Dept of Psychology

Objectives: The current study examined the mental health of couples living with and without sensory loss; compared the mental health of couples living with hearing, vision, or dual-sensory loss; and investigated the association between spouse support and the mental health of couples living with sensory loss. Method: The study included 513 couples with sensory loss and 1,079 couples without sensory loss. Actor–Partner Interdependence Models were used to examine associations between spouse support and mental health. Results: Controlling for potential covariates, individuals with sensory loss and their spouses were at a greater risk of mental health problems. Sensory loss modality (hearing and/or vision) did not explain any differences. Both actor and partner effects of spouse support on anxiety and depression were found. Discussion: The findings highlight the need to support the mental health of couples living with sensory loss and indicate the importance of considering the intimate r...

Objective To study the IQ distribution in each region and province of Thailand. Materials and methods This study was analyzed data from the national survey of Thai students’ IQ in 2011. Standard Progressive matrices (SPM-parallel version) were administered to 72,780 primary and secondary students with age between 6-15 years old. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the IQ distribution according to Wechsler’s IQ classifi cation in national, region, and province level compared with normal distribution. Results The overall IQ distribution of Thai students is relatively different from the normal distribution which 42.5% is students who has average IQ (IQ 90-109), 29% who has above average IQ (IQ > 109), and 28.4% who have below average IQ (IQ < 90). Regarding regions, the northern and the central areas has almost similar distribution to normal distribution in contrast with the northeastern and the south areas which has the proportion of intellectual defi ciency over the nor...

Objective The EOLAS programme is a peer and clinician-led mental health information programme on recovery from mental health difficulties, specifically for people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum or bipolar disorders, their family members and significant others. Method This article, the first of a two part series, outlines the background to and the rationale behind the EOLAS programme, and traces the participatory process used to inform the development and implementation of the pilot phase of the project. The aims of the programme, and the overarching principles that guided its development, delivery and evaluation, including the set-up of the project steering group are outlined and discussed. Findings Two separate programmes, one for family members and one for service users were designed. In addition, participant and facilitator handbooks were developed for each programme, including a training programme for facilitators. Conclusion Central to a recovery oriented service is...

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Austrian neurologist who founded Psychoanalysis, took his experience and theories through many analyses and developments, before coming to name anything. He took great care to make his concepts and theories intelligible, while Lacan was more interested in what cannot be limited to ordinary definitions. He was interested in what happens between words and lines, with the margins of the psyche, with an unconscious La Linguisterie that is the art andscience of the word that fails.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is considered the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. Lacan deliberately wrote in a Prose style, that would resist any neat summary of his concepts and avoid being over systematised. His style of writing and analysis is full of play, puns, jokes, metaphors, irony and contradictions that resemble the psychoanalytic ‘free association’ of images words ideas and meanings that change with context and reveal unconscious desires.

For this essay, I am using ordinary psychoanalytic terminology and theory. In a Freudian understanding, this self-restriction to representing standard psychoanalytic theory, is achieved through the repressive function of my superego. In a Lacanian understanding, this writing function is achieved in the name of the Symbolic Father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. If like Lacan however, the playful son, I allowed myself creativity and unconscious fluidity in writing about Freud and Lacan, this would be a very different kind of essay. My experience of studying, reading and interpreting Lacan however, was a fluid and erotic experience, so perhaps his theory of the intimacy of language and desire is correct.

“Will our action go so far, then, as to repress the very truth that it bears in its exercise?” (1)

This essay forms the theoretical part of my investigation of an automatically produced, surreal, self-portrait watercolour painting, one of my few scattered attempts at painting. Recently, I’ve been lucky enough to have practiced watercolour painting using the automatic technique, whilst studying Psychoanalysis and Art theory at Birkbeck College. I have studied psychoanalytic psychology for several years there, and am currently in psychoanalytic treatment, of which this self-portrait is playing an integral part. Here then, bringing together artistic practice, psychoanalytic theory and analysis, I am continuing a creative psychoanalytic therapeutic process of looking into an automatically produced self-portrait. This essay gives me the opportunity to record my learning experiences of the automatic approach to watercolour painting, as well as record psychoanalytic insights about my healing process. I hope it illustrates how an individual brings their unconscious, as well as their conscious awareness, to a psychoanalyst and to artistic practice..........

