This book shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. The book, building on anthropological theories, draws examples of ritual attitudes from a variety of cultural settings, including original comparisons of Chinese and Jewish discussions of ritual and its importance. The book utilizes psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives on how ritual, like play, creates “as if” worlds, drawing upon the imaginative capacity of the human mind to create a subjunctive universe. This ability to cross between imagined worlds is central to the human capacity for empathy. The limits of this capacity mark the boundaries of empathy. The chapters juxtapose this ritual orientation to a “sincere” search for unity and wholeness. The sincere world sees fragmentation and incoherence as signs of inauthenticity that must be overcome. Our modern world has accepted the sincere viewpoint, at the expense of ritual, to a degree rarely seen in other times. It has often dismissed ritual as mere convention. The chapters point to the modern disavowal of ritual in the creation of fundamentalist movements as well as other extremist positions. Portions of the book take up questions of music, architecture, and literature, which also show the tensions between ritual and sincerity. The book shows that ritual, at least in its relationship to the rest of experience, is never totally coherent and never complete. Ritual is work, endless work. But it is among the most important things that we humans do.
This chapter turns directly to the tension between sincerity and ritual. Sincerity often appears as a reaction against the perceived hypocrisy of ritual; these reactions in turn tend to ritualize over time. Sincerity offers the world “as is” instead of ritual's “as if”, a world of discursive meanings and unique selves instead of repeated acts and fragmented worlds. Modernity has brought an especially powerful turn toward sincerity. One crucial implication has been a utopian search for wholeness as part of a general dissolution of social boundaries in principle, even as people constantly reassert them in fact. It is suggested that phenomena like “fundamentalism” are more usefully understood in relation to this dynamic than the more usual claim that they are returns to tradition.
This paper is intended as a contribution to the understanding of errors in our field. The title refers to the index entries "incest" in several classic psychoanalytic texts. In a way that is analogous to the defenses utilized by survivors of incest, psychoanalysis has both known and not known, avowed and disavowed, the traumatic impact of actual incest. It is argued that psychoanalysis erred in (a) focusing too heavily on the implications of incest for the Oedipus complex instead of its implications for every stage of development, and (b) missing out on the full and detailed description of the clinical pictures of incest victims and of treatment issues, including transference and countertransference. The author presents an overview of the history prompted by Masson's original attack on Freud for abandoning the "seduction hypothesis." Topics covered are: Freud's early papers, the Freud-Ferenczi controversy (1932), and the state of psychoanalytic awareness in the 1960's of the importance of actual incest. Certain features of our field make it all too likely that new errors can be generated that may similarly take decades to recognize and undo. These include the politics of our discipline, and negative attitudes toward systematic gathering and assessment of evidence.
Current controversies about the centrality of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis are difficult to resolve unless we address three obstacles in the way of rational examination. The first is that the Oedipus complex, Freud's "shibboleth" of psychoanalysis, is politically controversial. Second is the great difficulty in agreeing upon the definition and boundaries of the Oedipus complex, especially the necessary complexities introduced with the negative Oedipus complex, female sexuality, the nature of the preoedipal, and counteroedipal fantasies and actions. The third obstacle involves basic questions of psychoanalytic epistemology: our criteria for evidence to prove or disprove any particular proposition. I conclude that the awareness of these difficulties signifies a certain maturation in our thinking and that the complexity introduced by these obstacles can in time provide the groundwork for a set of formulations that is richer and closer to the complexities and ambiguities of the clinical situation.
Several years ago, each of the authors experienced the death of a close family member. In the months after our return to work, we found ourselves discussing with each other our losses, the process of mourning, our families, and gradually, our patients. We became aware that we both were struggling privately with the problem of being a therapist in the wake of a deep personal loss. We began to discuss our cases in greater detail with each other, reviewed the literature pertinent to upheaval in the lives of therapists, and spoke with colleagues who had also experienced the death of a loved one. This paper explores the problems and opportunities that may arise in this common clinical situation. Our principal finding is that the interaction between patient and therapist often repeats an earlier trauma for the patient in which the therapist unwittingly reenacts a pathogenic parental response. The therapist should be sensitive to this possibility and attempt to deal with the problem interpretively. Rather than focusing on whether or not to reveal his or her loss to the patient, the therapist should address the broader issue of the meaning that revealing or not revealing will have for the patient. Overall, we hope to further the dialogue about the impact of a therapist's loss on the patient.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.