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This scientific meeting featured the contemplations of Sheldon Bach, presenting in a postmodern context some disorders on thinking that we commonly meet while doing psychoanalysis, and illustrating through clinical examples how they might be engaged. Linking thinking disorders of self and mutual regulation of attachment and separation, this paper suggests that the encounter of the analyst's mind with the mind of the analysand can help each to solidify their sense that they have a mind of their own.
Bach's paper is subtitled, “some observations on thinking disorders,” so as to enlarge on the area of thinking itself which still has not received its due from psychoanalysis. While problems of thinking have been addressed by Rappaport, these “thinking problems,” Bach maintains, need to be reexamined from the perspective of contemporary theory. Thus, Bach begins his paper by clarifying that his perspective falls somewhere between radical constructivism and realism/essentialism. Within its spectrum is a place where one can maintain a systems theory of causality, wherein the social world and the physical body reciprocally act upon the other. Bach additionally notes that the brain can be acted upon by surgery, chemotherapy, and psychotherapy, which by association suggests there is no dichotomy between emotional disorders and biochemical disorders. Bach also views the mother/infant dyad as a mutually regulating system and takes this notion one step further to characterize the analyst/analysand unit in psychoanalysis. With these positions as his starting point, Bach then outlines some clinical examples, presenting both his dynamic formulations and treatment of his patients with “thinking problems.”
Bach believes these patients with “problems of thinking” suffer from questions of epistemology, resulting in a constant obsession over whether their own minds really exist. Bach finds that such patients do not feel entitled to a mind of their own and are led to this ontological dilemm