Lacanian perspectives on psychoanalytic supervision.

This article presents a Lacanian perspective on supervision within the context of the history of psychoanalytic supervision. Lacan emphasizes the importance of the personal analysis and how supervision, at times, can function as a resistance against the same. Eventually, Lacan concluded that an analyst is authorized by what he called the analyst's synthome and a few other analysts. What allows an analyst to effectively operate with the transference of the analysand is that, because of his/her own analysis, he/she knows that he/she does not know and, therefore, is generally not deceived by the transference to the "subject who is supposed to know". An analysis ends by virtue of the desire of the analyst not to remain in the position of the beloved subject who is supposed to know, and by virtue of the analysand's own "unknown-knowing." The analyst is an ex-analysand that has transformed the jouissance of his/her symptom into an Other jouissance of the synthome. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The death of desire. A study in psychopathology.

Reviews the book, The death of desire. A study in psychopathology by M. Guy Thompson (1985). Thompson has written an amiable book, filled with the spirit of ecumenism. A practising clinical psychologist, his thesis is that desire is the "foundation of the human subject," that it is "located in the heart of the unconscious," that, if once "situated in phenomenology," this unconscious can reveal "the nature of intersubjective relations." Accordingly, pathological phenomena would be attributable to the deadening of this desire—hence, the book's title. Thompson clearly intends a dialogue between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The result is an attempt at synthesis that takes R. D. Laing on the one hand and Jacques Lacan on the other—two rather strange bedfellows—as his chief sources of inspiration. Taken as a whole, this book's reach outstretches its grasp. It really does not offer a cogent, coherent synthesis of phenomenology and psychoanalysis but seems rather to offer a congenial amalgam of the many insights experienced by a highly intelligent, versatile and sensitive man during the long, fecund years of his training. As such it is endlessly stimulating, if never quite convincing, and offers singular promise for the future work of its author. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out.

Reviews the book, Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out by Slavoi Zizek (1992). The following reviews one of Slavoi Zizek's books, Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. Zizek's book and this review aim to address the relevance of Lacan for many of the ethical questions that arise when psychology begins to envision its own concepts and practices as culturally embedded. The matrix of discourse, power, and subject is most often articulated in psychology through the ideas of Foucault, but Lacan illuminates the same field of effects with closer attention given to the specifics of language (discourse), the body, the individual, and intersubjectivity. Lacan most obviously addresses the role of speech in a clinical setting. But the implications reach further and Slavoi Zizek takes the Lacanian intervention into the social order. At present Zizek represents the most explicit and uncompromising Lacanian reader of contemporary culture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Maternal Desire: On Love, Children, and the Inner Life: Comment.

Comments on the review by Arietta Slade (see record 2005-12958-012) of the author's Maternal Desire: On Love, Children, and the Inner Life (2004). For many contemporary women, becoming a mother represents a crisis of desire. A woman finds herself suddenly, unbelievably compelled by her baby and motherhood. As Slade observed in her review, feeling the full weight of their maternal desire is conflictual for many achievement-oriented women. This is understandable, because the time devoted to caring for children is directly at odds with time devoted to other goals. However, as Slade also astutely notes, some women manage this conflict by devaluing, dismissing, or ignoring maternal desire, treating it as less valuable, less real, or less feminist than their other desires. This comment examines this tendency. The dismissal takes three main forms. The first is the view that, in talking about mothers' desire to care for their children, mothers risk naturalizing women's caregiving roles in a way that is detrimental to women's progress. Maternal desire is also neglected by the insistence that the problems and conflicts contemporary mothers face are caused by purely external forces. Finally, maternal desire is dismissed by construing it as a by-product of privilege, something only the lucky few have the luxury to indulge. Maternal Desire is an exploration of motherhood but also a plea for honoring our inner life and acknowledging the full complexity of our feelings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Lacan.