In producing this essay, I have enjoyed exploring twenty four volumes of The Complete Psychological Works of the founder of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). His essays that I read for the first time in the duration of the Exploring Creativity psychoanalytic psychology course are, A Dream is the Fulfilment of a Wish (1900), Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1907), Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), The Moses of Michaelangelo (1914), On Transience (1915), and Dostoevsky and Parricide(1927). I also discovered several other essays of Freud’s that deal specifically with creativity, but unfortunately due to limits of space and time, I could not study them all. However in the bibliography, you will find many of Freud’s essays listed that I have read in previous years, so have contributed towards my current level of understanding of psychoanalysis. To help structure this essay, I found it necessary to use paragraph headings relevant to a Classical Freudian understanding of the nature of creativity. I hope the text is sufficiently integrated, flows and makes some sense.........

In this essay exploring the nature of creativity, I draw on an essay of Austrian born British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960), Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse (1929). While Freud’s ideas came from working with adult patients, Klein was innovative in working psychoanalytically with very young children. Observing children, she analysed and interpreted the meaning of their play and following Freud’s Instinctual and Oedipal theories, emphasized the essential role of Life and Death Instincts and of the Oedipus complex.

In Psychoanalytic theory, the term ‘Primal Scene’ refers to a child’s initial ‘sight’ of the sexual act between its parents that is observed, constructed, phantasized and interpreted by the child as a scene of violence. The Oedipus complex was Freud’s central theory to denote the most primary sensations, emotions and phantasies that involve a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother and kill his father. To Freud’s requirement of uncovering the Primal Scene and the Oedipus complex, for an analysis to be effective, Klein added that analysis can only have its full effect in conjunction with,

“the task of discovering the infantile danger situations, working at their resolution and elucidating the relations between anxiety situations and neurosis on the one hand, and anxiety situations and ego development on the other.” (1)

This short essay on the psychical operations of the Life and Death Instincts, as seen in the Object Relations theories of Melanie Klein, was my first glance at Psychoanalytic Instinct Theory, studied and written in the Spring of 2008. Three years later, in the Autumn of 2011, I was in possession of the entire 24 volumes of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, at my home and able to study them at leisure. A Psychoanalysis research associate on the Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice Seminar Series at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, suggested I read Freud’s essay the Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter 1 in Volume 18 of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

To my dismay the Beyond the Pleasure Principle chaper 1 of volume 18 is a very long essay indeed in 7 parts, but I was curious and had a desire to explore Freud’s writings as it felt like an adventure. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Part 5 of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle essay is where Freud lays down the fundamental components of his Instinct Theory. My essay attached here is British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s interpretation, development and use of some of the possible psychical mechanisms and processes that can be said to result from Freud’s Instinct Theories. In this Abstract (also attached as an Appendix to my Kleinian, Life and Death Instincts in Object Relations Theory essay), I am tempted to summarize Freud’s actual Instinct Theory itself, as described in Part 5 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Vol. 18, p.34-43, as I have never heard it discussed or even mentioned in any Psychoanalytic context and I think it merits attention, especially considering the current Environmental zeitgeist and hegemony that we are all being subjected to.

(Instinct Is Conservative - Journal Article on Freud's Instinct Theory uploaded as a separate word doc.)

In comparison with Klein’s use of Instinct theory, it is plainly evident that she was interested in the functions of instincts as they can be seen operating in everyday life and death experiences and relations, while Freud was much more interested in the very nature of instinct itself. I hope my summary of Freud’s Instinct Theory will show how deep and wide variation in Psychoanalytic theorizing and practice is and how open and attentive Psychoanalytic inquiry and investigation is to an individual theorist’s inherent psychical constitution and conditioned psychodynamics, born of their inner personal/subjective life and death experiences, their external relations with significant others and the external collective conditions that individuals are subjected to. People, individuals/subjects, instinctively find, perceive, understand and even believe what they desire to know and this is one of the reasons why every reader/thinker is biased and projects onto and conditions a text with their own needs, ideas, prejudices, hopes, wishes and delusions. Every past thought and feeling is reawakened and modified by fresh experience through the cycles of time. I certainly can be accused of spinning Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Part 5) text to suit my own interests and purposes, just as Melanie Klein took Freud’s ideas where she and her colleagues in the British School of Psychoanalysis (that was not yet formed at that time) were heading. Individuals have their own agenda, but can’t achieve it without others, as the Psychoanalytic theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan have made exceptionally clear, in his own way, for his individual purposes and for the purposes of the collective (professional, social, political, etc.) ideologies that he chose to cathect. There can be no Self, whatever you want to call it - individual, person, human being, human organism, etc. - without an Other, because of the function of the I.

