The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
August 2026
Anat Tzur Mahalel
This essay explores the role of visual images in dream imagery as a space where unconscious processes intersect with historical forces. It offers a comparative reading in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Benjamin's Arcades Project (1982). Freud conceptualizes dream images as condensed memory traces that navigate between perception and hallucination, revealing repressed desires....
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
May 3, 2024
Thomas H. Ogden
ABSTRACT The author proposes ways of rethinking the concepts of the unconscious and time in the analytic setting, including the very existence of the unconscious. Freud (1915) stated that the success psychoanalytic thinking has in making inferences about the patient’s unconscious makes the existence of the unconscious “incontrovertible.” The author submits that this success does not establish...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
October 1, 2021
Cesare Secchi
The author examines the paradoxical dramatic dynamics of the Dreyer's masterpiece, according the Matte Blanco's theoretical model, as a tormented path of self awareness that consists in a progressive immersion in the unconscious. Anne, the young wife of an old Lutheran pastor, marginally involved in the witchcraft trial of a friend of her mother (now dead, but suspected to be a sorceress as...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
June 1, 2019
Lutz Goetzmann, Christian Benden, Barbara Ruettner et al.
Although it is well known that a lung transplant enhances the recipient's quality of life, our knowledge of how it is processed mentally is limited. In this study, interviews were conducted with a lung-transplant patient two weeks, three months, and six months after surgery so as to investigate the relevant unconscious processing mechanisms. A dream reported in the first interview was analysed...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
April 2018
Brett H Clarke
As a conspicuously hybrid entity, neuropsychoanalysis enjoins one to look critically at its assumptions about knowledge and subjectivity as one tries to understand how its un-hyphenated halves relate to one another. The author looks at the differences between mind (which is grounded in subjective experience) and brain (which is an objectively described neurobiological entity), and suggests that...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
October 4, 2017
Leandro Drivet
1 citation
This paper addresses Nietzsche's reflections on the phenomenon of dreams as a crucial precedent of Freud's Die Traumdeutung. The works of Nietzsche and Freud are scrutinized to establish and compare the most relevant aspects of their understanding of dreams. The philosophical impact of both accounts is assessed in terms of the transvaluation of religious and metaphysical values, which reveals...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
September 28, 2011
Jay B. Frankel
10 citations
The analytic state of consciousness is a particular regressive altered state in the patient characterized by an increased sensitivity and reactivity to impressions arising from both the inner world and the analyst, a heightened sense of dependence and vulnerability, a permeability of boundaries in regard to the analyst, and a shift toward functioning on the basis of omnipotent fantasy in the...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
February 21, 2011
Michel Sanchez‐Cardenas
15 citations
It can be seen that, although psychoanalytic pluralism is widespread, there is still a spirit of intolerance among the different theoretical schools. Matte Blanco's work allows us to think about these questions in a fresh way. Direct psychic experience, felt to be an indivisible whole, is characterized by the symmetrical mode (close to the unconscious) and projects itself in a multiple and...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
December 1, 2003
Fredrik Falkenström
The author attempts to integrate the concepts of self used in psychoanalytic theory with the understanding of the nature of self as explained within the Buddhist meditative tradition. He divides different concepts of self in psychoanalytic theory into three major levels of consciousness and abstraction: self as experience, representational self and self as system. The representational level is...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
June 1, 2003
Jenifer A Nields
Loewald's understanding of ego development offers a way to conceptualise, from a psychoanalytic perspective, those aspects of religious experience that can reflect or contribute to the enrichment of the ego, in contradistinction to the defensive and regressive elements of religious experience that have been well detailed in the psychoanalytic literature in the past. In Loewald's view, a dynamic...
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis
February 1, 2002
Janet Sayers
It is unusual to combine mysticism and psychoanalysis. Marion Milner, however, achieved precisely this. Through her self-analysis and analytic work with children and adults--and using as an illustration her own and others' imaginative ideas, paintings, doodles, drawings and pictures--she drew attention to the potential for health and creativity of undoing the obstacles to mystical experience of...