The Transfer from the Clinical to the Social and Back

Abstract

The following paper serves, first, as an attempt to posit some initial parameters that may better orient an understanding of the relationship between psychoanalytic praxis and the social realm. These initial remarks are used as a starting point to consider a case where the issue of the social is brought into a psychoanalytically informed therapeutic practice. The second part of this essay focuses on a case presentation that has been published by the relational psychoanalyst, Ken Corbett, who explores family romance, the primal scene, and the difficulties of a young boy who has (the now proverbial) two mothers.

Psychoanalytic Theory and Psychology

“…Questioning those presuppositions about the raising of consciousness, psychoanalytic work on the clinic and the social have moved in a wider sweep across this boundary between psychoanalysis and constructionism, taking experience seriously but then embedding it in political context (e.g. Malone & Kelly, 2004). A corresponding move, perhaps, might be identified in the work proceeding from discursive assumptions about models of individual experience and leaping across the boundary from the constructionist side of the equation into studies of the construction of psychoanalysis in an uneasy attempt to take the psychoanalysis seriously but to treat it as a necessary complement to the production of subjectivity in discourse (e.g.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘sociology and psychoanalysis’

“…As already noted, two traditions in which that challenge has been prominent are examined in this issue (group analysis and work emanating from the Tavistock). Many similar challenges have been explored in the pages of PCS over the years (for example,Altman, 2013;Layton, 2014;Malone and Kelly, 2004;Rosa and Mountain, 2013). But despite all of that, it cannot be said that sociological questions have entered the psychoanalytic mainstream.…”