Oublier. Des mauvais souvenirs et de la banalité du mal

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2019

These three scholars, all British academics, define their mission thus: "to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process. As such, it can be understood as an interdisciplinary field in search of transdisciplinary objects of knowledge. Studies in the Psychosocial is also distinguished by its emphasis on affect, the irrational, and unconscious processes, often but not necessarily, understood psychoanalytically" (p. ii). (The disclaimer at the end of this statement, regarding unconscious processes, frankly puzzles me.) Stepping up to the challenge in this volume is Karl Figlio, Professor Emeritus at the University of Essex, Senior Member of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He further establishes his bona fides by acknowledging Robert Hinshelwood as a friend and colleague, as well as Ronald Britton, "who has informed every level of my thinking" (p. vii). By creating this link to two prominent neo-Kleinians, we are assured that Figlio will have done his psychoanalytic homework in tackling the task at hand. In his introduction, the author argues that historical consciousness is the common denominator of psychoanalysis and history and that the two are thus "rooted in the same soil" (p. 1). Moreover, despite their significant differences, both contend with the subjectivity of the historical actor, 844703A PAXXX10.

2018

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2019

sources. While this can be creative, it can also be baffling. What is useful about her discussion of different psychoanalytic views of female sexuality is that it foregrounds the complexity and many different ways of speaking about the body, actual, experienced and fantasized, within a psychoanalytic framework.

1998

Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso , 2024

Michelle Maiese: Trauma, dissociation, and relational authenticity Caroline Christoff: Performative trauma narratives: Imperfect memories and epistemic harms Aisha Qadoos: Ambiguous loss: A loved one's trauma Alberto Guerrero Velazquez: El trauma está en la respuesta. Hacia una visión post-causal en la definición de trauma psicológico Clarita Bonamino, Sophie Boudrias, and Melanie Rosen: Dreams, trauma, and prediction errors Gabriel Corda: Memoria episódica y trastorno de estrés postraumático en animales no humanos: una propuesta metodológica María López Ríos, Christopher Jude McCarroll, and Paloma Muñoz Gómez: Memory, mourning, and the Chilean constitution Sergio Daniel Rojas-Sierra, and Tito Hernando Pérez Pérez: Subjetividades rememorantes, marcas narrativas y trauma cultural en la construcción de memoria de desmovilizados de las FARC-EP en el AETCR Pondores Germán Bonanni: Y después de la guerra... ¿Qué?

Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2009

These two books share an uninteresting feature but contrast markedly in much more interesting ways. The uninteresting feature they share is that they are both slightly prolix and tend to repetition (perhaps to be expected in works of close relevance to psychotherapy). The much more interesting contrast is in the understanding of the mind to be found in each. In The Moral Demands of Memory, Blustein addresses the intrinsic and pervasive normative and ethical aspects of the psyche whereas, in Talking Cures and Placebo Effects, Jopling tends to treat the mind in the naturalist and scientistic mode, i.e. as a cognitive device whose workings explain our behaviour and adaptation to the world. This contrast is both striking and instructive for those engaged in philosophical reflection about psychiatry and, in particular problems of memory and psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis and History, 2001

At the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Freudian paradigm took its first steps towards becoming a modern amalgam of science and hermeneutics, history was considered the most established and instrumental discipline in man's quest to endow his thinking and action with meaning. The kinship between the disciplines, which could be traced back to the persona of Freud, took many shapes in the course of the twentieth century. Examined in perspective one could maintain that modern historiography and psychoanalysis have travelled the same distance in moving away from philosophical idealism, have shared some of the illusions of militant positivism and are accustomed to evoke the same criticism due to their claim to half-scientific, half-artistic epistemology. We start by considering the intellectual legacies and theoretical foundations that shaped the two disciplines' perspective of each other. We then proceed to juxtapose several historical moments in the evolution of psychoan...

