Tag: Psychoanalysis

On This Day .. 12 November

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People (Births)

  • 1894 – Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, Norwegian zoologist and comparative psychologist (d. 1976).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Daniel Stern, American psychologist and theorist (b. 1934).

Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe

Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe (12 November 1894 to 08 June 1976) was a Norwegian zoologist and comparative psychologist.

Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe described the pecking order of hens in his PhD dissertation of 1921. The work in his dissertation was partly based on his observations of his own chickens that he had recorded since the age of 10.

The dominance hierarchy of chickens and other birds that he studied led him to the observation that these birds had established the order in which individuals would be allowed to get to food while others would have to wait for their turn.

Daniel Stern

Daniel N. Stern (16 August 1934 to 12 November 2012) was a prominent American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist, specialising in infant development, on which he had written a number of books – most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985).

Stern’s 1985 and 1995 research and conceptualisation created a bridge between psychoanalysis and research-based developmental models.

Stern was born in New York City. He went to Harvard University as an undergraduate, from 1952 to 1956. He then attended Albert Einstein College of Medicine, completing his M.D. in 1960. In 1961, Stern was member of the Freedom Riders, a group of black and white activists challenging racial segregation in the south by travelling together on bus rides.

He continued his educational career doing research at the NIH in psychopharmacology from 1962-1964. In 1964, Stern decided to specialise in psychiatric care, completing his residency at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1972 he started a psychoanalytic education at Columbia University Centre for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

For more than 30 years, he worked in research and practice as well in developmental psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

In his research, he dedicated his time to the observation of infants and to clinical reconstruction of early experiences. His efforts continue to contribute to currently existing developmental theories.

He was well known as an expert researcher of early affective mother-child bonding. Research and discoveries on the field of affective bonding was one of his leading activities.

Before his death, Stern was an honorary professor in Psychology at the University of Geneva, adjunct professor in the department of Psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical School and a lecturer at the Columbia University Centre for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

He received Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Copenhagen (2002), Dk; Palermo, It; Mons Hainaut, Be; Alborg, Dk; Padua, It, and Stockholm University.

He died, aged 78, in Geneva, Switzerland, following a heart failure. He actively contributed to the ongoing work of the Boston Process of Change Study Group only a few months prior.

Book: Cold War Freud

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Book Title:

Cold War Freud – Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes.

Author(s): Dagmar Herzog.

Year: 2016.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Cambridge University Press.

Type(s): Hardcover, Paperback, and Kindle.

Synopsis:

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II.

Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud’s legacy.

From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations.

Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis’ enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches.

On This Day … 03 November

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People (Deaths)

  • 1957 – Wilhelm Reich, Ukrainian-Austrian psychotherapist and author (b. 1897).

Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 to 03 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual Revolution (1936), Reich became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.

Reich’s work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase “the sexual revolution” and according to one historian acted as its midwife. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.

After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud’s outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. Described by Elizabeth Danto as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called “orgastic potency”. He visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria. He said he wanted to “attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment”.

From the 1930s he became an increasingly controversial figure, and from 1932 until his death in 1957 all his work was self-published. His message of sexual liberation disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his political associates, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to dissolve their “muscular armour”, violated the key taboos of psychoanalysis. He moved to New York in 1939, in part to escape the Nazis, and shortly after arriving coined the term “orgone” – from “orgasm” and “organism” – for a biological energy he said he had discovered, which he said others called God. In 1940, he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.

Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper’s in 1947, the US Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a “fraud of the first magnitude”. Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.

Book: Psychoanalysis And The Cinema – The Imaginary Signifier

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Book Title:

Psychoanalysis And The Cinema – The Imaginary Signifier.

Author(s): Christian Metz.

Year: 1984.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan.

Type(s): Hardcover and Paperback.

Synopsis:

In the first half of the book Metz explores a number of aspects of the psychological anchoring of cinema as a social institution…In the second half, he shifts his approach…to look at the operations of meaning in the film text, at the figures of image and sound concatenation. Thus he is led to consideration of metaphor and metonymy in film, this involving a detailed account of these two figures as they appear in psychoanalysis and linguistics.

