Freud: Classical to Modern (Cohort 1)
October 28, 2024 @ 8:00 pm - 9:15 pm, Classroom One
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2-Year Certificate Program (2YCP), Cohort 1 (The Emotional Textures)
2024-25, 1st Term — Mondays, 8:00-9:15pm
James Basinski, MD
View Whole Syllabus
October 28, 2024
[48 pages]
This week’s readings sample contemporary psychoanalysts contemplating how best to understand and support the ego and its conflicts in our work. Fredric Busch discusses his views of how psychoanalyst interpretations can optimally assist without leading the patient’s ego into strengthened states of self-understanding and regulation. How do you approach the proverbial question of ‘giving a fish vs teaching to fish’ in your own practice?
Sander Abend’s paper reviews and builds on Charles Brenner’s (1913-2008) work suggesting a primacy of ‘compromise formation’ in psychic life. They describe a theory in which the totality of a person’s mental life and actions is understood as a balance of desires and fears originating from one’s experience and understanding of the self and world from about ages three to five. Though reductionistic, this theory does offer a focusing lens on clinical material.
The very optional reading from Kris offers an extensive clinical illustration of his own psychoanalytic process. He distinguishes from convergent conflicts in life (conflicts about self assertion, wish against prohibition, which are often ‘oedipal’ level) vs divergent conflicts (those pulling a person in different directions with either/or feelings of having to choose one side but lose the others, which may include ‘pre-oedipal’ abandonment conflicts). He asserts convergent conflicts improve with insight and lowering of repression and are more amenable to compromise. Using a clinical example including bisexuality, he illustrates how divergent conflicts, in contrast, lessen with alternating expression of both sides akin to mourning.
Seminar Objectives:
- Discern the difference between assisting vs dictating to the Ego/ ‘self’ as described by Busch while beginning to consider their approach to this issue in their own clinical work
- Recognize how ‘modern conflict theorists’ like Brenner and Abend focus on conflict about unconscious fantasy and related compromise formation in clinical work
Busch, F. (1996). The Ego and Its Significance In Analytic Interventions. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 44:1073-1099
Abend, S.M. (2005). Analyzing Intrapsychic Conflict: Compromise Formation as an Organizing Principle. Psychoanal Q., 74(1):5-25.
Optional Reading
Kris, A.O. (1988) Some Clinical Applications of the Distinction Between Divergent and Convergent Conflicts. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 69:431-441
