D.W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and W.R. Bion: The Controversy Over the Nature of the External Object—Holding and Container/Contained (1941-1967)

Conjoining Bion's Reading of C. G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections with his Clinical Seminars in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo

This author read W. R. Bion's (1974) unpublished, personally annotated copy of C. G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR). The interest here is to conjoin Bion's reading of Jung with his own contemporaneous work. After setting out a context for Jung and Bion's meeting one another in 1935, we look at Bion's subsequent psychoanalytic development over the decades until 1974, particularly in the area of clinical intuition. The author takes up Bion's clinical seminars in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1974. He maintains that direct correlations can be made between Bion's marginal comments in MDR and material that he directly lectured on in his 1974 clinical seminars. Bion's interest here centred on the development of clinical intuition, dreams and precocious intellectual development. Even though he never mentioned Jung by name in 1974, it seems that Jung was clearly to the back of his mind as he lectured to his Brazilian colleagues in 1974. The fields of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology can be further enhanced by exploring how Bion and Jung's ideas converge as well as diverge.

Living an experience of defence: Exploring defensive process within the play framework

The author deconstructs how elements of defense analysis operate during the process of play in analytic work. In play, a patient's defense process often involves an experience of aliveness and vividness within the analytic couple and is less oriented toward secondary process metacommentary about defensive function than is typical of more formal defense interpretation. The emergence of the analysis of defense that occurs during play is not meant to challenge other forms of defense analysis but is rather adjacent to these forms of defense analysis. This view of a cluster of approaches to defense analysis is consistent with his view that epistemological and ontological approaches often operate simultaneously in analytic work. The author theorizes defense process during play and clinically examines these processes in two vignettes.

Playing, Paradox, and Analytic Activity Between Knowing and Being

The author explores some ways that we help patients to hold paradoxical realities intrinsic to transference and play in analytic work. He suggests that Winnicott's guardianship of the setting for the emergence of playing raises questions about the role of neutrality in an ontological analysis. The author tries to demonstrate some ways that the work of helping patients to hold paradox in play overlaps with a concept that he has earlier referred to as an activity of neutrality. He explores how in the analytic process, understanding and being are two dimensions of the analytic process that work in concert with each other. Often the analyst works quietly in spaces between epistemological and ontological approaches in the holding of paradox.

Simulating the mind and applications – a theory-based chance for understanding psychic transformations in somatic symptom disorders

With the new category of somatic symptom disorder/bodily distress disorder in ICD-11, research into pathogenetic and therapeutic pathways is stimulated. By turning away from the definition of somatoform disorders as “the lack of something physical explaining everything”, this new classification might offer a way to put the focus on the individual patient’s psychodynamic balance and conflicts and their condensation in the symptom. Modelling and simulation have a long history in science to gain insight also into complex phenomena. Considering the evolution of precision medicine many different parameters are meanwhile operationalised and ready for consequent process research. Calculation models have to fit to the complexity of this disorder category. In an interdisciplinary discourse between computer and medical/psychoanalytic scientists a multilayer, fine grained calculation model is elaborated. Starting from a clinical case history, within iterative discussion, by acknowledging the demand for interdisciplinary synergy and cooperation in science, psychoanalytic theory served as the basis for computer-scientific information technique. A parallelisation with the Mealy model helped to establish a meaningful calculation possibility for further process research. How psychic transformations can be understood properly in order to provide meaningful treatments, the respective training, and to conduct appropriate process- and outcome-research is established in simulating the mind and applications.