American Imago, 2014

Published Dissertation, 2002

In whatever way persons approach me, in the same way they receive their reward. --Bhagavad Gita, 4.11 . The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. --G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy The author provides a comprehensive review of the current scientific “complexes” present in the theory, research, writing, and practice of psychology, pointing out the assumptions and biases which disregard, undervalue, and often marginalize crucial ideas relevant to expressing the logos of psyche and attending to its needs. Specifically, the influence and ideas of Cartesian thought, as well as other apodictic philosophical systems following in its train, are noted in relation to their culmination in scientific and technological systems in psychology and culture. By raising these complexes into awareness and then deconstructing the related edifice of thought where needed, the author is able to introduce older, forgotten ideas and traditions that have traditionally been overlooked by psychology as a science. Such ideas will ultimately be seen as compensatory, complementary, and healing to psychology in its effort to articulate a comprehensive and fully human imagination of psychological experience and phenomena. These Pre-Enlightenment ideas and traditions include those of rhetoric as it moved through three major historical periods: Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. During these three eras, rhetoric and its practice of an “art of memory” produced ideas relevant to modern psychology and the practice of psychotherapy. Jungian and Archetypal Psychology, two psychologies establishing these traditions as respectable psychological topics and which can rightly be argued as drawing from these older thought-forms, offer paradigms of psychological theory and method based on a poetics of the imagination. The author employs a qualitative research design: the historical/theoretical study. Using primary sources from and before the 18th century, as well as related theory and scholarship both past and current, the author will develop a synthesized imagination of highly relevant ideas for psychology contained within a rhetorical epistemology of knowledge involving memory and imagination. Rhetoric and the art of memory recover the excluded middle term between the current dualism of mind-body or spirit-matter, classically known as that of “soul”, thereby offering another departure point for psychological epistemology. The author proposes to articulate a poetics of imagination and memory that cultivates what Robert Fludd, the 17th Century Hermetic philosopher and rhetorician, called the oculus imaginationis (Godwin, 1991, p. 89), or “eye of the imagination”. Such a psychological “eye”, with the ideas and methodologies that create it, are well suited to psychological phenomena often invisible, intangible, or incomprehensible within the purview of science. Valuable theoretical ideas provided by rhetoric and the art of memory will be shown to provide the psychotherapist with ways of eloquently, prudently, and wisely attending to the sufferings of the soul appearing in the consulting room.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2008

The relationship between 'narrative' and 'historical-biographical truth' in psychoanalytic treatment has become the subject of many controversial debates in recent years. Findings of contemporary memory research have lead to great scepticism as to whether therapists are able objectively and reliably to reconstruct biographical events on the basis of their observations in the therapeutic situation. Some authors even claim that psychoanalysts should concentrate exclusively on observing the here and now of the patient's behaviour within the transference relationship to the analyst. In this paper it will be discussed whether the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater in this debate. Centred around the insights from a third psychoanalysis with a patient who suffered from a severe case of childhood polio, the hypothesis will be discussed that working through the traumatic experience in the transference with the analyst, as well as the reconstruction of the biographical-historical reality of the trauma suffered, prove to be indispensable for a lasting structural change. Integration of the trauma into one's own personal history and identity is and remains one of the main aims of a psychoanalytic treatment with severely traumatized patients. The reconstruction of the original trauma is indispensable in helping the patient to understand the 'language of the body' and to connect it with visualizations, images and verbalizations. The irreversable wounds and vulnerability of his body as the 'signs of his specific traumatic history' have to be recognized, emotionally accepted and understood in order to live with them and not deny them any longer. Another important aspect in psychoanalysis is to develop the capability to mentalize, in other words, to understand the intentions of central (primary) objects related to the trauma. The concept of 'embodied memory' might be helpful in understanding precisely in what way 'early trauma is remembered by the body'. Observing in detail the sensory-motor coordinations in the analytic relationship enables one to decode the inappropriate intensity of affects and fantasies which match the original traumatic interaction and are revealed as inappropriate reactions in the present, new relationship to the analyst.