The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 
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This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.On Bion ’s Concept of Truth in an Extra-Moral Sense
AbstractThe paper explores the concept of truth in Bion ’s theory and in the post-Bionian context of the analytic field. Truth is addressed on three levels: epistemological, metapsychological, and clinical. Bion criticizes positivism in psychoanalysis, and the same vertex when it appears in psychoanalysis itself, stating that the search for truth at al l costs is similar to the arrogance and stupidity of the psychotic part of the personality. He revolutionizes the analytic concept of truth by orienting it to the function of the emotional linking between analyst and patient rather than to content. Post-Bionian analytic th...
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 27, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Book review
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 27, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Slouching towards Bethlehem … and further Psychoanalytical Explorations, by Nina Coltart, Phoenix Publishing House, Bicester, Oxfordshire, 2021 (Original work published in 1992), 224 pp. How to Survive as a Psychotherapist, by Nina Coltart, Phoenix Publishing House, Bicester, Oxfordshire, 2021, (Original work published in 19 93), 162 pp. The Baby and the Bathwater, by Nina Coltart, Phoenix Publishing House, Bicester, Oxfordshire, 2021, (Original work published in 1996), 192 pp.
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 23, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
‘A Home to the Lie’: The Contemporary (Per)version of Truth
AbstractThis paper explores the contemporary trend towards relativization and perversion of truth increasingly prominent in American culture, which, in Bion ’s terminology (1970), has become an ever more hospitable “home to the lie.” The anti-COVID vaccine movement emerging in the United States in 2021, and its related network of conspiracy theories, is presented as an example. To make sense of these phenomena the author presents clinical vignettes illustrating (1) Bion’s (1970) notions of catastrophic change, the lie/thinker relation, and the messianic idea; (2) Freud ’s (1921) thinking on group leaders; and (3)...
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 22, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
On grotstein ’s ‘truth’ in bion’s theory of ‘o’
AbstractIn this thought-provoking exploration, the author examines Grotstein ’s seminal work, “The Seventh Servant: The Implications of a Truth Drive in Bion’s Theory of ‘O’” (2004), and its relevance to the psychoanalytic concepts oftruth andlies. Drawing on Bion ’s K-link and Klein’s epistemophilia, the paper argues that Grotstein’s concept of a “truth drive” is part of a transformative paradigmatic shift in psychoanalysis, emphasizing a focus on ontology and the process ofbeing with the analysand. The commitment to truth in psychoanalytic practice demands ongoing examination, open-mindedness, and a...
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 20, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times, by Michael J. Diamond, Phoenix Publishing House Ltd, Bicester, Oxfordshire, 2022, 139 pp.
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 14, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The Destroyed World and the Guilty Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of Culture and Politics, by David P. Levine and Matthew H. Bowker, Phoenix Publishing House, Bicester, Oxfordshire, 2019, 189 pp.
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 14, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Weaving deceptive webs and untangling emotional truths
AbstractThis paper explores how the allure of magical thinking andgroupthink contrasts with intuition of emotional truth. Since truth can terrify, the author suggests that a longer learning curve is needed to apprehend what Bion (1970a) called the “evolving O” of the analytic session. Traumatized patients are described asdream weavers who spin webs of partial truths and lies around their true selves. For the analyst, untangling these webs involves what Bion (1970b) calls an “act of faith.” Clinical material is presented to show howgroupthink and other concretions of thought can, under favorable circumstances, be tr...
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 13, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Coming to Life in the Consulting Room: Toward a New Analytic Sensibility, by Thomas H. Ogden, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022, 175 pp.
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 6, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Bion ’s Legacy in São Paulo: Theoretical Applications from the São Paulo Psychoanalytic Society (SBPSP), edited by Evelise de Souza Marra and Cecil José Rezze, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, (2022), 193 pp.
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 6, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Book review
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - November 6, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Embracing Therapeutic Complexity: A Guidebook to Integrating the Essentials of Psychodynamic Principles Across Therapeutic Disciplines, by Patricia Gianotti, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022, 329 pp.
(Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis)
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - August 9, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The role of groups during individual development and within the clinical dyad
AbstractThe author proposes that group identifications have been under-appreciated by individual psychodynamic psychotherapists in their conceptualization of normative individual development. He identifies the routes by which the child begins to internalize small and large groups during the early years of identity formation. Through individual therapy vignettes, the author suggests modifications to customary technique so that developmental shortcomings in group attachment security can be shored up. He offers some guidelines for the individual therapist so that group experiences are accounted for as the clinical narrative i...
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - August 8, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Raw Object Identification
AbstractThis paper attempts to deal with a specific kind of pathological identification —“raw object identification”—which tends to appear as concrete physiological phenomena, trying to escape meaning and integration. These somatic manifestations stem from early traumatic experiences with a meaningful object and entrap—as revealed through analysis—specific significant quali ties of that object. A massive splitting ensues between body and mind, self and object, relation and identification. Certain properties of the object are then experienced as a foreign body in the subject and are defensively identified with. ...
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - August 1, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Between The Real And The Imaginary: Truth And Lies In The Psychoanalytic Encounter
AbstractWhen reality is too much to bear, bodymind unity can fracture, creating self-deceptions, distortions, and disguises of emotional experience that amount to unconscious lies. Without clarity regarding what is real and what is imaginary, emotional truth is difficult to discern. Lies disrupt the development of a subjective sense of self, making it difficult to trust sensations, emotions, or thoughts. In the absence of this trust, a patient may form a delusion that they do not exist. Working psychoanalytically with patients traumatized in infancy and early childhood requires the analyst to experience a somatic link betw...
Source: The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - July 21, 2023 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
