Awais AftabFeb 4, 2023

This post debuts a new series titled “Mixed Bag” on my newsletter where I ask an expert to select 5 items to introduce or explore a particular topic: a book, a concept, a person, an article, and a surprise item (at the expert’s discretion). For each item they have to explain why they selected it and what it signifies.

My first guest is Adam DeVille on psychoanalysis

#psychoanalysis #psychiatry #psychology

https://awaisaftab.substack.com/p/mixed-bag-1-adam-deville-on-psychoanalysis

Mixed Bag #1: Adam DeVille on Psychoanalysis

This post debuts a new series titled “Mixed Bag” on Psychiatry at the Margins where I ask an expert to select 5 items to introduce or explore a particular topic. The 5 items are: a book, a concept, a person, an article, and a surprise item (at the expert’s discretion). For each item they have to explain why they selected it and what it signifies. —

Psychiatry at the Margins
Show threadadamdoesitFeb 4, 2023
@awaisaftab Neat! A few thoughts: While Bollas has pocketed the metaphor of the shadow of the object, and invested it wisely, the coinage is Freud's (and Strachey's). In another of his great and under-appreciated papers, Mourning and Melancholia, it describes a mental process in which, on account of some rupture in the relationship, the subject withdraws libido from the object, but brings so to speak a negative image (the shadow) of the object along with it. 1/n
Show threadadamdoesit
@awaisaftab That part of the ego on which the shadow of the object falls is then hated and cut off from the rest of the ego in the object's stead. This sounds to me like Freud's metaphor of transference as visual reproduction, but working specifically with a negative, and going in the opposite direction. This makes it, in a way, an instance of hate in the counter-transference (!). 2/n
Feb 4, 2023 at 4:27pmWeb
Show threadadamdoesitFeb 4, 2023
@awaisaftab It is also an instance of, and a result of, an attack on linking (!!): the link between subject an object results in the violent unlinking of two parts of an ego that had previously been one, but upon one part of which the shadow of the hated object fell. All of this, too, suggests some linkage with Freud's theory of representation, but that's out of scope for today… 3/3
Show threadAwais AftabFeb 4, 2023
@adamdoesit thank you for the clarification & elaboration!
Show threadadamdoesitFeb 4, 2023
@awaisaftab Thanks for starting the newsletter, and for posting about it here. I look forward to reading more.