Creating Alternative Reality: A Case Study

BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH SENECA'S PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN MIND

This paper regards Seneca's practical philosophy as ancestor to psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy and as a progenitor of ongoing contemporary praxis in applied ideas of mind. Facing forward into the Anthropocene, as psychoanalysis encounters Artificial Intelligence, the convergence with contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy of value concepts developed from Antiquity is discussed. Drawn from Seneca's Letters on Ethics, constellations of significant ideas present in ancient practical philosophy resonate with similar configurations developed two millennia later, and central to the practice of contemporary psychotherapy.

Weaving deceptive webs and untangling emotional truths

This paper explores how the allure of magical thinking and groupthink 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 as dream 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 how groupthink and other concretions of thought can, under favorable circumstances, be transformed on the wings of psychic truth. Alternatively, uncontained violent emotions can become calcified, creating a carapace over the chrysalis of the patient's true self. The author concludes that the analyst's desire for a particular treatment outcome can unwittingly lead to the formation of an adhesive web where healthy analytic culture becomes a cult. Paradoxically, it is only when there is equal attention to emotional truth and lies that a trajectory of growth is likely to evolve.

Fetal Fantasy and the Perfect Child: How Certain Challenges of Adolescence may Inform Aspects of the Abortion Debate

This article explores psychic aspects of abortion, from the fixity of beliefs over its legalization, to conscious and unconscious fantasies related to the fetus, children, parenting, fertility, and so on. Generally speaking, the field has shown less direct interest in abortion per se than might be surmised, particularly given the centrality of sexuality and procreation in psychoanalysis. The recent legal changes may initiate more psychoanalytic interest in the topic. The current writing studies a possible strand of fantasy in which conscious and unconscious wishes for an unending, idealized, and blameless child-object are displaced onto a fetus or fetal imago. Speculations and suggestions are drawn from casework with an individual which points to a possible channeling or avoidance of unprocessed grief when the seeming perfection of childhood ends abruptly, almost without transition, with the imposition of adolescent personality development.

Second Thoughts: Pseudo-reality Between Hypnosis and Spectacle

"Second Thoughts: Pseudo-Reality Between Hypnosis and Spectacle" expands the discussion of Endre Koritar's and Robert Prince's presentations in the 2021 International Sándor Ferenczi Network webinar series, Listening with Ferenczi (Koritar, 2022a; Prince, 2022). Beginning with a segue from Prince's reference to Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician," the present paper expands focus from the dynamics of leadership to the grooming of followership along the pathway of image as the American national addiction to pseudo-reality, a fascinating and omnipotently expected, always disappointing entitlement (Boorstin, 1961). Political spectacle, ascendant in American executive, legislative, and judicial performance since 2016, functions as image-supercharged, with its guarantee of gratification powerfully overcoming disappointment.