On This Day … 02 October

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People (Deaths)

  • 2011 – Peter L. Benson, American psychologist and academic (b. 1946).
  • 2012 – J. Philippe Rushton, English-Canadian psychologist, theorist, academic (b. 1943).
  • 2013 – Gottfried Fischer, German psychologist, therapist, and academic (b. 1944).

Peter L. Benson

Peter Lorimer Benson (1946-2011) was a psychologist and CEO/President of Search Institute.

He pioneered the developmental assets framework, which became the predominant approach to research on positive facets of youth development.

J. Philippe Rushton

John Philippe Rushton (03 December 1943 to 02 October 2012) was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other apparent racial variations. His book Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995) is about the application of r/K selection theory to humans.

Rushton’s work was heavily criticised by the scientific community for the questionable quality of its research, with many alleging that it was conducted under a racist agenda. From 2002 until his death, he served as the head of the Pioneer Fund, an organisation founded in 1937 to promote Eugenics, which worked actively with the Nazi party to promote theories of racial superiority and inferiority, and has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature and designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Rushton was a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a onetime Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Gottfried Fischer

Gottfried Fischer (13 September 1944 to 02 October 2013) was a German psychologist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst.

He is considered to be the founder of psychotraumatology in Germany and has been director of the Institute for Clinical Psychology and Psychological Diagnostics at the University of Cologne from 1995 to 2009.

Book: Psychodynamic Therapy for Personality Pathology

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Book Title:

Psychodynamic Therapy for Personality Pathology: Treating Self and Interpersonal Functioning

Author(s): Eve Valigor PhD, Ott, F, Kernberg M.D., John F. Clarkin PhD, and Frank E Yeomans M.D. PhD.

Year: 2018.

Edition: First (1ed).

Publisher: American Psychiatric Association Publishing.

Type(s): Paperback.

Synopsis:

Deftly integrating contemporary psychiatry and contemporary psychoanalysis, Psychodynamic Therapy for Personality Pathology: Treating Self and Interpersonal Functioning introduces Dynamic Psychotherapy for Personality Disorders (DPD), a specialised, theory-driven approach to the treatment of personality disorders.

Beyond merely being compatible with the DSM-5 Section III Alternative Model for Personality Disorders, this guide elaborates on it, offering clinicians at all levels of experience an accessible framework to guide evaluation and treatment of personality disorders in a broad variety of clinical and research settings.In this volume, readers will find:

  • A coherent model of personality functioning and disorders based in psychodynamic object relations theory.
  • A clinically near approach to the classification of personality disorders, coupled with a comprehensive approach to assessment.
  • An integrated treatment model based on general clinical principles that apply across the spectrum of personality disorders.
  • An understanding of specific modifications of technique that tailor intervention to the individual patient’s personality pathology.
  • Descriptions of specific psychodynamic techniques that can be exported to shorter-term treatments and acute clinical settings.

Patient assessment and basic psychodynamic techniques are described in up-to-date, jargon-free terms and richly supported by numerous clinical vignettes, as well as online videos demonstrating interventions. At the end of each chapter, readers will find a summary of key clinical concepts, making this book both a quick reference tool as well as a springboard for continued learning. Clinicians looking for a novel guide to understanding and treating personality pathology that combines contemporary theory with clinical practice need look no further than Psychodynamic Therapy for Personality Pathology: Treating Self and Interpersonal Functioning.

Book: Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis

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Book Title:

Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis: Freudian Concepts in Contemporary Practice.

Author(s): Ahmed Fayek.

Year: 2017.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Routledge.

Type(s): Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis gives a clear overview of the key tenets of classical Freudian psychoanalysis, and offers a guide to how these might be best understood and applied to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Covering such essential concepts as the Oedipal complex, narcissism and metapsychology, Fayek explores what Freud’s thinking has to offer psychoanalysts of all schools of thought today, and what key facets of his work can usefully be built on to develop future theory.

The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and training, as well as teaching faculties and postgraduate students studying Freudian psychoanalysis.