HEIDELBERG MATURATION: phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis

This article attempts to historically reconstruct the phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis in order to establish a new framework of understanding psychoanalytic theory and practice, given the need for a new phenomenological justification of psychoanalysis as a special intersubjective experience of the analyst-analysand interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of phenomenologically oriented psy- chotherapies emerged within Western psychiatry. All of them were more or less influenced or exist in polemics with psychoanalytic teaching and relied primarily on phenomenology in its broadest sense. First of all, we should mention such eminent psychiatrists as Eugene Minkowski, who created the original project of phenomenological existential psychopathology, and also Ludwig Binswanger with his existential, or Dasein-analytical anthropology. All these attempts in one way or another correspond to the general attitude of phenomenology to the critique of psychologism, and ultimately to naturalism of any kind. Therefore, their critique of psychoanalysis is primarily destructive, and psychoanalysis itself serves as one of the distinct examples of naturalistic reductionism of the highest type. These all leads to the rejection of psychoanalytic theory and practice as scientific, that is, one that is based on the Newtonian and Cartesian mechanistic conception of nature, and therefore makes any anthropology impossible. That is why all the mentioned phenomenological projects of psychotherapy at one time or another positioned themselves as projects of philosophical anthropology in a therapeutic perspective. The latest attempts at the phenomenological discovery of psychoanalysis can be seen as the rehabilitation of Kronfeld’s guidelines for the phenomenological justification of psychoanalytic experience.

Living Parallel-ly in Real and Virtual

With the marking of the digital age, all forms of digital technologies become a part of the existence of human life, thereby, an extension of self. The ever-increasing influence of the virtual world or Internet cultures demands to read its complex relationship with human existence in a digital world. Theory of psychoanalysis, specifically object-relation theory can be called forth to analyze this multifaceted relationship. Within the light of this theory, Internet cultures are acting as “objects” like games, memes, chat rooms, social net etc. and the virtual world can be interpreted as the “object world”. The chapter is interested in reading the deep psychoanalytic experience of people (with a special focus on the youth) in reference to their relationship with the virtual arena. The experience can be associated with religion, spirituality, perception of beauty, sexuality, Identity formation and so on. Their behavior and responses to the virtual world will be framed within the psychoanalytic paradigm in the light of “object relation theory” in a digital age.

Letter to John Bowlby

Winnicott’s letter to John Bowlby on Bowlby’s recently written chapter on hysteria. Winnicott regrets that it does not reflect Bowlby’s considerable psychoanalytic experience.

Birth Memories, Birth Trauma, and Anxiety

In this essay, Winnicott describes clinical examples illustrating fantasies and possible memories of the birth experience. In many child analyses birth play is important. The clues to the understanding of infant psychology, including birth trauma, come through psychoanalytic experience where regression is a feature. When birth material turns up in an analysis in a significant way, the patient is showing signs of being in an extremely infantile state. A child may be playing games that contain birth symbolism, and an adult reports fantasy related consciously or unconsciously to birth. This is not the same as the acting out of memory traces derived from birth experience, which provides the material for study of birth trauma.