In the course of trying to educate
myself about psycho-somatic medicine for the further understanding of my
already discussed rip-roaring case of Psoriasis, which I assume is at least
partly psychosomatic, over a period of months I’ve read and in some cases
re-read the following books and\or essays and looked at the following U-tube
posts:
Touching, the
Human Significance
of the Skin, Ashley Montagu,
1971,
The Skin Ego; Didier Anzieu, translation by Naomi Segal, Pub.
2018 by Routledge
The Rights of
Infants, Margaret A. Ribble, M.D. Columbia
University Press, 1943
The Experience
of the Skin in Early Object Relations, Esther Bick; read
at the 25th International Congress, Copenhagen, July 1967; Pub; International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49, 484-6
Melanie Klein, A
Graphic Guide; published by Icon Books Ltd., Hinshelwood, Robinson, & Zarate, London, aka -
www.introducingbooks.com
Winnicott, life
and work, by F. Robert Rodman, M.D. Perseus
Publishing, Cambridge, Ma.
The Nature and
Nurture of Love; from imprinting to attachment in Cold War America; Marga Vicedo;
The University
of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992
A Framework for the Imaginary; Clinical Explorations in
Primitive States of Being, (with a Foreword by Joyce
McDougall, Ed.D.), Judith L.
Mitrani, Psychoanalyst; published by Jason Aronson Inc. Northvale, New
Jersey, and London
Frances Tustin, by Sheila Spensley, Routledge 1995
The Interpersonal
World of the Infant; Daniel N. Stern; 2000.
Utube
The Claustrum: A
Projective Identification View of the World; Donald
Meltzer Utube
New Stuff,
Re: 18feb24
Learning from Experience – Routledge Classics, London and
New York, Wilfred Bion
Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works, 1897 – 1979 Gerard Bleandonu; other press, 2020
Psychoanalytic Field Theory, a Contemporary Introduction, Giuseppe Civitares; Routledge
W. R. Bion’s Theories of Mind, A Contemporary
Introduction, Annie Reiner; Routledge
The Body Keeps the Score; van der Kolk; Viking Press, 2014
I'm going on the
assumption that knowledge and understanding can be a part of any therapeutic
context. After all, did Freud not analyze himself? I'm on the 'positive
thinking' side, especially when it comes to any hope of alleviating my
Psoriasis.
So after Googling the hell out of the psychosomatic
theme, and then having re-read, just to
warm up, the book, Touching, the Human Significance of the
Skin, by Ashley Montagu, which I first read in the 1970s, I brashly waded
in to an English translation of Didier Anzieu's The Skin Ego; a new
translation by Naomi Segal; Routledge, London and New York.
Didier Anzieu, a Frenchman who has been successfully
competing with Jacques Lacan through a theory of psychoanalysis that is “more
concrete, more body centered” then are Lacan's abstract, language-centered
group of theories, and gives credit where he thinks it's due to the British
object relations folks, and Melanie Klein, their leader.
Anzieu makes what seems like a very good case for the
human skin being what eventually evolves into the ego; with all its components
and objects.
While reading the Anzieu book, I got out my copy of Melanie
Klein, A Graphic Guide; published by Icon Books, Ltd., aka
www.introducingbooks.com* ..., and gave it a quick re-read.
See: Object relations vs. Drive
Theory
Anzieu gives plenty of credit for his theory of the skin
ego to the Klein group of psychoanalysts, who were mostly all associated with
Hampstead's Tavistock Center, Hampstead, London, U.K.* You might remember that
I've mentioned Hampstead in previous posts as the last home of Sigmund Freud
and a beehive of psychoanalytic activity since the Second World War, not to
mention my own home, [it's complicated] during the winter of 1963-'64..
(I was there under no official capacity, just an innocent bystander, a young
American, (High School graduate), waiting to be drafted into the Army and
using that as an excuse to take a vacation; not engaged in anything
psychoanalytical).
The Tavistock Clinic had been in existence since the
First World War as a place for poor children to get both medical and
psychological help resulting from damage caused by war. The group had moved
around London numerous times before ending up at Hampstead after World War ll.
