IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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in favor of urge towards intersubjectvitiy or intersubjective orientation as an irreducible force within human mind; b. from the clinical perspective, the intersubjectivity presents a new two- person model for clinical technique centering on the intersubjective field as an intersection of two subjectivities – that of the patient and that of the analyst; c. and from the social-political perspective, unique to the complicated history of the previous exclusionary policies of psychoanalytic establishment in the USA, whereby the previously excluded group of non- medical analysts were now not only included, but frequently front and center of these multifaceted changes. Some of the complex intertwining developments leading up to the above paradigmatic changes are outlined below. In the US, classical psychoanalysis with its theoretical emphasis on the dynamic unconscious, repression/resistance and infantile sexuality, as defined by Freud (first in Brill’s English translation), took hold since the 1920’s and 1930’s, and in subsequent decades it came to be the dominant influence in trainings of psychiatrists throughout the country. Most of the psychoanalytic institutes at the time had trained only physicians, which, together with the subsequent elegantly scientific English translation by Strachey sometimes contributed to mechanistic application of clinical technique, leading to accentuated asymmetry of a medical/surgical model of the physician/authority/ all knowing expert, and the patient/ unknowing sufferer, strict impersonal adherence to technical requirements of ‘sanitized’ neutrality, evenly hovering attention, and close monitoring of the patient’s free associations followed by long periods of silence until the associations provided the analyst with enough material to give a sometimes impersonal experience-distant interpretation of pertinent unconscious determinants. From late 1930’s, Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein and others (Hartnann, 1939; Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein, 1946) instituted substantive expansion to Freudian metapsychology under the rubric of Ego psychology, gradually adding genetic, developmental and adaptive consideration to the existing dynamic, structural and economic theories (Rapaport and Gill. 1959, Freud, A. 1936/1965). In their developmental theory, the unconscious emerges through an undifferentiated matrix that yields the potential for future ego development and functions. In their theory of adaptation, which posits an ‘average expectable environment’, ego development is mediated by relationships as identifications become the major ego function . In the analytic work, there is a growing emphasis on the unconscious processes within the ego, e.g. defenses. Emerging here is the increasing significance of experiences with people in the child’s environment . With this development, growing importance is being given to new sources of unconscious contributions to transference (and countertransference) activity. Considering mounting influence from Budapest ( Sandor Ferenczi, Michael Balint ) and later from the British Middle School analysts ( Donald Winnicott ) and the early Kleinians ( Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann ), contemporaries of Hartmann continued the object relations’ discussion by giving greater depth to the conscious and unconscious aspects of very early developmental periods. Edith Jacobson (1964) investigated the self and object representational worlds, and

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