Freud's interpretation in "Medusa's Head" and some alternative psychoanalytic implications of Ovid's Medusa

Freud's very brief 1922 paper on the beheading of Medusa by Perseus wisely concludes with a call for a further examination of the sources of the legend. A now widespread interpretation of this legend is based (often without acknowledgement) on an addition to traditions concerning Medusa made in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is argued here that this Ovidian innovation has often been misinterpreted, and that a more careful reading of Metamorphoses supports neither a widely alleged exclusively vengeful portrayal of Medusa, nor Freud's portrayal of Medusa's decapitation as solely a pitiable and terrible symbol of castration. Instead, Ovid's complex treatments of myths involving Medusa, Minerva and Perseus present parallels with Kleinian insights into phantasy attacks on fecundity, and into imagined revivals of dead or damaged inside babies. Thus the "displacement upwards" of the fearful castrated maternal genital envisioned in Freud's "Medusa's Head" must stand beside a quite different "displacement upwards" of the life-giving maternal genital. Indeed, tradition holds that Medusa's beheading gives rise to the birth of vigorous twins. Together with allied details, this aligns Ovid's masterwork with theories that modify or displace the so-called "sexual phallic monism" that some believe taints Freud's theories of gender development.

Was It Just a Dream? Aging and Dreaming the Psychoanalytic Process

By revisiting the last years of a long psychoanalytic treatment of a female patient, a psychoanalyst reflects on her own development as a clinician and on the changes in her experience of psychoanalytic generativity. An increasing ability to understand patient's shifts between creativity and destructiveness brings about a different understanding of the process of mourning, while the shared aging of the analytic dyad highlights the difficulty of ending an analysis that has become a way of life.

Must the Reality of Death Be Unspeakable?

Attention to the manifestations of death anxiety in the clinical context is often absent in the discourse of psychoanalytic training. This exchange addresses some of the causes of such an absence: a fraught relation between privacy and secrecy, primacy of psychic reality and interpretation, and cultural underpinnings of sanitization of death.

A misinterpreted psychoanalyst: Herbert Silberer and his theory of symbol-formation

The primary aim of this article is to give a more detailed exposition of the cultural, personal, and theoretical contexts in which the Viennese psychoanalyst, Herbert Silberer's theories were born. When assessing the broader picture that this approach offers, it can be concluded that Silberer was an innovative thinker who inspired several of his contemporaries. Recognized in many respects by the society and scholars of this time, he represented quite a different viewpoint that was significantly influenced by several forms of Western esoteric thinking. Yet his main aim was to contribute to the field of psychoanalysis and develop a theory in which rationalistic psychoanalytic interpretations were combined with nonreductive approaches to mystical experiences. Silberer's name is frequently mentioned in a specific context in which his tragic suicide is emphasized rather than his innovations. Upon evaluating the materials recording Silberer's private life, it seems very likely that his suicide was not triggered by the criticism of Freud alone. Silberer's family affairs, his relationship with his father, and his financial and professional struggles could have all contributed to his tragic decision. This paper contends that Silberer's oeuvre deserves greater attention and must be evaluated based upon its own merit.

The neglected object: A history of the concept of dreams in Polish psychiatry and psychology in the interwar period, 1918-1939

The development of the concept of dreams in interwar Polish psychiatry and psychology was influenced by Western European concepts as well as by sociocultural factors of the newly independent state. Few Polish psychiatrists addressed the subject of dreams. They were influenced mainly by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of dreams, but also by Alferd Adler's, Carl Gustav Jung's, and Wilhelm Stekel's ideas. Nevertheless, they approached psychoanalysis critically. The most comprehensive concept of dreams in Polish psychiatry was oneiroanalysis by Tadeusz Bilikiewicz. Oneironalysis was a method of dream analysis based on psychoanalysis but it rejected the psychoanalytic method of free associations and challenged psychoanalytic approaches to the interpretation of dream symbols. Polish psychologists were even less interested in dreams than psychiatrists. Problems with dreams, the most elaborate psychological work by Stefan Szuman consisted of an outline of epistemological problems with general theories of dreams and a harsh critique of psychoanalysis. The neglect of the subject of dreams in Polish psychiatric society can be seen as connected with the social and professional reception of psychoanalysis in Poland. Psychoanalysis was met with opposition from conservative scholars and publicists presenting nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes. It was also criticized by the biologically oriented majority of psychiatrists of the Polish Psychiatric Association. In the case of psychology, the most influential Polish psychological school, Lvov-Warsaw School, promoted Brentanian intentionalism, introspection, and psychology of consciousness, therefore, leading to psychologists' reluctance to explore unconscious states like dreams.

Transference: The Matrix of the Frame

I use the clinical example of a traumatized adolescent to talk about how a transference experience creates the frame where the analytic work occurs. Out of the external boundaries of the relationships with an object, the internal frame, the womb of transformation processes, is created. The analyst's capacity to wait is essential for the transformation that creates and shapes the transference experience, which, like playing, becomes the matrix of the frame where it happens as it happens. As the traumatic experiences find their place in the transference and begin to be integrated, the adolescent becomes more present and real in the session.

