Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“These are not simply methodological issues: in psychoanalysis transference and countertransference are the points at which clinical practice meets the theorization of psychic dynamics.“Central to this perspective is the idea that processes such as projection and introjection, splitting and fragmentation, occur routinely, if variably, within institutions at the level of the dynamics of group culture, rather than simply due to the aggregate dynamics of individual members.” –“Thus while individuals' internal states will have an impact on the institutional culture, the latter cannot be reduced to the former.”-individuals inform groups and the cultures at which the groups exist“this ignores how present dynamics may be influenced by cultural historical forces and may have tenacious roots.”-exactly! You can get at part of the problem but if the problem is a result of certain enduring systems then the problem will persist. Ignoring that is naïve and a large issue in clinical literature“Thus the group-relations approach takes scant account of wider social, cultural, and historical forces. It lacks an adequate theorization both of agency and of cultural-historical process to complement its focus on the internal, synchronic properties of groups.”“In examining social and cultural processes, we should acknowledge that psychoanalysis bequeaths a set of tools for analyzing the complete spectrum of hu- man states. This is why, despite a recognition of its historicity, psychoanalysis may be generalized and used as part of a hermeneutic process of gaining critical insight into sociocultural phenomena without imputing either judgments of clinical pathology or questions of practical intervention”-bringing it back to methodology and the usefulness of psychoanalysis in this process“The point about this approach is that the Kleinian ac-count of psychic functioning focuses on mechanisms that are basic or infrastructural. In Klein's terms, they are primitive (or primary) defense mechanisms.7 They are necessarily encapsulated by abstract concepts—"splitting," "denial," "fragmentation"—which can in turn be used to decipher another level of reality: the defense mechanisms characteristic of the discourse or cultural system under study. They are, then, open to reinterpretation in relation to sociocultural process.”“Splitting involves a distortion, afragmentation of thought and experience, whereby the object of perception is experienced as split into a good and a bad object which are absolutely separate yet antagonistically bound. The good object is idealized, granted supreme and unquestionable legitimacy, and felt to be a refuge from persecution. The bad object is feared as a terrifying, destructive persecutor or denigrated as worthless and illegitimate. Extreme splitting is linked with two other mechanisms: "denial" and "omnipotence."-denial = without reference to reality; things are all good or all bad; dichotomous“Pain, suffering, and excessive uncertainty or anxiety exacerbate an individual's tendency to fragmentation and splitting.”-contexts which predispose someone for worse outcomes“Envy, as a primitive defense and a destructive internal force, is also emphasized. This is linked to splitting and involves the unconscious wish to spoil or steal the good things and the autonomy possessed by the good object. Envy involves an inability to tolerate separation and difference and the drive to destroy the creativity and goodness of the (m)other.”“Ultimately, Klein traces the destructive elements of the primary defenses to the existence of a death instinct, counterpart of the life instinct or libido and usually in some fusion with it, which is manifested in destructiveness aimed at the self or projected into and attributed to the object”“Klein (1986a) stresses that both positions and the defense mechanisms associated with them actually recur throughout life and, in their less-extreme forms, inhere in normal psychic functioning”-not dependent on a developmental trajectory“ Klein founded the psychoanalytic "play technique" that posits children's play as equivalent to verbal free association in adult psychoanalysis (Klein 1986b).Hence there is a methodological widening beyond language to behavior, nonverbal communication, and symbolic play, which lays stress on the analyst's observations as a complement to linguistic interpretation and exchange.”“Juliet Mitchell notes that while "Freud's theory revolves around the question of a past" (1986:26) and, specifically, of repression, for Klein "the past and the present are one ... a position is a mental space in which one is sometimes lodged"“This pessimism is echoed by the tenor of Lacanian cultural theory, with its stress on the ideo-logical character of cultural forms and their inescapable effects on subjectivity. For Kleinians, by contrast, the vicissitudes of intersubjective and social experience, in conjunction with innate psychic factors, condition a baby's internal world from the outset, and, throughout life, the quality of human relations profoundly affects internal object relations, for better or worse.”“These debates appear to have settled into a postmodern orthodoxy, centered on a critique of the ethnocentric assumption that one could employ Western categories of male and female, culture and nature, analytically as though they were fixed and universal.” -THIS“Two key issues arise from Moore's discussion. One is the need to deconstruct Western assumptions by showing the variability of the categories female, male, nature, culture, and of their alignment: that is, the need to trace the specific contents of different gender classifications. The second is the question of where gender ideologies arise from and their articulation with social relations and practices.”“Minimally, gender classification amounts to systems of beliefs and/or practices, some of which devalue or oppress the category "woman," which is implicitly defined in some way by opposition to the category "man."“Moore is clear that there is no simple fit between gender stereotypes and social or economic relations and thus appears to stress the autonomous force of gender ideologies. This is consistent with an emphasis on the contradictions that may, in some cases, arise between cultural beliefs and practices, ideology and experience. These contradictions, however, do not obviate the importance of gender ideologies and their role in the cultural subordination of women, even if in other experiential domains women have a certain power.”“It is the tendency for binary oppositions and the classificatory systems that encompass them to be experienced antagonistically and evaluatively, the systematic idealization or advocacy of one pole and denigration of the other, that is captured powerfully by the concept of splitting.”-the power of always wanting to define and be able to operationalize everything -> “Thus splitting can provide a crucial link for theorizing the relation between classification and ideology in general, as well as giving insight into their subjective internalization, reproduction, and power”“What is needed is attention to how the political is articulated with persecutory and/or envious dynamics (e.g., Rose 1988) and under what historical conditions such mechanisms come to be pervasive”“A major benefit of the Foucauldian approach his its eschewal of a view of subjectification focused exclusively on internal and psychological processes. For Foucault, subjectification is also external; it occurs as much through discursive templates molding the body, forms of behavior, and practice. Lacanians, on the other hand, have focused on unconscious mechanisms immanent in material aspects of discourse, such as ideological systems of representation in film and other media and their construction of a subject position”-where is human agency and the potential for change?