Psychoanalysis and Interdisciplinarity With Non-analytic Psychotherapeutic Approaches Through the Lens of Dialectics.

Psychoanalysis, in its purist mainstream sense, tends to be considered as an isolationist discipline that steers clear of interdisciplinary connections with other psychotherapies. Its drive for purity does not open up to influences that cast as alien and a threat to its core principles. We refer to Hegelian dialectics in an attempt to offer an alternative approach to interdisciplinarity in clinical psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis entertains a complex dialectical relationship with the major theories it opposes. In this dynamic, psychoanalysis begins by negating the non-psychoanalytic theory as a part of self-negation (Hegel calls this phase self-alienation). But in its own process of growth, it negates this negation and reabsorbs the alienated self part. Reabsorbing the negated component, psychoanalysis does not revert to its original identity but becomes sublated into a different, more complex idea. In this epistemological process, psychoanalysis deals with its own practical and theoretical anomalies and lacunas. The paper illustrates this process using three central developments in the history of psychoanalysis: empathy in self psychology (connection with Rogers' humanist psychology), short-term dynamic psychotherapy (connection with short, intensive therapies), and mentalization-based psychotherapy (connection with cognitive-behavioral therapies). In all of these cases, psychoanalysis integrates components it previously opposed and changes these components to their own, specific characteristics. We address the epistemological shifts in the scientific status of psychoanalysis and show their connection to dialectics. Finally, we conclude that dialectical development is what allows psychoanalysis to remain relevant and up to date, to be open to interdisciplinary influences without its identity and tradition coming under threat.

Facts and Sensibilities: What Is a Psychoanalytic Innovation?

Psychoanalytic innovation is easy to recognize but difficult to define. There is a dearth of literature exploring the nature of innovation in our field. My main thesis is that psychoanalytic innovation can be of two types. Psychoanalytic innovation of the first order is about new discoveries concerning facts related to the psyche, development, transference relations, or psychopathology. It usually emerges as a development of insights from canonical psychoanalytic theory; offers an original explanation for a choice of empirical psychic phenomena hitherto unexamined; is perceived as creative and useful when it succeeds to reconceptualize the relations between the patient's past, unconscious dynamics, and the transference relations; often resembles poetic expression; and registers a truth we knew but did not yet put into words. When it is of the second order, psychoanalytic innovation challenges either methodological or philosophical assumptions held by psychoanalysis, without pretending to replace existing theories. It constitutes a "sensibility" that its adherents strive to incorporate into the existing corpus. I distinguish between two types of sensibilities: cultural -philosophical sensibility represented by the relational approach; and methodological sensibility represented by infant research, and neuropsychoanalysis. In the last part of the paper I analyze psychoanalytic progress pointing to its merits and shortcomings.

The Cognition of Severe Moral Failure: A Novel Approach to the Perception of Evil.

I describe the perception of evil as a categorization judgment, based on a prototype, with extensive feedback loops and top-down influences. Based on the attachment approach to moral judgment (Govrin, 2014, 2018), I suggest that the perception of evil consists of four salient features: Extreme asymmetry between victim and perpetrator; a specific perceived attitude of the perpetrator toward the victim's vulnerability; the observer's inability to understand the perpetrator's perspective; and insuperable differences between the observer and perpetrator's judgment following the incident which shake the observer no less than the event itself. I then show that the perception of evil involves a cognitive bias: The observer is almost always mistaken in his attributions of a certain state of mind to the perpetrator. The philosophical and evolutionary significance of this bias is discussed as well as suggestions for future testing of the prototype model of evil.

Psychodynamizing and existentializing cognitive-behavioral interventions: The case of behavioral activation (BA).

From the point of view of Cognitive-Existential Psychodynamics (Shahar, 2015a, 2016; Shahar & Schiller, 2016; Ziv-Beiman & Shahar, 2016), active techniques-primarily cognitive-behavioral therapy ones-might not only reduce distress but also bolster the therapeutic relationships and serve as powerful vehicles for self-discovery and growth. This, however, is contingent upon therapists' ability to view, and present to patients, the psychodynamic and existential nature of active techniques. Our focus herein is on behavioral activation, an intervention that consists of encouraging patients to participate in enjoyable and meaningful activities, in the face of depressive anhedonia. We posit that psychodynamizing and existentializing behavioral activation has the potential to increase awareness of inner multiplicity, strengthen eco-functions, assist in creating a "holding environment," bolster responsibility through agency, and offer a sense of transcendence. These benefits of behavioral activation are illustrated via a clinical case. (PsycINFO Database Record

From ethics of care to psychology of care: reconnecting ethics of care to contemporary moral psychology.

Moral psychology once regarded ethics of care as a promising theory. However, there is evidence to suggest that nowadays moral psychology completely ignores ethics of care's various insights. Moreover, ethics of care's core concepts - compassion, dependence, and the importance of early relations to moral development- are no longer considered to be relevant to the development of new theories in the field. In this paper, I will firstly discuss some of the reasons which, over recent years, have contributed to the marginalization of the role of ethics of care in moral psychology. Next, I will show that ethics of care's most promising idea centered on the care given to an infant and the importance of that care to the development of moral thinking. In this context, I will be describing the implications of John Bowlby's attachment theories, infant research, findings in moral psychology and neuroscience. I will argue that ethics of care needs to be radically re-thought and replaced by a psychology of care, an attachment approach to moral judgment, which would establish the centrality of the caregiver's role in moral development. The philosophical implications of this approach to the understanding of the "rationalists" and "intuitionists" debate about the true nature of moral judgment is also discussed.

The ABC of moral development: an attachment approach to moral judgment.

As with other cognitive faculties, the etiology of moral judgment and its connection to early development is complex. Because research is limited, the causative and contributory factors to the development of moral judgment in preverbal infants are unclear. However, evidence is emerging from studies within both infant research and moral psychology that may contribute to our understanding of the early development of moral judgments. Though its finding are preliminary, this proposed paradigm synthesizes these findings to generate an overarching, model of the process that appears to contribute to the development of moral judgment in the first year of life. I will propose that through early interactions with the caregiver, the child acquires an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how right/wrong judgments are to be construed, used, and understood. By breaking moral situations down into their defining features, the attachment model of moral judgment outlines a framework for a universal moral faculty based on a universal, innate, deep structure that appears uniformly in the structure of almost all moral judgments regardless of their content. The implications of the model for our understanding of innateness, universal morality, and the representations of moral situations are discussed.

The dilemma of contemporary psychoanalysis: toward a "knowing" post-postmodernism.

It is in the best interest of psychoanalysis that new schools of thought (earlier examples of which are the classical, Kleinian, and self psychological perspectives) evolve. Generating a new school of thought, however, is almost impossible in this postmodern era. The postmodern paradigm in psychoanalysis (intersubjectivity, dialectical constructivism, two-person psychology) does not strive to generate a "true" theory of mind that claims to fit reality, nor does it claim to be another school of thought. The creators of the classical, interpersonal, self psychological, ego psychological, Kleinian, Bionian, Fairbairnian, Winnicottian, and other schools cannot be postmodernists, for they all believed that their theories corresponded to reality and were therefore true. A shortage of analysts who "know the truth" today will make it extremely difficult for new schools of thought to arise in psychoanalysis, or for new and compelling theories and descriptions of the human psyche to be constructed. What is required is for pluralistic psychoanalytic institutions to empower analysts who are actively involved in the pursuit of new ideas and theories in psychoanalysis.

Some utilitarian influences in Freud's early writings.

The author argues that (1) the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were an important source for Freud's early metapsychology and (2) the two theories are radically different in many aspects. The facts that link Freud with the British utilitarian school are described in the first part. These include Freud's translation of three of Mill's essays, a course Freud took on utilitarianism as a student and a book written by Mill which Freud cited and held in his library. By stripping Freud's language of its biological connotations the author claims in the second part that utilitarianism ideas are ubiquitous in Freud's early thought especially in his "pleasure principle" and in the hedonistic side of the human psyche. The third part describes how Freudian theory breaks with utilitarianism along three lines: the quality of pleasure, conflict and irrationality. These breaks are demonstrated through concepts such as the quantity-quality dilemma, constancy principle, repression, conflict and hallucination. Although there is a strong basic philosophical affinity (certainly with regard to human motivation) between Freudian thought and utilitarianism the theories should not be compared on the same level.