Interpretation: Voice of the Field

To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the contents of the analyst's interpretations, but the feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful not because of what they say but because each one is evidence that the analyst, who generally becomes someone of great significance to the patient, knows the patient more than before the interpretation was made. As a result of this process of "witnessing" patients not only know and feel-they also "know and feel that they know and feel." They can feel their roles in authoring their own experience. Therapeutic action results: patients "come into possession of themselves." Interpretations are the outcome of shifts in the interpersonal field, which reveal this new freedom to think and feel. This new freedom allows the creation of the analyst's interpretations, which therefore serve as a sign of a new way of being in one another's presence that has now become possible between analyst and patient. Field shifts are jointly created, without conscious intention, and interpretations arise from these shifts. Thus, interpretations are not really created independently by the mind of the analyst, but are instead the voice of the field. A clinical vignette illustrates these ideas.

The Reflexive Function of Psychoanalytic Interpretation

The act of interpretation in psychoanalysis has a distinct character due to the discursive structure of the psychoanalytic setting. The discourse that issues from the interplay of the fundamental rule and evenly suspended attention is a reflection on reflection. The result is that interpretation instead of being a device for inquiry is itself the object of inquiry. Psychoanalysis does not use interpretation. It is about interpretation itself. This perspective sheds a certain light on longstanding questions about the form and effects of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Social Justice Activism as Interpretation in a Loewaldian World

At a time when many questions are arising about the nexus between psychoanalysis and social justice, the writings of Hans Loewald open an avenue for broadened conceptualizations of psychoanalytic activity and the role of interpretation within it. The pursuit of social justice, it is argued, is integral to psychoanalytic ethics, and the relation between activists and society can be formulated in Loewaldian terms. Using Loewald, and considering case examples from social justice informed advocacy, direct action, and protest speech in AIDS activism, social justice activism can be understood as a spontaneously emergent psychoanalytic interpretation delivered by activists to their social surround, effectively accomplishing multiple forms of therapeutic action. The therapeutic action includes a working through in two phases of the negative social transference, a concept proposed here to elaborate a mechanism for the transformation, through the interpretive aspects of activism, of psychic material directed toward marginalized subjects and those expressing marginalized subjective positions. Resistance to social justice activism is examined using the forms of resistance identified by Freud.

Interpretation as Hypothesis

Two distinct spaces can be seen as operating in a session-a private one in the analyst's mind, where formulations take shape, and one shared between patient and analyst, in which interpretations are offered. By maintaining a focus on the here and now in the latter space, taking care to protect it from intrusions from the analyst's theory except as hypotheses (in the form of interpretations derived from those formulations) aimed at eliciting unconscious responses that further the analytic inquiry, a basis for analytic work is established that aligns with ordinary scientific processes: theory is generated in the mind of the researcher, and hypotheses derived from it are tested systematically in a laboratory setting. Self-understanding that develops out of such an arrangement can then be seen as based on evidence, minimizing the role of suggestion. This line of thinking is illustrated with excerpts from the beginning of the analysis of a depressed patient. In developing areas of theory, when reliable evidence is particularly important, this way of working holds promise. In this case evidence was systematically gathered that led to the formulation of a model of internal racism.

Interpreting Interpretation

Interpretation of the latent meaning of manifest content is the core of the traditional approach to psychoanalytic treatment. The main purpose of such interpretation is to enhance the patient's self-knowledge, in particular his or her awareness of unconscious wishes and their embeddedness in inner conflicts. An assumption of classical psychoanalysis is that veridical interpretations-as Freud put it, interpretations that tally with what is real in the patient-will be especially effective therapeutically. These basic assumptions have been called into question, as reflected in such concepts as "narrative truth" and the overriding importance of the patient's "assured conviction" regarding interpretations. Also called into question is the therapeutic value of "deep" interpretations intended to uncover repressed impulses. To an important extent, these have been replaced by interpretations of defensive processes just below the surface of consciousness, and interpretations that make connections among different experiences, both of which are intended to help the patient understand how his or her mind works. There is also an increased emphasis on nonsemantic aspects of interpretation, as well as some degree of skepticism toward the therapeutic value of interpretation itself, along with an increased emphasis on the implicit interpretive aspects of the therapeutic relationship. Finally, representative research is presented on the relation between transference interpretation and therapeutic outcome.

What is Meant by the Term Interpretation, and What is it For?

