Psychological Transformation: Convergent Themes in Jewish and Psychoanalytic Thinking

2020 ◽  
Vol 107 (6) ◽  
pp. 517-530
Author(s):  
Dinah M. Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
Depressive Position ◽  
Psychoanalytic Literature ◽  
Psychological Transformation ◽  
History Of

The potential for psychological transformation is fundamental to psychoanalytic theory and therapy and to Jewish belief and practice. While Freud's rejection of religious experience as a manifestation of personal and cultural pathology had a long-reaching effect in the history of psychoanalysis, the theoretical extensions and advances of some of his followers have made it possible to view religious experience through a different lens. The author explores the convergence of Jewish ideas about the process of repentance (teshuvah) and the integration of psychic polarities conceptualized in the psychoanalytic literature, namely, love and hate in the shift from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position (Klein) and separation and reunion in the establishment of the self and the development of sublimation (Loewald).

Scripting the Self

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Pollmann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Development ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Cultural Script ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores the importance of family memory for early modern people, before moving to the question of how and why people structured personal memories as they did. Departing from the observation that early modern personal memories were more often associated with bodies than with emotions, it explores how memoirists selected memories for their exemplary potential. Memoirs were used to show how someone had ‘performed’ his life in accordance with cultural ‘scripts’ that were used to give meaning to personal experiences and made them useful to share. This helps explain the memorialization of two particular types of personal religious experience—martyrdom and conversion. Finally, this chapter will explain how, in the eighteenth century, memoirs were first put to a new use, to construct a history of one’s own emotional and moral development, so creating an important new cultural script for personal remembering that is more in line with modern expectations.

The Speculative Turn

2019 ◽  
pp. 68-98
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of

This chapter argues that Sigmund Freud’s 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks a watershed in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud not only speculates in this text, he also speculates in a way that is far-reaching and far-ranging: his speculation takes him back to the origin of consciousness and the beginning of life. But what does it mean, this chapter asks, for Freud’s speculation to culminate in the hypothesis of a death or destructive drive? Indeed, what does it mean for Freud’s hypothesis of the repetition compulsion and the death drive to breathe new life into psychoanalytic theory? It is here, this chapter argues, that we must take Freud’s speculative play seriously and rethink not only psychoanalysis’s relation to philosophy (i.e., speculation) but also its relation to Plato. For Plato, more than any other philosopher in Freud’s work, plays a vital—literally a life-and-death—role in Freud’s theory of the drives.

scholarly journals psychoanalytic theory of anxiety and defense

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Donald L. Carveth
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
External World ◽  
Structural Theory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Depressive Position ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Mind

The chronological development of Freud’s theories of anxiety is reviewed in connection with the series of infantile danger-situations, the distinction between traumatic and signal anxiety, and the defenses evoked by the latter to avoid the former. The central defense of turning aggression away from the object and back against the self, thus generating the hostile superego, is emphasized. A critique of Freud‘s one-sided conception of danger as loss of the good is offered in light of Melanie Klein’s recognition of the danger constituted by the presence of something bad. In light of the shift from topographical to structural theory additional types of anxiety are distinguished: instinctual anxiety experienced by the ego in the face of the Id; Reality anxiety in the face of the external world; moralistic anxiety in the face of the superego. While Freud failed to distinguish persecutory and reparative anxiety and guilt, Klein and her followers posited two fundamentally different layers or positions in the mind, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive or reparative positions characterized by these two types of anxiety and guilt respectively. There has been a good deal of confusion due to the widespread failure to distinguish depressive anxiety from depression: there is no depression in the depressive position because the splitting involved in depression is a paranoid-schizoid phenomenon. The existentialists remind us that not all anxiety and guilt is neurotic.

Tansley's Psychoanalytic Network: An episode out of the Early History of Psychoanalysis in England

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Cameron ◽  
John Forrester
Keyword(s):  
Discussion Group ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
Training Requirements ◽  
Life Paths ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts

The paper traces the psychoanalytic networks of the English botanist, A.G. Tansley, a patient of Freud's (1922-1924), whose detour from ecology to psychoanalysis staked out a path which became emblematic for his generation. Tansley acted as the hinge between two networks of men dedicated to the study of psychoanalysis: a Cambridge psychoanalytic discussion group consisting of Tansley, John Rickman, Lionel Penrose, Frank Ramsey, Harold Jeffreys and James Strachey; and a network of field scientists which included Harry Godwin, E. Pickworth Farrow and C.C. Fagg. Drawing on unpublished letters written by Freud and on unpublished manuscripts, the authors detail the varied life paths of these psychoanalytic allies, focusing primarily on the 1920s when psychoanalysis in England was open to committed scientific enthusiasts, before the development of training requirements narrowed down what counted as a psychoanalytic community.

Conversation with a Truth Seeker

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaap Bos
Keyword(s):  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Concept Of Truth ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

This paper is an invited response to Peter Rudnytsky's ‘Guardians of truth’ article. Taking issue with what are presented as fundamental theoretical and methodological caveats, this article discusses the question of when and how differing discourses on the history of psychoanalysis may or may not be compatible. In particular the author questions the validity of a concept of truth as defined from within a field of knowledge, to arrive at definitions of discourse and dialogue that can be useful to acquire new forms of knowledge.

Psychoanalysis Confronts Cognitive Disability

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Dagmar Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Disability ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
History Of

This essay outlines key moments in the long history of psychoanalysis’ deeply problematic engagement with the phenomenon of cognitive disability – as it highlights as well the work of exceptional counter-examples, including Fernand Deligny, Maud Mannoni, and Angelo Villa.

Walter Pater: Personality and Persons

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-250
Author(s):  
Stephen Cheeke
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reception ◽  
The Self ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge Of Persons

This article argues for the centrality of notions of personality and persons in the work of Walter Pater and asks how this fits in with his critical reception. Pater's writing is grounded in ideas of personality and persons, of personification, of personal gods and personalised history, of contending voices, and of the possibility of an interior conversation with the logos. Artworks move us as personalities do in life; the principle epistemological analogy is with the knowledge of persons – indeed, ideas are only grasped through the form they take in the individuals in whom they are manifested. The conscience is outwardly embodied in other persons, but also experienced as a conversation with a person inhabiting the most intimate and sovereign dimension of the self. Even when personality is conceived as the walls of a prison-house, it remains a powerful force, able to modify others. This article explores the ways in which these questions are ultimately connected to the paradoxes of Pater's own person and personality, and to the matter of his ‘style’.

Послестолетийодиночества:изменение социальнойпсихологиисирийскиххристианвновоевремя

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-255
Author(s):  
T.Yu. Kobischanov
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
The World ◽  
Psychological Transformation ◽  
History Of

Quite often in the course of historical events, social and economic changes obscure the changes in cultural psychology of ethnic groups and their representatives. The historical science explains what happened, how and why it was happening but very rarely gives us a chance to understand what people were feeling in this respect, what processes were going on in their individual and common consciousness and in the subconscious. The drama that the Christians of the Middle East are going through, the final act of which we are probably witnessing these days, urges us to look for its roots in the distant past. The Ottoman period in the history of East Christian communities is of particular significance. The Middle East Christians got under the Turkish rule as a discriminated minority pushed out on the curb of sociopolitical life, but by the beginning of the 20th century the Christians of the Middle East as a whole, and Christian communities of Syria and Lebanon in particular, were flourishing and were perfectly well adapted to possibilities that inclusion of the Ottoman state into the world capitalist system had to offer. The upgrade of the Christians status was accompanied by gradual changes in their social psychology including self identification of the members of the Christian communities, remodelling of their behaviour patterns in everyday life and in conflict situations as well as psychology of introconfessional relations. This research is an attempt to describe and analyse this cultural and psychological transformation.Нередко в ходе исторических событий социальноэкономические изменения затмевают изменения в культурной психологии этнических групп и их представителей. Историческая наука объясняет, что произошло, как и почему это происходило, но очень редко дает нам возможность понять, что чувствовали люди в этом отношении, какие процессы происходили в их индивидуальном и общем сознании и в подсознании. Драма, которую переживают христиане Ближнего Востока, заключительный акт которой мы, вероятно, наблюдаем в эти дни, побуждает нас искать ее корни в далеком прошлом. Османский период в истории восточных христианских общин имеет особое значение. Ближневосточные христиане попали под турецкое правление как дискриминируемое меньшинство, вытесненное на обочину общественнополитической жизни, но к началу 20 века христиане Ближнего Востока в целом, и христианские общины Сирии и Ливана в частности, процветали и были прекрасно приспособлены к возможностям, которые могло предложить включение Османского государства в мировую капиталистическую систему. Обновление статуса христиан сопровождалось постепенными изменениями в их социальной психологии, включая самоидентификацию членов христианских общин, перестройку их моделей поведения в повседневной жизни и в конфликтных ситуациях, а также психологию внутриконфессиональных отношений. Это исследование является попыткой описать и проанализировать эту культурную и психологическую трансформацию.

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