Scientific Papers

The following documents are saved as Adobe PDF files. To view and print PDF documents, you will need to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded for free through Adobe's web site.

Daniel Paul, Ph.D. The Psychoanalysis Of Dissociative States, The Sense of Safety and Self Blame in Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse
Adequate understanding of dissociation requires appreciating its function as a resistance. Victims of childhood sexual abuse alternately acknowledge the trauma and then flee from it in treatment. Interpreting the motive for resistance promotes integration. If one reifies the existence of a separate personality when addressing dissociated ego states, one promotes fragmentation. Common motives for resistance include, fear of over stimulation and ego dissolution and shame and self hatred. The victim blames herself for having participated in the act and doesn't realize that she was trapped and without other alternatives. Interpreting these motivations diminish the need to dissociate.

Harriet Kimble Wrye, Ph.D. Erotic Terror: Male Patients' Horror of the Early Maternal Erotic Transference
The maternal erotic transference (MET) manifests itself as pleasurable and painful sensory, body-oriented transferences deriving from past relationships with exciting but frustrating objects. Male patients are particularly threatened by the primal inchoate feelings acccompanying maternal erotic transferences, as regressive pulls toward symbiosis and early mother-baby boundary diffusion threaten core gender identity. Male patients with weakened egos and insecure masculine identity ward off the maternal erotic transference out of erotic terror and fear of psychic annihilation which occur in direct proportion to the intensity of frustration or overstimulation of pre-oedipal desires for maternal contact.

Michael Diamond, Ph.D. Fathers and Sons: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on "Good Enough" Fathering Throughout The Life Cycle
This paper, stemming from the work of contemporary adult developmentalists, examines the nature of fathering and its functions within the father-son relationship. A perspective is offered on those aspects of male development requiring paternal influence. Emphasis is placed on the father as a real person and internalized presence, enabling the formation of a sufficiently differentiated, caring paternal imago on which their sons can draw throughout the life cycle. A schema based upon observational research, interviewing, and clinical analytic findings is proposed, giving prominence to the need for, and contributions made by, fathers as containers, protectors, facilitators, models, challengers, initiators and mentors. Twelve phase specific tasks, and the accompanying representations of the "good enough" father throughout the duration of the father-son relationship, are discussed. Examples from literature, mythology, film, and analytic treatment illustrate the impact of fatherly provisions and deprivation on their sons' development.

Peter Wolson, Ph.D. The Vital Role Of Adaptive Grandiosity In Artistic Creativity
The artist needs adaptive grandiosity in order to create. Adaptive grandiosity is an ego-state which derives from primary narcissism and a partial resolution of the positive Oedipus complex, with the ego-ideal merged with the ego. It functions as a manic defense to overcome the artist's annihilation anxiety when confronting the blank canvas or other aspects of creativity which unconsciously represent separation from the maternal introject. Because of its fragile, defensive nature, adaptive grandiosity can readily degenerate into maladaptive grandiosity (omnipotence), which can block creativity. Clinical examples are used to illustrate the differences between adaptive grandiosity and omnipotence.

Jean B. Sannville, Ph.D. Meaning Making and Play in Infancy
If creativity is the capacity or activity of making something new, original or inventive, no matter in what field, then psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapies at best facilitate creativity in the arena of emending patients' formerly held schemas, no longer felt to be good-enough.

Lynda Share, Ph.D. Psychoanalytic Dream Interpretation And The Reconstruction Of Infant Trauma
We cannot take the newborn child as a tabula rasa but must consider the possibility that emotional experiences, their symbolic representation in dreamthought, and their impact on the structuring of the personality, may commence in utero. . . . Similarly the impact of interferences such as prematurity, incubation, early separation, failures of breast feeding, physical illness in mother or baby reveal themselves in character development as unmistakably as the "shakes" in a piece of timber mark early periods of drought. (Meltzer, 1988, pp. 8, 25)