Analysts seem spellbound by language when it comes to the word interpretation, a word so idealized and grand, so laden with fantasy, that the term itself continues to hold a magical sense that defies us to think about it. Called upon to do far too much explanatory work in psychoanalysis, it is accorded a variety of meanings. It is employed for varied uses, often simultaneously, making it hard to know what analysts mean when referring to "interpretation" and what uses they intend for it. Approaches to interpretation may be heuristically separated into those having to do with the content of the unconscious and those attempting to "use" interpretation in a manner still not divorced from content. What it means to attempt to interpret what is by definition uninterpretable is yet another area to be explored. Accordingly, issues of construction, co-construction, and transformation are examined. Every interpretation is at once a concealment, every inscription a negation, every representation a re-presentation of something unrepresentable. Despite this, the concept of interpretation, even if theoretically unsupportable in large measure, retains its clinical utility.

Interpretation: Time, Timing, Loss, and Recovery in the Analytic Hour

Interpretation remains relevant in contemporary psychoanalysis and serves a crucial linking function between patient and analyst. Interpretation provides an important link with temporalities: the time of the analytic hour and the time of the patient's history as it unfolds in the present. Analysis, it is argued, is bounded by time and loss. Two case vignettes, presented from a Kleinian perspective, exemplify these propositions.

The Psychoanalytic Mystic and the Interpretive Word

Explicit and implicit psychoanalytic assumptions concerning the analytic cure include the old "insight/interpretation" versus "relation/experience" duality. A synthesis of these two stances, grounded in recognition of the long denied yet central mystical facet of psychoanalysis and the crucial role of words in the "talking cure" that psychoanalysis still is, recognizes these two aspects of psychoanalysis-mystical communication through psychic overlap and interpretive words-as deeply interdependent. Analytic interpretations emerge from the depths of a mystical experience of psychic unity (as well as separateness) resulting from, but also creating, the patient-therapist caesura. Words shape the contour of this closeness-separateness matrix on which psychoanalysis depends. Moreover, the moment of insight into the psychic reality of the other is shown to often depend on crossing the threshold of the nonverbal toward consciousness and language. Constant movement between verbalization and the nonverbal is illustrated with clinical vignettes stressing the interplay of the mystical and the symbolized, of interpretation and intuition.

Efficacy of the Chinese version interpretation bias modification training in an unselected sample: A randomized trial

Training individuals to interpret ambiguous information in positive ways might be an effective method of reducing social anxiety. However, little research had been carried out in Chinese samples, and the effect of interpretation training on other processes such as attentional bias also remained unclear. This study examined the effect of interpretation bias modification program (IMP) on interpretation bias, social anxiety and attentional bias, and the possible mediation effects. 51 healthy adults were randomly assigned to either a 5-session IMP training that guided them to endorse benign interpretation in ambiguous scenarios or an interpretation control condition (ICC). Self-reported measures of social anxiety symptoms, attentional bias and interpretation bias were evaluated before and after training. Results showed that compared to control group, IMP group generated more positive interpretations and less negative interpretations after training (F(1,49) = 7.65, p<0.01, ηp2 = 0.14; F(1,49) = 14.60, p<0.01, ηp2 = 0.23respectively). IMP yielded greater interpretation bias reduction (F(1,49) = 12.84, p<0.01, ηp2 = 0.21) and social anxiety reduction (F(1,49) = 21.39, p<0.01, ηp2 = 0.30) than ICC, but change in attentional bias was not significant between IMP and the control group. Change in interpretation bias did not show a significant mediation effect in the relationship between training condition and social anxiety reduction. This study provided preliminary evidence for the efficacy of the Chinese version of IMP training. Possible methodological issues and interpretations underlying the findings were discussed. This study was registered in Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (www.chitr.org.cn), a WHO approved registry. The title of registration trial was "A Study on the efficiency of cognitive bias and attentional bias training on fear and phobia" and the registration number was ChiCTR2100045670.

Observations on Use of the N-Word in Psychoanalytic Conferences

In a frequently repeated group phenomenon, a racial slur is spoken in psychoanalytic conferences, after which a range of defensive responses emerge to counter acknowledgment of the meanings of having done so. After a discussion of the literature relevant to the use of slurs in psychoanalytic professional settings, Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, is used to identify and explore these events as a series of discriminatory gestures that evoke racial trauma. The defensive responses that emerge to protect the use of these gestures indicate ties to the traumatic legacy of slavery and to white supremacy as it appears in contemporary psychoanalytic culture. "Gestures of the open hand" are proposed, and their profound reparative potential is discussed. The intimate link between epistemic justice and psychoanalytic endeavors is delineated.

Analytic Process and Linguistic Style: Exploring Analysts' Treatment Notes in the Light of Linguistic Measures of the Referential Process

This paper presents a comparison between a clinical evaluation and a computerized linguistic analysis of the treatment notes of the first two years of an analysis conducted four sessions a week with the patient lying on a couch. Clinical notes had been written as part of the analyst's standard practice after every session, some years prior to the planning of this study. The notes describe the analytic interchange and the analyst's internal thoughts. The linguistic analysis focuses on two analytically relevant linguistic variables: Referential Activity (RA), a measure of the degree of connection between emotional processing and language, and Reflection, the use of words referring to thoughts. The examination of the linguistic measures point to overlooked parts of sessions which may be clinically significant. In particular, the examination of the clinical material during the nodal points of the first summer break, where significant changes in the linguistic measures were seen, provided clinical understanding of the analytic work that was not explicitly noted at the time of treatment. This method has the potential to be utilized in ongoing treatments and to improve the supervisory process.

