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International Forum of Psychoanalysis 16, 38-42, 2007
In this short text, the problem of how ‘the talking cure’ itself can become a perverse relation is considered and illustrated with a brief clinical vignette. Contributions coming from the work of Stern in infant research and Lacan in post-Freudian thought illuminate the potential for experience to be split off through the use of language itself. These perspectives are brought to bear on thinking about representation, splitting, and perversion as a basis for considering a clinical instance in which patient and analyst enact a perverse relation constituted by the way in which the patient uses the analyst's language to construct a sado-masochistic perversion of the treatment process. Within the clinical episode, Stein's reformulation of perversion, informed by Ogden's observations and expanding Stoller's earlier contribution, provides a basis for considering how the analyst was able to use attention to the body-based countertransferential experience to repair a sense of ‘erasure’ that was being accomplished for both analyst and analysand through the enactment.
International Forum of Psychoanalysis 16, 204-212, 2007
Freud viewed the unconscious as being roughly equivalent to dynamically repressed wishes, needs, and motivations. Findings from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience over the past 40 years have dramatically changed our views of unconscious processes and the human mind. It is now clear that Freud's dynamic unconscious is only a minor segment of information that is processed at subsymbolic, implicit, and automatic levels. Only a fraction of this information is further processed at explicit conscious levels. Moreover, t