George E. Atwood, PhD |
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gatwood@rci.rutgers.edu |
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Deep Thoughts: a forum for ideas expressed in a single sentence or lessEditors: George Atwood and David Klugman ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Cohesive selves stick together, as long as their cohesion is not borrowed. William Coburn & George Atwood
Martin Heidegger - submitted by Robert Stolorow Classic Deep Thought: "[In a dream, a delusion, or a work of art] a situation taken up into a metaphor loses its transitory, painful and unstable quality, and becomes full of significance and inner validity, the moment it passes wholly into an image." Rainer Maria Rilke - submitted by George Atwood Classic Deep Thought: “And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.” Soren Kierkegaard - submitted by Robert Stolorow "The name ...is in advance the name of a dead person." Jacques Derrida - submitted by Robert Stolorow "But science
is merely a secondary bracketing of philosophical language, Emmanuel Levinas - submitted by Robert Stolorow "Lamenting the groundlessness of our existence is why-ning." George Atwood Classic Deep Thought: "A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart." Goethe - submitted by Robert Stolorow Classic Deep Thought: "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror." Ranier Maria Rilke - submitted by Robert Stolorow Grief is the hole you walk around during the day, but fall into at night. Anonymous - submitted by Tony Schwartz "Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy" William Shakespeare - submitted by Michael Leyton "We only become what we are by the radical and deep seated refusal of that which others have made of us." Jean Paul Sartre Classic Deep Thought: It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found. D.W. Winnicott - submitted by Helen Davey " Classic Deep Thought: The prince of darkness is a gentleman." William Shakespeare - submitted by Stephanie Stolorow "Classic Oxymoron: Neuropsychoanalysis" Robert Stolorow "In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit (i.e., we should be able to think what cannot be thought). " Ludwig Wittgenstein submitted by Rebecca Rabin "All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy" Martin Heidegger submitted by Robert Stolorow Narcissistic parents give the gift that keeps on taking. Robert Stolorow Classic Deep Thought: "...go there where you cannot go, to the impossible, it is indeed the only way of coming, or going..." Jacques Derrida submitted by Dorthy Levinson Classic Oxymoron:
Trauma Recovery “You’re brainwashed” brainwashes. A patient - submitted by Robert Stolorow Classic Deep Thought: “You who are immaculate, you pure perceivers…Behind a God’s mask, you hide from yourselves.” From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche – submitted by Robert Stolorow The driven need to cut oneself, embodying a desire to render visible in the flesh injuries to the soul that have been denied, invalidated and erased, arises so that the bloody wounds stand as testimonies, in the manner of the mothers of the disappeared marching before the palace of the Argentinian generals in the 1970s, to a truth that otherwise vanishes without a trace. George Atwood A thought that strangely subverts itself, suggesting a certain madness in the thinker:”What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” From the Tractatus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein – submitted by George Atwood The positivist credo, which is a self-cancelling proposition - All those statements not verifiable by external observation are to be consigned to the flames - - - “Ahhh, positivism: a doctrine that flies up its own asshole!” George Atwood’s friend, Lawrence Schechter, who committed suicide in 1974 Classic Deep Thought: When you take poison, sooner or later you get poisoned – and all drugs are poison. The great psychiatrist, Elvin Semrad, answering a question as to what he thought of psychiatric medications submitted by Rebecca Rabin An unspoken counterpart to the idea of the selfobject in self psychology is that of the objectself, a self constituted exclusively by the needs and requirements of the object - inasmuch as the cohesion of the objectself is entirely a borrowed one, it can be said that an objectself disintegrates into authentic chaos upon encountering a selfobject. George Atwood For someone whose mind and body have been stolen, the only thing that exists is unreality and the only thing that is real does not exist. Dorthy Levinson and George Atwood In the use of the concept of projective identification, the clinician does to the patient precisely what this concept tells us that the patient is doing to the clinician. George Atwood, Robert Stolorow, and Donna Orange Those who create 'systems' in psychoanalysis, their most ardent followers, and those who revel in presenting, discussing, and being discussed at psychoanalytic conferences appear, almost without exception, to be in headlong flight from profound childhood depression. David Klugman and George Atwood An important difference one often sees between those therapists who never encounter multiple personality and who doubt its very existence except perhaps as something iatrogenically induced, and those therapists who observe and treat multiple personality fairly frequently and who regard it as absolutely genuine, is that the former tend to be persons who have compliantly identified with idealized authority figures in their lives (parents, teachers, analysts) and in the process have sequestered and silenced the pain of serious childhood trauma, whereas the latter are persons who