Psychoanalytic Paradigm and Its Meaning for Christian Anthropology

This paper explores the contribution of the psychoanalytic paradigm to Christian anthropology. In three thematic units, the author explores how certain classical psychoanalytic phenomena and concepts can contribute to a better understanding of growth and development in Christian maturity. In the first part of the article, the author interprets the instance of the unconscious within the psychic apparatus, with particular emphasis on the analysis of untapped potentials, repressed abilities, and conflicts that can obstruct growth in evangelical values. Since the imbalanced psychic structure can affect the spiritual dimension and impede its authentic growth and development, the contribution of psychoanalytic theory, which enters into deep dynamic and motivational categories, has a significant role in pastoral activities. Therefore, the second part of the paper focuses on the differential picture of the application and understanding of the psychoanalytic model of the unconscious in the pastoral context. In the third part, from the perspective of Christian anthropology, the author elaborates through the analysis and presentation of specific clinical cases how psychological maturation, which inevitably leads to a re-examination of motivational forces, can prepare the ground for a "dark night of the soul", after which a person, with the action of grace, can experience a qualitative leap of faith, and turn a psychological struggle into a spiritual struggle. In the concluding part, the author emphasizes the importance of integrating the natural and the supernatural dimension, and concludes that the psychoanalytic model and Christian anthropology should not be viewed from an exclusive "or-or" perspective, or through a model of identification, but rather that these two autonomous areas should be viewed in a dialogical and cooperative relationship.

Some psychoanalytic reflections: femininity, feminism and fantasy in "APPLE TREE YARD"

This paper examines the interplay between femininity, feminism, and fantasy, based on the analysis of the protagonist of Apple Tree Yard, a British television mini series (2017) adapted by Amanda Coe from the novel of the same name by Louise Doughty (Apple Tree Yard. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013). This examination addresses the following questions: What causes a married, 52-year-old woman, with two grown children to engage in a reckless and perverse affair with a man she does not know? What unconscious fantasies have been evoked by the traumas of her childhood and of her adult life, and how do these unconscious fantasies encroach upon her external reality?

Embodied Attunement and Participation

The analyst's embodied attunement and participation arises within an embodied analytic relationship. Understanding this "deep structure" of the interaction and attention to this level of interaction opens up new modes of engagement and therapeutic action. The importance of embodied attunement is supported by recent research and theories that the developing mind is shared and dialogical through bodily communication, by rhythms of cadence, tone, intensity, and movement. The analyst's embodied awareness of two bodies together and their interpersonal rhythm is the "tool" used to gauge the pulse, vitality of connection, and particular rhythmic qualities of a uniquely shared world. This provides a read on the most elemental way the dyad shares emotional experience (or fails to). The analyst's embodied participation is interpretation in another mode. Clinical examples illustrate how embodied attunement and intentional participation work in the session, and their therapeutic effect. Failures of attunement are also discussed in terms of how the analyst recognizes these failures and his internal process of reattunement.

Return of the Repressed: Revisiting Dissociation and the Psychoanalysis of the Traumatized Mind

Psychoanalytic treatment is often indicated when trauma and its psyche/soma companion, dissociation, severely disrupt symbolic functioning and associative linking. After Freud's initial thinking on these matters, repression replaced rather than supplemented dissociation (which occasions segregating units of experience) as the primary defensive response to severe trauma. Because psychoanalysis had "repressed" the salience of dissociation as actively motivated (though passively experienced), an unnecessary schism has occurred between trauma theories and mainstream North American psychoanalysis, and within psychoanalysis itself. To fully restore dissociation's role in primitive mental states and provide a more integrated approach to technique, it is necessary to comprehend the triadic nature of trauma, which entails economic/drive, structural conflict and deficit, and object-relational factors. For a treatment model that addresses defensive dissociation in the here and now, primary and secondary dissociation must be distinguished, with each differentiated from splitting and repression. Technique requires addressing unconscious, repressed fantasies associated with the "trauma," object-relational patterns that interfere with linking, and psycho-economic issues that have disrupted ego functioning. A clinical example illustrates both the analyst's persistence in suffering the dead, eerie space of dissociated trauma and efforts to find language that helps structure the patient's somatic and enacted expressions (and accompanying dissociative and repressive processes) by which traumatic experiences are registered and conveyed.

