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doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257580pmid: N/A
Extending psychoanalysis-drama comparisons proffered by prior theorists, Dr. Karbelnig introduces the novel concept of the psychoanalytic denouement. He differentiates these from Aristotle’s concepts of anagnorisis and peripeteia, and he compares them to phenomenon like Satori from Zen Buddhism or the “Aha” moment from the contemporary lexicon. Transcripts from three consecutive sessions (completely anonymized) demonstrate psychoanalytic denouements. Two sessions show clear psychoanalytic denouements; one, featuring an overtly psychotic patient, reveals intense emotional expression and cognitive insight but no psychoanalytic denouement. These clinical samples illustrate how theatrical metaphors incorporate phenomenological and theoretical perspectives, allow for micro- or macroscopic studies of psychoanalytic encounters, and confirm their inimitable nature. Dr. Karbelnig concludes by noting these analogies to drama helpfully expand extant metapsychology but, like all theories of mind, necessarily fall short.
Civitarese, Giuseppe; Boffito, Sara
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257581pmid: N/A
The article explores the metaphor of the “Greek chorus” as an image of the position of the analyst who, in the analytic field model, reverberates and returns the emotional content, sometimes slightly modified, so that the patient can listen to his or her own voice and enact a movement of transformation. That of the chorus, a voice made up of several voices, is also an antimoralistic, non-superegoic position, in which the analyst recognizes that he/she can accommodate the most diverse perspectives, emotions, and thus emotional truths that belong to the human. The authors show the relationship of their model to tragedy and, through clinical vignettes of both adults and children, they illustrate the technique of the analytic field in the light of this metaphor. The chorus corresponds to the we, to the overcoming of the I/you split made possible by interpretation. The analyst’s interventions give voice the chorus he/she creates together with the patient.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257582pmid: N/A
Beginning with a fantasy interview with Donald Winnicott and William Shakespeare – one in which Winnicott espouses the essential nature of play in psychoanalysis – he then joins Shakespeare in finding a promising set of ideas for psychoanalytic play. These ideas arise out of Shakespeare’s theatrical, play-full world of drama and narrative. Both these sets of ideas then build upon an epistemology based on an information theory of change in psychoanalytic therapy – one which asserts that change is a constant in every living system, and therefore the field of every session of therapy. Thus, in every developing psychotherapy, there becomes an emerging, often unknown “architecture” involving what is ceaselessly changing. This quality of change preserves some basis of order in any treatment (e.g. 1st Order Change). In effect, it is responsible for “keeping the system the ‘same.’” 1st Order Change involves the often unwitting “premises” upon which aspects of both the treatment narrative and drama are organized. It contrasts to a different kind of change (2nd Order Change) which radically changes some of the organizing assumptions (“premises”) of the therapy. 2nd Order Change typically emerges in an unwitting, unpredictable manner, catching both analytic participants by surprise. In other articles over the past two decades, the author has described this in terms of theory about improvisation. Optimizing the creative genius of such moments of play, requires that therapists immerse themselves in the field, in a non-presumptive “bottom-up” phenomenological experiential manner in contrast to the historical “top-down” “prejudices” that the history of theory and practice – within psychoanalysis and from without – often dictate, in terms of what becomes searched for and interpreted. Two case illustrations examine what can emerge when unwitting, unpredictable, preconscious moments of improvising emerge, with unpredictable aspects in entities such as character, narrative, script and so forth. This broad coalescence of ideas leads to the creation of moments of the “heretofore unimaginable” rather than what seems more like the expectable and predictable 1st Order Change world orders most treatments.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2258060pmid: N/A
Drawing on my work as an actor, I make a case for the importance of a dialogue between actors and analysts about the aspect of an actor’s creative process I experience as listening a character into being. It’s my contention that, since actors and analysts both extend an invitation through our listening, there is vast territory the two professions share in common with far-reaching implications.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257583pmid: N/A
As both a therapist and an actor, O’Connell proposes that: 1) The artforms of acting and psychotherapy share the same core goal: to invite another person to embody a range of their humanity; and 2) Both artforms rely on the same core action to realize that goal – to listen. By listening to clients the way actors listen to their scene partners, O’Connell suggests that clinicians can maximize how we use our most essential instrument for therapeutic engagement: ourselves – particularly in terms of our implicit/nonverbal communication, or “subtext.” He emphasizes that listening like an actor is always the key to performing the art of therapy, no matter what “kind” of therapist we are, and no matter how our “scene work” takes place, (e.g. on “stage” or screen). Anecdotes from both therapy and acting are used to illustrate his ideas.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257584pmid: N/A
Drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and my work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, I look to some commonalities in the ways dramatists and psychoanalysts generate meaning through action and interactions. These ways include an attention to the interweave of text and subtext, a sense of rhythm and timing, an inquisitive stance and an interest in reversals and the recognition that follows.
Federici, Susanna; Nebbiosi, Gianni
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257588pmid: N/A
In this article we emphasize that Greek tragedy, surprisingly, can prove to be close to current psychoanalytic practice in exploring the paradoxical dimension of subjectivity. The interweaving of explicit/implicit communication and unconscious dimension in psychoanalytic work gives rise to emergent moments of meaning. Tragedy and psychoanalysis find their value in always striving for truth, at times grasping it, only to lose it and to have to co-construct it all over again. In the figure/background articulation of the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable, it is important to consider words not as labels fixed to define qualities and phenomena, but as living processes that go through exciting twists and turns. The words of therapy are spoken words and are part of a communicative flow that takes place in the interweaving of multiple implicit and explicit channels involving all the senses: voice quality, rhythm, sound, gaze, emotionally activated body. We have been interested in rhythm in the clinical exchange and we have delved into the study of imitation as the primary vehicle of implicit relational knowing and the transmission of pragmatic knowledge embodying ways of being in the world at very deep and procedural levels. A short vignette and a clinical case illustrate how the tool of mimesis proves useful in activating and improving our clinical sensitivity.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257586pmid: N/A
The author revisits his previous papers on dramatology published in 2009, 2011, and 2015, adding the results of new research. The additions are ideas about dramatic action by philosophers William James and John Dewey and literary theorist Kenneth Burke. There is a new discussion of the relation between dramatology and narratology. The approach is a retrospective application of dramatization to Freud’s method in analyzing the famous cases of Dora and Schreber. A new finding is dramatization in DSM-5 diagnoses. Another new interest is applying dramatology to Freud’s mass psychology and world-wide events as dramas of history.
doi: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2257585pmid: N/A
This paper challenges the strictures in psychoanalysis that seem to decry creativity. Sanford Meisner, a renowned theater teacher, trained actors to perform the same script night after night with an unpredictable sense of freshness. This complex accomplishment was achieved through improvisation. These improvisations relied on imagination and creativity. Meisner’s approach afforded intense, affective engagement between two or more actors. The script created the context for interaction, while improvisation created the affective engagement that was unpredictably different with each performance. The case of Roberto demonstrates how Meisner improvisations afforded a creative entry into Roberto’s feelings of detached isolation. Through these improvisations, impasses in the treatment were transformed. New dimensions in the analyst/patient connection unfolded, and new understanding of the source of the patient’s protracted, detached, isolated, depressed states emerged. Roberto’s discovering new-found satisfaction not only with his analyst but in all relationships supports the value of improvisation as a creative contribution to psychoanalysis.
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