The Psychoanalytic quarterly
-
Emphasizing psychic truths as the major domain of psychoanalysis, the author explores the complexity of defining such psychic truths. It is suggested that thinking of levels of psychic truths is the most useful approach. How to understand trauma and historical truth within this context is examined. The role of the analyst as aiding the search for psychic truths, rather than functioning as psychic "truth teller," is discussed within the context of paradigmatic changes in the psychoanalytic method that form an emerging common ground.
-
Recognizing that enactments have been discussed in psychoanalysis primarily as occurrences in the treatment setting, the author proposes a new application of the term enactments: that it may pertain to the actions of some individuals in their efforts to cope with bad things that they have done to others. That is, enactment can be a substitute-for-atonement mechanism. The author illustrates this view of enactment through a discussion of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001), and in particular by examining the behavior and motivations of one of its central characters, Briony Tallis. Included are explorations of the relationships between enactment and guilt and between enactment and reparation.
-
Biography Historical Article
The inability to mourn and the inability to love in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
The author discusses the special role played by Shakespeare's masterpiece Hamlet in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud and many of his followers have treated Hamlet as if he were a real person inhibited by the Oedipus complex. ⋯ The author proposes that, if Hamlet is autobiographical, it expresses Shakespeare's inability to mourn and love until a childhood homosexual memory has emerged. Hidden in Hamlet is a cure through the recall of a childhood memory.
-
Biography Historical Article
Kafka, Borges, and the creation of consciousness, Part I: Kafka--dark ironies of the "gift" of consciousness.
The ways in which Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges struggled with the creation of consciousness in their lives and in their literary works are explored in this two-part essay. In Part I, the author juxtaposes a biographical sketch of Kafka with a close reading of his story "A Hunger Artist" (1924), in which a character (whose personality holds much in common with that of Kafka) spends his life in a quasi-delusional state starving himself in public performances. The hunger artist's self-awareness (of having lived a life devoid of the experience of love and mutual recognition) is achieved in the context of an interpersonal experience in which he has, in fact, found/created "the food [he] liked," that is, an experience of loving and being loved, of seeing and being seen, of being aware of and alive to his own imminent death. This fragile, paradoxical state of consciousness is sustained for only a moment before it is attacked, but not entirely destroyed.
-
The fact that analysts inevitably analyze "in character" (i.e., as themselves) has been commonly assumed but unacknowledged publicly ever since Freud's Papers on Technique (1911-1915). Analysts' implicit private beliefs about the impact of their own characters on analytic work have been addressed obliquely via theorizing about the analyst's subjectivity and the role of mutually created resistances and enactments in the transference/countertransference matrix, but these views remain largely tacit. The author suggests that the psychoanalytic concept of character has run aground as a moral issue, not a theoretical one, and that its deeper role as the vehicle for unconscious action remains indispensable in analytic work. An extended clinical example is presented to illustrate the author's preliminary ideas about the impact of her own character in this analysis.