International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
At the beginning of the twentieth century Freud and Pavlov made complementary theoretical splits in their observational field. This splitting initiated a dialectical interaction that tended to polarize the Freudian mental world of insight and the psyche against the Pavlovian outer world of learning theories and the soma. The 1950s saw an exaggerated polarization between strict behaviorists and "classical" psychoanalysts. The linkage of ideas of therapeutic action with metapsychology also dates from Freud and is briefly illustrated.
Zeitschrift Fur Psychosomatische Medizin Und Psychotherapie
The paper discusses a variety of perspectives of psychoanalytic psychosomatics in the past, the present and the future. An epigenetic model of scientific development is introduced and developmental strains in psychosomatic medicine are evaluated according to the claims of the bio-psycho-social model. In historical terms, the psychological dimension of psychoanalytic psychosomatics has been the first strain to be elaborated; it is being extended still.
The diversity of theories regarding children's development is commensurate with the enormity of the task of seeking ordering designs for explaining behavioral and psychic ontogeny in infants, children, and adults. The purpose of this paper is to look at these developmental theories as epigenetic stages themselves. I shall suggest that the next stage in the epigenesis of theories of development is to see variability and disorder on a continuum with order and stability, as a constant dialectic that moves development along, whether at the level of the cell or at the level of fantasy.
The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry
Functional capacities, such as attachment and affect regulation, object relations capacity, symbolic function and language development, now documented by neuroscientific research and epigenetics, are reviewed. Results from this research, together with other factors, are posited to have contributed to effective contemporary psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic treatments for the psychoses and schizophrenias.
This paper is written from a psychodynamic clinician's perspective, juxtaposing a psychoanalytic-attachment model of depression with recent developments in neuroscience. Three main components of the attachment approach are described: the role of loss, of childhood trauma predisposing to depression in later life, and failure of co-regulation of role of primitive emotions, such as fear, despair, and helplessness. Blatt's distinction between anaclitic and introjective depression is delineated and related to hyper- and de-activation of the attachment dynamic.
International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
This paper traces the transformation of narcissism, paralleling the transformations of object love, occurring between early and late adolescence. Narcissism is examined in terms of three lines of development: erotic self-love, omnipotence, and the regulations of self-esteem. The transition occurs relatively rapidly in most normal and psychoneurotic individuals and involves a massive reorganization of the psyche. The acquisition of a body image of an adult sort probably acts an organizer. A normal consequence is the first romantic love relationship.
Sex sterotypes, clinical observations, and psychoanalytic theory of sex differences are presented. Stereotypes show differences in areas of inhibition and clinical observations, differences related to the phallic and genital phases in psychosexual development. Divergent analytical views on the sexual development of boys and girls are discussed.
International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
A discussion of "Self Psychology and the Distinctiveness of Psychotherapy," by Arnold Goldberg, M.D. Arnold Goldberg's applications of self psychology to psychotherapy help conceptualize psychoanalytic psychotherapy, contribute to technique, and provide new goals. Self psychology is formulated in terms of an intrapsychic focus and other psychoanalytic considerations of clinical process, is consistent with advances in the psychoanalytic study of object relations, and advances the clinical theory of psychoanalysis.
With the help of clinical material obtained from two male patients in therapy at the same time, the concept of the loving father is examined. Both patients presented with a fear of being homosexual. It gradually became clear during the therapy that both of them were searching for a loving father.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Even those aspects of transference which initially favor the analytic process and seem to have the least connection with resistance do become integral parts of the transference neurosis and contribute massively to some of the most subtle difficulties in the process, especially in its resolution. These phenomena are, by their very appearance of rationality and cooperation, all the more difficult to bring under analytic scrutiny.