Reviews the book, Lacan by Malcolm Bowie (see record 1991-97907-000). What is on offer here is one outcome of a conversation in which Lacan's texts--whatever their difficulties, obscurities, and seductive attractions--have been obliged to make their sense in and to a larger field of psychoanalytic concerns. Bowie divides Lacan's career into five main phases, to each of which he devotes a chapter. Bowie's is a strong and frequently persuasive partitioning of Lacan's development. The interplay between Bowie's style and his interrogation of Lacan's style is central and productive throughout the book. Those who have been wrestling with Lacan for some time will find there is room for reservations about Bowie's Lacan, and some of those reservations will be of possibly considerable consequence in the end. There will also be reservations provoked into explicitness by--and so also indebted to--Bowie's own argumentative clarity and force. And for those who are not already at grips with Lacan, for those who want an introduction to Lacan that is at once straightforward and fully serious, at once skeptical and generous, it is hard to imagine any other work that would serve as well. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The unmasking of consciousness by means of criticism of illusion and ideology

The author contends that the constitution of Psychology as a Science requires the elucidation of the conceptual instruments to be used in the approach of its specific theoretical object. In order to meet that requirement, three main methodological subjects are considered: I. The image, conceived as embodiment of the illusory and the deceptive, vs. the image as "the imaginary". Images are defined as representations determined a priori as the sole possibility of understanding reality. The distinction is made between two modes of this gnoseological process: the one, apparent, the other real. The first one, image as a representation having no correspondence whatsoever with reality, conveys only deceptive features: illusion at the individual level, and ideology at the broader scale of the socioeconomical class. Illusion and ideology are subject to parallel in that both mask reality, uncovering a part of it in order to hide the whole; and they imply each other in that to each illusion of individual consciousness corresponds a single socio-economical ideology. The unmasking must be performed both at the individual (illusion) and the collective (ideology) levels, through a conceptual work under a clear conception of knowledge and its methods, leading to an actually objectivating neutral act-Husserl. II. The imaginary as a project of irreality. Accepting that the image has a double function: a) an essential (gnoseological) one, and b) an unesential, supplementary one, as the support of illusion and ideology, there is yet a double manner for the concealment: a) subjective or belonging to the psychological level, and b) objective-intersubjective level, or actual social level. The image provides the object for the "belief", being thus the basis for the creation of a super-reality, an invention over another invention, with the goal of fulfilling desire. This goal implies failure in itself, as desire is always beyond the reality that seeks its fulfillment. The process of illusion can be explained by the triple link: desire-imagination-illusion, leading to belief. In desire there is a double work: a) a positive one, or trend towards the appropriation of the object; and b) a negative one, or the all-present frustration leading, precisely, to illusion. III. Desire and discourse: dialectics of possibility. Reality provides a limit-border to desire: it sets the frontiers of impossibility. Only the discourse provides a program, a planification of the being-desire. But desire exceeds the limits of possibility, and sets the underlying framework on which the impossibility of desire is expressed. Two different answers have been attempted from a logical-gnoseological-methodological stand point, consisting of reductionisms or pseudo-answers. Firstly, intellectualism, professing to reduce everything to rational cathegories and their logico-formal methods; and secondly, naturalism, professing to reduce everything to a factic-empirical scheme and to its experimental method...     

Review of Technology as symptom and dream.

