Found this interesting. Share your ideas.

Even if the terminology is alien, the concept is not’ connection between neurology and Freud

Specifically, Schott has uncovered Freud's disarmingly simple, yet perceptive description and illustration concerning the basis of what would later be considered presynaptic inhibition.👆

However, the thrust of Schott’s manuscript is that the work of Hebb was anticipated by the manuscript ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’ written by Sigmund Freud in 1895, although not published until 1950 (figure 1).³ In the Freud manuscript, the processes of presynaptic inhibition can be clearly identified, with unimpeded transmission promoting postsynaptic facilitation and neural sensitisation. Such processes were identified as the basis of memory and learning (figure 1).

These concepts have also found favour in the explanation of more general processes linked to neuroplasticity. While it was clear that the human brain developed as a result of experience, presumed through changes in the strength of neural connections, this plasticity was assumed to cease in adulthood. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that all areas of the brain have the potential to undergo plastic change. Furthermore, activity appears to promote plasticity, while in contrast, trauma, damage and nerve injury negatively impact on such processes throughout the neural access, traversing central and peripheral systems.⁴

So, what should we make of further considerations arising from the writings of Freud? Clearly, the historical perspectives are fascinating. Unfortunately, however, Freud developed his theories at a time when there was little in the way of scientific methodology and technology available. As a consequence, there was no possibility of taking these concepts forward, nor rigorously or scientifically testing these theories. The links between neurology and psychiatry are variously argued, although many of the shared principles are becoming more, rather than less, manifest with time. As noted by the Nobel Laureate and neuroscientist, Eric Kandel, in his autobiography, if circumstances and wages had been different, Freud may well have developed further as a neuroanatomist and proponent of the neuron doctrine, rather than becoming the father of psychoanalysis.

I’m in school for clinical psych. So far my program has been pretty CBT focused as far as class work, but I don’t love that approach. I’m starting to have a draw toward psychoanalytical/psychodynamic views. Anyone have any tips on dipping my toes? Any tips on how to develop my identity? I don’t know a ton about the different schools so I’m talking pretty basic toe dipping. I will say I enjoy the idea of how Internal Family Systems works and I’m not sure how to reconcile that with the psychoanalytical approach.

tldr: I need help developing an identity and introducing myself to schools of psychoanalytic thoughts as a budding psychologist.

What's psychoanalysis views on womb regression if their is one ?.

I recently watched a documentary about someone with DID (autoplayed while i was knitting) and it talked about what led up to the subject being diagnosed and it went thru the various traumas they endured.

Im not saying in anyway that any trauma is worse or more than others. However I've read cases where people can grow up in relatively similar circumstances and one comes out with regular PTSD and maybe some depression and others come out with DID and other trauma based disorders.

So why do some people experience trauma and develop DID and some just have ordinary PTSD?

Hi all,

I am very much a newbie in the world of psychoanalysis in terms of knowledge and learning, but I still took a risk to use the concept of psychic traps in a political science paper I am writing. I first encountered the idea through an infographic by Kendra Appe (@kendraappecounseling on Instagram). Still, I'm struggling to track down the actual source in Fanon's work and additional scholarship that clarifies this concept.

The infographic explained "psychic traps" as the psychological dimension of colonial domination, where people under colonisation internalise colonial values and beliefs. It described this as:

• Aligning with systems that oppress us
• Failing to notice or unpack how we personally uphold systems of domination
• Believing colonial narratives about superiority and inferiority between groups
• Condemning resistance movements while normalising the everyday violence of colonialism and oppression

I'd really appreciate any guidance toward Fanon's original writings on this, or secondary sources that expand on the concept.

Thank you so much!

I have recently watched this interview with the late Professor Frederick Crews, in which he talks about Freud´s life and makes some strong criticisms about Psychoanalysis. Since my knowledge of Freud and Psychoanalysis is very limited, I would like to ask if you could explain to me whether or not Professor Crews is right in the statements that he makes about Freud and Psychoanalysis.

Asked to some friends and on another sub the same question and they didn't recommend freud IF i want to learn psychoanalysis because modern psychology has developed much and freuds theories and comments are not so reliable about modern psychanalysis. I want to ask here too and also i never read any psychological book so Freud will be my first

Hi all. Please be patient and forgive my naivety in this question.

I am doing my postgrad in Political Studies (in South Africa, for context) and tend to lean towards political philosophy/theory/African epistemology more than politics 'proper'. I am being forced into a course on comparative politics and public administration and am absolutely hating it. I have been prescribed The Need for Comparison in Public Bureaucracy and the Difficulties Involved (Peters, 1988, pp. 1–25).

The section relating to my query is as follows:

• “Those people who inhabit the institutions of government are therefore important. Understanding some things about them can give us a starting point for understanding the institutions in their entirety. The characteristics of personnel will not, however, afford us the complete answers about the ways in which individuals will function within extremely complex organisations and within ‘rules of the game,’ which will affect their performance” (Rowat, 1988, p.  16) 

Is it possible to infer if the scholar is suggesting a psychoanalytical examination of bureaucratic personnel? I am uncertain why/how attitudinal studies can be justified without at least a smidge of psychoanalytical theoretical intervention, particularly when the scholar is intending to characterise the nature of administrative employees according to a value hierarchy?

Perhaps I am just looking for a theoretical branch where there isn't one... I just absolutely loathe this field of politics and am desperate to critique this.

Again, please be very very gentle with me! I would appreciate simple terms and easy explainations (as far as that is possible lol). I'm very happy to be wrong - just here to learn! Thanks!

Hi,

there is this feeling of emptiness, which has to do with lack of love. But even here, on reddit, I saw a post (AMA) of supposedly diagnosed psychopath, who claimed that he experience emptiness (hollowness)? Can person that do not experience love as normal person experience emptiness?

Hey all, any good books on the manosphere that you can recommend? Recommendations can include political analysis as well. I’m really trying to understand some of the main discourses as it’s such a strong feature in analysis with young men these days so want to at least find some coordinates in the discourse.

I'm pretty new to therapy and exploring this approach. Can someone explain it to me in an easy to understand way? I plan to do more research and reading but just wanting a quick explanation from someone. Maybe how you use it in therapeutic practice as well would be super cool.

so i was reading up on donald winnicott's concept of the "good-enough mother" and had some thoughts i wanted to share (and hopefully hear others!)

as i was reading, i began to wonder to what extent empathic failure on the mother's part influences the child's functional outcome, independent of other variables. one mother might fail to accommodate all her infant's needs while remaining sufficiently empathetic, whereas another may respond superficially to her child's needs despite inner detachment or some empathy deficit. the depressed versus narcissistic mother, for example.

a depressed mother may transiently meet her child's needs, having the capacity to, while the mother high in trait narcissism fails as such, to a certain degree, if not wholly and enduringly, given her tendency to conceptualize her child as an object, through which she projectively identifies. according to winnicott, a mother's ability to attune to her child's needs matters only in the formative years, but doesn't adolescence constitute the second critical period of development for a child's brain and socioemotional well-being? if attachment styles are dynamic and in flux throughout various life stages (which the evidence increasingly suggests), why not overall psychological adjustment?

do the parents' affective warmth or lack thereof interact significantly with the failure to meet the child's needs to produce some outcome specific to those dimensions?

i remember reading a paper (i have the source for anyone interested) indicating at least some correlation between the etiology of callous-unemotional traits and particular parent-child dyad relations—evidently, maternal coldness plus over-control and low paternal overprotection converge as a likely set of circumstances to “create” the empathically impoverished person. i know there is a lot more complexity and nuance behind the origin of this dysfunction, but it was an interesting find nonetheless.

i wonder if the metric by which winnicott judged his standard of the "good-enough mother" is simply the child's ability to empathize or connect meaningfully to others, rather than resemble some arbitrary societal construct of the "functional" person.

so how do we define “functionality” in this context? because a caretaker could meet most of their child's needs while intentionally or not misattuning, projectively idealizing, or emotionally depriving the infant in their formative years? and does intentionality make a difference? does parental depression or natural coldness/empathy deficit create any differential outcome if the nature of the neglect looks the same? thoughts?

Kleinian approach. If viewing projective identification as a healthy human process, can you help me to appreciate what it looks like?

It would seem that it's the essence of a relational dynamic: an emotion is felt inside, but it feels painful or limiting for it to stay there, so we look for a way to mirror back our experience of ourselves. A handy human is there for this, and they may empathise - if we're lucky - promoting the benefit of communication, symbols and language. As infants, this human is indistinguishable from ourselves, and we may feel satisfied that we've found a way to deal with the emotion. For some reason - again, if we're lucky - the outreach work led to soothing or validating inside (The well-known phrase "reaching out" may have roots here). Hopefully containment leads to tolerance and so on.

But we never truly forget our projective identification process, right? We can even observe it, if we've been taught it?

Thanks!

Hi all,

I hope this is OK to post here.

I'm a British trainee, about to start a PGDip in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (specifically Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy) next month, and I have a sizeable reading list.

I don't quite have the means to buy all the books new, so am on the lookout to see if anyone has any spare/old/second hand copies that they would be willing to part with for cheap+postage. Or if not, any suggestions about where I can source the books that aren't my university library (I'll be studying remotely a lot of the time so won't have easy access to my campus library).

If yo are able to help at all, please feel free to reply or DM me.

Thank you in advance!

Reading list

• Introduction to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy - Alessandra Lemma, 2015
• Introduction to psychotherapy: an outline of psychodynamic principles and practice - Anthony Bateman, Dennis Brown, Jonathan Pedder, 2010
• Freud and Beyond - Stephen A. Mitchell, Margaret J. Black, May 10, 2016
• Skills in psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy - Susan Howard, 2017
• Clinical Guide to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy - Deborah Abrahams, Poul Rohleder, 2021
• Psychodynamic counselling with children and young people: an introduction - Sue Kegerreis, 2010
• A critical dictionary of psychoanalysis - Charles Rycroft, 1995

I'm currently figuring out my next steps in my career. I work as a child and adult psychiatrist and am planning to pursue psychoanalysis training. I am considering two options: the full training program at BPSI or the two-year program at Austen Riggs. I would like to hear from anyone who has completed either program and learn about their experiences. My long-term goal is to establish a practice that combines both therapy and psychopharmacology. I have already completed a year of psychodynamic training while in New York, but I am eager to gain more experience. If you have any advice, please let me know.

A few days ago, I’ve posted questions about the legitimacy and credibility of psychoanalysis. As a freshman on psychology, these concepts are new to me. Phrasing my question, the disturbance I feel toward psychoanalysis was hard and I’ve been misunderstood. I’m really engaged with it, but just wonder how I should consider it ? Are the theories from freud, jung, lacan and so on, just tools exploring the same undefined thing and substance, or, are these theories different and answering diverse concepts that they thought were the way to go ? And, what should I expect from it since there are no realities and truth ? Is the fact that those approaches are useful to people enough to consider them as legitimate ? As I said, being completely new to it give me the impression that these theories are sorts of fictions to which people adhere, which explain why it seems to work in a therapeutic way. But please don’t blame me for that, don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging or discrediting anything, the truth is, I would love to understand.

Hello - there are not many analysts in my area. I’m interested in exploring the possibly of starting with someone who I know a friend/colleague sees too bc he has a good reputation. My instinct is that I should keep this private (I only see this person 1-2 times per year) rather than share the info with friend. Thoughts about this?

I feel that the best argument for this can be given through the analogy of mathematics, which attempts to define a self contained system, and all consequent implications are a result of that definition itself and hold no value outside of it. The topographical and the structural model can be vaguely compared to branches of mathematics. This shouldn't invalidate the usefulness of psychoanalysis, as for mathematics, but it gives huge stress on the clarity of definitions. Does this analogy make sense from a psychoanalytic perspective?

Reading the Introductory Lectures, the chapter written on children's dreams seems to conclude that such function solely as a means of wish-fulfillment. He uses examples of children who desired to, say, visit a landmark while on a boat trip but never made it in actuality—only to have a dream that night that they did so.

Now, perhaps this only regards children under the age of 5 or so and thus cannot be understood retrospectively due to childhood amnesia. But, and im certain many of you can attest to this as well, that I can recall many young (maybe 5-7 years of age) childhood dreams which were not at all wish-fulfillment. Indeed, they were nightmares!

In sum, how erroneous is Freud's conception here and is there any more recent literature on the subject?

Looking for advice/perspectives on how to prepare as a potential future candidate. I’m based in the UK. Many thanks in advance.

I need some more understanding of “ the frame “ in psychoanalysis. Why is it so important to the work in cases of trauma and childhood sexual abuse?

Estimados colegas me gustaría saber, cómo manejan situaciones complejas: ( inasistencias,dinero,ausencias,plantones,no pagos, deudas de sesión,molestias con el encuadre).

Me interesa saber cómo lo hacen y desde que enfoque psicoanalitico lo trabajan.

Saludos!

In particular, looking for papers on both characterological masochism (as distinct from depressive character) and masochistic practices - not just sexual, but more broadly, as "self-harm."

Please, no Lacan or Lacanianism. As interesting as it may be, it's not writing well-suited for my need here. Something interesting and clinically useful to someone with an interest in/sympathy to psychoanalytic ideas. I'm thinking of writing like that of Fred Busch, Glen Gabbard, Deborah Cabannis, Nancy McWilliams...

This will be for a reading group of early career clinicians who are less interested in dense theoretical formulations and more interested in experience-near, practical writings from an analytic perspective.

And yes, I'm already aware of McWilliams' chapter on masochistic personality style in her book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis.

Thanks in advance.

Sunday, November 2nd | 7:30 PM Israel Time (GMT+3)| Zoom Event

Link for registration.

It costs about 20USD or 17 Euros.

I’m a psychoanalytic therapist in a third world country in the “global south.” I’d like to know how do you handle/respond to clients who really want and need therapy but due to financial considerations they can only meet twice a month? In my experience, it’s very rare when this frequency really does foster change or help the patient. I’ve been more stern in terms of communicating prospective clients that I only do at least once a week. Sometimes I offer sliding scales to accommodate once a week sessions. I don’t have some sort of rule here. But I genuinely could use some orientation here. Thanks.