A persistent polarity has existed among theories concerning the origins and the nature of preferred homosexuality. One major group of theories, including most psychoanalytic approaches, stresses early developmental contributions and tends to view homosexuality as psychopathological--a deviation from healthy and fully mature living. The other major group of theories assumes homosexuality not to ...

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 ...

This paper applies psychoanalytic frameworks to the survival horror franchise Silent Hill, a series which is itself informed by psychoanalytic themes. Concerns include the construction of game space as maternal womb, cinematic sequences as primal fantasies, and the representation of memory across the games within a psychoanalytic context. The horror genres’ preoccupation with monstrous mother f...

In the present essay, we aim to develop and contrast three different positions toward Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images of man: Dennett's philosophical reconstruction of neurocognitive science, contemporary phenomenology and psychoanalysis. We will suggest that these respective traditions and the substantial differences between them can be understood in terms of a ...

This article addresses the effort made in the Pragmatic Case Study (PCS) method to enhance the quality and rigor of knowledge gained from psychoanalytic single case studies. Five limitations of typical psychoanalytic case or vignette presentations are reviewed and the ways in which the PCS method attempts to improve upon them are highlighted. The limitations include: (1) reliance on the therapi...

The clinical work of psychoanalysts can be thought of in both a narrow and a broad sense. In the narrow sense, it refers to what is commonly thought of as psychoanalytic technique, the methods analysts use to understand their patients and to convey that understanding to them. In the broad sense, it refers to the entirety of their work as clinicians: the content of understanding, as well as such...

The renewal of humanistic values and practices in contemporary psychoanalytic therapy is exemplified vividly by the impact of Heidegger's existential philosophy on a psychoanalytic perspective called post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. This perspective is a phenomenological-contextualist one in which the focus of psychoanalytic inquiry is shifted from Cartesian isolated minds to ways of being-in-the...

Psychoanalysis experienced a remarkable boom in 1960s Italy. One of the areas where psychoanalytic theory disseminated was the world of marketing and the sociology of consumption. Based on the case of the sociologist Francesco Alberoni, we can examine the impact of the theories of Melanie Klein for understanding the behavior of consumers. Similarly, Alberoni's work shows the concerns and uncert...

In connection with controversial IJP articles by Stern et al. and Fonagy on the interpretation of the repressed and the recovery of past memories, the author maintains that the affect that is inherent in positive transference is at the heart of therapeutic action. Points of view put forward in the controversy (based on neurobiological knowledge) are related to Freudian metapsychology, as well a...