August 06, 2003
Where the road ends
We'll take another break from our project of assimilating psychoanalytic theory to the metapsychology of the Cube of Space and get our bearings by looking at the map of the development of analytic theory over the past century. We have defined the psychological development of psychoanalytic thinking as its resistance to intersubjectivity, or the Other in its own unconscious. So far, we've looked at the central concepts of projective identification, part and whole self and object relations, transitional space and splitting and dissociation. Ahead are the theoretical and therapeutic consequences of these extensions of psychoanalytic theory toward the Other. Psyche Matters by Cheryl Martin contains a wealth of psychoanalytic references and literature. The Psychoanalytic Classics page is interesting for its shortness (even when padded with every work in the Standard Edition) and the absence of any new classics in the last 20 years (Grotstein and Hinselwood are codifications and extensions of Klein and Bion). The list really ends with Searles, Gill, Schafer and Langs at the end of the Seventies or mid-Eighties if you stretch it. With Laplanche and Pontalis representing the therapeutically-starved offshoot of Lacanism. So what happened? Did psychoanalytic thinking hit a brick wall or come to the edge of a cliff?
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Or reach the end of its metapsychological rope?
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August 04, 2003
Splitting and Dissociation
Freud distinguished primary repression (neurologically based avoidance of pain) and psychologically defensive secondary repression (repression proper), the avoidance of instinctual conflict in the whole object Oedipal period. In the intermediate stages of development, repression is represented by the concepts of splitting and dissociation and autistic states. Working backward from the Oedipal stage, the post self-object theorists find narcissistic dissociation, splitting of self representations, and expressions of the broken primary link and the failed or dead mother. Dissociative Identity Disorder doesn't fall neatly into this scheme, and we are left wondering if there is really any difference between a dissociation and a split, or for that matter, a repression. But what we are really interested in is what is being repressed, split, projected, introjected and dissociated and in whom is doing it. Splits of object representations are called projections and introjections of self representations are called splits. Dividing by the lowest common metaphorical demoninator, we are left with projection/introjection (flow of energy/meaning) between the poles of self and other, and an ego or psyche which can only repress, split and dissociate.
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