Freud s Sisters A Fantasia on a Photograph

This psychoanalytically based imaginative inquiry into the role of Freud's sisters in shaping the meanings of Femaleness and gender difference for Freud starts from the author's study of a photograph in the Library of Congress Freud exhibit, “Portrait of the Jakob Freud Family ca. 1876,” which shows Sigmund Freud, age 20, with his live then adolescent sisters. Freud's Dream of the Botanical monograph, especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu, is used as a window into Freud's early childhood relations with his sisters and the registration of gender difference in his psychic reality. A peculiarity in the photograph in the presentation of Freud's half-brother, Emmanuel, leads the author's reverie to another dream of Freud's, the “nonvixit dream.” especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu and by Max Schur. The non-vixit dream is thought to bear traces of Freud's experience of the death of his infant brother Julius. New suggestions are made with regard to Freud's difficulties with depressive-position anxieties in relation to his mother; it is suggested that these difficulties led to his concept of girls' genitals as “castrated” becoming dominant over another stratum of psychic experience in which girls' genitals, and femininity, were viewed with erotic wonder as intact in their own right. This idea is linked with Freud's difficulties in construing woman as subject.     

Cultural workers,pedagogy and the politics of difference: Beyond cultural conservatism

‘Odor di Femina: Though you may not see her, you can certainly smell her’, articulates the primacy of visualism in the history of psychoanalysis. In the first half of the study Mavor reveals how both the photographs of mentally ill women made under the direction of Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot and the use of the visualist rhetoric in the writings of Charcot and Freud were regarded as proof of an always already diagnosed and conceptualized vision of sexual difference. Charcot's and most emphatically Freud's conception of the senses conventionally marked vision as masculine and the others (touch, hearing and especially smell) as feminine. Mavor then turns to Lacan to undo this historically gendered, power-hungry split between sight and the othered senses through his theory of the gaze as objet petit a, which reticulates the gaze and its conventional singular authority. Taking a cue from Lacan's provocative claim that ‘a wild odour emanates’ from the‘function of seeingness’, Mavor pushes Lacan's theory of the gaze (which, she argues, has often been sorely misrepresented in feminist film theory and art history) towards an expanded constellation of the senses. Her excavation of Lacan loosens the gaze's hold on the site of seer/seen, subject/object and, especially, sight/smell. As a result, sight loses its historical pride of place among the senses.     

Sigmund Freud's Discovery of the Etiological Significance of Childhood Sexual Traumas

ABSTRACT

Challenging assumptions that Freud's early writings have no place in the current discourse on child sexual abuse, this article reconstructs Freud's early treatment of Emma Eckstein. Setting Emma's account of childhood sexual abuse in the context of Freud's early therapeutic practice reveals how Freud first formulated his radical theory, that his patients' psycho-neuroses were due to their having been sexually traumatised as children. The article concludes by inviting a reevaluation of Freud's work.     

Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and Addiction in Gambling

In this paper the modern ideal of “autonomous” or “pure” gambling is put forward in an analysis of Dostoevsky's gambling behavior, his novel The Gambler (1866) and Freud's psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky. The significance of The Gambler lies in the way conceptions of gambling are related to the social conditions of gamblers. Furthermore, the author demonstrates that Dostoevsky and Freud express contradictory views on gambling addiction. While Dostoevsky primarily appreciated roulette as a means of making money, Freud mistakenly interpreted this as a “pathological passion”. In different ways, however, both approaches toward excessive gambling presuppose and reinforce “gambling‐for‐its‐own‐sake” – Le jeu pour le jeu.     

“Who Wears the Pants Here?”: Gender as Protest

Psychoanalysis has, from Freud's earliest ideas, been drawn to comprehending and defining gender—decoding what is masculine and what is feminine. Although Freud believed that masculinity and femininity would normatively fall along biological lines, gender, as a category, very quickly became destabilized by theorists who contested Freud's view. This article looks at a case in which the analyst came to view the patient's gender performance as a form of protest as it became transacted within the transference-countertransference relationship. In drawing upon contemporary gender and relational psychoanalytic theories, the author considers the multiple layers of gender meanings held within the patient and within the analyst and concludes that gender is never fully resolved and will continue to carry shifting relational meanings.     

Exploring the (Post) Industrial Subculture - Towards a Critical (Post) Anal-ytical Approach to Organizational Analysis

You could maintain incredulity toward metanarratives as much as you liked, but it wouldn't keep your feet on the ground. Not if you were an oilskin. If you were a fleece however, your feet may be on the ground, but your ideas may be in the air. Yet your problem wouldn't be how to resolve your differences - it would be how to recognise them.     

