Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Commons^™

The Dialectic Of Airless Space, Ophelia Arc

Masters Theses

The Dialectic of Airless Space is a cumulative, cross-disciplinary research project that explores ‘airless space’ as a somatic and psychological condition shaped by institutional environments. Unfolding over time through five interrelated books, the project weaves together writing, ephemera, textile sculpture, and drawing to archive the invisible architectures of bodily and mental experience.

Family Fragments: Pressure And Proximity In First-Episode Psychosis, Cassandra B. Seltman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explores the value of assuming a position that decenters the identified patient in families with a member with schizophrenia. Instead, a systemic view of the family is taken, as subject to pressures from without and within, and utilizing observable processes for the management and discharge of tension. It attempts the difficult balance of thinking dynamically without sacrificing scientific rigor, considering the social without discounting the biological, and exploring the functionality of the family without collapsing into blame, reductive cause-and-effect thinking, and the search to prioritize one true origin.

When treating family members as discrete units around an identified …

Notes On Language In The Clinic In A Lacanian Key, Sean J. Carroll

Counseling and Family Therapy Scholarship Review

There is no shortage of therapeutic modalities and interventions at the therapist’s disposal. Psychotherapy, because it claims to treat the individual, is necessarily multifaceted and complex. The dimension of language which structures much of our experience should be considered as a starting point for a psychotherapeutic technique. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan developed a theory and technique of the talking cure beginning from this assumption: that language structures our experience. In the early 1950s he sought to recover a linguistic Freud: to re-center psychoanalytic psychotherapy on language itself. In this paper, I sketch the theoretical reasons for this turn in Lacan …

Ego-Feeling And Ego-Boundaries: An Examination Of The Work And Legacy Of Paul Federn, Samuel Selinger

Dissertations and Theses

Paul Federn was an important figure in the early development of psychoanalysis. He was, besides Sigmund Freud himself, the only founding member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society who was still a member when the society was disbanded by the Nazis in 1938. He was also an early pioneer in the use of psychoanalysis toward the understanding and treatment of psychosis, and was among the very first to consider the importance of the ego to psychoanalytic understanding of the mind and mental illness. This dissertation examines Federn’s key ideas-- ego-feeling and ego-boundaries-- their influence on later psychoanalytic formulations by Winnicott, Lewin, …

From One Period To The Next... : Menstruation And The Psychoanalytic Process Of Working Through To The Feminine, Loryn L. Hatch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation delves into the theoretical treatment and place of menstruation in psychoanalysis. Beginning in Chapter I with a broad and varied overview of menstruation with a primary focus on Western culture, some of the persistent ideas and themes, as well as their effects, are illustrated to help pose core questions about menstruation, including how to think about its simultaneous presence and absence within the social discourse and its relationship to psychoanalysis. Chapter II explores the appearances of menstruation in Freud’s body of work, including its relationship to the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis and the fixed place it holds in …

Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This cross-disciplinary dissertation provides a missing intellectual history of an ostensibly dead idea. Once widely held and no less elegant for its obsolescence, the principle of biogenetic recapitulation is best remembered by its defining mantra, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Among psychologists and sociologists as well as embryologists, the notion that the development of any individual organism repeats in compressed, miniaturized form the entire history of its species enjoyed broad (if not uncontested) acceptance through the early twentieth century. The author reexamines the origins of this theory in the work of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, and traces its influence in psychology …

Let Fall: Hysteria And The Psychoanalytic Act, Matthew W. Oyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This text proposes to examine the contemporary crisis of psychoanalysis by taking seriously feminist critiques of the theory’s phallocentrism, but arguing that the phallus cannot be metaphorically or metonymically replaced by any substitutive term, as most revisionist theories of psychoanalysis have sought to do. Castration is the central psychoanalytic concept, though the theory always seeks to cover it over. In order to develop a psychoanalysis that can confront this castration that is always repressed and yet, in its persistent return, continuously disrupts the continuity of psychoanalytic theory, a detour is proposed, returning to the origins of psychoanalysis and taking hysteria …

Blood/Lust: Freud And The Trauma Of Killing In War, Nolen Gertz

Publications and Research

During World War I, Sigmund Freud and his followers held a special symposium in Budapest entitled "Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses." Their contributions centered on the importance of trying to understand what can cause a soldier to become traumatized in war by investigating the individual factors of each case as opposed to merely the situational factors. Thus by redefining such ambiguous illnesses as shell shock and war strain into the Freudian framework of the traumatic neuroses, they were able to do what the neurologists could not — explain the meaning behind the soldiers' symptoms and treat them with successful results. …

Queering Psychoanalysis: The Relational Turn, Jack Drescher

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

On Thursday, March 25, CLAGS hosted a panel entitled "Queering Psychoanalysis: The Relational Turn." The program, part of an ongoing CLAGS effort, introduced academics and scholars more familiar with Freud and Lacan to contemporary, relational psychoanalytic theories and practices.

An Addition To The History Of Psychoanalysis: An Encounter Between Z.V. Togan And S. Freud, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article was submitted to IBPP by Dr. H.B. Paksoy concerning the historian Z. V. Togan. It is taken--with appropriate permission--from Z. V. Togan's Hatiralar (Memoirs) as translated by Dr. Paksoy and published in Paksoy's Central Asia Reader: The rediscovery of history. (NY/London: M.E. Sharpe, 1994). (Ed.). ISBN 1-56324-201-X (hardcover)/ISBN 1-56324-202-8 (paperback). Dr. Paksoy's translation was developed to preserve Togan's syntax. What follows is brief introductory material about Dr. Paksoy and Z.V. Togan, then the article entitled A Poem of Mother's and Freud, and finally a brief commentary by IBPP.

Psychoanalysis And The Soviet Secret Police: Another Look At The Eitingon Controversy, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article provides a hypothetical damage assessment based on the assumption that Dr. Max Eitingon, a significant early member of the international psychoanalytic movement, was also a Soviet intelligence operative.