"Rules of technique in Psychoanalysis are invented at points of ambiguity, to help therapists feel their way along the edges of the unexplored. A patient who can tolerate the precariousness of such a place can sometimes help to show the way, much as moonlight, striking at the right angle, can guide a lost traveler through dense woods. This is what makes Anna O. and R. N. such powerful models: they were courageous enough to work right at the edge of the darkness.
Patients like this are desperate to have therapists who can bravely accompany them into the depths. Mental illness is exhausting. Having to add the burden of the therapist's fear can make it unendurable. Patients know they can't cure themselves. They need doctors who can bear witness to the terror and reclaim them from its power.
Many really gifted clinicians, like Ferenczi and Frieda, are unable fully to explain why they do certain things; they can only say what they tried. This is why Ferenczi's most important work is his 'Clinical Diary' and Frieda's is a text, 'Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy', a diary of a different kind.
Like people with exceptional skill of any kind, therapists like this do what feels right at the moment, making subtle adjustments as they go along. Attending simultaneously to many levels, they trust their intuitions, letting the patient's unconscious mingle with their own. They allow themselves to be guided "by instinct," whether or not they can explain what this means. Freud was just the opposite — better at describing his method than using it. But his descriptions were so brilliant and seductive that analysts have come to value theory over clinical accomplishment. Frieda may have helped to heal her patients, sometimes even the sickest ones, but she couldn't explain how she did this, which is why Freud has followers and Frieda doesn't."
Gail A. Hornstein, To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World [pag 158]
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Intuição e teoria
Attention seeking
"Curiosity never comes with a guarantee."
"Attention seeking is one of the best things we do, even when we have the worst ways of doing it."
"One of the child's fundamental questions is: what is he allowed to be interested in outside the family? The history of our attention, in other words, is one of the stories of our lives."
"I was educated in the culture that is being defended here --a culture of close reading and slow looking, in which the arts were taken to be formative -- which tended to pride itself, as certain kinds of liberalism do, on the ability and freedom to question and cast doubt upon itself; and to concentrate in a way that made recognition of something other than one's self and its abiding preoccupations possible. As though this, in and of itself, guaranteed something; something that could be called the impossibility of fanaticism, or fascism, or certain kinds of egotism; or the imagining of lives not devoted to profiteering; or the possibility of including as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible, with as little demeaning hierarchy as possible (all in the service of personal development, assumed to be the ultimate value). Which at its best it can do and at its worst is a coercive and sure of itself as the people it claims to oppose."
"What would our lives be like without focus? Or without our attention always being prescribed, or described as a means to a known end?."
"psychoanalysis, at its best, contrary to popular prejudice, is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves."
"Dreams are the counter-culture of culture."
"Psychoanalysis is one way of describing what happens to us despite what we want to happen to us; and a way of describing what we are doing despite what we think we are doing."
"Shame, then, is also a sign of self-deception [...] If you want to know what you want to be, pay attention to what makes you feel ashamed of yourself. It is a revelation, so to speak, of your ego-ideal (who you, in the fullest sense, wish to be: how you would like to look). But it is also, by the same token, a revelation of an assumed self-knowledge (someone who had no idea who they were or wanted to be could not feel shame."
"Behaviour that is in conflict with the super-ego, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft writes, 'evokes guilt, while that which conflicts with the ego-ideal evokes shame.' [...] In the Freudian story, broadly speaking, the super-ego represents the internalised rules of the parents, the ego-ideal the internalised, preferred version of oneself: 'a model to which the subject attempts to conform'. [...] The ego-ideal, that is to say, creates an essential perplexity. Is it safeguarding and sustaining what is best about us -- what we value above all about ourselves, about life -- or is it humiliating us with unattainable ideals? And are we able to talk about the values it promotes, or have we been, as it were, brainwashed or enchanted by our ideals? Are we suffering from our obedience -- our indebtedness -- or for our values? If, for example, we started from the principle that no one owes anyone anything, we could begin to think about what we want to give each other. Are we setting ourselves up to fail, or bringing out the best in ourselves?"
"What Freud is describing is the difference between the kind of attention paid when we know what we want, what we are looking for; and the kind of attention paid when we are finding out what we want, when we don't know beforehand what we want or what we are looking for, only that we are in a state of wanting and seeking."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking
A change of attention is a change of experience
Protect me from what I want / motivated exclusion
"Freud [suggests] that attention is primarily, if not essentially, already thoroughly censored (or selective, as we more blandly say). That looking is a way of stopping us seeing; that talking is a way of stopping us speaking; that listening is a way of stopping ourselves hearing. That what we call attending is a process of motivated exclusion; that we concentrate and focus in order to occlude and temper what we might see.
[...]
"Psychoanalysis tracks what attention wants and doesn't want to omit."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 96]
Zerkalo (The Mirror) 1975 - Second scene
Forbidden pleasures and taking things for granted / Picturing human interactions / on Morality
"When we are most excited and most endangered, we’re likely to feel we’re about to have the realistic experience available to us. In other words, there’s something about something that feels dangerous that’s linked to something that’s forbidden.
So that’s one bit of it.
And I think that’s likely to make us think, not that unforbidden pleasures are so boring, but that they’re just fine. We just don’t think about or talk about them. That’s just what we do.
And then there’s the whole world risk taking and courage and bravery and all that stuff, saying that if you privilege forbidden pleasures, it’s a way of not talking about most of the pleasures we have. Because most of the pleasures most of us have are unforbidden. And again it seems me that (not that everything has to do with childhood), if you look at the origin of this, most of the pleasures of childhood are, actually, unforbidden. And most of our everyday pleasures… How much time can you spend doing unforbidden things? Not that much!
So, even though if you were a professional criminal, there’s still going to be a limit.
Most of your day is going to be spent sustaining yourself, hopefully, on unforbidden pleasures.
Because it’s arranged like this, for whatever reason, our conversations or our language about pleasure is severely diminished. There’s lots of exciting language about exciting dangerous pleasures, but there is very little language about most of the ordinary pleasures.
So, for me, it’s partly to do with imagination. Which is, we’ve been induced to imagine forbidden pleasures much more, because they’re forbidden. What else would we be imagining? Whereas the unforbidden pleasures, like having a cup of coffee… Why would you want to think about that... much? But there could be something very immediately and intensively pleasurable about that, that is kind of set aside or taken for granted.
So that’s really THE point. We're being instructed about what to desire, by the forbidders. And I think that's a shame, because it's so limiting."
Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips and Chris Oakley: Unforbidden Pleasures
Other stuff in the interview:
“There may always be things we care about more, than the things we care about most.”
This seems to suggest that we never really know what we want. And if we think we do know what we want, we’re, in some way, in error.
So let’s problematize:
I think the point in the sentence is to say: ‘We are, largely out of anxiety and need to survive, we have to be conscious of our pleasures, to some extent’. But we’re likely, I think, to be more unconscious of the pleasures and desires that are more troubling or more conflictual for us. So… we might have a quite rigid sense of what or who we like most. And this is a way of, both, expressing a preference and it’s also a way of narrowing our minds, that it creates a kind of internal security along the lines of ?I know what I want’ (even though I can’t have it) or I know what I like.
So what the sentence holds out for is that there’s an unknown repertoire of things and people we might enjoy that we might be unwilling or we might feel unable to engage in.
It’s like a phobic model of the mind. In which you think, ‘I know exactly what I want and if I stick to that I’ll be fine’. And, in fact, what one’s doing is fundamentally narrowing the repertoire. So it’s like not allowing oneself to be as receptive as one might be, not to the whole world, but (because of our education) to be extremely selective in terms of our attention."
"The most obscene form of desire is doing one's duty"
Slavoj Žižek
"The good is that which is and can be argued about".
Rowen Williams
The thing about obedience is that it's a conversation stopper. That it's as though, at a certain point, the conversation stops and people abide by whatever the rules are taken to be.
"The book in a very ordinary and sort of liberal way, is promoting the idea that it's possible to, in conversation with other people, work out which rules you might want to agree to and consent to and be able to give reasons why that is to somebody who asks you, including yourself, and that this could evolve, so that it's ongoing".
[...]
on SUPER EGO:
Freud’s idea of ‘super ego’ is an attempt to secularize a more religious idea of conscience. In other words, if the question is: where do the internal authorities come from? Well, Freud’s saying they don’t come from God. Freud says the super ego does two things: It punishes you and restricts you and it can also sustain your ideals for you. It gives you a picture of how you ought to be, or of your preferred or better self. In a way, Freud wants the super ego to do too much, because it’s very difficult to, actually, talk lucidly about internal authority, because, of course, you can only imagine it on the basis of external authority.