During that war, A small group of American philanthropies arranged for Anna
Freud to open a wartime baby nursery in Hampstead, and after the war there was
some sort of merger between the Clinic and the Nursery. I am slightly familiar
with the Hampstead based London psychoanalytical group because of having read,
when it first came out in 1973, the very popular biography of D.W. Winnicott, Winnicott,
life and work, by F. Robert Rodman, M.D., Perseus Publishing,
Cambridge, Ma. And if you were to ask well "How did you get interested in
Winnicott, well, then I'd just have to refer you to The Culture of
Narcissism, which I also read when it first came out, because, you guessed
it, I'm a self-diagnosed narcissist.
Of course after reading that very popular book by
Christopher Lasch, also when it first came out, I felt compelled, [OCD], to
read one book each of Kohut and Kernberg, two American object-relations leaning
analysts, without of course presuming any professional standing. (That reading
occurred 40 years ago.)
But
getting back to Hampstead:
After the War, Tavistock became part of the National
Health Service. In 1945, John Bowlby, MD and psychoanalyst, was appointed head
of its Department for Children and Parents at the Clinic and began
restructuring that department to make training a key component. (At the same
time he resumed its pre-war relationship with the London School of Economics
for the training of social workers.)
In 1946 he hired a psychoanalyst named Esther Bick to
supervise the training. Bick, born in Poland in 1902, educated in Vienna, had
fled the Nazis in 1938.
Concerning Bolby;
A couple of years ago, while on horseback, riding with a
small group through a South Florida park, I had a conversation with a man who I
decided needed to be distracted from his cell phone. [By being further distracted by me, I
suppose.] Turns out he was a director at one of the Alcoholism Rehabilitation
centers in our area, and so, I guess I was picking his brain, while at the same
time being a name dropper, …I suppose I mentioned some book I'd read like maybe
the Winnicott bio, and he, as I remember, said that his preferred treatment for
his patients centered around Bolby's attachment theory. …So, later that day I
looked up Bolby on Wikipedia and whetted my appetite. …Surfing Amazon Books I
found the following and loaded it into my Kindle; The Nature and Nurture of
Love; from imprinting to attachment in Cold War America; Marga Vicedo; The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992. .....Vicedo is a
Professor of The History of Psychology, (who knew?) at Toronto University. Her
book I found a bit of a grind, quite academic and probably biased along the
latest 'Gender' informed thinking about which I'm, I suppose, either ignorant
or skeptical; choose one. She does however give some attention to Margaret
Ribble, M.D., and her book, The Rights of
Infants,* Columbia University Press, New York, 1943, and allows that
Ribble’s book influenced Bick, Bolby et. al. I get the impression though, I could be wrong,
forgive me; that she'd like to put a road-block up around the whole idea of motherhood, thinking that said whole
idea is, well, overblown. At least that's the impression I got.
*Ribble happened to have been my mother’s analyst during
the time-frame in which I was conceived, born, and experiencing
infanthood.
She, [Prof. Vicedo] does do a job on Bolby though, that's
for sure; [yet he seems to have survived the hit.] She points out very well
how, with the help of The World Health Organization, Bolby has gotten plenty of
mileage out of a relatively small amount of scientific research. What she
doesn't do, though, is put Bolby and his theory in anything like the proper
context. …As for what I've found out through further reading: With the
help of the object relations school of thought, and some Americans like the late
but brilliant Daniel Stern*, developmental psychology has put a great deal of
meat on the bones of what is becoming, potentially, the new, post Freudian
psychoanalytical model of the infant mind. And that's where it gets quite
interesting.
…………………………
[ Below, I just for some reason jump to Stern. Bare with me; I want this Effort to be out there, meanwhile I realize it's not 'of-a-piece' but I'll try to keep working on it, while it's out 'here'. ]
............................................................
Daniel N. Stern
(August 16, 1934 – November 12, 2012) was a prominent
American developmental psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a
number of books — most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985).[1] Stern's research
and conceptualization created a bridge between psychoanalysis and
research-based developmental models.
To the extent that it has taken hold, (and it is not as
yet universally accepted), prenatal psychology is usually tied together with
developmental psychology, a more mainstream area of research. The histological
territory currently under investigation is the life-span of the
embryo-turned-fetus up to and including birth. The future psychological
development of the individual, (called an embryo for the first eight weeks
after conception and fetus until birth) is the ‘common thread’ of inquiry in
these studies. Of particular interest for the prenatal psychologist is the
development of the brain. Whether newborns are capable of forming memories is
still being debated, as well as whether it could be possible to recover
[retrieve] them from the unconscious mind, and what effect these memories might
have on the developing personality. In the past, the common assumption has been
that the fetus is almost completely shut off from outside stimulation, so that
perception and consciousness may only begin to develop after birth. Meanwhile,
clinical evidence continues to grow that perception and learning ability are
well formed even before birth. In fact, since the development of ultrasound
technology it has become possible to make detailed studies of the motor skills
of both embryo and fetus.
Otto Rank certainly opened the door to pre-natal
investigation with his Birth Trauma, and many other's have alluded to
the potential for symtomology to have had it's beginnings pre-birth. (I'm
familiar with Rank through having exhaustively read Henry Miller and his pal
Anais Nin; and having struggled through his Art and Artist, which,
though I found it difficult going, I also found enlightening.)
From Rank on, certain psychoanalysts have believed that
the groundwork of the unconscious psyche starts before birth. In the last
quarter of the 20th century, dozens of researchers have observed and
measured prenatal sense reactions; touch, heartbeat, eye movement, motion,
proprioception, hearing and the like. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts
have used this research as justification for rethinking theory and
practice.
*
STERN
Wayne The Self is born –
a phenomenological perspective ] (Amazon review) The following is a
reader-review of Stern’s book, The
Interpersonal World of the Infant; Daniel N. Stern; 2000. (Wayne is the
name the Amazon reviewer goes by, and I’ve decided to just copy it rather than
paraphrase, since it is so well done that it could be a book, a’la “Stern for
Dummies.”) Thank you Wayne!
“If we just take the position of
a working hypothesis for the developing senses of the self, we find the need
for higher order constructs, similar to attachment theory and psychoanalytic
theory. What is different here [in the Stern book] is the organizing principle of the subjective sense
of self. Subjective experiences per se, the sense of self-and-other, are
the basic building blocks in this phenomenological account of the self.
A phenomenological account of the development of the sense of self
that incorporates a large group of data from late 20th c.
developmental psychology. ….in which new
research incorporates new technology.
“Have you ever wished you could
ask an infant what he is really thinking, feeling or wanting? It is in seeing
what the infant is capable of doing (sucking, looking, etc.), that gives [that
we get] the answer, and the value of reporting and summarizing research on the
development of the infant.
Stern makes over 400 references
to research findings to report consensus in the field and offers new
possibilities, separate from any preconceived theoretical construct such
as psychoanalytic theory. While it could be considered that Stern is
only providing a report on developmental psychology, he is rather presenting an originary approach to psychology in general
from an observational, phenomenological, no- theoretical framework with
implications for psychotherapy.
[ my first exposure to this word, originary, courtesy Wayne, and which
I assume means having to do with ‘origins’.
]
…………….[ * ] check, does Kristeva use this word?
“Stern shows that from birth (or
prior), infants experience becoming; the process (and result) of emerging
organization:
(1) Emergent Sense of Self. Infants experience an alive (felt) self
while engaging the world.They experience the result (product) of forming
relations between isolated experiences (invariances, or patterns) as well as
the process itself. Emergent processes:
a.) Amodal Perception: Stern reports how infants have an innate
learning ability of Amodal (multimodal) Perception, to take information from
one sensory modality and translate it into another sensory modality. There is
an encoding multimodality which can be recognized in any of the sensory modes,
from the sensory specific to the sensory generalizable. Amodal Perception may
be the sensory form of analogy similar to the later ability of cognitive
symbolization, and appears to allow assessment of the internal state of others.
(See pp. 154 ff.)
b.) Affects (the overarching mode of all modes): Werner (1948) proposed
that amodal qualities that are directly experienced by the infant are Darwinian
categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) mixed with other modes of color, sound,
shape, etc.
c.) Vitality Affects (in the presence of categorical and
noncategorical): related to vital processes of life such as breathing, hunger,
elimination, sleeping, coming and going of feeling, thoughts, sensations.
d.) Mirror Neurons are known to contribute to primary
intersubjectivity, affective resonance and imitation; if not empathy as well.
“Infants do construct
relationship as well as perceive, directly due to perception, invariant
qualities (e.g., face, voice) related to mother, etc. The infant experiences
organization through amodal perception and constructionistic efforts as well.
(2) Sense of a Core Self: (2-7 mos.) which includes…,
a.) Self agency (volition)
b.) Self-coherence: 1.) Unity of
locus; 2.) Coherence of motion; 3.) Coherence of temporal structure; 4.)
Coherence of intenwsity structure; 5.) Coherence of form.
c.) Self-continuity”
"The matching of caregiver
behavioral variations and infant predelictions gives the infant the optimal
opportunity to perceive those behavior invariants (adaptive oscillators) that
identify self or other." (p. 73) Invariance (repeatability, p. 80) is the
crucial experiential condition under which the infant becomes able to encode a
predictable self, and a predictable other. Invariance yields a self, and an
other. Memory itself becomes the invariant due to encoding that permits
recognition (re-"cognition," nonvariance).
One of the foundations of Stern's
approach to self is "There are never emotions without a perceptual
context. There are never cognitions without some affect fluctuations . . . . An
episode [episodic memory, island of consistency] appears to enter into memory
[encoding] as an indivisable unit." (p. 95). What gets encoded
episodically are not specific memories, but generalized: 1)experience, 2)
intuition schema, and 3) imagining capacity--a Sense of a Core Self.
(3) Sense of a Core Self with Other (9 mos. and up)
a.) Self-regulating of the infant
for attachment, security, arousal, activation, pleasure, physical
gratification, self-esteem, (atunement, p. 138 ff.)
b.) Self-resonating
c.) Being with: self in presence
of other, physical and psychological proximity and individuation (evoked
companion. p. 111)
d.) Family triad
(4) Verbal self (1 year and up)
The use of words not only gives
the child increased ability of cognition, generalization and identification,
but also responsibility to the parent and society's demands. When children
begin using words, adults usually become less personal, more abstract, more
demanding and more alienating (p. 163). Children use words as an adjunct while
adults believe in words, and the imbedded demands…
Becoming verbal leads to 1) The
objective view of self; 2) Capacity for symbolic play; 3) Use of language and
new ways of being with and of being divided between the verbal and nonverbal.
(5) Narrative self (3 years and up)
Our autobiographical history told
to ourself and to others, constructional autobiography as told to us by family.
There are cultural enactments and filters affecting our self from subgroups of
society, kin-groups and our family per se.
The final part of the book is
devoted to implications for psychotherapy, which are profoundly affected by
research presented so far, and by Stern's own research which focused on
process, the now, what he called the "microanalytic interview," assessing
a client's instant-by-instant lived experience at any given time. He asserted
that phenomenologically we only live in the present moment, and he applied that
to his psychotherapy systematically. His work integrates no less than
psychotherapy, developmental psychology, anthropology and psychoanalysis.
Postlogue: Stern's findings have been updated and corroborated this
year in
The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the
Self (The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Ammaniti and Gallese. However these
authors still cling to psychodynamic theory which misses the seminal and
phenomenological work of Stern.”
……………………………..
METRANI
Metrani’s theoretical construct relies heavily on Bion’s
thinking concerning the ‘containing’ function of the mother or mother-figure.
Metrani: “Owing to
Bion’s work, we now understand that in order for the normal processes of
projective and introjective identification to proceed in a healthful manner,
without mutating into pathological autistic maneuvers or hyperbolic
disintegration of the self, the holding mother of infancy, (Winnicott 1941)
must also exhibit containing properties. The metabolic processing of the baby’s
raw sensory experience (which is intitially devoid of meaning), through the mother’s mental function leads to
increasing development of the mother’s mental function leads [which leads] to increasing development of symbol formation
and a decrease in mindless action and somatization in reaction to intense
affective states. Normal projective identification and subsequent introjective
identification with a containing object leads to a decrease in the tendency to
concretize emotional experience and an increase in the development of abstract
and creative thinking, replacing action symptons related to painfully
unbearable emotional states with increasing tolerance of psychic pain and
mental transformations.
“The overanxious mother may be impaired in her capacity for
reverie. If she cannot receive her baby’s communications, she may be
internalized as an obstructive object unwilling or unable to contain. If she
cannot digest what she receives, but is instead felt to add her own anxieties
to those already overwhelming the infant (using the infant as a container for
her own unthinkable dreads), then what she hurriedly gives back to the baby
will be suitable only for some hyperbolic form of discharge. Consequently, the
baby will develop a precocious mind as an instrument for evacuating or encapsulating
experience rather than as an instrument for thinking thoughts.
“….Federn’s work (1952) preceded Bion’s thinking
when…….. tktktk
The following is a blurb from Routledge, publisher of
Mitrani:
“An extraordinary depiction of one analyst’s efforts to
receive and respond to the vivid impressions of her patients’ raw and sometimes
even un-mentalized experiences as they are highlighted in the
transference-countertransference connection. Mitrani attempts to feel, suffer,
mentally transform, and, finally, verbally construct for and with the patient
possible meanings for those immediate versions of life’s earliest experiences
as they are re-enacted in the therapeutic relationship. She uses insights from this
therapeutic work to contribute to the metapsychology of British and American
object relations as well as to the psychoanalytic theory of technique. In these
eleven essays, Dr Mitrani masterfully integrates the work of Klein, Winnicott,
Bion and Tustin as she leads us on an expedition through primitive emotional
territories. She clears the way toward detecting and understanding the survival
function of certain pathological manoeuvres deployed by patients when
confronted by unthinkable anxieties. In her vivid accounts of numerous clinical
cases, she provides and demonstrates the tools needed to effect a
transformation of unmentalized experiences within the context of the
therapeutic relationship.”
………………………………………………
Psychoanalysis and Art:
Kleinian Perspectives
Editor : Sandra Gosso, Author(s) : Donald
Meltzer
This essential edition brings together a collection of
classic papers from key figures in Kleinian and post-Kleinian thought that
explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and art.
Sandra Gosso begins with a comprehensive and fascinating
guide to the history of this relationship which began with Freud and was
developed further by Melanie Klein at a time when most analysts were moving
away from links with art. Melanie Klein's pivotal paper, "Infantile
Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative
Impulse", follows the Introduction. The other papers featured are mainly
from British analysts who expanded on Melanie Klein's ideas, inspired by the
influence of the creative Bloomsbury and Imago Groups. Members of the Imago
Group, founded by Adrian Stokes, include Donald Meltzer, Wilfred Bion, Roger
Money-Kyrle and Marion Milner; all of whom underwent analysis with Melanie
Klein. Their interests range throughout the arts and this allows them to
explore the relationship between art and psychoanalysis from varied and
thought-provoking angles. The book also includes four chapters by Meg Harris
Williams. The papers featured here investigate such core themes as the creative
impulse, aesthetics, literature and symbol formation.
This definitive volume is essential reading for students and
professionals in the fields of psychoanalysis, art and cultural studies.
About the Editor
Sandra Gosso is a researcher in dynamic psychology at the
University of Pisa, Italy where she also teaches Psychology of Art in the
Cinema, Music and Theatre course (CMT). She has contributed to various books in
the field of psychoanalysis and she is the author of Paesaggi delle mente: una
psicoanalisi per l'estetica (Franco Angeli, Milan 1997).
Donald Meltzer (1923-2004) is widely known as a psychoanalyst
and teacher throughout Europe and South America. He is the author of many works
on psychoanalytic theory and practice, including The Psychoanalytical
Process, Sexual States of Mind, Explorations in Autism, The Kleinian
Development, Dream Life, Studies in Extended Metapsychology, and The
Claustrum, all published by the Harris-Meltzer Trust.
………………………………………..
Remembering Daniel Stern [check forms of…and use below as
bibliography of Stern.
Forms of Vitality
The Child's Curriculum: Working with the
Natural Voices of Young Children
Colwyn Trevarthen
et al., Oxford Academic Books, 2018
Perinatal Psychiatry: Motherhood in Mental
Health Services
Jacqueline
Humphreys et al., Oxford Academic Books, 2018
Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language,
Subjectivity
Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi et al., Oxford Academic Books, 1994
Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History
Nora Doyle, Journal
of American History, 2020
Powered by-
January 16th 2014
By Colwyn Trevarthen
Colwyn Trevarthen is Professor Emeritus of Child Psychology
and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a close colleague of
Daniel Stern for over forty years. He is co-editor of Communicative Musicality:
Exploring the basis of human companionship Published by Oxford University
Press.
“Daniel N. Stern, a New Yorker, died in November 2012 after a
long illness. A distinguished child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a
world-famous developmental psychologist, he transformed ideas of human nature
in infancy and he made important contributions to his last days. He gave us a
theory of how we create and share imaginative stories by rhythmic movements,
which he called ‘forms of vitality,’ a domain that draws satisfaction and
regulation from all sensory modalities in a consciousness of movement, and
which, “distinct from the domains of emotion, sensation, or cognition,” gives
life to all our ventures.
“As a child Dan was, by his own account, observant of people.
When he was seven years old, he saw that non-verbal expressions of a baby that
were clear to him could be invisible to a talkative parent. He conceived the
idea of two languages, one of which, awareness of embodied movement, may become
dismissed with age. After studies at Harvard of the 1950s, he graduated from
Einstein Medical College with MD in 1960. He turned to psychiatry, and then
psychoanalytic training at Columbia University, hoping to gain knowledge of how
the mind works. Dissatisfied with the theory of instinctive drives and their
complexes, which he could not relate to everyday experience or clinical work,
he was drawn to research in child psychology, then a very active field. “Inspired
by the discoveries of ethologists who demonstrated how signals among animals
guided their social lives, he tried a different approach. He became part of a
group at Columbia who adapted micro-analysis of natural communication by
gesture and expression when words are inadequate or misleading, and this led to
curiosity about how infants share ideas without language.
“Dan wrote seven books, each a step in a journey of discovery
of the human ‘self in relations’. In 1977 The First Relationship: Infant and
Mother summarized work at Columbia on the fine timing of expressive movements
by which a mother and baby share a game. His first scientific paper, ‘A
micro-analysis of mother-infant interaction: Behaviors regulating social
contact between a mother and her three-and-a-half-month-old twins’ in the
Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry, appeared in 1971. It was followed
by others on how gaze, facial expressions, and vocalizations controlled the
‘stimulus world’ of playful interaction between an entertaining baby and a
loving mother. As Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre
and Chief of the Laboratory of Developmental Processes, Stern did not see the
infant as a mindless organism dependent on maternal care for bodily pleasure or
comfort, and needing to learn a separation between a Self and any Object. From
an approach assuming personal powers for the baby grew a new conception of the
mother’s role and her experience of being with her baby, which in time became a
model for a different way of conceiving psychotherapy for adult patients.
“In his famous 1985 book The
Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Development
Psychology, translated into many languages, Stern presented the infant as a
human being from the start, especially gifted for attracting communication from
a mother. He portrayed the emergence of awareness of self and other as a
layered model like a building, in which initial talents remain a foundation for
later advances. Dan’s book excited critical responses from followers of the
modern authorities on the infant mind, Freud and Piaget, but the new vision was
welcomed and strongly supported by psychologists who had been collecting
evidence for 20 years about young infants’ clever powers of communication, and
instincts for cultural learning. In his book Dan introduced new terms: ‘affect
appraisals’, ‘core relatedness’, ‘intermodal fluency’, ‘intersubjective
relatedness’, ‘relational affects’, ‘selective attunement’, and so on, to
capture what was expressed in the infant-mother relationship from the start.
Stern’s new terms became the language of a different developmental science for
the baby in their interpersonal world.
“In 1990 Stern, retaining the post of Adjunct Professor of
Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre, New York Hospital, had moved
to the University of Geneva as Professor of Psychology and gained a new group
of collaborators who shared a particular interest in the mother’s contribution.
Her experience of pregnancy, birth, and new motherhood became a topic for
in-depth research, and three books: a fanciful Diary of a Baby (1990)
expressing a richer view of growing self-awareness; The Motherhood Constellation:
A Unified View of Parent-infant Psychotherapy (1995); and in collaboration with
his wife Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, a developmental pediatrician and child
psychiatrist, and with a professional journalist Alison Freeland, The Birth of
a Mother: How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever (1998). This last
is a guide for expectant and new mothers to give support for “their
extraordinary experience. Dan also joined work on the relationships of the
infant to with mother and father together, and with other persons. The
sociability of the young human person assumed a much wider purpose, to become a
conscious actor in a collaborative community.
“In 2000 Dan presented a new paper-book edition of The Interpersonal World of the Infant.
He made no changes to the 15-year-old text, instead adding a 26 page
Introduction, which is an important addition to his writings. He reviews
advances to his thinking, and gives thoughtful response to criticisms received,
mainly by psychotherapists defending the classical psychoanalytic model of
neuroses and therapy for patients who are able to speak, denying relevance of
the research on infancy. He says:
“ “One consequence of the book’s application of a narrative
perspective to the non-verbal has been the discovery of a language useful to
many psychotherapies that rely on the non verbal. I am thinking particularly of
dance, music, body, and movement therapies, as well as existential
psychotherapies. This observation came as a pleasant surprise to me since I did
not originally have such therapists in mind; my thinking has been enriched by
coming to know them better” ”(p. xv)
“In the last decade of Dan’s life he felt committed to a
dynamic and generative view of the conscious self-as-agent with an experience
of time in movement, in the ‘present moment’ of vivid awareness, and in
‘narratives’ of personal ambitions and affective engagements. New terms in the
theory include ‘dynamic emotional states’, ‘forms of feeling’, ‘forms of
vitality’, ‘present moments of meeting’, ‘proto-narrative envelopes’. Two books
present these ideas. The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday Life
(2004) opens the way to a more sensitive and collaborative way of exploring a
patient’s distress and its manifestation in all expressive actions, and in
responses to an open reception by a person trained to sense the feelings behind
their dynamics. The Boston Change Process Study Group, adopting Stern’s layered
model of developmental change in relationships, promoted of this in practice
and produced Change in Psychotherapy: A Unifying Paradigm (2010). The same year
brought Dan’s final masterpiece, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic
Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development, published by
Oxford University Press. Here we have an eloquent presentation of a theory of
all human creativity, which depends on the creativity and sympathy for the
poetic motives of body and mind which seek to discover two worlds, the
physical aesthetic one of objects with beautiful properties
that may be profitably used, or horrors that must be avoided, and the animated
human one that senses one’s hopes and fears for relationships and may offer
sympathetic moral companionship and collaboration.
“This is a psychology to build not only practices to
strengthen care for those in distress, but also encouragement for education of
the young, and the development of laws and social industries and institutions
of government that will benefit more people and reduce injustices. Dan Stern’s
thoughts are with us, and will last.”
…………………………………..
Addendum:
The National Institutes of Health;
The following is an introduction to The National Institutes
of Health, copied from Wikipedia. The site itself is much more comprehensive
and I’ll leave it to the individual to seek out what he/she needs.
“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary
agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical
and public
health research. It was founded in 1887 and is now part of the United States
Department of Health and Human Services. Many NIH facilities are located in
Bethesda, Maryland, and other nearby suburbs of
the Washington metropolitan area, with
other primary facilities in the Research Triangle Park in North
Carolina and smaller satellite facilities located around the United States.
The NIH conducts its own scientific research through the NIH Intramural Research Program
(IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research
facilities through its Extramural Research Program.
“As of 2013, the IRP had 1,200 principal investigators and more than 4,000 postdoctoral
fellows in basic, translational, and clinical research, being the largest
biomedical research institution in the world,[1]
while, as of 2003, the extramural arm provided 28% of biomedical research
funding spent annually in the U.S., or about US$26.4 billion.[2]
“The NIH comprises 27
separate institutes and centers of different biomedical disciplines and is
responsible for many scientific accomplishments, including the discovery of
fluoride to prevent tooth decay, the use of lithium to manage bipolar
disorder, and the creation of vaccines
against hepatitis,
Haemophilus influenzae (HIB), and human papillomavirus (HPV).[3]
“In 2019, the NIH was ranked number two in the world,
behind Harvard University, for biomedical sciences in
the Nature
Index, which measured the largest contributors to papers published in a
subset of leading journals from 2015 to 2018. ”
Below illustrates how useful NIH is for research:
From: …NIH
History of the psychosomatic approach in France;
“Although somatization is accepted in all current
theories, the process differs from one theory to the other: alexithymia,
operational thinking, dysfunction, incapacity to attain the symbolic level,
etc. ....According to Sami-Ali, all of this remains within the context of a
body-soul dualism which constitutes a major epistemological obstacle,just as
[does] its opposite, monism. Relational psychosomatics strives to transcend
dualism as well as monism (…) It means
finally that the organic and the functional belong to
a sole theoretical model, (…) in which the
relational appears as the unifying principle par excellence.” Sami Ali
fundamentally distinguishes himself from historical approaches in French
psychosomatics, nearly all in the sphere of influence of Freudian theory and
emphasizing the notion of deficiency. His approach could call to mind those of
Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Ludwig Binswanger, (1881-1966), German
philosopher Karl Jaspers, (1883-1969) and his notion of limit situations (Leydenbach,
2013), and French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) with the notion of
narrative identity (Leydenbach, 2013). Sami-Ali’s oeuvre is indissociable from
his Egyptian roots. He has always lived at the frontier of two cultures.
Trained in philosophy, while integrating Western thought, he also saw
psychoanalytic theory through the lens of a different social environment and a
different language. He was the first to translate Freud to Arabic and, more
importantly, he translated different mystic Arab poets to French with
introductory comments on their works. In these comments, he emphasizes the
fundamental unity of poetry and thought, thus stressing the fundamental unity
of poetry and thought, thus stressing the fundamental unity of the human being
and starkly contrasting Western dualism. “Although trained in philosophy, I do
not believe that rational thought can give an answer to the great questions of
Mankind. In my opinion art is the only way to confront the enigma of (…) : art does not ask questions, in art, there is
no need. Art is; as light is.” (Tarantini, 2004, p95) Faced with the limitless
complexity of human reality, Sami-Ali sees but one way to approach it as a
therapist: to be in resonance, the very core of Relational Theory. According to
Sami-Ali, Wittgenstein conveys this best: “Things are immediately there before
our eyes, no veil covers them.” In the same vein, it could be similarly stated
that relation is, like art and light, and thus may represent the major gateway
to the imbroglio of ultimate complexity...with ultimate simplicity”
Conclusion: .....In France,
psychosomatic
conceptualization has been fundamentally shaped by psychoanalysis
much more than by animal experimentation. Thus, psychosomatic patient care
deals fundamentally with the patient’s words and existential condition rather
than focusing on physical symptoms. As a result, the word “psychosomatic” came
to be understood in daily language in a reduced way, qualifying a kind of
linear action from the
psychic to the
organic. Furthermore, in spite
of the monistic aspirations of a large number of French “psychosomaticians”,
this layman’s usage of the “psychosomatic” notion continues to underline the
psychic/soma division, suggesting the influence of the former on the latter.
Opposing this evolution, however, French medicine has maintained its interest
in the psyche-body dynamic in another form, for instance by establishing new
types of collaboration between practitioners of disciplines concerned with this
dynamic, such as the Balint groups mentioned above, medical psychology, (Moor,
1977) (Keller, Senon, 2007), or consultation-liaison psychiatry (Zumbrunnen,
1992), present in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Moreover, in recent
years, the French psychosomatic field has expanded to
new research in sectors previously considered
outside of its
limits, such as
the placebo effect
(Keller, Giroux-Gonon,
Gonon, 2013) or
hypnosis and its
derivatives like hypnosedation
(Bioy, Keller, 2009). Such research intends to better study the coexistence of
simultaneous psychic and somatic phenomena, not so much focusing on explicative
logic as on a more phenomenological approach.
………………………………………
Below is an abstract from Guilford Pub. Of an article
titled,
The Somatic Symptom as One's Object: Applying Fairbairn's
Theory of Internal Object Relations and Winnicott's Conceptualization of the
Psyche-and-Soma
The author discusses Winnicott's theory (1949/1975) of
the psyche-soma and Fairbairn's (1944) theory of internal object relations,
bringing them together to enrich our perspective of one's somatization. By
focusing on how the patient takes care, attends, experiences, and feels toward
the symptom, the analyst can better understand the patient's early
object-relations. This allows analyst and patient to rethink the symptom in
terms of the patient's early traumas and one's capacity to mourn the loss of
the love-object. Fairbairn's conceptualizations of the “rejecting,” “alluring,”
and “addictive” object-relations are combined with Winnicott's understanding of
the split between psyche and soma, following the ill-adaptation of the mother
to the baby's earliest emotional needs.
