Psychic Reality in Context : Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, Personal History, and Trauma

ISBN-13: 9781780491264 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 192 str.

Marion Michel Oliner

Opis

This book spans the work that the author has done in the last 15 years concerning the issue of the impact of external reality on psychic reality. During those years many analysts, especially in the English-speaking countries and Germany, where historic events loomed large in the lives of their patients, have turned from the exclusive emphasis on psychic reality to greater attention to the traumatic impact of external reality. Considering that this has led to a body of psychoanalytic writings in which events are used to give a name to the pathology, incest survivor, Holocaust survivor, transmission of trauma, to name a few, it has implicitly created two categories of patients: the patients who, because of their failed solutions for conflict, are regarded as active agents in their own suffering, and those who are victimized by events they endured passively, thus implicitly taking away from the second group the focus on conflicting motivations. This in turn has led to the adoption of some of Freud's concepts that lack a dynamic dimension. First among those is the repetition compulsion which supposedly causes events to be repeated because they happened. The concept has its place, but, if not properly understood, risks to by-pass the analysis of unconscious guilt as a motivating factor in repetition. These factors have not been sufficiently explored in the analytic literature, and over the years the author has written a number of articles that try to distinguish important elements that contribute to the psychoanalytic exploration of trauma. This book is an important summation and further development of that work.

Spis treści

Series Editor’s Preface: Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Series , Introduction , Prologue A: Personal reflections on three analyses and their aftermath , Prologue B: Excuse me for having been born: the fate of a German Jew during the Second World War 1 , The role of historic events in treatment 1 , Actual experience, memory, and the assimilation of trauma , The elusive dimension of external reality in psychoanalytic theory , The limit of omnipotence , Life is not a dream: the importance of actual perception 1 , Conclusion: “The unconscious has eyes and can see” 1 , Psychoanalysis from a different angle: “Jacques Lacan: the language of alienation” *

O autorze

Marion Michel Oliner