Transformation of Dreams in Analysis: the Research Findings with Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Prof. Dr. Phil. (Frankfurt)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
Release Date: 07/28/2024
Candidates' Reflections on their Psychoanalytic Training with Himanshu Agrawal, MD (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“The theme that I found with IPSO [International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization] was that there was a common theme [in psychoanalytic training]. There was an initial phase full of terror and excitement, and then a middle phase of maybe some lethargy or apathy or disillusionment. In that middle phase, many candidates found IPSO, or IPSO found them, where they found refuge. They found solace. They found community, not just at their local institutes, but at this kind of world market. Many of the candidates talk about what a timely and wonderful experience it was to be seen, to be...
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Reflections on Our Changing Field with Stefano Bolognini, MD (Bologna)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“When we reconstruct [in a patient] a possible lacking object or role or function, we see that if the analyst himself has been able and the patient allowing him to be able to enter to a deep level the objective reality of the internal world of the patient, it can happen that some new function or position can be achieved. This is something that could be rare but it happens. This is one more reason for not blaming the length of some analytic treatments, because time is needed for entering that internal deep area where the analytic relation can create something new. Transformation...
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Discovering the Process of One's Mind with Fred Busch, PhD (Chestnut Hill, Mass.)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“The original papers that were written about the analyst’s unconscious being attuned to the patient's unconscious by Hyman and Racker, in both cases they talk about this phenomenon. But both of them utter a caution, which is that one always has to take into account one's own ‘mishegas’. Essentially, what they're saying is, the unconscious is pretty individualistic and we have our own things, and we have to consider that possibly it's our own difficulties, our own unconscious, that is playing a bigger role in our countertransference reaction to the patient's unconscious.”...
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Religion, 'Allegorical Objects' and Levinas with David Black, PhD (London)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“The idea of analytic neutrality, which was more or less a cliche truth when I was training back in the 1980s, is clearly getting at something very important, which is that we mustn't try to pre-conceive where the patient's development is going to take him or her. But that doesn't mean that the development is not in a direction. Aristotle famously said that the human being is a ‘zoon politikon’, a creature who belongs in a somewhat structured society. Healthy development is in that sort of direction as we become more integrated, as our ‘ghosts become more like ancestors’, to use that...
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Childhood Memories: Their Impact on Mothers and Their 0–3-year-old Children with Ilene Lefcourt (New York)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“There are very specific fears that people have that are specifically related to their own childhood, and I'd like to give an example. A mom with twins had a kidnapping fear. She was afraid every time she saw a car drive by her house that her twins would be kidnapped. Now this mother was herself adopted when she was a newborn, but her adoption did not become final until she was one year old. Her twins were approaching one year. I was struck by the anniversary of her fear of kidnapping, and when I asked her who she thought was driving the car that drove by her house, she blurted out, 'my...
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Forbidden Intimacy: Marrying the 'Other' with Ashis Roy, PhD (Kolkata, India)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“The amount of guilt and the sense of alienation that people feel when they fall in love with someone who is ‘outside’, and the struggle that they have to undergo to explain that choice which they fully don't understand themselves, is a very deep conflict that my work tries to capture. The title of my book is ‘Intimacy in Alienation’, and alienation is something that is really very pregnant in the identities of these individuals who feel like aliens to their own community because their community cannot imagine why are they seeing the other as something positive but not as how the...
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The Making of the Documentary: Outsider. Freud with Yair Qedar (Tel Aviv)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“I belong to the race that in the Middle Ages was blamed for all the plagues and such experiences have a sobering effect, and they do not arouse the tendency to believe in illusions. Much of my life has been devoted to trying to shed illusions. But if there is an illusion worth believing in, at least partially, this is the illusion: that we learn how to divert the impulse of destruction from our own kind, how to stop hating each other because of trivial differences, and stop killing each other for profits. That we stop taking advantage of the achievements of progress to control the forces of...
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A Fourth Pillar: Unlocking the Power of Case Writing in Analytic Training with Stephen B. Bernstein, MD (Brookline, Mass.)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“I've had the experience of having some wonderful supervisees, many of whom have done quite fine work and where it has not been an issue of any kind of great concerns. And allowing the candidate to see what's written and also discussing it with them, obviously makes it quite easy for them to get both positive input, but also at times, input that will help them evolve and deepen their work even more.” Episode Description: We begin by exploring the critical role of case writing in psychoanalytic training, discussing Stephen’s concept of "a fourth pillar of analytic training." Stephen...