Bound by Infinities: Technology, Immediacy and Our Environmental Crisis

This paper explores the relationship between human desire, technology, and imagination, emphasizing (1) the phenomenology of this relationship, and (2) its ontological and ecological ramifications. Drawing on the work of Bion and Winnicott, the paper will develop a psychoanalytic container for attitudes contributing to our current climate-based crisis, paying special attention to the problematic effect technology has had on our sense of time and place. Many of our technologies stunt sensuous engagement, collapse psychic space, diminish our capacity to tolerate frustration, and blind us to our dependence on worlds beyond the human. In short, our technologies trouble our relationship to our bodies and other bodies. The paper argues that omnipotent fantasies organizing our relationship to technology, to each other, and to the nonhuman world, have cocooned us in a kind of virtual reality that devastates a sense of deep obligation to the environment.

Reconsidering Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood

Previous considerations of Freud's 1910 pathography of Leonardo da Vinci have grappled mainly with errors of fact (among them a mistranslation in the study's signature childhood memory, widely known since the 1950s). Here a more consequential flaw is examined: Freud's fatefully pathogenic framing of Leonardo's homosexuality. While few present-day analysts share that perspective in its entirety, Freud's complex and plausible reconstruction drew wide support in the literature for more than a century and has to date never been subjected to rigorous critique. A close reading of the study, exploring Freud's perspective and that of later psychoanalysts and historians, seeks to account for the biography's tenacious grip on the psychoanalytic imagination. In the end, it is argued, the pathography is a failed effort to grapple with an unsettling transformation unfolding around and within Freud: the emergence of the category that eventually would be called the "healthy homosexual."

Cognitive bias modification for threat interpretations: Impact on anxiety symptoms and stress reactivity

BACKGROUND

Cognitive bias modification for interpretations (CBM-I) is a computerized intervention that has received increasing attention in the last decade as a potential experimental intervention for anxiety. Initial CBM-I trials with clinical populations suggest the potential utility of this approach. However, most CBM-I experiments have been conducted with unaffected samples, few (one or two) training sessions, and have not examined transfer effects to anxiety-related constructs such as stress reactivity.

METHOD

This study compared a 12-session CBM-I intervention (n = 12) to an interpretation control condition (ICC; n = 12) in individuals (N = 24) with elevated trait anxiety on interpretation bias, anxiety symptom, and stress reactivity outcomes (electrodermal activity, heart rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia).

RESULTS

Compared to the ICC group, participants assigned to CBM-I experienced significantly greater improvements in interpretation bias and anxiety symptoms by post-intervention 4 weeks later, with impact on anxiety maintained at 1-month follow-up. While CBM-I and ICC groups did not differ in stress reactivity during an acute stressor at pre-intervention, the CBM-I group evidenced improved stress reactivity at post-intervention compared to ICC on two psychophysiological indices, electrodermal activity and heart rate.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this pilot study suggest that CBM-I may hold promise for reducing anxiety symptoms, as well as impact psychophysiological arousal during an acute stressor.

Emerging From Deadness: A Microanalysis of the Analytic Relationship

Video microanalysis, a technique developed by infant researchers, is used to understand the withdrawal that developed between analyst and analysand when the latter resumed use of the couch after a period of sitting up. The case includes three excerpts of microprocess, accompanied by descriptions of content apart from explicit verbal material, content such as tone of voice, speech patterns, facial expression, and body movements, along with diagrams showing the second-by-second vocal rhythm coordination of analyst and analysand. Supervision using the video, as well as the analyst's viewing the video with the analysand in a modified use of video feedback, widened the pair's understanding of the determinants of their mutual participation in withdrawal and a feeling of deadness, thus freeing them from the repetition of an enactment. It is shown how (1) movement to the couch created an affectively heightened state that brought central psychodynamic aspects of the analysand's experience to the fore; (2) video microanalysis allowed access to previously unavailable content; and (3) understanding of unconscious, dynamically determined conflicts and defenses embedded in body movement, facial expression, speech tone, and rhythm patterns illuminated facets of the co-created relatedness between analysand and analyst.

Reflections on Therapeutic Action and the Origins of Psychic Life

Psychoanalysis has seen a shift in emphasis regarding therapeutic action and technique. A predominant focus on the uncovering or reintegrating of repressed, disguised, or split-off contents has moved to include the intersubjective creation, development, and strengthening of psychic processes and capabilities. The analyst's role in this process has been analogized to that of the primary maternal object in the origins of psychic life. This metaphor illuminates the movement from unrepresented to represented psychic states in treatment, as seen in a clinical example from the analysis of a particularly withdrawn young adult.

The return of the repressed. On Robert N. Bellah, Norman O. Brown, and religion in human evolution

As much as Robert Bellah's final work, Religion in Human Evolution, has been studied and dissected, no critic underlined the importance of psychoanalysis for its main argument and its theoretical framework. The paper shows the influence exerted by a controversial interpreter of Freud, Norman O. Brown, on Bellah's ideas, intellectual profile, and writing style in the late-1960s and early 1970s. While in search for a new intellectual voice, Bellah was struck by Brown's work and began to make intensive use of his book, Love's Body, both in his teaching and in his research of the early 1970s, during his so-called "symbolic realism" period. While Bellah abandoned Brown's ideas and style in the mid-1970s, some of the basic intuitions he had during that period still survived as one of the major theoretical intuitions of Religion and Human Evolution.

