WINTER 2024
Freud’s Rat Man and the Meaning of the Rat Torture, John Barresi
Abstract: Freud’s 1909 case of obsessional neurosis of a patient called the Rat Man is unique in being the only case for which he saved his process notes. Because these notes provide data with which we can both evaluate Freud’s account in his case report and generate alternative, possibly better, accounts, it is one of the best ways to evaluate Freud’s analytical techniques and the historical constructions reported in his case studies. I provide a novel interpretation of the ‘rat torture,’ the signature obsession in this case. Freud provided an elaborate account of the meaning of why the patient feared that this punishment would be given to his lady love and dead father. I give a more straightforward explanation in proposing that the patient’s father engaged in anal sexual abuse with his children and provide evidence for this hypothesis from the process notes. I evaluate both Freud’s and the present interpretation with respect to Freud’s changing view of the bases for neurosis from the sexual seduction theory to the fantasy theory and more recent work on child sexual abuse as an essential contributor to psychopathology.
Keywords: Freud, Rat Man, incest, sexual seduction theory, childhood sexual abuse (CSA), personology, Freud’s case studies, single case studies
Authoritarian Sadism in U.S. “Foreign Policy”, Willia C. Manson
ABSTRACT: Supreme political ambition has frequently been motivated by a single-minded quest to attain “power-over,” which in itself may compensate for deep-rooted feelings of insecurity and humiliation. Authoritarian domination serves the grandiose, retaliatory narcissism of such powerful “leaders,” who subjectively experience sadistic satisfaction in destroying, and/or forcing into submission, “enemies” with little power to resist. In this paper, such latent motivations in the “foreign policy” of three recent leaders are examined.
Applied Psychohistorical Organizational Analysis, Seth Allcorn & Howard F. Stein
ABSTRACT: This article proposes that organization is a fundamental element of groups and societies and may be best understood by using psychohistorical organizational analysis. Western social science and popular thought has limited organization to discussions of urbanization, industrialization, and corporations. We, however, cast our organization net far wider to encompass all forms of cooperatively organized human activities ranging from family groups and preliterate hunter-gatherer bands to contemporary complex public and private organizations and societies. This broader perspective suggests that psychohistorical analysis can contribute to better understanding of all organizational dynamics. We will explain how psychohistory can be adapted to organizational analysis. Several brief organizational examples and one longitudinal forty-year organizational example are provided to ground the discussion of theory in practice. We conclude that non-traditional psychohistorical institutions, transgenerational trauma, and contributions from anthropology, must also be considered to be a part of psychohistorical inquiry.
Key Words: organizations, organizational analysis, social unit, local, psychohistory, anthropology, trauma, Zuni, Lakota, corporations, nations, international relations, longitudinal time
Estranged From Oneself: Negation Trauma, Unrepresented States, and a Fiction Shaped by the Setting, Rose Gupta
Abstract: In this paper, I inquire about the phenomena of negating interpersonal narratives that pass for reality but are not reality based, and that result in a distorted intrapsychic fiction about oneself and others. What I propose to contribute to contemporary trauma theory, is that the negating other in the social surround is internalized as an uninscribed, unsymbolized object because it has yet to be thought. It often masquerades as a paradoxically good object — obfuscating its annihilating intention — so that it is not recognized by the sufferer but is felt.
Approached from a synergistic, intersubjective psychoanalytic model, the focus is within the subject-to-subject encounter where we can locate the origins of the personal and the political in the unconscious minds of the participants. The clinical case presented highlights issues of forced migration, transgenerational trauma, and untreated mental illness “behind closed doors.” Opening the mental doors makes it possible for patients to name the source of their pain and begin the task of grieving the loss of a complex, fictional narrative and claim a reality-based view of oneself and others.
Book Review Essay
The Long Voyage Home of Bee Miles, Robert Kaplan
Bee Miles: Australia’s Famous Bohemian Rebel, and the Untold Story Behind the Legend, Rose Ellis, 2023
James Joyce chose Dublin – the ‘dead centre of paralysis’ – as the setting for his epic novel Ulysses because it was a small city on the edge of Europe where everybody knew each other. Homer wrote of the 17-year travels of Odysseus to return home to Penelope, having many adventures along the way; in Joyce’s version Leopold Bloom, grieving the ghost of his mother, wanders around the city over 18 hours in a single day (16 June 1904), encountering a range of characters, including his father, before returning home to Molly Bloom.
Now, consider Sydney in the middle decades of the twentieth century: a small city on the far side of the world, timidly shaking off its colonial origins, conservative in outlook and somewhat fearful of anyone who would challenge the status quo: an antipodean analogy of Joyce’s Dublin. In this city a female version of Leopold Bloom, day after day, week after week, year after year, she follows a path around the city, mixing with many while always fighting off her enemies. Through all of this looms the figure of her ferocious father, if not in presence, then as a ghost….Her name was Bee Miles.
PSYCHOHISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: POETRY
Predatory Darkness, Howard F. Stein
Teaching and Learning in the Widening Gyre, Howard F. Stein
The Patient Teacher, Howard F. Stein
Lunch Accompaniment, Senior Center, Howard F. Stein