Acting out and psychoanalytically informed treatment in inpatient adolescent psychiatry.
This article seeks to revitalize the psychoanalytic concept of acting out by exploring its significance in work with adolescents in inpatient psychiatric settings who do not respond to behavioral health therapies. Utilizing a Freudian–Lacanian lens, this article examines the ways in which acting out is a response by the adolescent to an elimination of desire found within family systems as well as in psychiatric systems. The elimination of desire leads to the collapse of the fantasy that guarantees desire. Acting out, in the Freudian–Lacanian sense, is a method of reproducing that fantasy in action. By providing an inte...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - March 21, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Expressed emotion and reflective functioning across the schizotypy spectrum: Developmental experiential factors.
Expressed Emotion (EE) in relation to caregivers is predictive of relapse and symptom exacerbation over the course of schizophrenia and other severe mental disorders. Even individuals with milder, subclinical manifestations of the schizophrenia genotype, such as schizotypy, may be adversely affected by high levels of EE. A potential source of resilience in high EE caretaking environments might be the capacity for mentalization or reflective functioning (RF), which is the ability to accurately think about the mental states of others and the self. The main hypothesis of the present study is that when mentalization capacity o...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 17, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness.
Reviews the book, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness by Mark Solms (2021). In this book, Solms is squarely in the Darwinian tradition with regards to emotions, but with a very strong Freudian slant to both the topic, and to the history of psychology. As a scientist, the reviewer focused on Solms' treatment of those aspects of the emotional brain that he is knowledgeable about, and he stayed away from other topics that he is less versed in, such as Solms' views on dreaming and his embrace of Friston’s extremely complex free-energy principle. But there is a completely different way to read The Hidd...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The Epistemic Trust Assessment—An experimental measure of epistemic trust.
This study describes an experimental paradigm for assessing ET. We designed the ET assessment (ETA) procedure in which we first utilized the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups, which asks participants to engage in public speaking and mental arithmetic in front of two evaluators and other experimental participants. Next, the participants were individually administered a questionnaire, which asked questions about participants’ own behavior and overall performance during the interview. Participants were then given a standardized feedback about their behavior and performance, which included information about aspects in whic...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Heidegger’s Nietzsche, the doctrine of eternal return, and the phenomenology of human finitude.
Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger’s interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. The author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche’s metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A unique romance: Psychoanalysis and phenomenological philosophy: An essay in honor of Carlo Strenger.
This paper is inspired by the unique contributions of Dr. Carlo Strenger to psychoanalysis. Dr. Strenger was one of very few analysts who saw the foundation of psychoanalysis to lie in phenomenological philosophy. After a discussion of how Strenger used phenomenology to address and shed light on the epistemology of psychoanalytic psychology, the paper moves to the clinical arena. It is argued that Dr. Strenger developed a unique clinical approach that drew on the findings of existential and phenomenological philosophy. Building on this philosophical approach, Strenger shows that the mission of analysis, no matter the level...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Two visions of psychoanalysis: An essay in memory of Carlo Strenger.
Strenger (1989) refers to the classic and romantic vision of psychoanalysis. I build on Strenger’s paper and discuss the contrast between the vision of psychoanalysis that emphasizes the enhancement of self-knowledge and that tends to view conscious experience as dissimulating and the vision of psychoanalysis that places its emphasis on the enhancement of the range and richness of subjective experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology)
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The fear of insignificance from a socio-communicative perspective: Reflections on the role of cultural changes in Carlo Strenger’s thinking.
This paper commemorates the work of Carlo Strenger, a prolific writer and unparalleled critic of contemporary culture, with a focus on his thinking concerning the role of cultural changes, and globalization in particular, on the development of what he termed the fear of insignificance. We relate Strenger’s thinking in this regard to socioevolutionary and developmental psychopathology approaches concerning the role of culture in engendering a sense of agency and selfhood. These views illustrate our own shift in thinking concerning the role of psychological and sociocultural factors in the development and course of psychop...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Self-creation and the good life: Carlo Strenger’s existential psychoanalysis for our time.
