Many others have pointed out this relationship between character and neurosis. Nunberg, to quote but one example, says, “There exists some kind of relationship between character and neurosis, particularly when we learn that a character ...
Author: Ruth Lax
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814750421
Category: Psychology
Page: 467
View: 863
Character refers to the unique aspects of behavior which make up each individual's patterns of thought, attitude, and effect. In this collection, Ruth Lax has put together the seminal papers which both define the contstuence of character and its disorders and elucidate some of the persistent controversy regarding the treatment of character neurosis.
The undignified, disgraceful character of neurosis has many forms: the ridiculousness that inheres the object feared in phobias, the absurdity of the handwashing or front-door-checking rituals in obsessive-compulsive disorders, ...
Author: Wolfgang Giegerich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781000062380
Category: Psychology
Page: 466
View: 528
Psychoanalysis began over a century ago as a treatment for neurosis. Rooted in the positivistic mindset of the medicine from which it stemmed, it trained its empiricist gaze directly upon the symptoms of the malaise, only to be seduced into attributing it to causes as numerous as there are aspects of human experience. Edifying as this was for our understanding of the life of the psyche, it left the sickness of the soul that was its actual subject matter, the neurosis which it was supposed to be about, out of its purview. The crux of this problem was of a conceptual nature. As psychology increasingly gave up on its constituting concept, its concept of soul, it succumbed to the same extent to treating its patients without an adequate concept of what both it and neurosis were about. Attention was paid to mishaps and traumas, the vicissitudes of development, and the Oedipus complex. But neurosis, according to the thesis of this ground-breaking book, comes from the soul, even is soul; the soul in its untruth. Indeed, both it and the modern field of psychology are successors of the soul-forms that preceded them, religion and metaphysics, with the difference that psychology's reluctance to recognize and take responsibility for its status as such has been matched by the neurotic soul's clinging to obsolete metaphysical categories even as the often quite ordinary life disappointments of its patients are inflated with absolute importance. The folie à deux has been on a massive scale. Owing their provenance to the supplement they each provide the other, psychology and neurosis are entwined in a Gordian knot, the cutting of which requires insight into the logic that pervades both. Taking up this sword, Giegerich exposes and critiques the metaphysics that neurosis indulges in even as he returns psychology to the soul, not, of course, to the soul as some no longer credible metaphysical hypostasis, but as the logically negative life of the mind and power of thought. Using several fairy tales as models for the logic of neurosis, he brilliantly analyses its enchanting background processes, exposing thereby, in a most lively and thoroughgoing manner, the spiteful cunning by which the neurotic soul, against its already existing better judgement, betrays its own truth. Topics include the historicity of neurosis, its soulful purpose as a general cultural phenomenon, its internal logic, functioning, and enabling conditions, as well as the Sacred Festival drama character of symptomatic suffering, the theology of neurosis, and ‘the neurotic’ as the figure of modernity's exemplary man. A collection of vignettes descriptive of various kinds of neurotic presentation routinely met with in the consulting room is also included in an appendix under the heading, ‘Neurotic Traps.’
The Relation to Character Structure Historically , aspects of character were not considered relevant to the concept or subject of a transference neurosis unless , through analysis , the conflict of which they were a part was mobilized ...
Author: Gail S. Reed
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300059571
Category: Psychology
Page: 268
View: 426
This book provides extraordinary insight into the subtleties and diversities of contemporary clinical practice by exploring the problematic and ambiguous concept of the transference neurosis. Gail S. Reed makes use of a crucial but mostly ignored aspect of psychoanalytic discourse, its oral tradition. She reproduces extensive portions of interviews with twenty-two psychoanalysts to investigate the way they understand and use transference neurosis and transference, comments on their views, and draws on her own clinical work. The interviews detail not only the internal struggles analysts undergo in order to help their patients but also the effect of analysts' personal struggles on their immensely varied understanding. Reed discusses the development of the transference neurosis from Freud's initial formulation of an artificial illness in the patient to the testimony of many contemporary analysts that the transference neurosis includes a profound experience in them that is the critical feature of every therapeutic relationship. Reed fashions a new definition of the transference neurosis that attempts to conserve what makes sense of its traditional meaning while integrating current practice. This book is unique in combining historical and theoretical analysis of a clinical concept while conveying to the reader with astonishing immediacy what it feels like to do analysis.
Neurosis must also, in principle, be distinguished from what psycho-analysts call character-neurosis. The idea underlying character-neurosis is that a person can develop general traits of character in lieu of symptoms, so that instead ...