From here
I think conscience, or our super ego, feeds us our worse lines. I think talking about the super ego can feed us our best lines.
"The extent to which self criticism is a refuge... It's a refusal to think about something. It's a refusal to engage, that looks like a profound engagement."
"We can only recognise in ourselves what we are capable of judging [...] The extreme version of this would be, we've judged ourselves before we found out who we are. So that judgement is privileged over experience, in some way. So that, internally, we're very very quick to judge, criticise, assess, evaluate what's going on inside us or between us and other people, at the cost of or instead of experiencing it. What psychoanalysis does is to invite you to suspend your judgement insofar as you're able to. And it does it for a very interesting reason which is: you don't actually know the value of what you said until you say it. But, of course, the internal censorship says, you know exactly the value of what you said before you say it.
Habit is almost always linked to failure and we should try out other habits.
Desire is inconceivable without imagining it's satisfactions. here.
To want more wanting.
[...]
Two versions of a dependent self:
— The happily dependent self thinks, 'How wonderful it is to live in a world where other people have different thoughts and feelings than I do'
— The unhappily dependent self thinks, 'Shit. Why couldn't I have thought of that?'
In the first picture you have an open world full of unknowable thoughts and feelings that other people might have that you don't know about.
In the second version you've got a closed system where 'it's all about me' And it's fundamentally all about my envy and all about my depravation.
So the book is on the side of an openness that is not an over anxious, and therefor, violent narrowing of the mind and other peoples minds.
[...]
The Story of the Traffic Lights
In Holland, on a rather complicated roundabout crossing, the oficial view was that it would be necessary to put traffic lights on this crossing. Because traffic lights actually enable the flow of traffic. And a very interesting traffic engineer decided that it would be much better to take away the traffic lights. Because if we do so, people will have to cooperate with each other to make the traffic flow. And that’s exactly what happened.
So there was much less road rage, much less congestion and the traffic flowed better. One of the things this example illustrates is that, if you take away the oficial rule (the red light), people will be much more attentive to each other. It’s more like coreography and less like prison.
Certain kinds of discipline preclude collaboration between people. In fact, they are an attack on people’s capacity to collaborate.
The ‘one forbidden thing’
There’s the one forbidden thing, and then the ‘hero’ goes and does exactly that thing that was forbidden… And the story of Adam & Eve is an excellent example of the one forbidden thing. And if the hero or the heroin does that one forbidden thing, things actually begin to happen and the world is no longer the way it was before. So it’s a very good thing to do the one forbidden thing… And also, the ‘one’ who forbids, if he has any wisdom at all — and we assume that God is full of wisdom — he knew precisely that his one forbidden thing would be broken
https://youtu.be/z1uHQmCn7JQ?t=2898
[...]
The book is all about morality, because pleasure is about morality. About what we want to believe we should be able to do with each other. Why are people so frightened of each other? It's easy to say why we are frightened of each other, but less easy to say why we might not need to be frightened of each other. And I think one of the ways we intimidate each other is through morality. It doesn't mean to say that we have to get rid of morality but it might mean that we need to get less intimidating forms of morality. That seems to be a good project— here
Missing out / fields of difference
Adam Phillips & Paul Holdengräber discuss 'Missing Out'
Paul Holdengräber: Jokes are problematic on so many levels because they demand a response. They’re not unlike gifts, which demand a response as well. But a joke also excludes… A joke is also there to humiliate.
Adam Phillips: Jokes are really a test of sociability, because if I tell a joke… If I say to you, ‘I’m going to tell you a great joke’, obviously I can’t tell you a great joke. I can tell you a great joke and you will tell me whether it’s a great joke with your response.
If I were to tell a joke now, it could be excruciatingly embarrassing or a roar in success. But it would be like some love test to the audiance: ‘am I, are we all together in this? Or am I an isolate?’ So it’s a real test of sociability and a real test of one’s relation to the group. The other bit which I think is very interesting (which I think Freud says) is that , ‘we never really know what about a joke amuses us’. And in that sense, jokes are like some tacit communications in the sense of, if we get it we laugh. But what we don’t get is what getting it involves. We don’t actually know what we’ve got. All we know is that we’ve been amused. And Freud makes a lot of this because there is a lot in it. It’s a very strange form of… You never know, with a joke, whether it’s creating a collusion or a collaboration. Whether you’ve got a sort of gang of accomplices who all share a sense of humour, whether it’s a cult, so to speak, or whether it’s a group of differently minded people. Whether you’re coercing a sort of group by shared sense of humour. And Freud’s obviously very on to this, because he’s wondering what kind of intimacy jokes create… And do they, in a sense, gloss over differences between people or are they a sort of magical act between people?
