Abstract
Personal experience of being a psychoanalyst in a standard and old-fashioned psychiatric service is reviewed to consider how psychoanalytic ideas may be presented as relevant to psychiatry. The difficulties are considered, and several forms of intervention by the psychoanalyst are reviewed – those forms are described under the headings Education and professional Read more
Abstract
Adolescence is a period of change. An existential change that is a change in the sense of who one is, a change in one’s identity. It may be a catastrophic crisis in identity, so that there is an uncertainty about being a person at all. Adolescence is a process of learning a new identity without knowing clearly where one will get that new identity from. The authors reflect on these issues that nowadays increasingly involve schools, social stakeholders and mental health services when a treatment response is needed for problematic adolescents and their families. Read more
Abstract
The institution tends to organise the individual in standard ways. And individuals are vulnerable to being organised for the convenience of the institution. Probably psychiatric patients needing hospitalisation are especially vulnerable to this coercive influence.
This has for long been known as a ‘top-down’ authority. A smallish group or single leader at the top of the organisation’s hierarchy makes decisions for those lower down to follow. For 50 years or so from the 1940s, there was, in Western society, an attempt to reverse this structure with what is called ‘bottom-up’ authority. The therapeutic community was one Read more
Abstract
In this paper the author reflects on the curious fact that the human being from infancy relates to others, starting with mother, from the first weeks, but later in life appears able to switch off that engagement with others and to treat them with indifference and callous disregard. Read more
Abstract
A major developmental step in infancy is to move from being an exclusive partner in the mother-infant pair, to becoming an excluded observer of the parental couple. This suggests a significant dynamic in groups in which the individuals may seek an exclusive other while being observed, or remain observers of others who can pair together in dialogue. Such an alternation of different experiences has important effects on the capacities to think, and to feel in possession of an Read more
It is owing to Claudio Neri’s inspired intuition that we were able to plan this fascinating issue of Funzionegamma on Bion’s Memoir of the Future (hereafter MoF). Inspired for many reasons. Firstly, as a result of the literature’s curious scarcity of works on the Trilogy; and then, because the paradigm prompted by Bion is becoming increasingly well known among psychoanalysts – and moreover in a version that places Italian authors in the forefront; and finally, because focusing on MoF means Read more
Abstract
Bion’s paper ‘On arrogance’, written in 1957, came at a cross-roads in his life. Evidence from his various writings is used to demonstrate a change at this time in Bion’s attitudes to himself and to others. In consequence, Bion’s paper could be read as an insightful exposition of what underlay his own contempt and Read more
Abstract
Bion developed many theories in his life, moving from one to another across a number of causurae. Beginning with a psychological ideas arising during his medical training as a Doctor, and the influence of the surgeon Wilfred Trotter. Then later influenced by the social approach of John Rickman to the psychology of groups, and subsequently his psychoanalytic training with Melanie Klein, when he reviewed his psychosocial ideas in terms of psychoanalytic concepts. And finally his concern with how psychoanalysts communicate their Read more
Abstract
As a general proposition having a mind entails being able to recognise another mind. Indeed Bion’s theory of alpha-function implies that the very development of a mind at all depends in the first place on another mind. Such an ‘other mind’ acts as a container. Thus a mind evolves from interpersonal and Read more
Abstract
If we want to enrich our ideas, we must study the problems of holding together caring and hating, the individual and the social. We each need to face the difficult emotional significance of the issues of group therapy, and group life. We need to remember it is an easy option to go for one position or the other. We do that for comfort rather than for truth. We need to establish the tension as a creative one. If influences that drove Bion and Foulkes, and their followers, towards polarised positions are valid, it is important for us now to understand how we each position ourselves. If we are to follow Malcolm’s initial plan of ‘ongoing dialogues between Foulkesian and other group-as-a-whole approaches’, we Read more
Abstract
Ogden Nash’s quip implies a perfectly neutral attitude on the part of a professional to the affairs of the people he deals with. Perhaps it is a familiar view of professional people. We need our accountants, lawyers and so on to give us an objective view of our affairs. Maybe that should be what is needed from the caring professions. However, I have argued that within psychiatry carers are particularly disconcerted by the work they do (Hinshelwood, 1999; 2004). In the present paper, I wish to look in some closer detail at these interpersonal processes that occur between carers and those they care for, with particular emphasis on personality disordered people.
This Chapter will take a critical perspective, questioning and problematising the standard approach to care provision based on the consumer model as developed since about 1990 in the NHS. The critique will involve a perspective based on a relational model, in which ‘users’ will be recognised as in relation with their carers, rather than merely objects of care; and indeed ‘carers’ are, equally, in a relationship with their users. In other words the critical position is to focus on ‘users’ in context, and in the relational environment of care. Increasingly the discovery of the notion Read more