The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in Poland Before the First World War

So far, the origins of Polish psychoanalysis have remained in historical obscurity. Today few people remember that at the start of the twentieth century psychoanalysis sparked a debate and divided physicians, psychologists and pedagogues into its followers and opponents in partitioned Poland. The debate about psychoanalysis played out with the most dynamism in the scientific community of Polish neurologists and psychiatrists, where most of the first Polish psychoanalysts were based: Ludwig Jekels, Stefan Borowiecki, Jan Nelken, Herman Nunberg and Karol de Beaurain. Their efforts to popularize psychoanalytic therapy resulted in the entire scientific session being devoted to psychoanalysis at the Second Congress of Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists in Krakow in 1912. This paper illustrates the profiles of individuals who were involved in the popularization of Polish psychoanalytic thought and demonstrates a variety of reactions provoked by psychoanalytic ideas in scientific circles. It also sets out to piece together the development of Polish psychoanalysis as a whole before the First World War, suggesting that this first wave of interest might in some ways amount to a historically overlooked pre-war Polish school.

The Death Drive of Evolution (From the Perspective of Depressive Realism)

This paper analyses Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud as depressive realists who attempted to dethrone the human species from their central place in nature and history. Both evolutionary theory and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis partly preserve the idea of human exceptionalism, while considering psychoanalysis’s negative conceptualization of humans as the most maladapted species. This maladaption is conventionally conceptualized in psychoanalysis as a rupture from the natural order and is sometimes presented as the embodiment of the death drive. Such a concept of the death drive tends to be seen as an exclusively human drive. Developments in recent evolutionary biology and psychoanalytic thought suggest ways to elaborate on the concept of the death drive as not being exclusively human. Nature’s evolution is not the embodiment of progress that results in the appearance of the human species, and it is not the embodiment of a harmony from which humans deviate, but it is rather a rupture with itself. Nature as such is an embodiment of the death drive.

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THOUGHT OF HÉLIO PELLEGRINO (1924-1988): INITIAL REFLECTIONS

"This theoretical study is part of a doctoral thesis and aims to investigate how the psychoanalytic thinking of Hélio Pellegrino - the Brazilian psychoanalyst, poet and writer - is structured and its ethical and political implications in the formation of psychoanalysis. We note the importance of thematic research, since there is no scientific publication that has as its object of study a systematic analysis of the author's psychoanalytic production. Furthermore, investigations of this kind contribute to the establishment of a reference bibliography on psychoanalysis in Brazil. That said, this research was developed and completed through a study of a large part of his psychoanalytic production, which is under the custody of the personal archives of the Museum of Brazilian Literature, at the Casa Rui Barbosa Foundation (FCRB). In this work, we outline some elements of the analysis found in his work, whose focus is on reflecting on the epistemological, conceptual and practical foundations of psychoanalytic theory. It has, as a constant concern, the analysis of the problems that structure Brazilian society, observed through his own reading of the Oedipus complex, the constitution of subjectivity and the social pact, in general, and in Brazil, in particular. As such, he discusses the explicit commitment of psychoanalysis in transforming the serious social problems faced by Brazil, which are related to the serious structural problems of international capitalism, and which are also reflected in the problems of the development of psychoanalytic institutions around the world."

Large-group psychology and political conflicts: an introduction to the psychosocial work of Vamik Volkan

Professor Volkan responds to questions about the emergence and development of his work as a psychoanalytic consultant and mediator in inter- and intra-national conflict situations. He outlines the circumstances of its beginnings at the University of Virginia and its subsequent growth including the development of interventions based on the ‘Tree Model’. He emphasises the centrality to this informal diplomatic work of the concept of large-group identity, and refers to some of the elaborations of this, for example in the influential concepts of chosen trauma and chosen triumph. He discusses the relationship of this non-clinical application of psychoanalytic ideas to the clinically-based schools of psychoanalytic thought, considers the conditions which lend themselves to effective interventions, and the possibility for improved management of political conflicts.

Infanticide and the influence of psychoanalysis on Dutch forensic psychiatry in the mid-twentieth century

This article demonstrates how psychoanalytic thought, especially ideas by Adler, Reik, Deutsch, and Alexander and Staub, informed forensic psychiatry in the Netherlands from the late 1920s. An analysis of psychiatric explanations of the crime of infanticide shows how in these cases the focus of (forensic) medicine and psychiatry shifted from somatic medicine to a psychoanalytic emphasis on unconscious motives. A psychoanalytic vocabulary can also be found in the reports written by forensic psychiatrists and psychologists in court cases in the 1950s. The new psychoanalytic emphasis on unconscious motives implied a stronger focus on the personality of the suspect. This article argues that psychoanalysis accelerated this development in the mid-twentieth century, contributing to the role of the psy-sciences in normalization processes.

Wrestling with the Inner Demons of Contemporary Life: A Brief Overview of Psychoanalytic Thought

We begin our examination of Enlightened Leadership by exploring a number of Psychoanalytically based theories, in particular with regard to what they have to teach us about the human condition. Thus, we briefly examine some of the key concepts and ideas of Melanie Klein, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Eric Berne, and John Bowlby. One of the major benefits is that they illuminate important aspects of the Coronavirus that are difficult to ascertain otherwise. For one, each provides a different take on the enormous stress we are experiencing as a result of the Virus. They also reinforce the absolute necessity of following the dictates of reputable scientific experts and science itself if we are to stand any hope at all in dealing with the Virus.

Foucault On Psychoanalysis: Missed Encounter or Gordian Knot?

Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contra-dictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely criti-cal of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the sec-ondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Fou-cault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Fou-cault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, partic-ularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly ex-clusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights.