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Created: February 11, 2002
Latest Update: February 11, 2002
E-Mail Icon jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Psychoanalysis and Higher Education

Entry by jeanne

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, February 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on a set of book reviews received from Other Press, "Other Press is a new independent academic press committed to exploring alternative perspectives in psychoanalysis and cultural theory." These abstracts will give you a sense of current work in the field of reinterpreting Freud. My particular interest will be in the transfer of some of this new psychoanalytic material to teaching practices and interpersonal relationships in higher education, one of the topics for Reinterpreting Theory, Soc 595, in Fall 2002.

Note color highlighted passages for discussion:

On Monday, February 11, 2002, jeanne received from Peter at the Other Press:

This week we are featuring the work of Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann on www.otherbooks.com Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-Constructing Interactions. February 2002. For decades the collaboration of Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann has consistently provided the psychoanalytic community with a window on the clinical relevance of the evolving scientific understanding of early development. As the understanding of early parent-infant interaction has progressed, Beebe and Lachmann have served as outstanding guides to the dialogic origins of mind, bringing to bear expert knowledge in both clinical and research domains. Together they have made the case that the clinically salient pay-out from a generation of infant research lies less in a clearer grasp of infant mentation than in a thoroughly revised understanding of the very process of human relatedness.

Infant Research and Adult Treatment

Infant Research and Adult Treatment is the first synoptic rendering of Beebe's and Lachmann's impressive body of work. Therapists unfamiliar with current research findings will find here a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of infant competencies. These competencies, as the authors demonstrate, give rise to presymbolic representations that are best understood from the standpoint of a systems view of interaction. It is through this conceptual window that the underpinnings of the psychoanalytic situation, especially the ways in which both patient and therapist find and use strategies for preserving and transforming self-organization in a dialogic context, emerge with new clarity.

Beebe and Lachmann not only show how their understanding of treatment has evolved, but illustrate this process through detailed descriptions of clinical work with long-term patients. Throughout, they demonstrate how participation in the dyadic interaction reorganizes intrapsychic and relational processes in analyst and patient alike, and in ways both consonant with, and different from, what is observed in adult-infant interactions. Of special note is their creative formulation of the principles of ongoing regulation; disruption and repair; and heightened affective moments. These principles, which describe crucial facets of the basic patterning of self-organization and its transformation in early life, provide clinical leverage for initiating and sustaining a therapeutic process with difficult to reach patients. Written by psychoanalytic practitioners for psychoanalytic practitioners, this book provides a bridge from the phenomenology of self psychological, relational, and intersubjective approaches to a systems theoretical understanding that is consistent with recent developments in psychoanalytic therapy and amenable to further clinical investigation. Both as reference work and teaching tool, as research-grounded theorizing and clinically relevant synthesis, Infant Research and Adult Treatment is destined to be a permanent addition to every thoughtful clinician's bookshelf.

Table of contents:
  1. Introduction
  2. A Dyadic Systems View
  3. Interactive Reorganization of Self-Regulation: The Case of Karen
  4. Early Capacities and Presymbolic Representation
  5. Patterns of Early Interactive Regulation
  6. Co-constructing Inner and Relational processes: Self- and Interactive Regulation in Infant Research and Adult Treatment
  7. Representation and Internalization in Infancy: Three Principles of Salience
  8. Three Principles of Salience in the Organization of the Patient-Analytic Interaction
  9. An Interactive Model of the Mind for Adult Treatment

AUTHOR BIO:

Beatrice Beebe Ph.D., a psychoanalyst and infant researcher, is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University, where she has been doing infant research for 30 years, first with Daniel Stern, M.D. and then with Joseph Jaffe, M.D. She teaches at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, and the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

The author or coauthor of over 40 articles and coauthor of Rhythms of Dialogue in Infancy, Dr. Beebe received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association in 1999. She currently holds an NIMH research grant with Joseph Jaffe to investigate maternal depression, mother-infant interaction, and infant attachment.

Rhythms of Dialogue in Infancy
By Joseph Jaffe, Beatrice Beebe, Stanley Feldstein, Cynthia Crown, Michael Jasnov

Coordination between infant and adult is thought to be essential to infant development. However, the evidence is sparse. This study is theoretically and methodologically grounded in a dyadic systems perspective and relational psychoanalysis. Our automated apparatus explores the micro-second timing of 4-month infant-adult vocal coordination to predict 12-month infant attachment and cognition. Coordination was related to the contexts of partner (mother/stranger), site (home/lab) and outcome (attachment/cognition). Although "more" coordination is generally assumed to be "better", a midrange was optimal for attachment (enhancing flexibility), and a high degree between stranger and infant in the lab was optimal for cognition ("high novelty response"). Stranger-infant coordination showed more mutual (bidirectional) coordination than mother-infant, suggesting that the measure assesses vigilance rather than "attunement." Stranger-infant coordination predicted attachment just as well as mother-infant, and was a more powerful predictor of cognition. This work further defines a fundamental dyadic timing matrix that guides the trajectory of infant development.

Transforming Aggression by Frank Lachmann

Dr. Frank M. Lachmann, eminent clinician, teacher, and researcher, offers help to clinicians working with difficult-to-treat patients. Designed to avoid escalating spirals of aggression and prevent therapeutic stalemates, the process of change begins with an understanding of the nature, causes, and function of the patient's aggression.

Resources of empathy, humor, and creativity are needed by both the therapist and the patient to transform chronic, eruptive expressions of anger and transcend the tendency to violence. The task of therapy is to develop these resources. Dr. Frank M. Lachmann, eminent clinician, teacher, and researcher, offers help to clinicians working with difficult-to-treat patients. . . .

Distinguishing between reactive and eruptive aggression, Lachmann identifies the specific adverse developmental conditions that contribute to the latter. Some of the factors examined are experiences of abuse, deception, and neglect; early failure to establish self-soothing and affect regulation; deficiencies in the mother-infant dyad that interfere with the development of self-cohesion and increase self-fragmentation; neurological abnormalities; and an intolerance of feelings of shame.

The therapeutic process is presented with rich clinical material that highlights the effects of spontaneity, humorous exchanges, improvisational interplay, and non-interpretive comments rather than rigorous attention to technically correct interventions. The dimensions of the transference are richly elaborated, and the devaluations of the therapist characteristic of these patients are deeply and broadly understood. Creative, encouraging, and optimistic, this book offers therapists a refreshing perspective and invaluable clinical help.

Table of contents:

  • Self Psychology Strikes Back
  • The Aggressive Toddler and the Angry Adult
  • The View from Motivational Systems Theory
  • State Transformations in Psychoanalytic Treatment
  • State Transformations and Trauma
  • State Transformations through Creativity
  • The Transformation of Reactive Aggression into Eruptive Aggression
  • It's Better to Be Feared Than Pitied
  • The Empathy That Enrages
  • A Requiem for Countertransference
  • A Systems View
  • Self Psychology and the Varieties of Aggression
. . . .

224 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011, Tel. 212-924-3344, orders@otherbooks.com

Discussion Topics

  1. dialogic origins of mind - What would you suppose this term means?

    Consider:

    “This extraordinary book is a critical landmark in the psychoanalytic literature. The culmination of decades of dialogue between the coauthors, Infant Research and Adult Treatment provides rich new metaphors, scenarios, and narratives for practitioners. Beebe and Lachmann lay out a sophisticated paradigm of the origins of relatedness and a complex systems view of mind as organized in interaction. Disposing definitively of any residual sense that clinical psychoanalysis and infant research cannot fully address, and benefit from, the insights of the other, they bring the conversation between these disparate disciplines to an exciting and creative new level.”--Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
    From     Analytic Press Review

    Consider that dialog suggests discussion, discourse, and that this new text focuses on infant development as interaction with the mother-figure and with others (strangers). So we might say that this is a study of development from the perspective of the interpersonal reading and learning of communication. Our interest, for purposes of teaching, is that these authors have studied patterns of infant development and transferred that knowledge to therapy with adults. We would like to transfer that knowledge to the teaching process of adults in higher education.

    Consider also that a disciplined reading of book reviews will provide you this much information. This permits you to decide whether you want to explore the text further. If it fits the direction in which you want your research to go, then find the text and go further. If not, keep it for your references, in case the direction your going in should change.

  2. "Stranger-infant coordination showed more mutual (bidirectional) coordination than mother-infant, suggesting that the measure assesses vigilance rather than 'attunement.' " What clue might this statement provide for building more effective interpersonal relationships between teacher and student in higher education?

    Consider that mutual coordination is more characteristic of the stranger-infant relationship, and that the [s]tranger-infant coordination predicted attachment just as well as mother-infant, and was a more powerful predictor of cognition. Might that not suggest that mutual coordination would be a more effective learning tool than the supervisory coordination more typical of the mother-infant relationship?