The subjectivity of Jung's theories
Part I of this paper was devoted to translating Jung's concepts into phenomenological terms and to understanding the nature of the representational world implicit in Jungian theory.
Their principal significance, however, emerges most clearly when they are stripped of metapsychological reifications and retranslated into purely phenomenological terms. His life work then becomes a fascinating descriptive psychology of primitive self and object representations and their typical symbolizations in the spontaneous productions of individuals and in the store of mythological and religious imagery which is the heritage of mankind as a whole.
The factual referents for this image are entirely phenomenological in nature, including such situations as condemning oneself for conduct or feelings which one regards as morally reprehensible.
First, such a description could mistakenly confound a physical property (spatial localization) with a phenomenological one; and second, the facts of psychopathology indicate that the experiences which the theory is designed to encompass are unstable with respect to the subjective boundary between inner and outer worlds, i.e., they cannot be consistently characterized as internal, even in the phenomenological sense.
From a phenomenological viewpoint, this process is to be understood as one of structuralization rather than internalization.
One may view this transition and the accompanying alterations in the structure and content of consciousness as expressive of a phenomenological continuum, rather than in terms of interacting regions of the psyche.
Within this framework, the concepts of the inner and the outer worlds are shown to apply to regions of the individual's phenomenological space and the process of internalization is conceptualized as referring to translocations within this space.
Within our framework, the concepts of the inner and outer worlds were shown to apply to regions of the individual's phenomenological space and the process of internalization was conceptualized as referring to translocations within this space; the concept of character was seen to be coextensive with that of the representational world; and the concept of the unconscious was expanded to include the representational structures which pre-reflectively organize a person's subjective experiences.
In some earlier writings critiquing classical metapsychology (Atwood and Stolorow, 1980, 1993), we argued that many of the reified constructs in psychoanalytic theory can be profitably understood as condensed symbols of various classes of experiences and can therefore be retranslated into phenomenological terms. Applying this translation project to the topic of the present discussion, the question arises: What are the experiences reified in the notion of defects in the self?
The framework is phenomenological in that it investigates and illuminates organizations or worlds of emotional experience.
Our unwavering dedication to phenomenological inquiry, in turn, led us inexorably to the context-embeddedness of all emotional experience—hence our contextualism. It strikes us that our path from phenomenology to phenomenological contextualism mirrors that taken in the movement from Husserl's still-Cartesian phenomenology to Heidegger's phenomenological contextualism (Stolorow, 2011).
1 What darkness does phenomenological contextualism seek to dispel, and what utopian deliverance does it simultaneously seem to offer?
Let us seek an interpretation of what we have come to call phenomenological contextualism in the contexts of our own personal worlds and histories.
The framework of phenomenological contextualism embraces the hermeneutical axiom that all human thought involves interpretation and that therefore our understanding of anything is always from a perspective shaped and limited by the historicity of our own organizing principles—by the fabric of preconceptions that the philosopher Gadamer (1975/1991) called prejudice.
Our goal in giving this account is to reflect on the deepest assumptions of the phenomenological-contextualist theory to which our shared efforts have led us.
Like George, I early on became interested in the phenomenological underpinnings of clinical phenomena.
It seems to us that this agreement establishes the possibility of an integration of phenomenological insight into psychoanalysis.
Although Binswanger's (1946) existential analysis produced some brilliant phenomenological descriptions of the “world-designs” (p.
One of the tasks to be faced in the continuing development of phenomenological contextualism is that of reflecting upon the process of reflection itself.
A sketch is offered of varieties of the experience of personal annihilation within an intersubjective, phenomenological framework of understanding.
E-mail: ufoatw@csnet.net
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One of the most dramatic consequences of adopting a consistently phenomenological, post-Cartesian viewpoint is the opening up of the most severe ranges of psychological disorder—the so-called psychoses—to psychoanalytic understanding and treatment.
How are the clinical differences between neurosis and psychosis to be seen within a phenomenological, post-Cartesian framework?
These states include experiences of the dissolution of boundaries demarcating I and not-I, of the fragmentation and dispersal of one's very identity, and of the disintegration of reality itself. A phenomenological framework, by contrast, is unencumbered by objectifying images of mind, psyche, or psychical apparatus, and is therefore free to study experience without evaluating it for its veridicality with respect to a presumed external reality.
Seemingly extravagant assertions of personal achievement and capability
Terms such as agency, authenticity, cohesion, and others are used here in an exclusively phenomenological sense, referring to dimensions of self-experience along which annihilation states typically take form (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, chapter 4).
We would characterize the essence of a post-Cartesian psychoanalytic framework as its being a phenomenological contextualism (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, 2002). It is phenomenological in that it investigates and illuminates organizations or worlds of emotional experience.
Our awareness of these fracturing experiences and of their impact on our philosophical commitments and psychoanalytic thinking keeps us continuingly self-reflective and ever phenomenological, contextual, and perspectival, open to new possibilities of understanding yet to be discovered.
