Burial and resurgence of projective identification in French psychoanalysis.

Curiously enough, the concept of projective identification was ignored, and even rejected in France for at least two decades after the publication of the founding texts of Melanie Klein and Herbert Rosenfeld. This rejection was due to a critique from child psychoanalysts close to Anna Freud and also from the teaching of Lacan: the first took the real mother-child relation extensively into account, while the latter only saw the internal object as a signifier. The fact that during this period the countertransference was a concept reduced to its negative content no doubt explains this deliberate ignorance. With the dissemination of a broader and more positive conception of the countertransference, a renewal of interest could be observed in the 1980s with references to empathic listening and to the effects of thought-induction.

[Emotions and affect in psychoanalysisis]. / Émotions et affects en psychanalyse.

The goal of this paper is to give some indications on the concept of affect in psychoanalysis. There is no single theory of affect, and Freud gave successive definitions, which continue to be deepened in contemporary psychoanalysis. We review some steps of Freud works on affect, then we look into some present major questions, such as its relationship to soma, the nature of unconscious affects and the repression of affect, which is particularly developed in the field of psychoanalytic psychosomatic. From Freud's definitions of affect as one of the drive representative and as a limit-concept between the somatic and the psychic, we develop some major theoretical perspectives, which give a central place to soma and drive impulses, and which agree on the major idea that affect is the result of a process. We then note some parallelism between psychoanalysis of affect and psychology and neurosciences of emotion, and underline the gaps and conditions of comparison between these different epistemological approaches.

[Sense of personal identity from a psychoanalytical perspective]. / Le sentiment d'identité

Psychoanalytical perspective on the sense of personal identity displays paradoxical aspects. It increases the knowledge of the Self, particularly of the Unconscious. However, simultaneously, it stresses the gap between the knowledge which we can have of ourselves and what is thought inside us. We successively study the consequences on the sense of identity of the psychoanalytical method, structural models and identification processes. The ego theory and the ambiguities of the self consciousness will be singled out.

[Consciousness: a psychoanalytical point of view]. / La conscience du point de vue de la psychanalyse.

There is no specific point of view on consciousness from psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic investigations are focused on inconscious psychic acts and the ways they can be accessible to consciousness. We successively examine the virtual preconscious, the repressed preconscious, and the proper unconscious. For each of these types of events stored in memory, we specify the modes of access into consciousness, specifically the role of co-thinking in the access to consciousness proper and the status of the unconscious psychic reality.

The third in mind.

Various aspects of the occult as they relate to psychoanalysis are discussed in this article. Drawing on both Freud's writings and Granoff and Rey's (1983) work on the occult in Freudian thought, the author considers the concept of co-thinking and its manifestations in clinical work. The psychoanalytic third is viewed in the context of the occult element known as thought transference, or thought transmission, and is also considered as it bears on psychoanalytic supervision.

[Motivation and psychoanalysis. A cross-road]. / Motivation et psychanalyse. A la croisée des chemins.

The concept of drive in psychoanalysis corresponds to the question of motivation. This is related to the psychoanalytical methodology that is founded up on a specific process of communication, the listening and the interpretation of subjectivity and its unconscious origins. This specificity explains why psychoanalytic psychology deals with attachment and aversion drive (on one side sexuality, broadly speaking, including infantile sexuality, and on the other side aggressivity and destructivity). In the unconscious part of the mind, these drives are materialized in fantasies, action representations, that impose themselves unconsciously upon the conscious mind and give rise to intrapsychic conflicts and to personality disorders that are treated by psychoanalysis.

Inconsciente y teoría de la acción / Unconscious and theory of action

Las ciencias cognitivas, volviendo a dar una legitimidad científica al estudio de las actividades mentales, han permitido nuevamente el diálogo entre psicoanálisis y psicología científica. Sustituyendo la noción de comportamiento por la de acción, en particular a partir del criterio de intencionalidad, las teorías modernas de la acción pudieron integrar particularmente el modelo psicoanalítico. Los elementos de esta integración serán examinados en relación con la definición del concepto (criterio de intencionalidad), los mecanismos elementales, subpersonales y la conciencia de la acción. Al contrario, el modelo de la acción necesita que el concepto metapsicológico de pulsión sea radicalmente revisado. A partir de allí puede edificarse una teoría de la representación conciente como representación-acción. Gracias a lo que una metapsicología renovada iría, a su vez, a interrogar a la teoría de la acción.