Psychoanalysis

RESUMEN:
El presente artículo se ocupa de la novela de Adolfo Bioy Casares La invención de Morel (1949) novela fundacional de la literatura de anticipación, en la que a través de la ficción científica, policíaca y amatoria, concurren los tópicos del ingenio técnico, la reduplicación de la vida, los periplos de inmortalidad, los archivos de imágenes, los simulacros y finalmente los hologramas, alumbrando el estatuto ontológico de las imágenes en la nueva ecología de medios, cuestiones problematizadas por teóricos de la imagen como Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio o Susan Sontag. Dando lugar, finalmente, a una reflexión en torno al complejo paso de lo real a lo virtual en el cual el mundo de las imágenes amenaza por suplantar al mundo real.
Dr. ADOLFO VÁSQUEZ ROCCA

Building on a broader concept of Nachträglichkeit explored in recent psychoanalytic literature, this article describes a phenomenological perspective on lived time informed by the later work of Merleau-Ponty. Rather than seen as linear or even bi-directional, time has a depth structure where temporal meaning takes shape in a field. Like the intertwined yet separate relationships between figure-ground and self-world, past-future becomes a shifting latticework of remembered and anticipated experiences forming and transforming in the now. Far from simply psychic «rays» of association, this description suggests that remembering and anticipating form complex layerings of experience in the world, hence, «rays of the world». This characterization of temporality is elaborated through a clinical example.

Much has been written about the two interrelated fundamental aspects of human experience: Sexual passion and attachment. It is suggested that from infancy on, sexuality and attachment form a bidirectional matrix - mutually influencing each other as the passion-attachment configuration shifts over the life cycle.

This paper explores the links between adult attachment and passion. Passion is addressed from a broader perspective beyond erotic desire. It is conceptualized as a strong emotion - a wide range of powerful feelings of enthusiasm, excitement and joy, as well as hatred, anger and aggression, in addition to strong sexual or romantic feelings. Passion is among other important life mobilizing forces, in being closely associated with energy and ambition. Compromised passion is, therefore, detrimental to one’s strivings and motivations.

The authors investigate the myriad ways in which attachment patterns and the subjective experiences of excitement interact. Attachment and passion can be successfully integrated, be segregated or be confused with each other (Eagle, 2007). The paper discusses the particular manifestations of secure and insecure attachment styles in high and low passion individuals. The paper argues that high and low levels of passion can enhance or detract from one’s life depending on the context of the individual’s attachment style and what he or she is looking to gain from human bonds.

The authors will illustrate three different attachment-passion configurations:

1. Insecure attachment - low passion will be illustrated trough a clinical case of a 25-year-old woman who never formed a secure attachment to her early objects. Now, as an anxious–preoccupied adult, she is fixated on finding a husband in a manner completely devoid of passion. The implications of the patient’s passionless approach to her engagement in therapy, as well as the analyst’s struggle to maintain her own concordant passion for the therapeutic work will be discussed.

2. Insecure attachment- high passion will be discussed through an analysis of Don Draper, a successful advertisement executive, who is the main character in the popular TV series Mad Men (now watched across the world in several languages including Italian). As a dismissive–avoidant individual Don Draper’s feelings of aggression, rivalry and longing color both his object choices and professional endeavors. Short clips from different Mad Men episodes will be shown if audio-visual equipment is available. 
                                                                                                                                       
3. Secure attachment - high passion will be illustrated through a clinical case of a 30-year-old highly functional female patient.

Due to time constraints secure attachment - low passion will not be discussed during the conference presentation but will be included in a subsequent paper.

The paper proposes that the termination and posttermination phases of psychoanalysis are important periods in which significant developmental achievements are attained. The author applies relational psychoanalytic principles in formulating potential growth and transformation during the termination and posttermination phases of psychoanalysis through examining a case illustration in Shoshani (Rosenbaum's) book Dare to be Human. She highlights that in Shoshani (Rosenbaum's) illustration both analyst and patient simultaneously negotiate the multiple configurations of preoedipal, oedipal, and postoedipal yearnings, thereby promoting the patient's ability to hold in mind complex and multilayered self-states' demands without fragmenting. It is argued that Shoshani (Rosenbaum's) negotiation of the therapeutic relationship—in particular, his complementary participation in the oedipal transference which is marked by idealization and rivalry, as well as his ability to extract himself from it through lending himself imperfect and tolerating his own deidealization, loss of primacy, and exclusion—facilitates his patient's growth and transformation and ushers him into a mutual and reality-based postoedipal organization.