"I May Allow Myself to do This": Conflict in Freud's Writing of The Interpretation of Dreams

An autobiographical interpretation of latent meanings in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is undertaken in order to explore oedipal themes in Freud's writing and their role in his resistance to writing the book. By looking at how the book performs its message, in presenting a collection of Freud's personal dreams that talk to each other and inspire meaning-making, we can see how readers are drawn into the role of interpreters/analysts. This process makes the oedipal myth palpable long before Freud mentions it. It also illustrates an analytic process that analysts are all required to follow. Finally, the process reveals something in Freud that could be apprehended only after his ideas were conveyed-the unending process of interpretation, in which every conclusion gives rise to new ideas, inspiring new conclusions.

Ghosted and Ancestral Selves in Hamlet: Loewald's "Present Life" and Winnicott's "Potential Space" in Shakespeare's Play

This psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet places Shakespeare's play in the theoretical contexts of Loewald on time and Winnicott on space. For Loewald the subject moves from past to present, in a therapeutic fashion, through the intervention of the analyst, a contemporary object. A redemption of time occurs in the internalized action of thought and dialogue. In Winnicott the redemptive movement is from an internal-subjective to an external-objective way of perceiving. The passage occurs in a transitional space where the presence of another allows the discovery of a world. Hamlet suffers from a ghosted self emptied in submission to the father-ghost. In the temporality of thought and the spatiality of action Hamlet moves toward an ancestral self, filled and stable, through the mediation of Horatio, his friend-counselor-analyst.

Creativity and Perversion: Waiting for the Muse

Although there is an extensive psychoanalytic literature on perversion, and numerous articles about creativity, few authors have explored relations between creativity and perversion. In particular, the role of childhood trauma and its impact on object relations has not been examined in patients with perversions whose creativity is blocked. In association with preoedipal anxieties and fantasies, childhood trauma can not only contribute to the development of perversion, but can also inhibit or distort the creative process by establishing an inner world characterized by the presence of a threatening internal bad object and the elusiveness of an internal good object. Though it is essential to help these patients establish an identification with the phallic father, an internal good maternal object, in the form of a muse, needs to be retrieved to bring inspiration and reduce the anxieties generated by an internal bad object, thereby facilitating the pursuit of authentic creative work. A detailed case report illustrates how this theoretical perspective guided the treatment approach to a male patient with macrophilia who was struggling to realize his creative potential.

Clinical Reasoning, Grünbaum, and Freud's "Cleverest Dreamer" Dream Interpretation

The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum has repeatedly criticized Freud's reasoning, claiming that much of it is overtly fallacious. One such criticism that has gone without reply concerns Freud's controversial response to the counterwish objection to his theory of dreams, that the reason some dreams appear to represent the frustration of a wish rather than the fulfillment of one is that they actually represent the dreamer's wish to prove Freud wrong. Grünbaum contends that in giving such a response Freud commits several glaring fallacies. But Grünbaum's analysis is mistaken and misrepresents Freud's thought. Contrary to Grünbaum's interpretation of Freud's reasoning as deductive, this reasoning is best construed as a form of "inference to the best explanation."

Thoughts on the limits of a mutual technique

Ferenczi's appreciation of the inherently mutual nature of the analytic encounter led him, and many who followed, to explore the value of mutual openness between patient and analyst. Specifically, Ferenczi saw the analyst's openness as an antidote to his earlier defensive denial of his failings and ambivalence toward the patient, which had undermined his patient's trust. My own view is that, while the analyst's openness with the patient can indeed help reestablish trust and restore a productive analytic process in the short term, it also poses long-term dangers. In certain treatments it may encourage "malignant regression", where the patient primarily seeks gratification from the analyst, resulting in an unmanageable "unending spiral of demands or needs" (Balint, 1968, p. 146). I suggest that an analyst's "confessions", in response to the patient's demand for accountability, can sometimes reinforce the patient's fantasy that healing comes from what the analyst gives or from turning the tables on his own sense of helplessness and shame by punishing or dominating the analyst. In such situations, the patient's fantasy may dovetail with the analyst's implicit theory that healing includes absorbing the patient's pain and even accepting his hostility, thus confirming the patient's fantasies, intensifying his malignant regression and dooming the treatment to failure. When malignant regression threatens, the analyst must set firmer boundaries, including limits on her openness, in order to help the patient shift his focus away from expectations of the analyst and toward greater self-reflection. This requires the analyst to resist the roles of rescuer, failure, or victim-roles rooted in the analyst's own unconscious fantasies.

Expanding the interpretive power of psychological science by attending to culture

A lack of interpretive power (i.e., the ability to understand individuals' experiences and behaviors in relation to their cultural contexts) undermines psychology's understanding of diverse psychological phenomena. Building interpretive power requires attending to cultural influences in research. We describe three characteristics of research that lacks interpretive power: normalizing and overgeneralizing from behaviors and processes of people in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) contexts; making non-WEIRD people and processes invisible; and misapplying WEIRD findings in non-WEIRD contexts. We also describe research in which leveraging interpretive power prevented these negative consequences. Finally, using the culture-cycle framework, we outline a vision for creating culture change within psychology by implementing culture-conscious practices to guide the formation of research questions, empirical design, and data analysis and interpretation.

Potential use of text classification tools as signatures of suicidal behavior: A proof-of-concept study using Virginia Woolf's personal writings

BACKGROUND

The present study analyzes the feasibility of text classification to predict individual suicidal behavior. Entries from Virginia Woolf's diaries and letters were used to assess whether a text classification algorithm could identify written patterns associated with suicide.

METHODS

This is a text classification study. We compared 46 text entries from the two months before Virginia Woolf's suicide with 54 texts randomly selected from Virginia Woolf's work during other periods of her life. Letters and diaries were included, while books, novels, short stories, and article fragments were excluded. The data was analyzed using a Naïve-Bayes machine-learning algorithm.

RESULTS

The model showed a balanced accuracy of 80.45%, sensitivity of 69%, and specificity of 91%. The Kappa statistic was 0.6, which means a good agreement, and the p-value of the model was 0.003. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was 0.80. In other words, the model exhibited good performance when used for classifying Virginia Woolf's diaries and letters.

DISCUSSION

The present study showed the feasibility of a machine-learning model coupled with text to identify individual written patterns associated with suicidal behavior. Our text signature was able to identify the period of two months preceding suicide with a high accuracy. This technique may be applied to subjects with psychiatric disorders by means of data captured from social media, e-mail, among others. The algorithm may then predict a specific outcome and enable early intervention by clinicians.

Playing in the Darkness: Use of the Object and Use of the Subject

Play in the context of the patient's sense of absence, loss, and compromised capacities for symbolization can be a link between unsymbolized experience and greater capacities for representation. Winnicott's concepts of play evolved as one of the ways that analysts translate unconscious and unrepresented experience. For many patients who have experienced absence, the analyst and the analytic setting are subjected to the patient's unconscious efforts to destroy and negate meaning and relatedness. For the analyst to be "used" as an object to be destroyed and to survive destruction, he must become a subject in the mind of the patient and in his own mind as analyst within the intersubjective field. The analyst's work with his own resistance is vital to becoming a changing subject and an object available for play in the psychoanalytic process.

Spatial Translation and Regression in Dreams: The Nicholas Young Phenomenon

The Nicholas Young phenomenon involves an immediate shift in dreams to more regressive mental functioning whenever, in the manifest ideational content, the dreamer or protagonist crosses a topographical boundary or threshold (spatial translation). This phenomenon thus furthers the regression typical in dreams. Eight examples of the Young phenomenon are presented. An attempt to explain this highly specialized phenomenon addresses dreams in series, or dream sections in series, and refers to Scherner's Law, which covers their sequential trend toward regression. Referring to the mind's self-observing capacity, Silberer's "symbolism of the threshold" is invoked to explain the spatial translation of the Young phenomenon.

Illusion as a Basic Psychic Principle: Winnicott, Freud, Oedipus, and Trump

Illusion can be viewed as a creative engagement with the world, and as a central psychic motivation and capacity, rather than as a form of self-deception. Winnicott and other Middle Group writers have understood integrative, imaginative illusion as an essential part of healthy living and psychosocial development. As such, it emerges and presents itself in a variety of ways, in transaction with the realities that support or degrade it. In its absence, varied difficulties in living ensue. To elaborate and illustrate this conceptualization, Freud's notion that the oedipus complex is resolved is reconsidered as a creative misreading of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy, one based on the plausible illusion of a civilizing psychosocial development that would serve as a protective bastion against his experience of the political chaos and violence of the first decades of twentieth-century European history. Finally, the place of illusion and disillusionment among those most disillusioned by the recent election of Donald Trump in the United States is considered in relation to the recent right-wing populist turn.

A Psycho-Analytic Approach to the Diagnosis of Schizophrenic Reactions

The purpose of this paper is to describe the manner in which psycho-analytical concepts and theory may contribute to the difficult problem of diagnosis in schizophrenic reactions. At the present time there is an increasing realization that the criteria which are used in the diagnosis of these conditions are unsatisfactory, not only because they have a low prognostic significance but also because they fail to provide the research worker with discrete clinical concepts which he can use in physiological or psychological investigations. As Stengel (1960) has pointed out, the criteria employed in the diagnosis can vary extensively within the same hospital quite apart from the inevitable differences which exist within the one country and from country to country. It is the wide variation in what is called schizophrenia which has vitiated so much important and worthwhile research in clinical psychiatry.

