Beyond Pluralism: Psychoanalysis and The Workings of Mind

Abstract

Subjects that Freud excluded or incompletely explored have been sites of theoretical expansion in over a century of observation: the role of the other, the self, the preoedipal period, action, the countertransference, limits to neutrality/anonymity/abstinence, the loci of the analytic drama, effects beyond interpretation, agency, and basic needs (versus wishes). These developments have led to conflicting theories and sect-like groupings within the field. Group psychological processes underlying this are discussed; and a broad and inclusive view of psychoanalysis is proposed under the heading of the study of the workings of mind. Additionally, substantial integrative proposals are offered with respect to the central tasks of individual development, theories of mind, the relational turn, and aspects of technique.

A Personal Odyssey Through Psychoanalytic Process and Presence

“…These changes include the effort to foster change in the patient by working "psychotherapeutically" alongside my working in an exploratory "psychoanalyzing" way; respecting and giving space to the powerful effects of the relationship-in-itself in contributing to the patient's development; and working in close-up, experience-near ways that stay very close to the patient's language and capacity for awareness. This is all in addition to my expanded understanding of the significant developmental stages, issues of mind, and the sites of technical intervention that I have described elsewhere (Pine 2011). Further, they all bear upon my personal odyssey in regard to both psychoanalytic process (my understanding of how the process works) and psychoanalytic presence (an awareness of who I am in the office and its effects on the process).…”

The Analyst’s Way of Being: Recognizing Separable Subjectivities and The Pendulum’s Swing

“…Current trends that overemphasize the two-person psychological perspective contribute to our forgetting that we all bring our own psychologies-our separable subjectivities-to the consulting room, independent of the analytic third that is constituted once the process gets underway. Diamond (2014) refers to these trends as a rational turn, which some see as tantamount to a radical paradigmatic shift (Fabozzi 2012;Pine 2011).…”

Analytic Mind Use and Interpsychic Communication: Driving Force in Analytic Technique, Pathway to Unconscious Mental Life

“…The relational turn, with its use of the wider concept of countertransference, recently regarded as a paradigmatic change and radical, albeit silent revolution (Fabozzi 2012;Pine 2011; see also Aguayo 2011), shifted the focus from the individual's intrapsychic life to the interpsychic drama taking place between patient and analyst in a "spontaneous, preconscious way of functioning" (Schmidt-Hellerau 2012, p. 449, italics in original). Discovering the patient's intrapsychic world through the analyst's looking inward was initiated by the landmark works of Heimann (1950), Racker (1953), Grinberg (1962), and Bion (1962aBion ( , 1962b and subsequently elaborated by many others (e.g., Baranger, Baranger, and Mom 1983;Bollas 1983;Bolognini 2004Bolognini , 2008Botella and Botella 2005;Civitarese 2013;Ferro 2008;Ferro and Basile 2009;Gill 1982;Jacobs 1997;Ogden 1994;Stolorow 1988).…”

“…This turn-though not a paradigm change, from my standpointhelps us recognize a long underdeveloped investigative tool in what might be considered a seventh pathway or royal road (Freud 1900) that evolved chronologically and operates in every analysis as a "road to a knowledge of the [patient's] unconscious activities of the mind" (p. 608). Hence, mind use in the interpsychic field stands alongside the dream, the transference, play (in child analysis), present life, remembered and reconstructed past, and countertransference itself (Pine 2011).…”

“…[to] give our patients fuller pictures of themselves" (p. 1042). Today the interpsychic, largely here-andnow stage taking place in the process between patient and analyst, and partially induced by the patient through mood, voice, tempo, movement, action language, and nonverbal behavior-in contrast to the content of the patient's dreams, free associations, and transference-countertransference phenomena-has increasingly become a key venue for discovering the patient's intrapsychic world by means of the analyst looking within (Pine 2011; see also Busch 2009).…”