Reviews the book, Technology as symptom and dream by Robert D. Romanyshyn (see record 1990-97140-000). This book is an empassioned call to reexamine the history of technology and to remember the desire that propelled it. Faced with the atom bomb and space flight, we can no longer ignore, Romanyshyn argues, the possibility of the final destruction of our planet. True to his vocation as a psychologist, Romanyshyn finds that the path toward preventing the suicide of mankind lies in re-examining, reflecting and retelling the story of our past and in understanding how it shapes our present and our future. He offers us a shift in perspective: maybe we have misunderstood what technology is all about. "Perhaps technology has been part of the earth's long history of coming to know itself, and perhaps in that effort we have been its servant. (...) On a dry African plain, in the silence of the early morning, one can still imagine technology as vocation, as the earth's call to become its agent and instrument of awakening. But in the shadows imagination falters and technology seems less the earth's way of coming to know itself and more the earth's way of coming to cleanse itself of us" (p. 3). Romanyshyn's book is biased, but biased in a positive way: he refuses the detached view of the uninvolved observer. The book speaks with passionate insight for the abandoned body and the repressed soul. Informed by the phenomenological critique of the scientific attitude, Romanyshyn attempts to recover the cultural history of consciousness and the lived body. He weaves a fascinating story that resonates with profound echoes from the past. He challenges the reader's presuppositions and our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing space, body and self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The works of Jacques Lacan: An introduction.

Reviews the book, The works of Jacques Lacan: An introduction by Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy (1986). Thanks to its clarity, this is a book that allows us to raise the whole issue of Lacan's version of psychoanalysis. "The aim of this book," its first sentence says, "is to give a clear introduction to the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan". In this, Benvenuto and Kennedy have succeeded admirably. If you are looking for a book to guide your students or yourself through Lacan's version of psychoanalysis, I know of none I would recommend more highly. Lacan's writing is witty and playful, but notoriously difficult. Benvenuto and Kennedy include just enough quotations from Lacan to make one grateful one is reading a summary and not the original. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Empathy-based helping: Is it selflessly or selfishly motivated?

A substantial body of evidence collected by Batson and his associates has advanced the idea that pure (i.e., selfless) altruism occurs under conditions of empathy for a needy other. An egoistic alternative account of this evidence was proposed and tested in our work. We hypothesized that an observer's heightened empathy for a sufferer brings with it increased personal sadness in the observer and that it is the egoistic desire to relieve the sadness, rather than the selfless desire to relieve the sufferer, that motivates helping. Two experiments contrasted predictions from the selfless and egoistic alternatives in the paradigm typically used by Batson and his associates. In the first, an empathic orientation to a victim increased personal sadness, as expected. Furthermore, when sadness and empathic emotion were separated experimentally, helping was predicted by the levels of sadness subjects were experiencing but not by their empathy scores. In the second experiment, enhanced sadness was again associated with empathy for a victim. However, subjects who were led to perceive that their moods could not be altered through helping (because of the temporary action of a "mood-fixing" placebo drug) were not helpful, despite high levels of empathic emotion. The results were interpreted as providing support for an egoistically based interpretation of helping under conditions of high empathy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Jacques Lacan & Co.: A history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985.

Reviews the book, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, written by Elisabeth Roudinesco and translated by J. Mehlman (1990). This volume focuses on the relations among psychoanalysis, surrealism, and the Communist movement. To set up her central argument that Lacan was infinitely more than a doctor with psychoanalytic training, that he had had a literary and political past, Roudinesco begins with his background in Hegelian philosophy and his associations with the Surrealists. Throughout the book, she comes back to their influence on his thoughts and actions. Roudinesco succeeds in demonstrating that Lacan, early on, had his feet planted in both the literary and medical milieus and that French writers were far ahead of the doctors in their acceptance of psychoanalysis. Roudinesco reaffirms what we all know, that Lacan has become a legend--that his texts were sacralized; his person, gestures, and habits imitated; his own itinerary rewritten by himself in 1932 and in 1966. Whatever her reader's predisposition or psychoanalytic credo, Roudinesco has recapitulated brilliantly the battles among French psychoanalysts and has provided the liveliest and most animated portrait of French intellectual history. And even if she has stressed the most absurd and outlandish components of this history, it is the most amusing scholarly book I have ever been asked to review. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research.

