Arnold Wilson

An Investigation into Some Implications of a Vygotskian Perspective on the Origins of Mind: Psychoanalysis and Vygotskian Psychology, Part I:

The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed an analysis of language, thought, and internalization that has direct relevance to the current concerns of psychoanalysts. Striking methodological and conceptual similarities and useful complementarities with psychoanalysis are discovered when one peers beneath the surface of Vygotskian psychology. Our adaptation of Vygotskys views expands upon Freuds assigned role to language in the topographic model. We suggest that the analysands speech offers several windows into the history of the individual, through prosody, tropes, word meaning, and word sense. We particularly emphasize Vygotskys views on the genesis and utilization of word meanings. The acquisition of word meanings will contain key elements of the internal climate present when the word meaning was forged. Bearing this in mind, crucial theoretical questions follow, such as how psychoanalysis is to understand the unconscious fantasies, identifications, anxieties, and defenses associated with the psychodynamics of language acquisition and later language usage. We propose that the clinical situation is an ideal place to test these hypotheses.

Language and the psychoanalytic process : psychoanalysis and Vygotskian psychology. II

This paper follows our previous one, where we described a psychoanalytic conception of language, thought, and internalization that is informed by the thinking of Lev Vygotsky. Here, several aspects of the analytic process which allow for the understanding of ineffable experiences in the analysands history and the analytic situation are investigated: specifically, primal repression, metaphor, and the role of speech in free association. It is suggested that Freuds notion of primal repression be revived and redefined as one aspect of the descriptive unconscious. Some implications of primal repression for transference and resistance are explored. The metaphoric in its broad sense is examined as one example of how early dynamic experiences embedded in the process of language acquisition can be reached within the clinical situation. It is proposed that an understanding of free association is enhanced by awareness of distinctions between inner, egocentric, and social speech. The basic rule can be interpreted as an invitation for the analysand to use inner speech in collaboration with the analyst as best he or she can. Further, the aliveness and degree of superficiality of the analysis can be seen as a function of the analysts ability to appreciate the properties of inner speech and foster the conditions in the analysis that allow for its unfolding.

Analytic Positions, Repetition, and the Organization of Emotional Memory

Analytic positions are defined as viewing perspectives. Therefore, an analytic position determines ones field of observation. Two families of affect theories in psychoanalysis are then identified: the Darwinean and the Aristotelian. Affect has been addressed as either an energic like charge along a gradient or a form of communication. Each swims into focus when viewed with respect to the position of the observer as either inside the clinical interaction or outside the transference. How each is observed then determines different implications for interpretation, transference, reconstruction, and defense analysis. How the mind itself is modeled in theory is seen to follow from how observers position themselves. Choosing an observational field cannot be avoided. How an analyst in a clinically meaningful way might think about such disparate fields is taken up.

Ghosts of paradigms past: The once and future evolution of psychoanalytic thought

An example of the psychoanalytic mode of thought is put forward concerning how psychoanalytic theories have historically been constituted and transformed. The model of world hypotheses, characterized by multiple irresolvable truth claims, captures the nature of most psychoanalytic theorizing until about 1970. Each of two world hypotheses—one grounded in intrapsychic conflict (seen when the analyst observes from outside the transference) and the other in interpersonal internalization (seen when the analyst observes from inside the bidirectional interactive processes)—is an autonomous and self-sufficient aggregate. The stance taken by the analyst-observer with respect to the analytic interaction is key to seeing how the two world hypotheses are made manifest in clinical work and in theory. By contrast, the model of competing programs captures the essential nature of most psychoanalytic theorizing since about 1970, and is characterized by the necessity of each progressively evolving through a particular kind of commerce with its neighbors. Such commerce is necessary when a program is in danger of degenerating. In this way of thinking, there is a fundamental tension between classical psychoanalysis adapting to the demands and exigencies of its particular and ever evolving historical niche and simultaneously retaining the core commitments that guarantee continuity. Honoring the forces of progression displaces the quest for truth as a paramount goal of psychoanalysis. A developmental lag in recognizing this transformation has hindered progress toward a comparative, process-centered psychoanalysis.

Analytic Preparation: the Creation of an Analytic Climate With Patients Not Yet in Analysis

The art and science of beginning an analysis has a life of its own and can be considered in many ways quite apart from its later stages. An incremental path forward is smoothed for patients who are not yet prepared to analyze, and builds eventually into something readily recognizable as an analysis. The term analytic preparation refers to this set of processes. Early on, the analyst is concerned less with facilitating an early replica of an idealized analysis than with facilitating the mutual adaptation of patient and analyst as they begin to negotiate a “thought community.” Since analytic preparation is not an entity, it does not neatly overlap in real time with the opening phase as usually described, does not have a discrete beginning or end, and does not abruptly shift midstream into analysis proper. Some relations between analytic preparation, analytic interaction, and the interpretation of transference are examined.

THEORIZING ABOUT THEORIZING : AN EXAMINATION OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF WILLIAM I. GROSSMAN TO PSYCHOANALYSIS

William Grossmans contributions to psychoanalysis are studied in the light of an interest that suffuses his papers: the remarkably complex ways an analyst develops his or her mind in order to become an effective analyst. Grossman sought to detail the many subtle factors infusing Freudian theory, from its initial sources to its consolidation as a system, to its embrace in the mind of an analyst who will use it, and on to the many iterations of its progress on the way to being applied in the clinical situation. This progression assumes a recognition of the analysts need to be at once both experiencer and observer. Implicit in the attempt to understand another is a self-reflective taking of oneself as an object of analysis. How an essential tension is worked out between the subjective and objective points of view is an issue that pervades Grossmans writings. This is but one instance of a larger tendency characterizing his ideas—thinking psychoanalytically about psychoanalysis itself. Factors he implicated in being a contemporary Freudian analyst are then taken up.