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) came to England in the late 1920’s and helped found the Object-Relations School of Psychoanalysis. In her pioneering work on child analysis, she formulated two very early developmental positions, through which infants pass and which remain unconsciously active within the adult psyche. Klein was trying to understand the earliest ego development of an individual personality and in so doing outlined what she termed the Paranoid-Schizoid Position and the Depressive Position of psychical orientation. The points at which Klein refers to these two positions in her writings are countless. For this essay therefore, I draw on two of her papers in which the two psychical positions are described in detail, her 1935 paper........

This journal article looks briefly at Freud’s Psychoanalytic concepts of auto-erotism, regression, fixation, denial and primary, secondary and pathological narcissism, to understand addiction and compulsive behaviours/practices. Central to understanding any psychical or human behavioural phenomena psychoanalytically, is Freud’s large scale Meta-Psychological schema of the oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital stages of psychosexual development and his concept of Libido, the instinctual sexual energy or life force that drives his work and this article. I also draw on his theories of need deprivation, separation anxiety and dependence on narcissistic supply and conclude by drawing attention to the issue of whether or not a sufficiently conscious adult is makinga choice to repeat, or is driven by a compulsion to repeat, a crucial distinction to be made in understanding addiction.....

I am writing in response to Ryan Bourne’s, Head of Economic Research, Centre for Policy Studies article, Minimum Alcohol Pricing: Illogical, Illiberal, Unfair, posted on the CPS website four months ago on 23rd March 2012. (1) I write from the perspective of a trainee psychoanalysis researcher, a former mental health NHS researcher and a former mental health worker in voluntary and statutory mental health frontline services. I write as a woman who has lived with drug using relatives and friends and as a human being that has witnessed the horrific effects of drug and alcohol misuse and abuse. I write as someone who has witnessed a drugs market, moved from King’s Cross, back into the West End and into Camden Town, when two decades planned redevelopments were completed in King’s Cross St. Pancras about seven years ago. Academics, local Social Services and Hospital departments, Church representatives, Community groups, Artists and the Metropolitan Police co-operated as parts of a social engineering support team, to ensure all sections of society, including minority groups such as drug using homeless sex workers, were not forgotten in the process of gentrification......


References

Bourne, Ryan. (2012) Minimum Alcohol Pricing: Illogical, Illiberal, Unfair, Centre for Policy Studies article.

Demir, Ayla Michelle. (2006) Addiction Is Narcissism. Psychoanalytic Psychology essay published on Academia Education website.


This Centre for Policy Studies article review and accompanying Foster the People track by Houdini, were supported by the Arts and Media sections of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Freud Museum, London, UK.

Houdini - Foster the People (mp3 music link)
http://hypem.com/#!/item/1b315?utm_content=tweet_button-horizontal&awesm=awe.sm_k1DPh&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=awe.sm-twitter&utm_source=t.co


Find the Time - Chase and Status
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9jeU76Y9E
Supported by Refuge, for Women and Children Against Domestic Violence, Addiction and Alcohol Abuse.

www.refuge.org.uk

This essay applies various psychoanalytic concepts to the analysis of consumption, the practical everyday routine buying activity of individual consumers. It is a response to German psychoanalyst Siegfried Zepf’s journal article, Consumerism and Identity: Some Psychoanalytic Considerations, published in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis in 2010.

The development of Psychoanalytic Drive Theory has undergone a continual remodelling during the hundred years since the birth of psychoanalysis.  In this essay, I trace some of its evolution from the earliest stages of Sigmund Freud's thinking and through to his post 1920 Structural theory. I then look at some of the key concepts of drive theory in Donald Winnicott’s inter-subjective psychodynamic Object Relations theory, and in Jacques Lacan’s poststructuralist psychoanalytic drive theory. (Freud, 1915; Winnicott, 1971; Lacan, 1977)  Freud’s, Winnicott’s and Lacan’s drive theories will provide the materials for the main body of the essay and facilitate a comparative analysis and critique of their work towards the end.  It will not be possible to avoid using the shared terms and concepts interchangeably at times, as often these traditions are seen as extensions and progressions of the same classical Freudian theory.  However, there are clear differences between these three schools of psychoanalytic drive theory and the essay aims to demonstrate some of these.