This paper connects Carlo Strenger’s life with his writings, how what he embodied as a life path is what he articulated in his work. Strenger left his Orthodox Jewish religion and home in Switzerland and recreated himself and his life in Israel. Drawn to the philosophy of existentialism, with its emphasis on the individual’s irrefutable freedom and responsibility for the creation of meaning, Stenger stressed the creative possibility of reinvention throughout his career and utilized it in his work with patients, developing a unique and coherent psychology of self-creation that encouraged people to fashion a life grounde...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Yalom, Strenger, and the psychodynamics of inner freedom: A contribution to existential psychoanalysis.
Carlo Strenger was a unique person, for many reasons. One such reason was his ability to integrate the existential (humanistic) and psychoanalytic schools of thought into a seamless whole. Nowhere is this seamless integration more apparent than in Strenger’s treatment of inner freedom. In this article, I juxtapose Irvin Yalom’s seminal work on the four existential concerns in psychopathology and psychotherapy (death, responsibility, isolation, and meaning) against Strenger’s work on the psychodynamics of inner freedom. More specifically, I touch upon Strenger’s identification of three psychological processes that e...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Carlo Strenger: Embracing internal contradictions.
Carlo Strenger, PhD, was a person of mysteries, riddles, and contradictions. He lived in Israel, but his heart and mind were really global. Born and raised in Switzerland, he spoke freely all dialects of the European language and culture. Having treated many American patients and having strong professional and personal relationships with people in the USA and Canada, he was intimately familiar with North American culture, science, and psychology. Although not all of those who knew Carlo took a liking to his flamboyant style, his intellectual powers and his contribution to bridging (existential) philosophy, (scientific) psy...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 7, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Autistic disturbances in skin containment: The dermic drive as a psychoanalytic concept in the study of autism.
This article investigates the particular association of disturbances in the skin function with the onset of autism. A new approach to the skin function is put in motion using terms borrowed from the mathematical field of topology developed by Bernard Burgoyne. Through this interpretation, autism is postulated as originating in disturbances in a particular modality of the skin function that cause psychic representations to operate according to a mode of separation characterizing specific topological spaces. This mathematical perspective explains the complexity and diversity of autistic symptoms in terms of linguistic functi...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 3, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Mania in the mirror: A qualitative study of recovery of mania within a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework.
The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of recovery from and dealing with experiences of mania within a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework and to build on existing Lacanian theory to clarify processes of identification involved in recovering from experiences of mania. Based on a qualitative interview study including 18 individuals with experiences of mania, the authors undertook a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts, resulting in six themes that form a trajectory of identity construction. The first part of the results provides a thematic description of the steps that participants took in regar...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - January 31, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Relative effects of Big Five traits and mindset on malignant self-regard.
In this study, we examined the relative effects of Big Five traits and mindset on MSR using a Bayesian approach to multiple linear regression. We found that Neuroticism is the primary predictor of MSR but mindset about personality (i.e., the belief that one can change one’s personality with effort) has an incremental influence over and above Neuroticism and other Big Five traits. These findings contribute to the growing research base on MSR and have implications for future psychodynamically oriented research and clinical intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology)
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - January 31, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of toward a unified psychoanalytic theory: Foundation in a revised and expanded ego psychology.
Reviews the book, Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: Foundation in a Revised and Expanded Ego Psychology by Morris Eagle (2021). This book lays out the basis for Eagle's convictions that “an expanded and revitalized ego psychology constitutes the strongest foundation for the development of a general psychoanalytic theory of mind,” and that such a project is “capable of integrating the perspectives of different psychoanalytic schools” and “needs to integrate findings from nonpsychoanalytic sources.” In addition to slaking our intellectual thirst for a convincing overview of psychoanalytic theory and practic...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - January 6, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