People will say, ‘we share a sense of humour’, then…
All those things, Freud is suspicious of. Not in a cynical way, but in a genuinely questioning way. Wondering what we’re doing with this stuff.
[…]
Adam Phillips: Any culture that puts so much value on knowing, must be very frightened of not knowing… And it’s very clear that there are limits to knowing.
About Paul Holdengräber"The way we miss our lives is life" - Randall Jarrell
Recognitions / repetition / resonations
"As fantasias sempre estão ao serviço de algo, de uma posição que desejamos manter. Não somos objectos. Somos sujeitos que organizam as próprias fantasias. A situação em que me encontro é a situação na qual eu me coloco".
Jacques Sedat
Depois dizem que somos histéricas
Segundo Carol Gilligan, Jean Piaget, George Herbert Mead, Freude e Erik H. Erikson, equivalem o desenvolvimento humano ao desenvolvimento masculino.
More performative utterances
"In Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) or Indian fifteen hundred years ago or in the thirteenth-century Japan, when the vagina was portrayed as the most sacred spot in the most sacred temple in a sacred universe, that was how woman's brains experienced their vaginas. When, as in medieval Europe during the witch hunts the culture cast the vagina as the devil's playground and the gateway to hell, a woman in that culture felt herself to be built up around a core of existential shame. If, as in Elizabethan England, a culture portrays the vagina as a hole, a woman in that culture will feel that she is centered around emptiness or worthlessness; when, as in Germany and England and America after Freud, a woman's culture portrays the vagina's response as a test of womanliness, she is likely to feel herself insufficiently womanly. When a woman's culture – as in today's women's magazine-type sexual athleticism in the West – casts the ideal vagina as a producer of multiple orgasms on call, she will feel herself put to a continual, impossible test. When mass culture represents any given vagina as just one in ten million available orifices, as in today's porn industry, a woman will feel her sexual self to be replaceable, not important and not sacred.
And all this is not superficial: these perceptions are constructed at the level of neural synapses. In other words, the female brain changes physically over time in response to these kinds of repeated triggers in the environment. These triggers also affect her confidence and sense of hope."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina
Wish list
A stunning exploration of the relation between desire and psychopathology, The Death of Desire is a unique synthesis of the work of Laing, Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that renders their often difficult concepts brilliantly accessible to and usable by psychotherapists of all persuasions. In bridging a critical gap between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, M. Guy Thompson, one of the leading existential psychoanalysts of our time, firmly re-situates the unconscious – what Freud called "the lost continent of repressed desires" – in phenomenology. In so doing, he provides us with the richest, most compelling phenomenological treatment of the unconscious to date and also makes Freud’s theory of the unconscious newly comprehensible.
In this revised and updated second edition to the original published in 1985, M. Guy Thompson takes us inside his soul-searching seven-year apprenticeship with radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing and his cohorts as it unfolded in counterculture London of the 1970s. This rite de passage culminates with a four-year sojourn inside one of Laing’s post-Kingsley Hall asylums, where Laing’s unorthodox conception of treatment dispenses with conventional boundaries between "doctor" and "patient." In this unprecedented exploration, Thompson reveals the secret to Laing’s astonishing alternative to the conventional psychiatric and psychoanalytic treatment schemes.
Movingly written and deeply personal, Thompson shows why the very concept of "mental illness" is a misnomer and why sanity and madness should be understood instead as inherently puzzling stratagems that we devise in order to protect ourselves from intolerable mental anguish. The Death of Desire offers a provocative and challenging reappraisal of depth psychotherapy from an existential perspective that will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, social scientists, and students of the human condition.
Aqui
Sobre o autor: aqui
Sigmund e Anna – Um pai que não podia tolerar ninguém acima de si.
