Interiority and inner genital space in men: what else can be lost in castration.

The author reassesses castration anxiety in men in light of advances in psychoanalytic theory. Castration anxiety arises when any crucial part of mature psychic life is threatened. As in women, oedipal-level and adult male psychic functioning contains powers rooted in the body-mind that are distinct from those we designate as phallic. The author struggles for a comparable word to represent devalued aspects of higher-level development that are primary, "feminine," essential for psychic mastery, and threatened by loss, i.e., by castration. Defining this aspect of mental life is difficult, but it includes receptivity, groundedness, connectedness to self and others, and tolerance of ambiguity. Without access to this interior and more ambiguous continent, a man is castrated, less than whole. Clinical examples are provided.

A classic revisited: Loewald on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.

Versions of the following papers were presented at the panel "Psychoanalytic Classics Revisited: Hans Loewald's "On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis' " (Gerald I. Fogel, chair) at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, December 1993. As a tribute to Loewald's lifetime of achievement, and in belated recognition of his preeminent position in the field of psychoanalysis, the exchange appears here almost in its entirety, rather than as a conventional panel report.

Psychological-mindedness as a defense.

Many patients seen today use sophisticated capacities for psychological reflection and premature synthesis to ward off knowledge of more primitive conflict and islands of unintegration. They show a precocious talent for free association, a talent they perversely misuse. Similarly, they enjoy access to a rich fantasy life, even as they subtly impoverish it. Effective therapeutic work requires that they suffer "traumatization"--experiences of dedifferentiation that undermine their considerable capacity to know what they feel and think. Structural and process variables interact with content variables in complex and ambiguous ways. As a consequence, estimates of the authenticity and "fit" of personal and interpersonal experiences and behaviors of both partners in the therapeutic encounter become necessarily involved. Such factors may increase the possibility of misunderstandings, but also of more authentic and firmly grounded understandings. Similar issues are eventually revealed in these patients' early lives, where psychological and other formulaic understandings were prematurely applied to offset overwhelmedness and other unarticulable experiences; the patient's talents for ambiguity, irony, self-soothing, or responsiveness to others were, in effect, exploited at the expense of full psychological growth. Versions of this clinical presentation may be increasingly common in a new generation of analyzable patients. Clinical work with them is facilitated by a synthesis of contemporary developmental, structural, and object relations theory.

A transitional phase in our understanding of the psychoanalytic process: a new look at Ferenczi and Rank.

In The Development of Psychoanalysis, Ferenczi and Rank (1922) demonstrate an important transitional phase in the conceptualization of the psychoanalytic process. It is not the archaic language of libidinal flow that separates their work from modern psychoanalysis, but their insistence on the ideal of the analysts's objective authority, despite the implicitly more current interpersonal and structural understandings embedded in their sound principles of character analysis. Freud's early theory presumed the possibility that an analyst could be an objective observer of forces entirely within the patient. Today's theories must account for newer intrapsychic, interpersonal, and intersubjective realities--the analyst's subjective experience as well as his observing functions. In the decade preceding the monograph, implicit developmental, structural, and object-relational understandings began to emerge. A concurrent dramatic but unacknowledged change in the meaning of the terms "psychic reality" and "intrapsychic" also occurred. The controversies surrounding the monograph predicted many lines of development and dialectics for future theoretical discourse. The subjects of countertransference and empathy, almost entirely absent in the monograph, became major fields of study, and focal points for divergent schools in the new struggle to define the necessary roles of the analyst's interaction and subjective experience.

Winnicott's antitheory and Winnicott's art. His significance for adult analysis.

The significance of Winnicott's work for the theory and practice of adult analysis is examined. Winnicott's most valuable contribution was to discern important new clinical phenomena. This is a crucial aspect of theory development, but not the same as explicating new theory, and partly accounts for the difficulty integrating his ideas with traditional psychoanalytic theory. Winnicott left the theoretical revisions possibly necessitated by his discoveries for others to accomplish, and some of this new work is discussed and synthesized. The nature of Winnicott's discoveries, especially the phenomenological field of transitional or intermediate experience, is elusive to define, and is also related to his clinical stance and his attitudes to theory for the purposes of clinical work. His work demonstrates the limits of theorizing and of our theories, and also an attitude toward theory that facilitates clinical and theoretical progress. He also provides conceptual language to discuss what is often called the art of psychoanalysis. Both the value and limitations of studying Winnicott are considered.

The analyst's postgraduate development--rereading Freud and working theory through.

The authors believe that important aspects of a psychoanalyst's development can only be accomplished after the completion of training, that potential resistances to learning are not uncommon, and that the first five to ten postgraduate years are critical. A crucial acquisition of this developmental educational phase is a "theoretical identity," a personal theoretical synthesis which requires working through incompletely resolved transferences to Freud, to personal mentors and institutes, and to theory itself. The authors use the example of their own working through experiences while participating in a postgraduate Freud study group and show how a concurrent deepening of their theoretical identities contributed to their maturation as analysts and analytic teachers.

The authentic function of psychoanalytic theory: an overview of the contributions of Hans Loewald.

Loewald believes that psychoanalytic concepts can be redefined and reinterpreted, seen anew in the face of new data and ways of seeing, thus becoming transformed and transformative. Although he anticipated much of what is new in psychoanalysis in the last thirty years, he also anticipated a more recent integrative trend and a return to classical theory--a return to Freud. This paper summarizes and discusses Loewald's major writings, and argues that his work demonstrates the authentic meaning of psychoanalytic metapsychology.