The author reassesses castration anxiety in men in light of advances in psychoanalytic theory. Castration anxiety arises when any crucial part of mature psychic life is threatened. As in women, oedipal-level and adult male psychic functioning contains powers rooted in the body-mind that are distinct from those we designate as phallic. The author struggles for a comparable word to represent devalued aspects of higher-level development that are primary, "feminine," essential for psychic mastery, and threatened by loss, i.e., by castration. Defining this aspect of mental life is difficult, but it includes receptivity, groundedness, connectedness to self and others, and tolerance of ambiguity. Without access to this interior and more ambiguous continent, a man is castrated, less than whole. Clinical examples are provided.
The authors believe that important aspects of a psychoanalyst's development can only be accomplished after the completion of training, that potential resistances to learning are not uncommon, and that the first five to ten postgraduate years are critical. A crucial acquisition of this developmental educational phase is a "theoretical identity," a personal theoretical synthesis which requires working through incompletely resolved transferences to Freud, to personal mentors and institutes, and to theory itself. The authors use the example of their own working through experiences while participating in a postgraduate Freud study group and show how a concurrent deepening of their theoretical identities contributed to their maturation as analysts and analytic teachers.
Many patients seen today use sophisticated capacities for psychological reflection and premature synthesis to ward off knowledge of more primitive conflict and islands of unintegration. They show a precocious talent for free association, a talent they perversely misuse. Similarly, they enjoy access to a rich fantasy life, even as they subtly impoverish it. Effective therapeutic work requires that they suffer "traumatization"--experiences of dedifferentiation that undermine their considerable capacity to know what they feel and think. Structural and process variables interact with content variables in complex and ambiguous ways. As a consequence, estimates of the authenticity and "fit" of personal and interpersonal experiences and behaviors of both partners in the therapeutic encounter become necessarily involved. Such factors may increase the possibility of misunderstandings, but also of more authentic and firmly grounded understandings. Similar issues are eventually revealed in these patients' early lives, where psychological and other formulaic understandings were prematurely applied to offset overwhelmedness and other unarticulable experiences; the patient's talents for ambiguity, irony, self-soothing, or responsiveness to others were, in effect, exploited at the expense of full psychological growth. Versions of this clinical presentation may be increasingly common in a new generation of analyzable patients. Clinical work with them is facilitated by a synthesis of contemporary developmental, structural, and object relations theory.
Versions of the following papers were presented at the panel "Psychoanalytic Classics Revisited: Hans Loewald's "On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis' " (Gerald I. Fogel, chair) at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, December 1993. As a tribute to Loewald's lifetime of achievement, and in belated recognition of his preeminent position in the field of psychoanalysis, the exchange appears here almost in its entirety, rather than as a conventional panel report.
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