"As pessoas estarão cientes de que Anna foi analisada pelo pai? A partir de 1918, quando manifestou o desejo de se tornar também analista, deitou-se no divã, todos os dias. Na época, eu não via nisso mais do que um favor que ele lhe fazia. Mais um favor. Mas muito em breve me interroguei. Ela vivia com ele e, além disso, confidenciava-lhe o que não se diz a ninguém. Os pensamentos secretos, os desejos mais vergonhosos. Pensamentos, desejos esses, que lhe diziam respeito a ele, essencialmente. Sigmund publicara, 1919, um artigo intitulado "Uma criança é espancada". Anna, pelo seu lado, no Congresso de Berlim, em 1922, proferiu uma conferência que incidia sobre os fantasmas da fustigação numa rapariga, exactamente sobre o mesmo tema. Naquela altura, ela ainda não tinha doentes e, portanto, não podia falar senão de si mesma. Ora, tratava-se de fantasmas incestuosos entre pai e filha. Tudo era trazido para a praça pública, numa exibição que não enganou ninguém. Talvez uma maneira de afrontar as críticas, de as antecipar. Ou, então, estavam os dois de tal forma cegos que não viam que se podiam achar aí motivo de censura? Aliás, não houve ninguém que ousasse levantar a menor reserva, em todo o caso.
Sigmund era já sagrado e, havia muito, intocável.
Para mim, não é esse, contudo, o ponto essencial. Não percebo como pôde ele aceitar, daquela mulher nova, que se deixasse aprisionar em definitivo por essa psicanálise, sabendo que Anna tinha consigo uma relação de amor exclusivo e excessivo. Por mais que fosse um génio, como era capaz de evitar que aquele laço, no qual estava tão implicado quanto ela, não se consolidasse assim para sempre? Estou certa de que tal passo, em lugar de exercer um papel libertador, apenas fez estreitar mais os nós que os ligavam. O resultado foi visível. Anna jamais largou o pai, tornou-se na sua única colaboradora, na sua voz nos congressos, na sua herdeira espiritual. Foi a sua guarda na doença – mais próxima do seu corpo do que de qualquer outra pessoa.
Em 1925, Sigmund ofereceu-lhe um cão, um pastor-alemão que a devia defender durante os seus passeios. O Wolf.
Para ambos, o animal assemelhava-se a um filho. Davam-lhe de comer à mesa, cúmplices num jogo que me era insuportável. Cúmplices em tudo. O mesmo se passou com a amizade que particular que Anna estreitou com Dorothy, no ano em causa. Sigmund tudo fez para que esta se desenrolasse perto de si, quase debaixo dos seus olhos, na mesma teia das relações amorosas, familiares e analíticas. Aliás, foi Dorothy que lhe ofereceu o seu primeiro cão, o seu primeiro chow-chow. Não existia qualquer fronteira, qualquer limite. O magma. Para que jamais se separassem.
Sem dúvida, as pessoas julgam que a minha filha beneficiou daquela singular situação. Claro que tinha prestígio por causa do nome do pai e do adubamento com que ele a gratificou oficialmente, em vida. Mas bastava olhá-la para se perceber que não se achava à altura de tal destino. A identificação com o pai é uma impostura que não pode passar despercebida a ninguém. Anna é inteligente, sem dúvida, mas pobre e sem génio. Que criou ela? Na análise de crianças, de que retira a glória de ser fundadora, acho bem mais interessante o trabalho de Melanie Klein, sua rival, que não se limita a uma pedagogia vagamente tingida de psicanálise. Anna não fez mais do que aplicar, escolarmente, as teorias do pai. Como é que ninguém se dá conta?
Acho-a sobretudo alienada, esterelizada, sob todos os pontos de vista, pelo que o pai lhe impôs. A força do seu próprio desejo. Ele chamava-lhe a sua Antígona, esperando sublinhar assim o heroísmo que mostrava a seu favor. De facto, ele desvelava a origem incestuosa daquele amor: Antígona, filha de Édipo... Pergunto-me, às vezes, porque o inventor do extraordinário utensílio de libertação que é a psicanálise não se conseguiu aproveitar dele pessoalmente. No que se chama a sua auto-análise, ele parou, forçosamente, num limite que desconhecia. Acho uma pena que não tenha podido continuar a experiência mais tarde, com um dos seus alunos. Com certeza era impossível, de tal modo estes estavam aterrorizados pelo monstro em que ele se tornara, a seus olhos. Um deus vivo. A maneira como se conduziam com ele dá uma ideia daquele terror. Também teria faltado, por parte do Sigmund, uma humildade que estava longe de possuir. Agarrava-se ao seu estatuto de pai da psicanálise. Um pai que não podia tolerar ninguém acima de si.
