The “Oceanic Feeling” and Confrontation with Death

Freud’s explanation of Rolland’s “oceanic feeling” is reconsidered in the light of similar phenomena that occur in the face of impending death, such as the experiences described by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, and the aesthetic and transformational experiences described by Christopher Bollas. These phenomena are included in what Karl Jaspers calls “ciphers.” Other examples are presented to indicate the need to consider such phenomena in human psychology, phenomena that have been neglected in psychoanalysis due to the profound but arbitrary influence of Freud’s analysis of the “oceanic feeling,” an analysis based on the outmoded rigid assumptions of classical nineteenth-century science.

A poética do luto: reflexão a partir do conceito de objeto transformacional

Partindo do conceito de objeto transformacional formulado por Christopher Bollas, discutimos o potencial transformador dos encontros estéticos. Apresentamos algumas reflexões sobre uma experiência clínica vivida com uma paciente atravessando um luto, e destacamos a marcante habilidade dela em se utilizar de músicas, imagens e metáforas para dizer de sua experiência emocional. A partir desta experiência clínica temos por objetivo, neste artigo, refletir a respeito da potência transformacional dos objetos estéticos no contexto analítico, que parecem ter um papel importante no processo de elaboração do luto desta paciente. Por fim, fazemos alguns apontamentos sobre a importância do encontro analítico, na relação de transferência-contratransferência, para o potencial de transformação dos encontros estéticos vividos nas sessões de análise.

“The Dialogue of the Mind with Itself”

There is a strain of Freudians whose existence continues to go unrec-ognized by the intellectual public and unacknowledged by the members themselves. Of these, only Stanley Cavell was unaccredited as a psychoanalyst, but he, along with Adam Phillips, Christopher Bollas, and Jonathan Lear have reached similar conclusions, using comparable means, at roughly the same time, in a context as much literary as psychoanalytic. Freud himself described the mind in literary (which is to say, dramatic) terms, but whereas he understood the human psychic drama as Oedipal and thus tragic, these four revisionists have shown that the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements of the mind can be comical and thus benign. The sorts of ambivalence, conflictedness, or multi-mindedness that Freud described as departures from a normative singlemindedness, Cavell and company have redescribed as achievements of maturity and as a means of enlarging the self. Moreover, they all look to literature for figures that connect us to our preverbal selves and help to stimulate self-transformation. Artists—from Sophocles to Emerson, Melville, and (in the Cavellian reading of him) Freud—teach invaluable lessons not only about how our minds work but also about how to invent our own idioms and even our own worlds. And “the dialogue of the mind with itself” that Matthew Arnold assessed as the characteristic modern disease, these most sophisticated of postmodern revisionists redescribe as normative and democratic.

Coda

This chapter discusses how much Victorian fiction and British psychoanalysis together teaches about relationality. It explains loneliness, wishfulness, restlessness, and aliveness as profoundly solitary emotions. Relational readings reveal that people are never more intensely related to other than when these emotions are felt. Although novel reading is a solitary activity, the chapter shows how intensely, if paradoxically, people are related to others while they read: to narrators, authors, characters, and other readers, and also to themselves, in the new forms of self-relation evolved by Victorian novels and consolidated by British object relations psychoanalysis. The chapter also talks about the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas who has invented a new term to designate the opposite of trauma: “genera.” The psychic genera, in Bollas's theory, sponsors a very different kind of unconscious work. Rather than an open wound, it is a site of psychic incubation, an inner place to gather resources so that one may turn outward, to “novel experiences” that bring the self into renewing contact with ideational and affective states, often within an enriching interpersonal environment.

Re-visioning creativity in couple psychoanalysis: the importance of Winnicott and Bollas in clinical practice

This article suggests that the work of Donald Winnicott and Christopher Bollas is essential in helping us re-vision the current dominant Kleinian and post-Kleinian model of contemporary couple psychoanalysis. It shows how their different understanding of the nature of creativity draws upon different conceptions of the creative couple and upon a radically different understanding of the relationship between the self and the unconscious. It suggests that their thinking on creativity and the unconscious is useful in our work with couples. It goes on to focus on the clinical and technical implications of these ideas in five areas: gesture; repetition; compliance; mood and emotional atmosphere; and the use of objects.