{"title":"From struggle for pleasure to pleasure in struggling: psychoanalytic ideas on pleasure.","authors":"Rui Aragão Oliveira","doi":"10.1057/s11231-025-09494-w","DOIUrl":"10.1057/s11231-025-09494-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Pleasure in the human being has always been a major theme, associated with pain, excess and needs, determining many moral dilemmas, including the ethics of medical, social, and educational intervention. The rhythmic movement between the multiple pleasurable experiences, the effort to retain them or avoid different pains present themselves in the mental structure as a key approach in the evolving way of learning and integrating reality and influences the development of the symbolic capacity. This paper shows the evolutionary place and the function that pleasure itself has had in the clinical field, as well as some of the main pleasures of becoming and being a psychoanalyst.</p>","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143712080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Giorgia Tiscini, Dario Alparone, François Ansermet, Thibault Collin
{"title":"Homeostasis and dyshomeostasis in language and violent acting out. A dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.","authors":"Giorgia Tiscini, Dario Alparone, François Ansermet, Thibault Collin","doi":"10.1057/s11231-025-09498-6","DOIUrl":"10.1057/s11231-025-09498-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article we consider the question of homeostasis and memory from the perspectives of neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Our aim is to describe a link between homeostasis/dyshomeostasis, memory/language, and violent acting out. Our study is based on clinical observations concerning two groups of persons: those who were incarcerated for perpetrating non-premeditated murder and those who were victimized by violent trauma in their lives. The clinical findings, combined with the analysis of the relevant literature and research, demonstrate that the dyshomeostatic state, through a positive homeostasis, can drive the person to restore the balance by their usual coping mechanisms and thereby generate negative homeostasis. These acts-all violent, non-premeditated, and forms of desubjectivized acting out-stem from being outside language on account of two pathological extremes of memory, its absence or its excess. Aided by neuroscience and the results of our clinical findings, we support the practice of recalling and strengthening memory traces of trauma in psychotherapy.</p>","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"154-182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143732610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis, by Giuseppe Civitarese and Antonino Ferro, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022, 187 pp.","authors":"Nilofer Kaul","doi":"10.1057/s11231-025-09500-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-025-09500-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143411490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud's Totem and Taboo, by Daniel S. Benveniste, International Psychoanalytic Books, New York, 2022, 473 pp.","authors":"Endre Koritar","doi":"10.1057/s11231-024-09480-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-024-09480-8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142985296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion's Legacy to Psychoanalysis, by James S. Grotstein, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2024 (Original work published in 2007), 382 pp.","authors":"Cuneyt Iscan","doi":"10.1057/s11231-024-09478-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-024-09478-2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142911076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Michael Balint and His World: The Budapest Years, edited by Judit Szekacs-Weisz, Raluca Soreanu, and Ivan Ward, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxfordshire and New York, 2024, 183 pp.","authors":"Brett Kahr","doi":"10.1057/s11231-024-09479-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-024-09479-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142847444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Premonition: Hope and Dread in the Analytic Hour.","authors":"Judy K Eekhoff","doi":"10.1057/s11231-024-09489-z","DOIUrl":"10.1057/s11231-024-09489-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Analytic awareness of the process of meaning-making involves tracking premonitions and intuitions to their sources. As precursors of symbolic processing, premonitions are essential elements in any relationship, including the analytic relationship. They provide unconscious communication that informs and amplifies internal and external body and object relations. These relations facilitate depth and dimensionality between and within persons. They also enable the representational processes to establish psychic structure. When traumatized, a person can lose faith in these processes and defend against relationship. Exploring precursors of the emotional experiences of hope and dread enables the analytic dyad to re-vitalize lost potentials and the representation of experience. A clinical example is given to demonstrate the application of these ideas.</p>","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"611-631"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142717606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Communicating and not communicating with self and other. words, silence and the incommunicado self.","authors":"Lesley Caldwell","doi":"10.1057/s11231-024-09482-6","DOIUrl":"10.1057/s11231-024-09482-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This contribution begins from Winnicott's introduction of the incommunicado self in his paper on communication to suggest that interiority and the psyche come to constitute the infantile world through the earliest environment and through solitude. The capacity to be with others and to be alone originate in an earlier state where communication both makes no sense and yet contains the origin of the life source through the baby's bodily experience of self and world. The world beyond the baby enables this through an other's care. I link this with Bion's position on loneliness and his recognition that people may choose to live in contact with the unsynthesized and incoherent. Encouraging the unsynthesized, the formless, and the inexpressible in our patients offers ways of being an analyst that for me is the legacy of Winnicott and Bion.</p>","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"570-582"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142774136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contact barriers between Freud, Bion and Winnicott.","authors":"Dominique Scarfone","doi":"10.1057/s11231-024-09485-3","DOIUrl":"10.1057/s11231-024-09485-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The author discusses the idea that psychoanalysts could benefit from a common paradigm, not necessarily a single theory, but a general frame through which to view their work. Focusing on perception as a basic modality of psychic life, in combination with the system-environment approach, could provide this common baseline. The text explores how this approach relates to the work of Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, emphasizing the interconnectedness of systems and their environments, the role of perception, and the concept of a contact barrier. The notion of tangential interlocking is proposed as a way of illustrating how the system Freud called perception-consciousness is the contact-barrier common to all the psycho-somatic functions of interest to psychoanalysis.</p>","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"531-547"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142808329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Playing and its relation to psyche-soma. Origins of psychoanalytic apperception.","authors":"Maia Kirchkheli","doi":"10.1057/s11231-024-09488-0","DOIUrl":"10.1057/s11231-024-09488-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay was inspired by the experience of observing a newborn baby and the mother on a weekly basis for an entire year. I explore the receptive function of the maternal body whose mirroring acts created the intermediate area between her and her baby facilitating for what I call imitative playing. The concept of imitation came to mind because of its physicality. The reason for naming it 'playing' lies in its quality: I am trying to capture something about the perceptual and communicative capacity of the body. Born out of affective mutuality of the dyad, it is a corporeal elaboration of their union, the primary physical aliveness, that could be an observable element of personalization, a precursor in the journey to symbolism. The direct observation of infants is not sufficient to arrive at the ideas that I have suggested without psychoanalytic knowledge, the substance that I have imbued with what I perceived. In Winnicottian language this could be described as psychoanalytic apperception. I think it stems from an analyst's visceral self that gives life to psycho-analytic concepts as well as transforms an analysand's non-verbal expressions into communications.</p>","PeriodicalId":52458,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"632-647"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142717604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}