The Turkish translation of David Rosenfeld’s The Soul, The Mind, and The Psychoanalyst is out.
Translator: Sevil Uzunoğlu
Library of Psychoanalysis, Psike Istanbul, Here and Now, 6
İstanbul Bilgi University Publishing
In this volume, Rosenfeld describes his work with difficult patients who have psychotic attributes. He presents to us how he utilizes the analytic framework and countertransference in a seminal way while attempting to render comprehensible the incomprehensible by continuing to think analytically, and how he develops his theoretical contributions based on practice by engrossing us in a rich and vivid experience. The book titled Ruh, Zihin ve Psikanalist (English edition The Soul, The Mind, and the Psychoanalyst), which starts out with a foreword by Thomas Ogden, also includes a chapter by Ayla Yazıcı, “Being a Psychoanalyst in a Mental Institution”, where she candidly explores the various aspects of the relationship between psychotic patients and the institution staff in the hospital environment.
In addition to being an extraordinary clinician and theorist, Rosenfeld is also a gifted teacher. He lucidly and succintly conveys his ideas concerning the central role in psychoanalysis of the analyst’s use of his countertransference experience. He views countertransference as a signal, to be used to think and not to expel or interpret.
Thomas Ogden
Thomas Ogden
What is important is to be able to think psychoanalytically about the transference and the patient’s inner world, as well as about the countertransference. No one can prevent me from thinking like a psychoanalyst, even when I am walking through the hospital with the patient, or going to a shopping mall and playing video games.
(…)
Written words are not enough to Express the emotions recovered by a patient through lullabies, recapturing and recuperating from a lost infancy.nor are they enough to convey the emotions of a psychoanalyst when, after a long and apparently successful treatment, an addicted patient goes back to drugs. Or what the patient fells –the emotions and sobs of a patient- who systematically draws the face, lips, eyebrows, cheeks, end eyes of a women an done day, by chance, finds the only photo of his mother who died shortly after he was born, holding him in her arms –a photo of the women he had drown over and over again. Words on a page are not enough to express the impact on this patient of the discovery that he had preserved the internal image of his mother and, over the years, had compulsivelydrawn hundreds of pictures of the bits of her face. What can be experienced in a one-hour session could be years of life.
David Rosenfeld
David Rosenfeld
Since they—those behind the locked doors—are the other, then they can be gross, evil, violent, crazy, dirty, filthy. That is to say from within our clothing, we can toss onto them anything we consider unbecoming of us; anything we want to throw out. We can project our own evil, dirty, violent emotions upon them. They become filthy, violent, evil, and deserving of all sorts of coercive treatments, all forms of stripping of one’s identity and personality; as for the professionals, they have found a space to throw out, store all these away.
(…)
Forming a connection with these patients is a trying task. However, one should keep trying to form a connection bearing in mind that these people, like everyone else, also have non-psychotic sides. Whether or not there are mental institutes, whether or not there are drugs, the most important thing to be said from a psychoanalytic perspective is that it is imperative to form a relationship with the psychotic patient.
Ayla Yazıcı
Ayla Yazıcı