RESUMEN - ABSTRACT
Las investigaciones aquí desarrolladas buscan una aproximación interdisciplinaria al fenómeno de la salud y la enfermedad, así como a la naturaleza de la práctica médica en la posmodernidad. La filosofía de la medicina se inspira fundamentalmente en la actual filosofía de la ciencia, que ha abandonado la idea de una realidad objetiva o de un orden natural inmutable, reemplazándola por la representación de nuestro conocimiento, adquiriendo así uno de sus rasgos fundamentales, el carácter holístico e interpretativo.
Enfermedad, Biopolítica y Salud pública
Las investigaciones aquí desarrolladas buscan una aproximación interdisciplinaria al fenómeno de la salud y la enfermedad, así como a la naturaleza de la práctica médica en la posmodernidad. La filosofía de la medicina se inspira fundamentalmente en la actual filosofía de la ciencia, que ha abandonado la idea de una realidad objetiva o de un orden natural inmutable, reemplazándola por la representación de nuestro conocimiento, adquiriendo así uno de sus rasgos fundamentales, el carácter holístico e interpretativo.
Llevado al extremo de la irracionalidad, el esfuerzo de la medicina por preservar y cuidar la salud de las personas ha demostrado que es capaz de volverse en contra de aquellos a quienes pretende proteger. Cuando los médicos se empecinan en extender la vida aún más allá de las posibilidades fisiológicas y del deseo de sus pacientes, aparece lo que se ha dado en llamar el encarnizamiento terapéutico. Pero prolongar la vida innecesariamente no sólo perjudica a quienes se les priva del derecho a una muerte digna. En un mundo donde los recursos públicos que se destinan al cuidado de la salud no sólo son finitos, sino que muchas veces resultan insuficientes, su uso irracional parece cercenar aún más el acceso de la población en general al cuidado de su salud. Hoy se acepta el establecimiento de un límite en la asistencia médica, pero la cuestión es definir cuál es y quién establece, y aun más, cómo se valida este límite. Un punto de partida puede ser la observación de casos y el cambio actitudinal frente al manejo de estos conceptos.
Dr. ADOLFO VÁSQUEZ ROCCA

Recent studies of peer review underscore that some facets of accepted evaluation methods have serious flaws. Assessments are often burdened by protectionist inclinations against new ideas, unstable editorial demographics, affiliational biases, and occasionally unethical and/or corrupt protocols, or the avoidance of protocols put in place to restrain biases. This article examines a solution to these dilemmas: the open-source peer review. This emerging evaluation system allows the readers of a journal to offer feedback on submissions before they are officially sanctioned by a publication. Thus, the concept allows journal-readers (who are conceivably experts, like the editors) to decide or make recommendations on which articles are appropriate to continue with further revisions and/or to publish. The concept promises to offer a more democratically and demographically stable evaluation system, one that has the potential to avoid some of the problems that are inherent to traditional scholarly reviews.

1882-1883 marked the First International Polar Year, which was a significant moment in the history of colonial scientific exploration and research.  Frustrated with the piecemeal nature of previous polar research, Lieutenant Karl Weyprecht of the Austro-Hungarian Navy proposed to the International Meteorological Congress in the spring of 1879 that a coordinated international effort be made to gather scientific data about the Arctic and Antarctic.  Lt. Weyprecht’s proposal highlighted three major areas of scientific exploration: meteorology, geomagnetism, and auroral observation.  Each of the fourteen stations collected mandatory and optional data about these areas.  The United States embarked on two expeditions, coordinated by the Army: one led by Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely at Lady Franklin Bay, and one led by Lieutenant P. Henry Ray at Point Barrow, Alaska (which was established in 1881). 
The Point Barrow, Alaska expedition is significant in the overall programme of the First International Polar Year, as it was one of only two expeditions to include an ethnographer (John Murdoch) amongst its team of scientists (the French expedition to Bahia Orange, Hoste Island, Tierra del Fuego also involved an ethnographer).  Murdoch collected an enormous number of ethnological specimens, and produced many photographs and drawings of the Indigenous people and their everyday objects from the nearby villages of Nuwuk and Uglaamie.  Through a metonymy of images, the records of the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition produce a slippage that links Indigenous bodies with land and sea.
This paper analyses the photographic evidence of Indigenous peoples collected by the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition.  Theorizing the photograph as a “contact zone” (Pratt 1992) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in North America, this paper argues that we can read the vast archive of colonial photography as quasi-autobiographical documents of individual settler fantasies and broader cultural imaginations.  As a medium of objectivity and deathly stillness, photography was a particularly useful medium for non-Indigenous people to document the so-called benefits of the ‘civilizing’ project through representations of Indigenous bodies.  The photographs collected during the Point Barrow, Alaska expedition are uniquely positioned within the larger 19th century North American colonial photographic archive, I argue, for two interrelated reasons.  First, the photographs represent the Indigenous population as undifferentiated in terms of gender yet use ironic (or perhaps derisive) captions such as “Prince/Princess of Nuwuk,” projecting settler fantasies and anxieties about race, gender, and sexuality onto Indigenous bodies.  And second, because these photographs exist in the context of expedition rather than permanent settlement, they do not (yet) attempt to represent the Indigenous peoples of Nuwuk and Uglaamie as capable of being ‘civilized,’ which is further reflected in Murdoch’s report to the Smithsonian Institute’s Bureau of Ethnology in 1887-1888.  These representations are connected to the scientists’ perception of Point Barrow, Alaska as a barren landscape that held no promises of resource extraction.   
This paper is a part of a larger project on photography as a technology used to categorize colonized lands, resources, and peoples that reads photographs through the lens of settler fantasies of the meanings and effects of colonial contact for Indigenous people.  These fantasies are supported by what I call the logic of photography, which structures time into a ‘before’ and ‘after,’ erasing the violence, messiness, and contradictions that exist between these two moments.  I focus on four sites where these images were created in the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, including scientific expedition and geographical exploration, missions and residential/boarding schools, business, and commercial photography. This is a decolonizing project that aims to destabilize the objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive continues to be significant to the present. 