have reacted to the injuries and disruptions of their early years by becoming the idealized parent their mothers and fathers were not, and by seeking to heal and comfort themselves vicariously through taking care of childhood pain in others. George Atwood and Janet Droga The quintessential irony of the analytic relationship resides in the analyst who insists that the patient have a right to his or her own life, a right to develop a personal sense of freedom and agency. William Coburn Classic Oxymorons: (a) The fundamental RULE of FREE association - Robert Stolorow (b) Assertiveness ......... Training! - George Atwood In the same way one refrains from confronting the objective falsity in a delusion in order to respond to the core of subjective truth contained within it, one must avoid a focus on the potential or actual danger of a manic enactment in order to mirror and validate the sole surviving remnant of personal agency lying at its heart. George Atwood and Dorthy Levinson The traditional diagnostic process requires dividing the constituents of the intersubjective field into the patient and a separate observer, who does not consider himself or herself part of the diagnosis; this separation inevitably denies the patient the opportunity to have a twinship selfobject experience that is needed, generating reactions to this deprivation (feelings of estrangement, isolation, anxiety, depression, and the like) which the observer then identifies as emanating from a pathological condition located inside the patient's mind (or body). Gil Spielberg & George Atwood There are three known psychiatric conditions: (l) haldol deficiency; (2) valium deficiency; and (3) haldol/valium deficiency. (unnamed surgeon at 3:00 AM, residents' lounge, unnamed hospital,1986) reported to DT by Craig Smart
haiku - Purified affects Constance Brunig Against a theory of mental health that posits as its cornerstone a capacity to differentiate between self and other - and that an inability to do so represents a fixation at, regression to, or overvaluing of archaic psychic life characterized by fusion - one may suggest that the absence of a capacity for differentiation as such (be it in the form of pathological merger, conceptions of primal unity, or idealized transcendence experiences) is inevitably the result of trauma, by virtue of which the self has been usurped. David Klugman Analytic therapy eventually collapses into an arrogance-bound (and unfortunately stable) binary orbit, with the analyst's position of superior objectivity revolving around the patient's position that his or her problem is special, unique, and deserving of such attention, thereby replicating scenarios of early life (and analytic training) in which the analyst paid for parental approval and attention by a surrender of the mind. Craig Smart and George Atwood What we remain most unconscious of is not something that lives buried deep inside, but quite simply, the World. Barry Magid Reality is so continuous and pervasive, so solid, impenetrable, inscrutable, so real, that it is virtually impossible for the mind to grasp the simple fact that what we call REALITY is an illusion, a construct, a schema devised by the mind to explain the phenomenon and mystery of life. Floyd Arnold Food for Deep Thoughts "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. Most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think.". Sigmund Freud (from a letter to Oscar Pfister) "...an element of my psychology that analysis could not reach [was] the feeling that I would be all right if someone would split my head open (front to back) and take out something (tumour, abscess, sinus, suppuration) that exists and makes itself felt right in the centre behind the root of the nose." Donald Winnicott (from a letter to a colleague) Isolated minds are Descartesmentalized. Robert Stolorow In a life constituted entirely by lies, the only authentic action possible is suicide. In a life constituted entirely by lies, the ultimate act of compliance is suicide. George Atwood One result of psychoanalysis is that problems do not disappear from, but rather into our lives. Barry Magid The theory that mutual recognition necessitates a destruction of omnipotence in order to make room for the otherness of the Other, may be at risk of universalizing what is only one route to a sense of the Other as an independent center of experience and initiative: traumatic impingement on early organizations of subjective life (retrospectively identified as omnipotence in need of being destroyed) and the response to the trauma of forming a lastingly reified image of oneself and one's experience being insulated from contact with the Other, mirroring the Cartesian binary that separates the intrapsychic from the intersubjective. David Klugman and George Atwood A contemporary debate in psychoanalysis is anchored at a personal level by widely contrasting attitudes toward what is possible in human life: Cartesian thinking, which posits the isolation of the mind and the duality of mind and body, arises from an unconscious attitude of resignation and even cynicism as to the possibility of healing a breach in relatedness; certain trends in post-Cartesian thought, positing interdependence and approaching mind-body relations phenomenologically, reflect an attitude of hope that sustaining relations to others can be restored and that personal fragmentation can thereby be brought together in an embracing unity. George Atwood and David Klugman If your parent ORDERS you to be independent, you should respond by saying: "If a Greek man comes up to you and says, 'all Greeks are liars, do you believe him?'" Christopher Atwood (age 11) As our ancient, arboreal ancestors