Learning about/from Psychoanalysis

“Perhaps the greatest mystery of modern astronomy is that the extraordinary centrifugal rush into differentiated structures and boundaries and spaces seems to be balanced by an opposite, centripetal force that keeps all those structures from flying apart, that brakes the force of the Big Bang, that connects the seemingly separate and autonomous elements of our universe, and that may eventually draw them all back together again into yet another cataclysmic rebirth.”“There is something else, “hidden matter” in the seeming vacancy of all that space, that generates enough gravity to tie together even galaxies rushing apart across mind-numbing distances into a single force field.”-everything is interconnected in ways we have yet to understand or know“psychoanalysts, together with their patients, narrate not cosmologies, but developmental histories in which they speculate about the way the force field of the patient’s life came to be”“We begin, with experience in which there is no differentiation between inside and outside, self and other, actuality and fantasy, past and present.”“That original and continuing primal density, in Loewald’s vision of mind, operates as “hidden matter” tying together dimensions of experience that only appear to be fully separate, bounded, and disconnected… psychopathology most broadly conceived represents an imbalance between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of mind.”“In neurosis, the normative adaption to our scientistic, hypertechnologized world, the constituents of mind have drifted too far from their original dense unity: inside and outside become separate, impermeable domains; self and other are experienced in isolation from each other; actuality is disconnected from fantasy, and the past has become remote from a shallow, passionless present.”“these features are usefully lost as language use takes on “consensual validity” and moves into the domain that he terms the “syntaxic… language can now be used in a way that other speakers can understand precisely, and the residues of the original parataxic contexts remain as autistic pockets that detract from and compromise potentials.”“Humanity, Sullivan believes, takes place in human interaction” -love this“the sensual intensity is lost with the advent of language” -Stern; verbal and non-verbal realms similar to Freud; “language is associated with secondary process, the reality principle, the “word presentation,” the present-day adult world and is a considerable remove from the “thing-presentation,” the preverbal, fantasy-driven workings on primary process.”“the key feature of Loewald’s understanding of language is his challenge of that separation; language transcends the distinction between preverbal and verbal; language begins to play an important role in the earliest days of life.” “the most important distinction is… between the ways in which language operates in these two developmental eras and levels of mental organization.”“Does language in its adaptive, everyday form resonate with its earlier sensory, affective, undifferentiated origin, or has a severing split the two realms from each other? Such a delinking becomes definitive of Loewald’s reworking of Freud’s concept of repression, no longer the denial of access to awareness for an impulse, fantasy, or memory, but a severing of developmentally earlier forms of experience and psychic organization”“what psychoanalysis needs might not be a new language, but a less inhibited, less pedantic and narrow understanding and interpretation of its current language leading to elaborations and transormations of the meanings of concepts, theoretical formulations, or definitions that may or may not have been envisaged by Freud”“reality testing is far more an intellectual or cognitive function. It may be understood more comprehensively as the experiential testing of fantasy – its potential and suitability for actualization –and the testing of actuality – its potential for encompassing in it, and penetrating it with, one’s fantasy life. We deal with the task of a reciprocal transposition.” “Meaning in human experience is generated in the mutual, dialectically enriching tension between fantasy; each requires the other to come alive. In the psychic universe of the individual mind, vitality and meaning require open channels between the developmentally earlier, but perpetually regenerated primal density and the clearly demarcated boundaries that make possible adaptive living”