RESUMEN
El mundo como voluntad: La esencia del mundo es voluntad. El mundo contemplado desde dentro de sí mismo y nuestra vida es voluntad. La voluntad es lo íntimo del ser, el núcleo de cada individuo e igualmente de todo. Se manifiesta en toda fuerza ciega natural y también en la conducta del hombre. La voluntad obra de manera absolutamente libre, sin motivación, y es por tanto, irracional y ciega. Schopenhauer la identifica con las fuerzas que actúan en la Naturaleza, fuerzas que adoptan aspectos y nombres diversos (gravedad, magnetismo, electricidad, estímulo, motivo) en sus manifestaciones fenoménicas, pero que en sí son una única e idéntica fuerza: La voluntad de vivir. La voluntad es esfuerzo infinito, un impulso ilimitado, por ello no puede alcanzar nunca la satisfacción o un estado de tranquilidad. Su esfuerzo es continuo pero nunca alcanza. Lo que llamamos felicidad o goce no es más que el cese temporal del deseo. El deseo, como expresión de la necesidad y del sentimiento de privación, es una forma de dolor. Por ello la felicidad es la ‘liberación del dolor, la superación de la necesidad’; es real y esencialmente negativa, y en ningún caso positiva. No tarda en transformarse en aburrimiento y, entonces, el deseo de satisfacción resurge de modo natural.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

In the principle of desire, many thinkers throughout the history of ideas have expounded its meanings and structure. Across the multitude of theories, philosophers argue that desire is the essence of existence. But it is the psychoanalysts who delved unto the erstwhile taken-for-granted realm of unbeknownst strands of psycho-emotional impulses. Jacques Lacan exposited that desire is the essence of man, always unconscious as it is always sexual. However, he also linked desire to the notion of castration complex. He defines it as the lack of being, or a signification of a lack of being. Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, grounded the concept of desire on the very idea of the libido, which tied desire on its sexual nature. In many ways, Freud discourses the concept of desire in relation to various expressions of human needs, such as the drive to hunger, death, self-preservation, pleasure, but mostly he centred it in the psychoanalysis of sexuality. This even led him to bifurcate the nature of desire in the dual structure of Eros and Thanatos.

Given that the Eros is explained by Freud as the life-instinct, the desire for self-preservation which is grounded on the pleasure principle. This means that the very act of desire is aroused by the need for the satisfaction of the Self. Hence this branch of desire is defined by its object-choice, that is, the need for food, shelter, clothing, socialization, and even sexual gratification. On the other hand, with the idea that the life-instinct is driven by its object-choice, by what fulfils it, it is important to learn how the Thanatos, known as the death-drive, became possible. This will lead to a doubt regarding its object of desire, with which that desire is principally construed emanating from the interior. If both Eros and Thanatos are forms of desiring, from with-in, what then enforces the latter kind of desire to desire for death? And given that there this death-instinct, it therefore ensues the possibility of an end of desire itself. Another doubt is entailed, ergo: until when is desiring possible? And by this seeking to know the possibility of an end of desire, is there, at least, really an end of desiring that comes, not necessarily in the act of death, but in the form of satisfaction? But if satisfaction is the end of desiring, why does the Self still desire to desire?

It is the attempt of this paper to historicize the metapsychology of desire, that is, to give emphasis on the roots of such bifurcation of desire, which is, to exposit the inseparability of Eros and Thanatos with each other; as much as this bifurcated form of desire is, too, inseparable from the social. Of this, it is to assert a claim that the very act of desiring is a micro-scopic pronouncement of the superstructural order which has been clouded to serve the latter’s own purpose. Specifically, this superstructure as explored in this paper is aimed on critiquing the universal concepts of Morality and the Symbolic, ideas well-expounded by Nietzsche and Lacan, respectively. This historicization of the desire as metapsychological phenomenon therefore leads to the dialectical exploration of its being with the social milieu; as much as to its theorization unto the discourse of the historical, especially at this period of postcoloniality.