learned to see color to better distinguish poisonous from nutritious fruit, they relied on pigments (colors) previously evolved by the flowering, fruiting plants to attract the pollinating affections of the flying insects - - in that very successful, primeval competition that finally defeated the hegemony of the ferns - - and so the sky turned blue as the wasps and bees danced. Tom Atwood (from Why the Sky is Blue) From having little to having nothing takes one's life away. Ramon Riera Schools of psychotherapy that view psychological dilemmas as ultimately composed of pathogenic "narratives" over which the patient should acknowledge his or her "authorship" or agency paradoxically encourage a disavowal and intellectualization of these dilemmas - for in viewing one's life only as an aesthetic object, a kind of novel to be "reauthored" or otherwise manipulated, one ceases to feel it as a lived reality. Kyle Arnold (a) Kleinian game: "I'm rubber, you are glue; everything you say bounces off of me, and sticks to you." Julia Schwartz Kleinian greeting: "You feel fine, how am I?" Robert Stolorow Solipsism is a fantasy of the traumatized. David Klugman Classic Deep Thoughts [O]ne of the greatest difficulties encountered in bringing about favorable change is this almost inescapable illusion that there is a perduring, unique, simple existent self, [which is] in some strange fashion, the patient's, or the subject person's, private property. Harry Stack Sullivan - 1950 An analyzable patient is a patient with whom the analyst can maintain the illusion of neutrality. Merton Gill - 1982 DEEP LIMERICK ( Fall 2001) Ode to a Besserwisser There was a young analyst so fair, Take a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo and listen to it without
any backing - Ramon Riera & George Atwood One who never feels right enough, cannot say that he or she is actually right. Ramon Riera Psychoanalysis is hysterical; it cannot see its own blindness. Jeffrey Rubin The idea that one finds the otherness of the Other through destruction is often discussed as though some unchanging Other were out there to be found - call it the Real as opposed to the fantasied Other; and as such seems to harbor a sort of objectivism of Otherness that resembles all other objectivisms in that a Reality out there, presumed at first to be misrepresented in the mind, is thought, through the rigors of disenchantment, to become known in some final, independent way - which way of knowing is, because of a maturity morality disguised as developmental theory, regarded as more advanced, desirable, and praiseworthy than its forerunner. David Klugman The problem with running up against someone who knows what's what, is that it destroys our confidence in our own confusion. George Atwood & Dorthy Levinson The classical psychoanalytic model of the mind as being made up of Ego, Id, and Superego, when viewed as a symbol of a very particular human situation, may be understood as reflecting an enmeshment scenario, wherein the child, in fear of the loss of a needed connection, surrenders parts of his or her own experience to the judgments and values of authority, and a constellating occurs of a driven animality, a seething cauldron of sexuality and aggression, representing a compromised authenticity striking back against the hegemony of the Other (an interpretation, incidentally, that articulates closely with the suggestion that Freud's concept of the Id is a counterpart to Winnicott's idea of the True Self). George Atwood & David Klugman In the spirit of Winnicott's famous remark that there is no such thing as an infant, it can also be said that there is no such thing as a mother, no such thing as a patient, no such thing as an analyst, and even no such thing as a person. George Atwood The blues guitarist, from a precise tension in the strings
of his Ramon Riera A void the vortex 'Who or what do you see when six year old Christopher
sits Fitz Douglas The idea that one has identified the Satanic is itself the Satanic(?) George Atwood & Christopher Atwood I am (in the world), therefore I think. Robert Stolorow For one whose character is centrally organized by a split between an inner true self and an exterior false self, a radical relational theory would seem to suggest, insofar as it is only in the false self that concrete relationships with others are registered while the true self remains hidden and untouchable, that the so-called "true self" is in fact the product of inauthentic, solipsistic illusion while the apparent "false self" is the seat of a nascent authenticity embedded in its exquisitely sensitive attunement with the emotional needs of others- if so, perhaps instead of ridding the patient of an invidious false self, psychotherapy should attempt to help the patient discern the truth in that which had hitherto felt false, and the false in that which had hitherto felt true, thus deconstructing the schizoid fantasy maintaining the patient's divided self. Kyle Arnold Classic Deep Thoughts I met someone who claimed that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that more people were not so as well. Bertrand Russell (submitted by Floyd Arnold) The first lesson that innocent childhood affords me is - that it is an instinct of my Nature to pass out of myself, and to exist in the form of others; the second is - not to suffer one form to pass into me and to become a usurping Self in the disguise of what the German Pathologists call a fixed idea. Samuel Taylor Coleridge The world exists for the sake of the Self Patanjali - - the first Self psychologist - 2,500-3000
years ago The will to a system is a lack of integrity. Friedrich Nietzsche |
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