The intersubjective links in perversion

The author studies the intersubjective links which the pervert maintains with analyst or partner, attempting to indicate the differences between the investments in each case. Rather than accepting that empathy towards these patients is impossible to achieve and disturbs the countertransference profoundly, it attempts to show that these difficulties may be overcome if they are reinterpreted in the light of the theory of the intersubjective link. The author examines the theories and the practice of intersubjectivity and gives a definition of his approach to the link between two subjects. He applies these ideas to the case of a sexually masochistic female patient. The countertransference is marked successively by indifference, rejection and smothering. The analysis of the analyst's dream allows the situation to evolve. Failures in primary identification can result in domination over others and utilitarianism. The author examines the place of the challenge to the 'Law' and the father (in the attempt by the patient to put a theory to the test) in order to identify the figure of the witness in the pervert's intersubjective links. The desire of the transference would be marked by the figure of the witness rather than by that of the analyst as accomplice.

Remembrance, trauma and collective memory: The battle for memory in psychoanalysis

In contemporary clinical theory in psychoanalysis, remembering life-historical events and reconstructing the past have lost the central therapeutic function that they had for Freud. The author describes this development and demonstrates the way in which trauma and its remembrance resist it. He discusses the problem of the truth status of memories. Traumatic memories are not subject to transformation by the present when they are retrieved. They constitute a kind of foreign body in the psychic-associative network, but rather than forming an exact replica of the traumatic experience they undergo specific remodellings. The author describes some of the psychic processes in this encapsulated realm. Resolving its predominant dynamics and extricating phantasy from traumatic reality require a remembrance and reconstruction of the traumatic events in the analytic treatment. The author goes on to describe the vital importance of social discourse concerning historical truth for both the individual concerned and society in connection with disasters defined as man-made. A reluctance to know often sets in here that stems from the desire to avoid confronting the crimes, the horror and the victims' suffering. With the Holocaust in particular, the further problem arises of how to avoid its subjugation in historical description to defining categories that eliminate the horror and traumatic nature of the events. Remembering crimes unfolds a special set of dynamics. The author describes both these dynamics and their transgenerational effects on post-war German society. He concludes that, in order to confront the problems posed by a multifaceted traumatic reality, it is also necessary to battle to restore memory to an appropriate place in psychoanalysis.

The preconscious and psychic change in Fairbairn's model of mind

Fairbairn's mature model of mind was developed over a period of time and was modified significantly as it developed. In contrast to some sympathetic commentators who have suggested changes, the author has been impressed by the untapped potential of the theory. There are two areas that he feels need clarification and explanation, which are the importance of the preconscious, so neglected in our literature, and its role in psychic growth. By looking closely at the topographic categories and the way that Fairbairn uses them, the author has developed a modified version of Fairbairn's original model, which has a crucial role for a structured preconscious. The preconscious now becomes both a crucial original aspect of the early self and a significant, descriptively unconscious, fulcrum for both psychic change and mature dependence.

A disturbance of interpreting, of symbolisation and of curiosity in the analyst‐analysand relationship: (The patient without insight)

The author examines the function of the analyst who may distort the unconscious communication with the patient by means of the expression of his countertransference. He studies a disturbance in curiosity and in symbolisation in a patient with a narcissistic pathology. Both problems were related to this failure in interpreting. The curiosity of the patient, which initially seemed to be non-existent, was found to be directed towards investigating the mind of the analyst, this being his sole purpose. The disturbance in symbolisation was manifested as a constant verbal acting out, which was expressed as verbal communication empty of meaning. A change in the interpretative attitude enabled a modification in the objective of the curiosity, which became focused on investigating his own inner world, and the emptiness of the verbal communication was replaced by representations. This change in communication allowed the analyst to relate the facts of the psychoanalytic relationship both with the patient's phantasy and with the events in his history. An idealised identification with destructive aspects of the mother towards the father was discovered. This idealisation had been sustained by the analyst by means of his errors in interpreting. The author explores disturbances in symbol formation and in the use of symbols, and he considers the different states of emptiness.

Making conscious the unconscious in order to modify unconscious processing: Some mechanisms of therapeutic change

This paper examines some of the mechanisms through which interpretation aimed primarily at increasing conscious awareness can nonetheless produce unconscious changes, the latter being deemed the basic aim of psychoanalysis. The concept of valency or motivational weight of the interpretation is proposed to assess which forces of the various motivational systems the interpretation mobilizes (hetero/self-preservation, sensual/sexual, attachment, narcissistic, psychobiological regulation etc.), on which of the above-mentioned systems interpretation relies, and which would oppose therapeutic intervention and why. Certain conditions are also analyzed that could explain the so-called 'change through the analytic relationship', pointing out that, despite the major differences between this form of change and change through interpretation, both of them would share certain mechanisms. This conclusion leads to the need to qualify the idea that interpretation would be exclusively aimed at declarative memory, with no effects upon procedural memory. The paper examines the potential consequences for therapeutic techniques derived from recent findings in neuroscience on so-called labile state memory, and proposes the coupling of experiences as one of the analytical instruments used for therapeutic change. A clinical vignette is included to illustrate some of the theoretical and technical aspects considered.