to events, as the Oedipus myth describes, in which the
natural processes of life are perverted.
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