 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(July 2010) |
Martin Stanton (born 21 March 1950) is a British writer, teacher and psychoanalyst.
| This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(July 2010) |
Martin Stanton (born 21 March 1950) is a British writer, teacher and psychoanalyst.
He is known for his pioneering work in establishing Psychoanalytic Studies as a distinct and thriving academic subject that is now taught in universities around the world – he founded the first prototype Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, in 1986. He is equally known for his innovative and challenging work on the nature and function of unconscious processes. This began this with his first book Outside the Dream (1983) – and originally and free-associatively explored the vital impact of Lacanian thinking on contemporary psychoanalysis at that time (when Lacan was largely unknown in the English-speaking world). The book was equally a poetic account of Stanton's own early personal engagement with psychoanalysis. He spent much of the 1970s training to be an analyst in Paris, and was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he attended classes and lectures by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, whose teaching variously resonates in the footnotes to the book.
He followed Outside the Dream with a critical introduction to Sándor Ferenczi (1991) – which was the first major study of the pioneer Hungarian psychoanalyst, and this provoked a widely celebrated "Ferenczi renaissance" (Berman, 2002) in both the psychotherapeutic and cultural worlds. In the 1990s, he opened up large avenues in Ferenczi's thinking that were previously undiscovered, above all the critical value of utraquism – or the productive and free-associative use of analogies – in analytic work with unconscious processes, in particular the use of the analogy of the teratoma (an embryonic form of tumour) to engage with the after-effects of sexual abuse.
In Paris, Stanton also became closely linked with the work of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, and, through him, became actively involved in seminal debates on the central role of afterwardsness in the unconscious psychological process of trauma. These debates are now generally referred to under the general title of the new seduction theory. In this context, in 1998, Stanton launched his own notion of the bezoaric effect, which was developed from an analogy with animals' production of bezoar stones from progressive digestive regurgitations in wild and desert terrain (1998). At the same time, his book Out of Order (1997) presented an extensive critical review of his own contributions in the light of his psychoanalytic forebears, Ferenczi, Michael Balint, and Laplanche.
In this context, Out of Order was clearly written to re-connect psychoanalytic clinical work to its founding revolutionary impetus in the residual unconscious, and help people gain the strength and insight to remain open to unpredictable and unforeseen change, and to challenge their world, rather than conform and adapt to increasingly confined norms.
Stanton's work strongly opposes the core strategies of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy , notably in the way in which it aims to "manage" the production of symptoms of mental disorders. Above all, he sets out to expose how the prioritisation of cognition distorts and actively diminishes the elaborative complexity of conscious and unconscious life – notably by imposing set forms of linear causality (such as dialectics), and privileging projective ego-based thought-process over introjection (which centrally concerns the impact of feeling/sensations on thinking).
He chooses rather to explore the alternative dynamics generated within the interactive space between primary feeling/sensations and cognitive process. A central focus here is the elaborative feeling/thought dynamic that follows a primary feeling/sensory input (introjection) – or the particular inner-outer reverberations that follow once the psyche is struck or hit by something.
First of all, there are psychic contusions – psychic elaborations which evolve like bruises which brighten and darken, colour-up, and shift around feeling/sensation pin-point triggers (which Stanton calls contundors). Then there are the imagos , the amalgams generated from various bits of visual/sensation material that randomly stick together to form an evanescent image or sound that freeze-frames the ongoing narrative.
Finally, there are the set interactive systemic structures of effect, generated by primary feeling/sensory introjections, that form initially around contundors, and then subsequently progressively elaborate after-effects around imagos. Stanton has so far introduced and elaborated on the following general interactive systemic structures:
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who developed the practice from his theoretical model of personality organization and development, psychoanalytic theory. Freud's work stems partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions, mostly by students of Freud, such as Alfred Adler and his collaborator, Carl Gustav Jung, as well as by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies in the psyche through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.
Sándor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud.