Nicolle Rosen, in Martha Freud
Freud e Fausto
"Perguntava-me então se o Sigmund, sem o confessar nem a si mesmo, não acabava de introduzir na psicanálise uma nova dimensão que fazia parte do desconhecido, do inconhecível. Do limite no qual o humano se fere. Daquilo que o ultrapassa.
Ele estava em posição de dizer que se mantinha sempre dentro das fronteiras da ciência, mas eu não estava certa de ele não invocar, naquela nova elaboração da teoria, talvez até a contragosto, o tal além de que as religiões testemunham, cada qual à sua maneira. Sem dúvida era essa a razão pela qual os mais racionalistas dos seus alunos se tinham oposto com furor à nova concepção das coisas.
E talvez fosse por isso que o Sigmund se via obrigado, para se defender deles, a repetir os seus ataques à religião. Talvez acabasse de se ter ferido naquilo que sempre se negara a admitir, que a psicanálise, a sua criação, tinha limites.
Penso numa citação que, numa carta ao Stefan Zweig — de que eu soube recentemente —, fora buscar ao Fausto, de Goethe. Escrevera, a propósito da fuga do Joseph Breuer perante a gravidez nervosa de Bertha Pappenheim: Tinha na mão a chave que nos teria aberto as Portas das Mães, mas deixou-a cair. Apesar dos seus grandes dons, não havia nele nada de faustiano. Aquela referência não me era estranha. Goethe fora sempre um dos meus autores preferidos — eu lera e relera o seu Fausto. Mas não conseguia descobrir o local onde se falava naquelas enigmáticas "Portas das Mães" para compreender a que se referia ele. Tratava-se do Segundo Fausto em que Mefistófeles evoca as deusas capazes de fazer aparecer Helena e Páris, bem como o sítio onde elas residem. Tirei o livro da estante e reencontrei estes versos magníficos:
Majestosas, as deusas reinam na solidão; Em torno de si não há lugar, e ainda menos tempo; Falar delas é perturbante; São as Mães.
E a Fausto, que lhe pergunta qual o caminho para as encontrar, ele responde: Não há caminho! É no trilhado, no que nenhum pode calcar; um caminho para o indesejado, para o inacessível. Estás pronto? Nem fechaduras nem ferrolhos a abrir; vaguearás nas solidões. Tens ideia do vazio, da solidão?
Aquele texto sempre me impressionara pela sua beleza imponente e a língua admirável do poeta. Mas o mais emocionante era o que fazia ressoar de mistério, de desconhecido, o que evocava dum alhures inacessível onde se acharia, escondida, a explicação derradeira dos enigmas que o homem defronta. Aquele texto era místico, não restavam quaisquer dúvidas, e fiquei admirada por o meu marido, o notório ateu, o racionalista intratável, se referir a ele. Mas, talvez, disseram-me na época, não fosse senão uma das suas citações literárias em que era useiro e vezeiro.
Hoje não estou assim tão certa disso. Se o Breuer não era faustiano', o Sigmund, esse, não me restam dúvidas, teve sempre a ambição de o ser. Muito novo, via-se como um expugnador, um conquistador, como ele dizia, um homem que enfrentaria todos os perigos para descobrir terras ignotas. E não o foi? Não era o herói intrépido que vencera todas as provas para descobrir os segredos dissimulados no mais profundo do ser humano? Não era, tal como Édipo, aquele que havia resolvido o enigma da Esfinge? Não tivera de lutar com os seus próprios demónios, ultrapassar as suas angústias, bater-se com a adversidade, para aceder a um lugar de que nenhum outro ousara pisar o limiar? Não tinha lançado um desafio à ordem reinante, aos pais moralizadores, ao próprio Deus, e não se sentia, como todos os fundadores, investido duma missão que o colocava acima dos outros homens, que o levava a vaguear, como diz o poeta, nas solidões?
Mas, num certo momento da sua vida, chegara a um ponto onde o não trilhado, o indesejado, o inacessível, se revelaram mais inquietantes do que os arcanos do inconsciente. Não se tratava já, pura e simplesmente, dos mistérios, afinal bem anódinos, da sexualidade, mas daqueles que o homem enfrenta quando se trata da sua morte. E devo dizer que, pela primeira vez, me senti em profundo acordo com a sua pesquisa.