Author: Charles Rycroft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780429910852
Category: Psychology
Page: 174
View: 436
Anxiety may be debilitating or stimulating; it can result in neurotic symptoms or in improved, heightened performance in an actor or athlete. It is something every human being has experienced. As Professor G. M. Carstairs points out in his Foreword: 'During the course of the twentieth century we have found it progressively easier to concede that we are all to often swayed by emotion rather than reason. We have come to recognize the symptoms of neurotically ill patients are only an exaggeration of experiences common to us all, and hence that the unraveling of the psychodynamics of neurosis can teach us more about ourselves'. Although Charles Rycroft is also a psychoanalyst, it is as a biologist that he has made this study of anxiety, the three basic responses to it - attack, flight or submission - and the obsessional, phobic and schizoid and hysterical defenses. Written in precise but everyday language, Anxiety and Neurosis is based on adult experiences rather than the speculative theories of infantile instinctual development. Its clarity and authority can only add to Dr Rycroft's established international reputation.
3. “Neurotic” depressions: that is, slight ones, which are still aimed at objects, and cyclothymias. The oral element makes analysis more difficult in these cases than in compulsion neuroses. 4. Character ...
Author: Otto Fenichel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781134969579
Category: Psychology
Page: 744
View: 932
The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, Fenichel's classic text, summarized the first half century of psychoanalytic investigation into psychopathology and presented a general psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. When Otto Fenichel died, Anna Freud mourned the loss of 'his inexhaustible knowledge of psychoanalysis and his inimitable way of organizing and presenting his facts'. These qualities shine through The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis which has been a standard reference for generations of psychoanalysts. For this anniversary edition, Leo Rangell has written an introduction that sets Fenichel's work in context. He sees Fenichel as a worthy heir to Freud; both men influenced their followers by what Rangell calls 'the charisma of ideas'. In his epilogue, Rangell describes the fate of Fenichel's ideas and of this book as 'a barometer of the place of psychoanalysis ... within the external intellectual world and, even more significantly, of the trends and shifting winds of opinion within the psychoanalytic field itself'. He traces those trends through the turbulent controversies of the field, concluding that Fenichel's observations are as fresh and relevant today as they were fifty years ago.
The received wisdom in classical psychoanalysis is that in treating character neurosis, it is necessary to ... As J.K.'s experience indicates, the transformation of a character neurosis into a symptomatic psychoneurosis can occur prior ...
Author: Morris N. Eagle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781135252229
Category: Psychology
Page: 327
View: 662
The landscape of psychoanalysis has changed, at times dramatically, in the hundred or so years since Freud first began to think and write about it. Freudian theory and concepts have risen, fallen, evolved, mutated, and otherwise reworked themselves in the hands and minds of analysts the world over, leaving us with a theoretically pluralistic (yet threateningly multifarious) diffusion of psychoanalytic viewpoints. To help make sense of it all, Morris Eagle sets out to critically reevaluate fundamental psychoanalytic concepts of theory and practice in a topical manner. Beginning at the beginning, he reintroduces Freud's ideas in chapters on the mind, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment; he then approaches the same topics in terms of more contemporary psychoanalytic schools. In each chapter, however, there is an underlying emphasis on identification and integration of converging themes, which is reemphasized in the final chapter. Relevant empirical research findings are used throughout, thus basic concepts - such as repression - are reexamined in the light of more contemporary developments.
Recognition that neurosis can " change ' to character disorder is implied in the classification of ' obsessive - compulsive reaction ' as a diagnosis of neurosis and of " compulsive per . sonality " as a diagnosis of character disorder ...
Character. analysis,. psychoanalysis,. and. psychotherapy. In this book, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are used more ... An important aspect of Reich's work was that he came to see neurosis first and foremost as character neurosis, ...
Author: Jon Sletvold
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317859932
Category: Psychology
Page: 237
View: 473
2015 Gradiva Award Winner The Embodied Analyst brings together the history of embodied analysis found in the work of Freud and Reich and contemporary relational analysis, particularly as influenced by infant research. By integrating the ‘old’ embodied and the ‘new’ relational traditions, the book contributes to a new clinical perspective focusing on form and process rather than content and structure – the ‘how’, rather than the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. This perspective is characterised by a focus on movement, emotional interaction and the therapists own bodily experience in the analytic encounter. Jon Sletvold presents a user-friendly approach to embodied experience, providing the history, theory, training and practice of embodied experience and expression as a way of expanding clinical attention. Starting with a Spinozan view of the embodied mind, Part One: History of Embodied Psychoanalysis presents an overview of the history of the field in the works of Freud and Reich as well as a look at the Norwegian Character Analytic tradition . Part Two: Conceptual Framework and Clinical Guidelines explains how clinical interaction can be navigated based on the embodied concepts of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and reflexivity. Part Three: Embodied Training and Supervision presents innovative approaches to training in emotional communication inspired by the performing arts. The book ends with a consideration of the embodied analyst in the 21st century consulting room. Capturing key aspects of a transitional movement in the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, The Embodied Analyst is ideal for those working and training in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.