The id, ego, and super-ego are a set of three concepts in psychoanalytic theory describing distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus. The three agents are theoretical constructs that describe the activities and interactions of the mental life of a person. In the ego psychology model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual desires; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic agent that mediates between the instinctual desires of the id and the critical super-ego; Freud explained that:
The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that, normally, control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus, in its relation to the id, [the ego] is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often, a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide [the horse] where it wants to go; so, in the same way, the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action, as if it were its own.
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher. Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud's publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.
In psychology, introjection is the unconscious adoption of the thoughts or personality traits of others. It occurs as a normal part of development, such as a child taking on parental values and attitudes. It can also be a defense mechanism in situations that arouse anxiety.
Repression is a key concept of psychoanalysis, where it is understood as a defense mechanism that "ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it." According to psychoanalytic theory, repression plays a major role in many mental illnesses, and in the psyche of the average person.
Relational psychoanalysis is a school of psychoanalysis in the United States that emphasizes the role of real and imagined relationships with others in mental disorder and psychotherapy. 'Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new and evolving school of psychoanalytic thought considered by its founders to represent a "paradigm shift" in psychoanalysis'.
Jean Laplanche was a French author, psychoanalyst and winemaker. Laplanche is best known for his work on psychosexual development and Sigmund Freud's seduction theory, and wrote more than a dozen books on psychoanalytic theory. The journal Radical Philosophy described him as "the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day."
Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats an event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes re-enacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. This "re-living" can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and even hallucinated.
André Green was a French psychoanalyst.
Resistance, in psychoanalysis, refers to oppositional behavior when an individual's unconscious defenses of the ego are threatened by an external source. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic theory, developed his concept of resistance as he worked with patients who suddenly developed uncooperative behaviors during sessions of talk therapy. He reasoned that an individual that is suffering from a psychological affliction, which Freud believed to be derived from the presence of suppressed illicit or unwanted thoughts, may inadvertently attempt to impede any attempt to confront a subconsciously perceived threat. This would be for the purpose of inhibiting the revelation of any repressed information from within the unconscious mind.
Maria Torok was a French psychoanalyst of Hungarian descent.
Ignacio Matte Blanco was a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed a logic-based explanation for the operation of the unconscious, and for the non-logical aspects of experience. In applying the complexity and paradoxes of mathematical logic to psychoanalysis, he pioneered a coherent way of understanding the clinical situation. He has an international following that includes physicists, mathematicians, cyber-scientists, psychologists, mathematical philosophers, neuroscientists, theologians, linguistics and literary scholars.
Robert Douglas Hinshelwood is an English psychiatrist and academic. He is a Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. He trained as a doctor and psychiatrist. He has taken an interest in the Therapeutic Community movement since 1974, and was founding editor of The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, having edited. with Nick Manning, Therapeutic Communities: Reflections and Progress.
Identification is a psychological process whereby the individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed wholly or partially by the model that other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified. The roots of the concept can be found in Freud's writings. The three most prominent concepts of identification as described by Freud are: primary identification, narcissistic (secondary) identification and partial (secondary) identification.
In the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, afterwardsness is a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events... [from the German word] Nachträglichkeit, translated as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup, afterwardsness". As summarized by another scholar, 'In one sense, Freud's theory of deferred action can be simply stated: memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience'.
Claude Nachin is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, the majority of whose writings have affiliations with the joint work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, particularly with respect to their concept of the intergenerational "phantom".
Hanns Sachs was one of the earliest psychoanalysts, and a close personal friend of Sigmund Freud. He became a member of Freud's Secret Committee of six in 1912, Freud describing him as one "in whom my confidence is unlimited in spite of the shortness of our acquaintance".
Henry Zvi Lothane, M.D., is a Polish-born American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, educator and author. Lothane is currently Clinical Professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, specializing in the area of psychotherapy. He is the author of some eighty scholarly articles and reviews on various topics in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the history of psychotherapy, as well as the author of a book on the famous Schreber case, entitled In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry. In Defense of Schreber examines the life and work of Daniel Paul Schreber against the background of 19th and early 20th century psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