Freud and Developmental Theory A 21st-Century Look at the Origin Myth or Psychoanalysis

This article traces both Freud's contribution to developmental theory and the major trends in developmental theory since Freud. Although Freud's developmental theorizing has been criticized as outdated scientism, a close examination of his writings reveals a more radical “21st-century” Freud, whose, theoretical approach, to some extent, anticipated the deconstructive and postmodern perspectives of the current psychoanalytic scene. Freud's self-subversive analytic process has been lost in the developmental writings of his classical followers and in the writings of the alternative schools of psychoanalysis that have arisen since. In place of a psychoanalysis of inquiry, these theorists have reinstated a psychoanalysis of “truths,” universalist models of normal and pathological development, ostensibly allied to confirmatory infant observation. Such models can best be understood as psychoanalytic “origin myths,” selected and codified to support the belief system, meanings, and customs immanent in the school of thought they purport to validate.     

Effort to remove Medicaid prior authorization for bupe in NJ advances

You're a health care provider, and your patient is interested in cannabis — perhaps for pain, for anxiety, for depression or even for trying to quit drinking or using drugs. You think it could help him or her. Or, rather, it might — you really have no idea, because you didn't learn about it in medical school (except that it's illegal and addictive), but you know it's now legal in your state and you want to know how to respond to your patient's request.     

Fathers,others: The sacrificial victim in Freud,Girard, and Levinas

Abstract

This paper derives from an interest in murder. This interest began through reading fictional narratives which ceaselessly stage and restage scenes of murder; but it has also become clear that a range of theoretical texts are no less preoccupied with the basic question, ‘Why kill?’ (see Davis, 2000). In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Freud, Girard and Levinas, directly address the question of murder, its causes and consequences. In each case, the theoretical question turns out to depend upon a minimal core narrative in which the stakes of murder are crystallized; rival theoretical accounts are thus also bound up in a competition of stories. As this paper traces a common concern from Freud's Totem and Taboo, through Girard's La Violence et le sacré, to Levinas's Totalité et infini, the question ‘Why kill?’ gets entangled with the dynamics of storytelling and the issue of what it means to do theory.     

Five artists' valuations of the visual

Abstract

This paper comprises interviews with five practising artists: Terry Atkinson, Torie Begg, Rebecca Fortnum, Lubaina Himid, and James Hugonin. The aim is to gauge the ways in which ‘the visual’ features in contemporary fine art practice, not only at the end of a century in which the visual ‐ at least for much of the first half of that century ‐ was often accorded special status, but also, more recently, after Conceptualism and radical egalitarian interventions have challenged the status of and assumptions about the value of the visual. All five artists were asked the same questions: What/who are the formative influences on your work?; What role does the visual play in your work ‐ to what extent do you value the visual?; Can you say something about (i) aesthetic and (ii) pleasure ‐ however you define them?; How does a work evolve?; How do you define quality ‐ what makes you think one of your works is better than another?; What is the spectator's relationship to your work? ‐ what role does the spectator have? The responses bear witness to significantly different ways in which contemporary artists value the visual.     

Parting words: Trauma,silence and survival

Abstract

This article examines an enigma at the heart of Freud's work on trauma: the surprising emergence, from within the theory of the death drive, of the drive to life, a form of survival that both witnesses and turns away from the trauma in which it originates. I analyse in particular the striking juxtaposition, in Freud's founding work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of his two primary examples of trauma: the repetitive nightmares of battle suffered by the soldiers of World War I, and the game of the child, faced with the loss of its mother, who plays fort and da (there and here) with his spool. My own understanding of Freud's insight did not emerge, however, simply through a reading of his text but began, in fact, in my encounter with a real child in Atlanta, a child whose best friend was murdered in the street and who is interviewed by the friend's mother. I thus read together the language of the nightmare and the language of the child in Freud's text, and then attempt to understand how Freud's text and the language of the real child shed light upon each other.     

Fetishism and the social value of objects1

The idea of the fetish has a particular presence in the writings of both Marx and Freud. It implies for these two theorists of the social, a particular form of relation between human beings and objects. In the work of both, the idea of the fetish involves attributing properties to objects that they do not ‘really’ have and that should correctly be recognised as human. While Marx's account of fetishism addresses the exchange-value of commodities at the level of the economic relations of production, it fails to deal in any detail with the use-value or consumption of commodities. In contrast Freud's concept of the fetish as a desired substitute for a suitable sex object explores how objects are desired and consumed. Drawing on both Marx and Freud, Baudrillard breaks with their analyses of fetishism as demonstrating a human relation with unreal objects. He explores the creation of value in objects through the social exchange of sign values, showing how objects are fetishised in ostentation. This paper argues that while Baudrillard breaks with the realism characteristic of Marx's and Freud's analyses of fetishism, he does not go far enough in describing the social and discursive practices in which objects are used and sometimes transformed into fetishes. It is proposed that the fetishisation of objects involves an overdetermination of their social value through a discursive negotiation of the capacities of objects that stimulates fantasy and desire for them.     

Taking on the Role of Doctor: A Dramaturgical Analysis of Professionalization*

This paper applies dramaturgical analysis to the study of professional socialization in an innovative medical school. Using concepts from the theater, professionalization is seen as critically involving performances before legitimating audiences. The data were collected by means of participant observation and interviews of a cohort of students as they proceeded through the professionalizing career. Good acting demands that you are convincing in your part. The audience must be willing to take part in a ritual, in which you represent, say, Hamlet. You must be able to sustain this representation convincingly: that is to say, you must consistently satisfy the audience's imagination and never outrage its acceptance of the fact that yours is a convincing, or consistently credible, Hamlet,…or whatever character you are impersonating (Guthrie, 1971:11).     

Home Is Where She Is

ABSTRACT

I have written this paper with the intention of reading it out loud to you. As I was writing this paper, I imagined your skin, that soft outer membrane of your body. I imagined my tongue moving to shape my words, all the while carefully shifting my teeth out of the way. I imagined having these words thump under your skin and tremble your presence to the beat of our hearts. Because this paper was supposed to have you feel me and my people. And by “my people,” I truly mean everyone around me, including you. So, this paper is essentially about us, you and me. You know, I just had a feeling that you might know us, but you do not feel us. I just had a feeling that you have got to feel how we are. … Do you hear me? Because, only then, can we finally, start.     

Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender and Development's Views, Events and Debates section. We'd like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on important contemporary issues of relevance to the journal's core concern: to strengthen and support development which supports women's empowerment and gender equality as goals. We'd also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender and Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: jporter@oxfam.org.uk     

Similarities with a (Crucial) Difference: Reply to Commentaries by Shapiro and Marshall

Reviewing Sigmund Freud's essays and correspondence during World War I, we find that for the most part he minimized or denied the impact the war was having on him and his patients. Just as Sandor Ferenczi's emphasis on the impact of “real” childhood events and the “real” relationship between patient and analyst was seen as aberrant, so too was Ferenczi's warning Freud to leave Germany in 1933 Ferenczi , S. ( 1933 ). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child—the language of tenderness and of passion . Contemporary Psychoanalysis , 24 , 196 – 206 . [Google Scholar] treated as paranoia. Freud's later works apply his psychoanalytic theories to society as a whole but do not consider ways to “cure” social ills, so it is not surprising that Freud didn't hear Albert Einstein's famous question, Why War? as a plea for insight into how to end war. The author suggests a reconsideration of Einstein's question from the perspective of Buddhist psychology and finds a more optimistic albeit difficult answer.     

Possibilities Might Be More Encompassing than Solutions: An Interview with Bill O'Hanlon

Bill O'Hanlon has authored or co-authored seventeen books, including Taproots; Solution-Oriented Hypnosis; An Uncommon Casebook; Shifting Contexts; Rewriting Love Stories. He has published 32 articles or book chapters. Bill has produced or co-produced two computer programs and several audiotapes and videotapes about therapy. His books have been widely translated. He is co-editor of The Journal of Collaborative Therapies and is on the advisory board of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. He says that his teaching ‘may cause severe disruption to old beliefs and unhelpful patterns and you may have no place to go but toward the life that has been your heart's and soul's desire’.     

Reading and Writing,Talking and Listening Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexuality

This essay offers a brief history of how the stereotype “the female homosexual” was created through three installments of psychoanalytic theorizing, starting with Freud's (1920) case study. A second, brief history presents the various strands of critical theorizing that have identified “the female homosexual” as a stereotype. The essay then makes a contribution to current discussion of female homosexuality by suggesting an instinct theory that features ego instincts and sexual instincts interacting (as Freud' theory did before 1920). Reference is made to Takeo Doi's concept of amae (expectation of affection) and to amae as an ego instinct. This theory then is the framework for a clinical v ignette focused on a female homosexual's ego-instinctual needs.     

Toward Less Fixed Internal Transformations of Gender Commentary on: Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender by Meg Jay,Ph.D.

While highly commending this cross-disciplinary exercise and agreeing with Jay and Butler that children may indeed mourn the loss of erotics with same-sex parents as they identify and develop in a gendered fashion, this author highlights, in both Butler and Jay's interesting further refinements of Butler's position in their use of Freud's 1917 paper on “Mourning and Melancholia,” a lack of attention to the significant aggression that Freud also included in this early formulation concerning the lost object. A consideration of such affects is well taken, but this author prefers a less sparse and monolithic linear clarity about how girls grow into sexed and gendered women. She feels the limitation here of the use of later analytic theory such as Loewald's rich account of internalization.     

Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender & Development's Views, events, and debates section. We'd like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on issues relevant to the journal's concern: to inspire and strengthen development initiatives which support the goals of gender equality and women's empowerment.

We'd also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender & Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: gadeditor@oxfam.org.uk