STOLOROW
A Phenomenological-Contextual, Existential, and Ethical Perspective on Emotional Trauma
Two central interweaving themes have crystallized in my investigations of emotional trauma.
I would like to contribute a small addendum to the above theoretical considerations, an addendum which attempts to approach the issue on a phenomenological level. For it seems that the immediate experience of anger or hate, in and of itself, may be of a certain quality that adds to the necessity of its repression, and that individuals differ in the degree to which this holds true. In other words, from a phenomenological point of view, there are qualitative differences in the experience of anger or hate per se, which contribute to the degree to which its repression is felt by the ego to be necessary.
Armed with modern ego-psychological concepts, we are somewhat less interested in explaining mental activity primarily in terms of a hypothetical flow of instinctual energies (a highly abstract level of theorizing which is far removed from empirical and phenomenological verification), and we are more interested in understanding the multiple functions which a given mental activity serves in the interplay of id, ego and superego forces within the personality (a level of theorizing which is much closer to actual clinical observations) (Waelder, 1930); (Arlow & Brenner, 1964).
The phenomenological and dynamic underpinnings of the patient's perverse activity, with respect to its narcissistic function, could be reconstructed from material which he presented after the perversion had disappeared from his behaviour.
The clinical psychoanalytic meanings of psychological structure: a phenomenological interpretation
In some earlier contributions (see especially Stolorow & Atwood, 1978), a set of proposals was offered for the creation of a metapsychology-free clinical psychoanalytic framework for the study of human personality.
The criticisms which I discussed earlier of metapsychological conceptions of psychological structure apply equally well to metapsychological formulations of structural conflict and need not be repeated. From a phenomenological perspective, however, it becomes apparent that the concept of structural conflict, in its dual aspects as an explanation of content and a delineation of developmental prerequisites, contains penetrating insights into the subjective experience of conflict.
In my view, 'structural change' is an apt term for the goal of psychoanalytic treatment, once it is recognized that the structures which are changed are those which organize the representational world. From a phenomenological perspective, what is accomplished in the working-through phase of the treatment of a transference neurosis?
3 Yet, when viewed from a phenomenological perspective, Kohut's formulations clearly contain superb insights into the psychopathology and analytic treatment of patients who have suffered certain kinds of developmental interferences.
I have also attempted to demonstrate that this latter phenomenological conception, which is consistent with modern structuralism, highlights the central significance of the concept of psychological structure for the clinical psychoanalytic enterprise and illuminates the clinically crucial issues of structural conflict and structural change.
Also not sufficiently recognized is the extent to which Kohut's paradigmatic step has been paralleled, complemented, and supported by the efforts of others who have attempted to free the phenomenological insights of clinical psychoanalysis from the Procrustean bed of materialism, determinism, and mechanism that was the heritage of Freud's immersion in nineteenth-century biology — most notably, the work of Guntrip (1967), Gill (1976), G.
Our intersubjective perspective is a phenomenological field theory or dynamic systems theory that seeks to illuminate interweaving worlds of experience.
This shift from the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves
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psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective systems.
Stolorow
2444 Wilshire Boulevard, #624
Santa Monica, CA 90403
It is the thesis of this article that the shift in psychoanalytic thinking from the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective systems.
It is my Thesis in this Article that the Shift in Psychoanalytic thinking from the primacy of drive to the primacy of affectivity moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow, 1997) and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective systems (Stolorow, 1997).
Stolorow
Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis
2444 Wilshire Boulevard
Number 624
Santa Monica
CA 90403
E-mail: rstolorow@adelphia.net
In this article, the author attempts to show that Lacan's early writings are relevant to the author's own psychoanalytic perspective by virtue of Lacan's view of the psychoanalytic method and process as phenomenological, hermeneutic, and dialogic.
Specifically, I want to show that in his view the psychoanalytic method and process are phenomenological, hermeneutic, and dialogic, and that some of his theoretical ideas can be seen, only in part, of course, as further developments, specifications, or implications of these three emphases.
I call a psychoanalytic method phenomenological if it begins with the study of personal experiencing and if it seeks thereby to gain understanding of the experiential world of a particular person.
In this returning, Lacan sees the method and the process as distinctively phenomenological. In “The Mirror Stage” (1949/2002e), the phrase “as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” appears in the very title of the paper (p.
This primordial I, a structure of experience (note again Lacan's phenomenological emphasis) that is formed by identification with the mirror imago and that constitutes the nucleus of the Freudian ego, is actually an “ideal-I,”
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“a gestalt,” a skeletal “exteriority,” “the contour of [the baby's] stature that freezes it … in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it” (1949/2002e, p.
In essence, the article with Dede proposed a shift from the motivational primacy of drive to the motivational primacy of affectivity—a theoretical shift that moves psychoanalysis toward a phenomenological contextualism and a central focus on dynamic intersubjective systems.