Reviews the book, Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research by Kurt Danziger (1990). Kurt Danziger's Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research is a book of singular importance because it provides such a penetrating analysis, and does so in a manner that is cause for considerable reflection. In brief, Danziger provides a history lesson that not only situates the names and the projects of experimental psychology in the first part of this century, but also aims to clarify the project of knowledge generation both past and present. Indeed, shades of Quine, Kuhn, and Hesse permeate this book in a way that demands psychologists examine their own investigative practices and logics of justification. Through Wundt, through Galton, through Ebbinghaus and others, Danziger illuminates the development of experimental psychology along with the historical and philosophical vicissitudes that have given rise to numerous psychological knowledge claims. If it is true that we must understand our history in order to understand our present, then Danziger's book should be required reading in all research laboratories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An English asylum in Africa: Space and order in Valkenberg Asylum.

The authors explore the use of space within and outside the buildings of Valkenberg, a Cape Colonial asylum. Valkenberg's design was conditioned by a complex interplay of factors: the way insanity itself was viewed by the colonial government, developments in medical knowledge, social-economic relations in the colonial setting, and practical forms of treatment. The internal structuring of space within the building, and the way the building was situated in the landscape, are graphic representations of 4 influences, in tension with each other: determination to reform the colony's psychiatric practices, a desire to reproduce British institutions in colonial settings, a stigmatizing fear of insanity and lunatics, and a desire to maintain strict segregation between White and Black staff and patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The body and psychology.

Reviews the book, The body and psychology by Henderikus J. Stam (see record 1998-06784-000). Considering this collection as a whole, it is striking how many of the authors, some of whom have been proponents of social constructionist thinking, feel social constructionism is unable to articulate an adequate theory of the psychological body. This refreshingly critical edge will no doubt lead to more sophisticated debates on the psychological body. Overall, this book is probably best read by graduate students and scholars who have some familiarity with social constructionist theory (e.g., Harré), as well as poststructuralism (e.g., Derrida, Lacan) and social theory (e.g., Bourdieu). Moreover, since the authors rely on other disciplinary discourses, this will be an excellent text for graduate courses on the body in cultural studies and sociology. Teaching this book would be interesting as it contains some analytical contrasts; for example, one could turn Malone and Bayer on Baerveldt and Voestermans, Parlee on Kempen, or the thematic analysis of Frank on the book itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parenting and adolescent problem behavior: An integrated model with adolescent self-disclosure and perceived parental knowledge as intervening variables.

Parental monitoring, assessed as (perceived) parental knowledge of the child's behavior, has been established as a consistent predictor of problem behavior. However, recent research indicates that parental knowledge has more to do with adolescents' self-disclosure than with parents' active monitoring. Although these findings may suggest that parents exert little influence on adolescents' problem behavior, the authors argue that this conclusion is premature, because self-disclosure may in itself be influenced by parents' rearing style. This study (a) examined relations between parenting dimensions and self-disclosure and (b) compared 3 models describing the relations among parenting, self-disclosure, perceived parental knowledge, and problem behavior. Results in a sample of 10th- to 12th-grade students, their parents, and their peers demonstrated that high responsiveness, high behavioral control, and low psychological control are independent predictors of self-disclosure. In addition, structural equation modeling analyses demonstrated that parenting is both indirectly (through self-disclosure) and directly associated with perceived parental knowledge but is not directly related to problem behavior or affiliation with peers engaging in problem behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contemporary American psychoanalysis: A profession? Increasing the role of research in psychoanalysis.

The simmering crisis confronting American psychoanalysis today is, in part, a function of fundamental theoretical and clinical disagreements within psychoanalysis itself. Psychoanalytic training, which conveys the special knowledge of our profession, and its application to techniques of treatment have become fragmented and frayed; boundaries have lost definition and our qualification as a profession is vitiated. Our diminished status is reflected in reduced public support and our smaller share of the patient population. Debate seems unable to resolve these disagreements. Acknowledgment of this reduced status creates the need and the opportunity for an increased role for research in psychoanalysis and the development of an analytic research enterprise capable of exploring for empirical resolutions of basic questions and disputes. Such a concerted effort to define the psychoanalytic enterprise through empirically supported basic tenets is necessary to avoid further dissipation of the markers of our psychoanalytic identity, both as individuals and as a profession. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychology of 1975: An extrapolation.

In 1975 "our motive in studying psychology will continue to be primarily the fact that we have cognitive needs… . The creativity excitement of today will be geometrically expanded… because even the creativity abstraction is itself an exciting abstraction." The "new realm of knowledge to which Freud above all, has led… . [and] the huge legacy of Ivan Pavlov and our Soviet colleagues" will be utilized. Outrageous hypotheses are desirable tools. Advances in 4 fields will "make major impacts upon psychology: genetics, neurophysiology, perception theory, and ecology… . It is perfectly plain that among all the behavioral sciences psychology is central." Major sections are: Prediction Models, Radar into the Future, The "Specious Present," Biological Vistas, Outrageous Hypotheses, and New Psychologies? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The acidophilic nature of neuronal Golgi impregnation

Within a conceptualization concerning the health-disease process as a whole (which systematically correlates its biological, psychological, social and historical aspects), it becomes very difficult to find something in the universe involving humankind, without any direct or indirect relationship with that vital process. This fact had expanded medicine toward a very extensive and complex field of knowledge and practices. Just considering it from the scientific perspective, different and opposing acquaintances and research methods vie with each other, equally claiming their own worth and stature within science. Because of all this and from its origin, allopathic medicine has required the assistance and support of philosophy and, in particular, from one specific branch: epidemiology. Nevertheless, since Bacon's empiricism (17th century) and, above all, since Comte's positivism (19th century), there had predominated until now (Piaget) a scientific current which was the enemy of philosophical thinking. In spite of the fact that it constituted, in itself, an epistemological position, being generalized also among biomedical scientists, there is in medicine at least disdain against the philosophy of science. Nevertheless, it is objectively indispensable. So, the present essay is presented in this sense, through the analytic characterization of the prototypic epistemologies and their relationships with medicine throughout history.     

Covert sensitization with a homosexual: A controlled replication.

Describes the application of covert sensitization to a 22-yr-old male homosexual to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of the technique as described by J. Cautela (see record 1967-08999-001). Covert sensitization was effective in eliminating the deviant behavior, but therapeutic problems arose in that the client developed an intense transference toward the therapist as well as a strong desire to understand his homosexuality. In addition to having to cope with these new aspects of the therapeutic process, a "setback" occurred which required "working through." Results raise the question of whether a behavioral technique itself is sufficient treatment for homosexual behavior, or whether behavioral therapy should be complemented by a psychotherapeutic approach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and the nature of work.

Conducted exploratory studies on the psychological concomitants of aging, results of which indicate the following: (a) The process of making a career choice is the 1st significant confrontation with the sense of aging, involving the knowledge or belief that such a decision is fateful because it determines how the rest of one's life will be "filled in." (b) Students are aware that while society tells them that there are numerous directions available to them, the educational system is organized increasingly to pressure the student to narrow his choices. (c) For many reasons, chiefly demographic and economic, our society will increasingly contain individuals who will go through life knowing that they never were able to enter the career of their 1st choice. (d) There has been an increase in the number of people who seek a career change, whether that change is within or between fields of work. Implications of each of these points is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Estrogen and progesterone receptors in breast cancer

It is the desire of every dentist and dental technician to produce a restoration that will fit the patient with a minimum of adjustments and certainly one that does not require remaking. Yet many abuse the materials with which they work, either through improper manipulation, lack of familiarity with their properties, or by attempting to reduce laboratory time by taking short cuts. Wax is one of the materials that requires more knowledge and skill to manipulate accurately because it has a considerably higher coefficient of thermal expansion (and contraction) than any other dental material. It often contributes considerably to the inaccuracies of cast dental restorations. This article provides a review of dental waxes used to make prosthodontic castings and points out some of the properties of waxes that must be controlled to make accurate restorations.