Nicolle Rosen, in Martha Freud
Humanos, demasiado humanos
"O mais doloroso era ter de guardar no íntimo todo o sofrimento. Não me sentia no direito de me queixar — aliás, ninguém teria compreendido que o fizesse. E ele, durante esse tempo, deixara de me dar parte de tudo o que o agitava, de tudo o que o atormentava. Daí em diante, era a outros que confiava as suas emoções, as suas dores, as suas ilusões, as suas decepções. Quanto a mim, ele não poderia suportar a ideia, disso estava certa, de que eu pudesse sofrer com qualquer faceta da minha vida. O meu marido tinha necessidade de me julgar insensível, inalterável, tão sólida como uma rocha. A rocha na qual se apoiava. Era uma esposa perfeita, uma mãe perfeita. Um prodígio de equilíbrio e de bom-senso. E, aos olhos de todos, constituíamos uma família ideal.
Mas, então, eu já não podia desempenhar aquela comédia. Chegara ao limite.
A mãezinha teve, então, uma reacção pasmosa. Desatou a rir. Como podia ela?... De mim, que lhe tinha confiado toda a minha dor, todo o meu desgosto?... Olhava-a, siderada. Ela abraçou-me.
— Não estou a fazer troça de ti, minha filha — murmurou. — Mas devo confessar que acho divertido ver a que ponto o teu marido, o ateu do teu marido, se conduz exactamente como o mais dos ortodoxos. Com certeza sabes, ou talvez te tenhas esquecido, que é isso que, nos talmudistas, se exige duma mulher: fazer tudo para que o marido tenha tempo de sobra para estudar. Ele, não sei o que ele estuda, mas com certeza que, para si, tem o mesmo valor que o Talmude para os nossos barbudos.
Olhou-me meigamente e, com um gesto muito doce, enxugou uma lágrima que me corria pela cara. Não me disse mais nada sobre o assunto."
Nicolle Rosen, in Martha Freud
The texture of the process / Linguagem visual
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| Juan Miró / Alexander Calder |
Sigmund Freud pointed out that the first ego is the body ego, derived from early bodily sensations. [...] D. W. Winnicott, wrote that "the spontaneous gesture is the true self in action. Only the true self can be creative and only the true self can feel real. The true self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body functions including the heart's action and breathing. It is closely linked to the idea of primary process, at the beginning essentially not reactive to external stimuli, but primary. The true self appears as soon as there is any mental organization of the individual at all, and it means little more than the summation of sensory motor aliveness. [...] Works of art give immediately recognizable form to experiences for which we do not have words. They create a discourse on these experiences through multiple simultaneously overlays of time and materiality, transparencies, other formal devices in a metonymic construction that is an underlined principle of what Freud called the dreamwork. It's commonly visible in children's art and it is also a percevering remnant of early thought processes present in the way in which adults organize and interpret their experience. [...] One of the outstandin features of visual thinking is that it fosters the reordering of experience in a way that reveals connections hidden or dismissed by verbal logic. Visual and verbal thinking coexist in interacting works of art as they do in dreams. We pass fluidly back and forth in our thoughts from the metonymic, to the metaphoric, to the logical. [...] Visual thinking has the ability to bypass the conscious control of language in articulating experience and to tap directly into the language of primary process. That uncensored caldron of repressed memory body experience and metonymic logic. It's also a well of conflict, and in bringing this imagery to consciousness in visual form and in manipulating the juxtaposition of the images which are used to represent it, works of art have both the dialectic and the internal strive which Heidegger alludes in his famous essay in the origin of the work of art."
Jonathan Fineberg
sobre Jonathan Fineberg
The unconscious in psychoanalysis and cognitive science
"Ego
functions are intrinsically unconscious. ID functions are intrinsically
conscious. The ID functions when they extend up onto ego, when these
free energies of the ID extend onto the inhibited functions of the ego,
they render the ego functions conscious. So it is exactly the opposite
way around to how Freud put it. I'm sorry but it is. [...] What
is pleasure without consciousness? How can you possibly speak of
pleasure without consciousness? This is the very same Freud that said
that affects always have to be conscious. It's no such thing as
unconscious affect, said Freud. How can the part of the mind be
unconscious where the pleasure principle reigns?"
Mark Solms
Id = Free Energy
Id = Consciousness
> Free Energy = Consciousness
Ego = Bound Energy
Ego = Unconscious
> Bound Energy = Unconsciousness
Platão e o Corpo
Participam:
Jonathan Lear, University of Chicago: "Ironic Eros: Notes on a Fantastic Pregnancy"
Gretchen Reydams-Schils, University of Notre Dame: "What Does the Body Have to Do with Becoming Like God in Middle-Platonism?"
