Carlo Strenger

The desire for self‐creation

Some people feel that aspects of their past or limitations of their present prevent them from living a life they experience as worth living. They embark on the project of fully re‐creating themselves. This article traces various manifestations of the desire for self‐creation. An extended clinical example shows how this project led a patient to the brink of death, because it was more important for her to feel that she had authorship over her life than to be alive. The desire for self‐creation has found cultural expression in the Cartesian program of cleaning the mind from any external influence. In less sublimated forms, this desire can be found in bodybuilding and certain forms of sexual fantasy. This article ends by discussing psychoanalytic and existentialist approaches to the protest against fatedness, which motivates the project of self‐creation.

Why Psychoanalysis Must not Discard Science and Human Nature

This papers main thesis is that Irwin Z. Hoffmans thesis that psychoanalysis must choose between its worldview and quantitative scientific research creates a misleading dichotomy. First, because scientific research is not in itself a worldview but a means to ascertain empirical claims, and to the extent that psychoanalysis has such claims, they need to be ascertained scientifically. Second, the dichotomy is misleading, because there is nothing in science per se that contradicts the psychoanalytic ethos of exploring the selfs complexity and helping patients to become more autonomous and lead fuller and richer lives. Finally, the paper calls for a deepening of the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the evolving paradigm of the cognitive neurosciences that has, in many ways, inherited Freuds original program of an evolutionary science of human nature. Such dialogue will enrich both psychoanalysis and this paradigm, and taking into account the findings of biologically based investigation of the human psyche will not dilute the psychoanalytic ethos.

NOBROW Identity Formation in a Fatherless Generation

This article is part of a more extended attempt to examine the impact of the momentous social changes that have swept through the Western world in the past decade so n the individual psyche. The psychoanalytic consulting room may provide one additional prism through which the implications of the global village can be explored. Conversely, it is probably useful to connect the minutiae of interactions in the consulting room with the larger picture: Psychoanalysis, after all, does not function in a social vacuum. In the present article I wish to examine one particular aspect of these momentous changes: the immense impact of the new economy on cultural standards. I provide a brief sketch of some of the most salient social changes during the past two decades and offer a hypothesis of how these changes have influenced the psychic structure, personal identities, and self-images of those who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s. The patient, whom I call Ben, exemplifies a constellation that I believe to be rather prevalent. His parents were part of a social and moral order based on clear hierarchies: People with academic degrees and respectable professions were more valuable and more entitled to respect than those who did not have such a background. Professions that required high standards of ethical integrity provided social status that was often not commensurate with the financial income provided. I argue that Ben’s problem was a

Freud's forgotten evolutionary project.

In the last decades psychoanalysis has tended to recast itself as a hermeneutic discipline geared at the retelling of human lives, and Freud is recast as a great writer in the humanist tradition rather than as the scientist as which he saw himself. Although this reconceptualization has good reasons, it tends to obscure the fact that Freud primarily saw himself as a theorist of human nature. One of Freud’s deepest convictions was that psychopathology needs to be explained on the basis of evolutionary biology. This paper argues that this may have been one of Freud’s greatest ideas. The reason it has been “repressed” by psychoanalysis is that Freud based it on Lamarckian principles. The current flourishing of evolutionary psychology and psychiatry may well turn Freud into one of the precursors of the psychology of the future.

Body Modification and the Enlightenment Project of Struggling Against Death

This articles core idea is that body modification can be seen as a nonstandard symbolic expression of a long-standing project of the enlightenment: to control human destiny, with the dream of conquering death. This idea is based on experimentally validated tenet of existential psychology that the denial of death is one of humanitys deepest motivations. The first highlights a common denominator in the articles by Pitts-Taylor, Sullivan, and Knafo: they courageously oppose the knee-jerk reaction that body modification necessarily entails giving in to social or gender pressure. Instead each proposes refined psychodynamic hypotheses. Knafos analysis of body artist Orlan is taken as the starting point for an elaboration of this cultural phenomenon as a reflection of the denial of death.

Sosein: Active Self-Acceptance in Midlife

In light of the increase in life expectancy in the 20th century, a growing number of people are making significant midlife changes. This article tries to steer a way between two cultural myths about this life period. The first is that the only sane solution of the midlife crisis is acceptance of growing limitations. The second is the idea that, given drive and a vision, we are capable of boundless change. The alternative middle way proposed is called “active self-acceptance.” It is based on Karl Jasperss notion that we are all condemned to failure vis-à-vis boundary situations and that there is a Sosein (being thus and no other) that is recalcitrant to change. Jasperss biography and an extended case example show that active self-acceptance is not passive resignation but initiation of a process of self-transformation in which lucid self-knowledge and acceptance are combined into a process that allows full self-development.In light of the increase in life expectancy in the 20th century, a growing number of people are making significant midlife changes. This article tries to steer a way between two cultural myths about this life period. The first is that the only sane solution of the midlife crisis is acceptance of growing limitations. The second is the idea that, given drive and a vision, we are capable of boundless change. The alternative middle way proposed is called “active self-acceptance.” It is based on Karl Jasperss notion that we are all condemned to failure vis-a-vis boundary situations and that there is a Sosein (being thus and no other) that is recalcitrant to change. Jasperss biography and an extended case example show that active self-acceptance is not passive resignation but initiation of a process of self-transformation in which lucid self-knowledge and acceptance are combined into a process that allows full self-development.

Mentoring the Patient’s Self-Creation: Thoughts on the Nature of the Therapeutic Relationship

Recent writing in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has emphasized the ineradicability of the analyst’s subjectivity. This article tries to take this idea one step further by arguing for the existentialist position that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are primarily encounters between two human beings who bring their own aesthetics of existence, that is, their vision of what makes a life worth living, into the therapeutic relationship. Therapeutic technique is seen as a means that increases the likelihood that the relationship will be beneficial. This is illustrated by work with a highly gifted and perceptive patient whose theory about the therapy was that a form of what he called “intellectual mentoring” was integral to it. This idea is examined, and it is argued that it has practical implications. Making the fit between the patient and the analyst’s personal idioms an explicit part of psychotherapeutic discourse is proposed.

East of Eden: Clinical and Theoretical Aspects of the Sense of Excommunication

This article investigates an organization of personality, centered on a sense of excommunication. What often seems like amoralism or cynicism often hides a moral outrage against the moral and social order the individual experiences as inherently painful, as condemning him or her to unavoidable guilt, or as an identity of deviance or illegitimacy. This constellation is exemplified through elements of Philip Roths works and Jean Genet. Aclinical case study exemplifies the inherent complexity of working with patients whose identities are governed by the protest against social order. It is shown that they are particularly susceptible to experiencing the therapist as representing this order and that the experience of mutuality in the therapeutic relationship most likely is to establish a good working alliance.