32 research outputs found
Psychoanalysis, Reparation, and Historical Memory
This paper presents a psychoanalytic view of the tensions in assimilating a largely disowned past into a convergent contemporary social memory. It is based on the idea that remembering is making good a relationship to the past, akin to the Kleinian concept of reparation to a good internal object. By contrast, falsely remembering, or remembering by controlling unwanted memories, is a form of manic reparation that denigrates a good internal object. Reparation is based on concern for damage to the other, while manic reparation is based on narcissistic aggrandizement and contempt for the other. Symbols of reparation, such as memorials, gather conflicting groups around them as enclaves of conflicting memories. As sites of ambivalence, they represent both reparative and manicreparative intentions, as well as intellectual, emotional, and political conflict. Focusing on memorials, the essay addresses the problem of remembering and repairing through an analysis of ambivalence in German memory of the Nazi period after the Second World War. It aligns reparation with introjective identification and manic reparation with projective identification, clarifying and illustrating these concepts as part of the understanding of ambivalent remembering
Epistemological or Disciplinary Differences in Psycho-Social Studies: A Reply toStephen Frosh
A psychoanalytic reflection on collective memory as a psychosocial enclave: Jews, German national identity, and splitting in the German psyche
The Dread of Sameness: Social Hatred and Freud’s ‘Narcissism of Minor Differences’
The financial crisis: a psychoanalytic view of illusion, greed and reparation in masculine phantasy
The recent financial crisis has shaken the financial system and affected everyone's economic well-being. It has also shaken the framework of stability and trust in rational, ordered management, and injected an anxiety that irrationality is closer than we thought but that no-one really understands it. This essay argues that the financial crisis offers a way to look at a feature of masculinity that is a grounding assumption of both culture and the economy. Through exploring the crisis as a masculine collapse, we can simultaneously bring the nature of masculinity into clearer focus. In particular, I argue that our conscious sense of masculinity is only one pole of a duality - in psychoanalytic terms, it is phallic masculinity, which is based on an illusion of competitive superiority. Viewed as a manifestation of the unconscious, it can be seen as a defence against what I call seminal masculinity, which is based on the procreation, sustenance and restoration of life. I associate phallic masculinity with Klein's 'paranoid-schizoid position' and seminal masculinity with her 'depressive position'. This historic event ramifies into other areas, including environmentalism, trust and deception in politics. The paper focuses on illusion and illusory models that underwrite a sense of rationality, and the sense that a good economy that sustains life has been contaminated by 'toxic assets'
Phallic and seminal masculinity: A theoretical and clinical confusion
Both inside and outside psychoanalysis, the word, 'seminal', is used to praise a creative contribution to science and culture. Rarely, however, does it refer to male procreativity, to the structures and functions that subserve it or to the anxiety related to a threat to it. This situation becomes evident in the concept of castration anxiety, which typically refers, with Freud, to cutting off the penis and not to extirpating the testicles. This phallic theory has been debated, repudiated and ignored. While there is an alternative literature on non-phallic masculinity, it is scattered and rarely refers to seminal function. Freud's theory meets his requirement for a well-articulated representation of absolute loss as an experience, but this clear structure - and its repudiation - obscure the observation and theory of the internal world of the male. I propose the concepts of 'seminal masculinity' and 'seminal castration', which I ground in Melanie Klein's concept of depressive anxiety. I contrast them with phallic masculinity and phallic castration anxiety, which I ground in her concept of paranoid-schizoid anxiety. I argue that they meet Freud's requirement that castration be a potential experience and that understanding masculinity demands such a basis. © 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis Published by Blackwell Publishing