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The Unspoken: Analyst's 'Delinquencies', Post-Treatment Contact and Aging with Joyce Slochower, PhD (New York)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
“I feel so strongly about this [collective commemorative ritual]. I think that early psychoanalytic writing overemphasized the value of separation-individuation and pathologized the opposite. It's been through personal experience that I have come to see that in a different way with regard to Jewish commemorative ritual which takes place a couple of times a year. But also some experiences that I have had outside the realm of religion. The one that pops to mind was what President Biden did about a year after the first onslaught of the Covid epidemic. He had candles put all around the...
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Poetry of the Mind and the Process of Mourning with Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD (Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts)
Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
"What Freud may have missed here is that the investment in the lost object is a much more reconstructive and integrative process. It’s one where we remember all the stories that we have heard from the lost object - the repetitive stories about the childhood of the person or how they met significant others and all these stories are within us and revived, and we have questions. We think: ‘Too bad I never asked about this or that’ and in activating these memories we also experience joy and we have a slow process of integration which is not necessarily about loss but about how continuous...
info_outline"In my own two analyses, I had observed such transformations for me in a very impressive way. I started my own analysis after the traumatic death of my sister when I was 22 years old. At that time, I had a breakdown, and I suffered from severe depressive and psychosomatic symptoms and sleep disorders but also from terrible nightmares that haunted me almost every night. Fortunately, my two analyses did change my depressive and psychosomatic symptoms, but what was at least as important for me, subjectively, was the change in my dreams, including the manifest dream content. The nightmares became less frequent; I was hardly in the position of an observer anymore but actively involved in the dream event. I was less alone in the dream but accompanied by people close to me and was more often able to solve the problems and conflicts which arose in the dream. In addition, the dreams were no longer predominantly characterized by fear and death anxiety but a whole range of emotions emerged. Towards the end of my second analysis, I will never forget that I had the only dream of my life from which I woke up because I was laughing out loud."
Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the ambivalence that many analysts have towards research. It is seen as distant from the sharing of subjectivities that draw many to our field. Marianne honors the unique transference reliving and then remembering that is central to the analytic encounter and from that position suggests ways that it can be researched. She presents a patient whose manifest dreams were studied over the course of treatment along with his sleep laboratory data. She notes how the stability of the analyst's presence is essential but not sufficient to maximize therapeutic benefit. We discuss the role of theory, the controversy over approaching the veridical past and the seductions of simplified treatments. Marianne closes by sharing her deep respect for the unconscious and how psychoanalysts are living in "rich times of pluralism."
Linked Episode:
https://ipaoffthecouch.org/2019/07/13/episode-10-refugees-germany-psychoanalysis/
Our Guest: Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Prof. Dr. phil, director of the Sigmund-Freud-Institut in Frankfurt Germany (2001-2016), professor for psychoanalysis at the University of Kassel, Senior Research Fellow at the University Medicine in Mainz. She is a training analyst of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV) and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). She has served as the Chair of the Research Subcommittees for Clinical, Conceptual, Epistemological and Historical Research of the IPA (2001-2009), Vice Chair for Europe of the Research Board der IPA (2010-2021); Chair of the IPA Subcommittee for Migration and Refugees 2018/19 and since then member of the committee. She received the Mary Sigourney Award 2016, the Haskell Norman Prize for Excellence in Psychoanalysis 2017, the Robert S. Wallerstein Fellowship (2022-2027) and the IPA’s Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award, 2023. Her research fields are clinical and extra-clinical research in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic developmental research, prevention studies, interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature, educational sciences and the neurosciences.
Recommended Readings:
Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2008): Biographical truths and their clinical consequences: Understanding ‚embodied memories‘ in a third psychoanalysis with a traumatized patient recovered from serve poliomyelitis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89: 1165-1187.
Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2015): Working with severely traumatized, chronically depressed analysands. In: The International Journal of Psychoanalysis Volume 96, Issue 3, June 2015, Pages: 611-636.
Bohleber, W., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2016): The Special Problem of Interpretation in the Treatment of Traumatized Patients. In: Psychoanalytic Inquiry 36: 60-76, 2016.
Fischmann, T., Ambresin, G., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M. (2021): Manifest dreams in psychoanalytic treatment. A psychoanalytic outcome measure. Frontiers in Psychology, doi: 10,3389/fpsyg, 2021.678440.
Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., Donié, M., Wichelmann, J., Ambresin, G., & Fischmann, T. (2023). Changes in dreams - the development of a dream-transformation scale in psychoanalysis with chronically depressed, early traumatized patients. The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 46:1-2, 82-93. doi:10.1080/01062301.2023.2297116
Fischmann, T., and Leuzinger-Bohleber, M.: Dreams, Memories, and Trauma—A search for transformations in psychoanalysis (in press).