Maggie Magee, M.S.W. and Diana C. Miller, M. D. Psychoanalysis and Women's Experiences of "Coming Out": The Necessity of Becoming a "Bee Charmer"
The psychosocial process of "coming-out," identifying as homosexual to self and other, has received little psychoanalytic attention. This paper discusses coming-out for women through an examination of papers by Freud , Khan, the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe , and the film made from that novel. Fried Green Tomatoes describes the relationship of Idgie and Ruth, fictional American contemporaries of Freud's patient. Idgie is a "bee-charmer," one able to get honey without being stung by the swarming bees. "Bee-charmer" is an apt metaphor for a woman able to manage the ever-present anxieties of the never-ending experience of coming-out. She must manage the anxiety of being seen as having a disturbed sexuality and a disordered femininity. A capacity for "bee-charming" is also essential in those who offer psychoanalytic treatment to lesbian patients. Conscious and unconscious anxieties, the stinging names and confusions about homosexuality, will arise within the treatment, mix within the swarm of other anxieties, and threaten to confound and frighten the movements of both analyst and patient.

Maggie Magee, M.S.W. and Diana C. Miller, M.D. Superior Guinea Pig: Bryher and Psychoanalysis*
The imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) had a short analysis with Sigmund Freud in 1933 and 1934. Both psychoanalysts and literary scholars have examined H.D.'s poetry and Tribute to Freud, her account of her analysis, for what they reveal about the effect of the analytic treatment on H.D.'s writing as well as the effect on Freud of his relationship with the modernist poet. H.D.'s analysis with Freud was encouraged and financially supported by her life-long lesbian partner Annie Winifred Ellerman. Ellerman, who called herself Bryher, is all but unknown to psychoanalysts today, although she played an interesting role in the early psychoanalytic movement, and she contributed to its support and survival in significant ways. She was a prolific letter writer whose correspondents included Sigmund and Anna Freud, Havelock Ellis, Hanns Sachs, and Annie Reich. Her unpublished correspondence, housed in Yale University's Bienecke Rare Book Library, offers perspectives on early analytic practice in London and Berlin, the conflict over lay analysts, and the effects of the 1930s forced emigration of many European analysts. This paper uses Bryher's memoirs and correspondence to make her life and work better known to the psychoanalytic community she helped sustain.

Boys To Men: The Maturing Of Male Identity Through Paternal Watchful Protectiveness Michael J. Diamond, Ph.D.
This presentation will explore how a substantial aspect of fathering serves as one important avenue for the adult male's construction of his unique sense of masculinity. In rethinking the adult pathways to a man's "sense of maleness", prevailing psychoanalytic theories of masculinity are amplified by incorporating more recent advances pertaining to narcissism, the renunciation of early opposite-sex identifications, and the capacity for "fatherliness". I discuss adult male gender development from the perspective of the search for narcissistic completion as informed by the masculine ego ideal. A psychoanalytic, developmental perspective is used to understand the male ego ideal in both its infantile and its more mature forms. I will argue that adult male activity contributes to masculine identity development by transforming archaic, "phallic" ego ideals (resting on omnipotence and desires for narcissistic completion) into more realistic, "genital" ego ideals. Ossified and rigidly polarized gender identity consequently destabilizes and reconsolidates in a more fluid manner when fathering, work, aging and other facets of adult male development help to "correct" what a man may have incorrectly come to believe as being "closed off" to him because of his sex. The adult man is thus given an opportunity to develop a more mature gender identity by renouncing and mourning his (phallic) wish to be unlimited and instead, accepts certain real limits concerning sex, gender, and generational differences. Notions of what is masculine or feminine can thereby more comfortably destabilize in mature adulthood as finite categorization of gender identity is superseded by the complexity of one's multiple, differently gendered identifications.

My primary focus will be on the relationship between the father's function as the primordial "protective agent" of the mother-infant dyad and his ongoing construction of his "manhood". The impact of this early fatherly holding function on the father's unconscious striving for narcissistic completion, and its effect both on his genderized ego ideal and previously renounced early maternal and paternal identifications, will be considered. I will propose that adult male gender identity matures by becoming both more cohesive and more fluid as a result of this fatherly provision. A case example will illustrate the painful struggle of a new father limited by his impaired capacity for such watchful protection. This father, through the psychoanalytic treatment process, was able eventually to develop his initial fatherliness and thereby consolidate a maturing sense of masculinity that involved an interplay between his masculine and feminine identifications.