David O'Connor, University of Notre Dame: "Ice Cold Feet"
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| Miss Anna O |
"Considering that Breuer is the beloved, but it seems that he was also a lover pregnant in soul. It's clear from the case history that he was impressed with Anna O, as well he should have been. Quote: 'She was markedly intelligent with an astonishingly quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. She possessed a powerful intellect, she had great poetic and imaginative gifts which were under the control of a sharp and critical common sense, one of her essential character traits was a sympathetic kindness.' Unquote. [...] And if we look back at these pair of lovers with the benefit of hindsight, and if we try to cut through the draws of social pretense, and ask what was ethically significant about their interaction, we see that one person was asking another person for help and the other person was trying to offer help. And everything was going along smoothly in the production of a false theory and a false understanding of their relationship until miss O's unconscious interrupted it. And in effect, her pregnancy (her unconscience) was saying, 'I'm pregnant. I'm giving birth. This is your baby!"
Jonathan Lear
"How does wonder provoke us to put together our bodies and our souls? Something transcendent with something mundane? [...] If Wagner can't stir your anxieties about the relationship between the sensuous and the transcendent, you are stone cold dead. [...] King Marke, the legitimate spouse of Isolde, has been unable, ever, to have sex with her because he respects her too much. He sings this in music of great nobility and control. Which contrasts with the ecstatic eroticism of the music that the true lovers Tristan and Isolde tend to express their love in. Marke loved Isolde too much to become her sexual partner. He had a fantasy (I'm tempted to say) of love that would be undisturbed by the turbulence of erotic desire. I think Plato, too, knew all about this fantasy of philosophy without turbulence. [...] The fantasy of philosophy without erotic turbulence is enacted over and over again by Plato (it seems to me).A fantasy that he indulges but that he also chases. "
David O'Connor
Girls and Boys
"The problem that female adolescence presents for theorists of human development is apparent in Erikson's scheme. Erikson (1950) charts eight stages of psychosocial development, of which adolescence is the fifth. The task at this stage is to forge a coherent sense of self, to verify an identity that can span the discontinuity of puberty and make possible the adult capacity to love and work. The preparation for the successful resolution of the adolescent identity crisis is delineated in Erikson's description of the crisis that characterize the preceding four stages. Although the initial crisis in infancy of "trust versus mistrust" anchors development in the experience of the relationship, the task then clearly becomes one of individuation. Erikson's second stage centers on the crisis of "autonomy versus shame and doubt," which marks the walking child's emerging sense of separateness and agency. From there, development goes on through the crisis of "initiative versus guilt," successful resolution of which represents a further move in the direction of autonomy. Next, following the inevitable disappointment of the magical wishes of the Oedipal period, children realize that to compete with their parents, they must first join them and learn to do what they do so well. Thus in the middle childhood years, development turns on the crisis of "industry versus inferiority," as the demonstration of competence becomes critical to the child's developing self-esteem. This is the time when children strive to learn and master the technology of their culture, in order to recognize themselves and to be recognized by others as capable of becoming adults. Next comes the adolescence, the celebration of the autonomous, initiating, industrious self through the forging of an identity based on an ideology that can support and justify adult commitments. But about whom is Erikson talking?
Once again it turns out to be the male child. For the female, Erikson (1968) says, the sequence is bit different. She holds her identity in abeyance as she prepares to attract the man by whose name she will be known, by whose status she will be defined, the man who will rescue her from emptiness and loneliness by filling "the inner space." While for men, identity precedes intimacy and generativity in the optimal cycle of human separation and attachment, for women these tasks seem instead to be fused. Intimacy goes along with identity, as the female comes to know herself as she is known, through her relationships with others.
Yet despite Erikson's observation of sex differences, his chart of life-cycle stages remains unchanged: identity continues to precede intimacy as male experience continues to define his life-cycle conception. But in this male life cycle there is little preparation for the intimacy of the first adult stage. Only the initial stage of trust versus mistrust suggests the type of mutuality that Erikson means by intimacy and generativity and Freud means genitality. The rest is separteness, with the result that development itself comes to be identified with separation, and attachments appear to be developmental impediments, as is repeatedly the case in the assessment of women.
Erikson's description of male identity as forged in relation to the world and of female identity as awakened in a relationship of intimacy with another person is hardly new. In the fairy tales that Bruno Bettelheim (1976) describes an identical portrayal appears."
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice
