Herbert Alexander Rosenfeld (2 July 1910 – 29 November 1986) was a German-British psychoanalyst.
Herbert Alexander Rosenfeld | |
---|---|
Born | 2 July 1910 |
Died | 29 November 1986 76) London, UK | (aged
Nationality | German-British |
Known for | Clinical work with psychotic, and borderline patients |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Clinical Psychoanalysis |
Rosenfeld made seminal contributions to Kleinian thinking on psychotic and other very ill patients; [1] while his emphasis on the role of the analyst in contributing to potential impasses in the analytic encounter has had a wide impact on analysts both in Britain and internationally. [2] Among his most significant contributions were his groundbreaking exploration of projective identification; [3] the development of the concept of "confusion"; and the foundation of a theory of destructive narcissism, since taken up and developed by André Green and Otto Kernberg.
Rosenfeld was born in Nuremberg in 1910, received his medical diploma from Munich in 1934, and emigrated to Britain one year later due to the Nuremberg laws prohibiting him from working with non-Jewish patients. He retook his medical in degree, and went on to undergo a teaching analysis with Melanie Klein. He eventually became an analyst in 1945 himself and continued to work within the Kleinian movement. He died in London on 29 November 1986. [4]
Rosenfeld saw confusion as a half-way house between splitting and reintegration, either as a progressive step towards the latter, or as a regression from it. [5] In its negative aspect, according to Hanna Segal, "a most powerful element in confusion is envy...Narcissistic organisation protects us from that confusion". [6]
Rosenfeld played a leading part in the work of Kleinians on the destructive aspects of narcissism. [7] For Rosenfeld, "destructive narcissism...is directed against the libidinal ties or bonds of the self to the object". [8]
The concept of what Rosenfeld termed "narcissistic omnipotent object relations" [9] - a state of mind dominated by an internal object merging ego and ego ideal in a form of mad omnipotence - was later to feed into Kernberg's notion of the pathologically grandiose self [10]
Rosenfeld's final work, Impasse and Interpretation (1987), focused on the possibility of the overcoming of critical moments of impasse with difficult patients. Rosenfeld was increasingly convinced that such potentially destructive impasses were predicated on the existence of blind spots in the analyst, [11] thus pointing the way for the later developments of intersubjective psychoanalysis.
While for some analysts, the negative therapeutic reaction is an insurmountable block, Rosenfeld attempts to show that these "dead ends" are moments that can and should be overcome. Using the concept of envy to shed light on analytic impasse, Rosenfeld maintained that while patients may in some ways prefer to resist change rather than allow the analyst to help them, [12] if handled innovatively, such stalemates may allow patients to bring back to life for their analyst the impasses they subjectively lived at key moments in their development.
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.
Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.
Otto Friedmann Kernberg is an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives. His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a school within modern psychoanalysis.
Malignant narcissism is a psychological syndrome comprising a mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, sadism, and a paranoid outlook on life. Malignant narcissism is not a diagnostic category defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). Rather, it is a subcategory of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) which could also include traits of antisocial personality disorder or paranoid personality disorder.
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego ideal is the inner image of oneself as one wants to become. It consists of "the individual's conscious and unconscious images of what he would like to be, patterned after certain people whom ... he regards as ideal."
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Modern psychoanalysis is the term used by Hyman Spotnitz to describe the techniques he developed for the treatment of narcissistic disorders.
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John Steiner is a psychoanalyst, author and trainer at the British Psychoanalytical Society. Steiner, a "prolific London post-Kleinian", is best known for his conceptions of the "pathological organisation" or the "psychic retreat"...between the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions'. His book, Psychic Retreats, describes a treatment methodology for patients with complex defence mechanisms that are difficult to treat with conventional psychoanalysis.
Hanna Segal was a British psychoanalyst of Polish descent and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London (UCL) in 1987. The American psychoanalyst James Grotstein considered that "received wisdom suggests that she is the doyen of "classical" Kleinian thinking and technique." The BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley introduced her as "one of the most distinguished psychological theorists of our time,"
The term reparation was used by Melanie Klein (1921) to indicate a psychological process of making mental repairs to a damaged internal world. In object relations theory, it represents a key part of the movement from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position — the pain of the latter helping to fuel the urge to reparation.
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Depressive anxiety is a term developed in relation to the depressive position by Melanie Klein, building on Freud's seminal article on object relations of 1917, 'Mourning and Melancholia'. Depressive anxiety revolved around a felt state of inner danger produced by the fear of having harmed good internal objects - as opposed to the persecutory fear of ego annihilation more typical of paranoid anxiety.
Narcissistic neurosis is a term introduced by Sigmund Freud to distinguish the class of neuroses characterised by their lack of object relations and their fixation upon the early stage of libidinal narcissism. The term is less current in contemporary psychoanalysis, but still a focus for analytic controversy.
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