Hans loewald

At a time when many questions are arising about the nexus between psychoanalysis and social justice, the writings of Hans Loewald open an avenue for broadened conceptualizations of psychoanalytic activity and the role of interpretation within it. The pursuit of social justice, it is argued, is integral to psychoanalytic ethics, and the relation between activists and society can be formulated in Loewaldian terms. Using Loewald, and considering case examples from social justice informed advocacy, direct action, and protest speech in AIDS activism, social justice activism can be understood as a spontaneously emergent psychoanalytic interpretation delivered by activists to their social surround, effectively accomplishing multiple forms of therapeutic action...

Martin Heidegger's thought deeply influenced both Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, the catalyst they seemed to have been waiting for. For Loewald, Heidegger's ontological centrality of time to Being-in-the-World would bridge to Freud's centrality of transference to the analytic process, thereby operationalizing transference as a prism of time. In revealing the interwoven correlatives of present-past-future, how they bootstrap one another phenomenologically, Loewald also revealed a spiral of recursive meaning (in essence, après-coup) that draws us into the future, "the something more" of existence...

One of the most evocative uses of the metaphor of a ghost in psychoanalytic writing was crafted by Hans Loewald in "On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis" (1960). In this seminal work, Loewald likened the process of psychoanalytic change to that of transforming psychic ghosts into ancestors. In the present paper, the author supplements the metaphor of ghosts that haunt with the metaphor of vampires that menace, and links these two alien experiences to two psychological processes: repression and dissociation...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Loewald's writing is notable for its musicality as well as for its content. In this article, possible early determinants of this salient aspect of his work are discussed. The intensity of Loewald's regard for Freud and, in particular, his attentiveness to Freud's language are explored. Loewald's views on the legitimacy of transference as an ongoing aspect of human motivation is discussed, along with the possible emergence in Loewald's own writing of transferences toward Freud--both oedipal level conflicts regarding parricide and preoedipal concerns regarding unity and separation...

This paper argues that if one considers just a single clinical moment there may be no principled way to choose among different approaches to psychoanalytic technique. One must in addition take into account what Aristotle called the final cause of psychoanalysis, which this paper argues is freedom. However, freedom is itself an open-ended concept with many aspects that need to be explored and developed from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper considers one analytic moment from the perspectives of the techniques of Paul Gray, Hans Loewald, the contemporary Kleinians and Jacques Lacan...

Hans Loewald's classic paper, "On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis" (1960), is one of our field's most comprehensive and elegant accounts of the analytic attitude and stance that are required to enable a psychoanalytic process leading to psychic change, as well as a fine-tuned and original conceptualization of that change. The author shows how Loewald, while not including technical or interpretive recommendations or claiming a new metapsychology, elaborates the multiple facets of the relationship between analyst and patient and provides a subtly complex description of the epistemology of clinical work...

There have been relatively few discussions of systematic studies of language, including neuroscience studies, in the psychoanalytic literature. To address this dearth, a detailed review of research on embodied language in neuroscience and related disciplines is presented, after which their findings are considered in light of diverse views of language in psychoanalysis, specifically the models of the Boston Change Process Study Group, Wilma Bucci, Fonagy and Target, David Olds, and Hans Loewald. The juxtaposition of psychoanalytic models with the findings of research on embodied language shows that scientific studies can focus psychoanalytic understanding of verbal processes, and that integrations with neuroscience neither inherently threaten the traditional psychoanalytic focus on verbal meanings nor reduce the richness and complexity of psychoanalytic theory...

For some time psychoanalysts have tended to view Freud's cultural writings--concerning modernity, secularism, science, and religion--disparagingly, seeing them as the unscientific speculations of a misguided genius. But the questions Freud explored in those works are pressing topics that deserve serious attention. Just as fascism provided the historical context in which the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School developed a psychoanalytic social theory in the 1930s and 1940s, so the rise of fundamentalism demands a similar effort today...

In his 1988 monograph on sublimation, Hans Loewald describes the process as a transformation of the drives aimed at re-creating what he presumes to be the subjective experience of infantile attachment. To describe this experience, he invokes a state of mind that he calls "binocular vision." He maintains that this mental state may arise not only in activities usually associated with sublimation, such as the creation and enjoyment of art, but in all forms of sublimation, including effective psychoanalysis. Because Loewald's discussion is largely theoretical, it does not convey how the concept of binocular vision may inform clinical technique and interdisciplinary study...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Psychoanalysts have invoked infant development diversely to understand nonverbal and unspoken aspects of lived experience. Two uses of developmental notions and their implications for understanding language and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis are juxtaposed here: Hans Loewald's conception of developmental metaphors to illuminate ineffable aspects of the clinical situation and Daniel Stern's currently popular developmental model, which draws on findings from quantitative research to explain therapeutic action in the nonverbal realm...

The author suggests that part of the legacy of Hans Loewald is the nature of his approach to psychoanalytic theory. Loewald carefully considered and selectively utilized the work of theorists from a number of psychoanalytic schools of thought: id psychology, object relations theory, ego psychology, self psychology, and the interpersonal tradition. In addition, he helped pave the way for the current widespread interest in intersubjectivity, and also positioned himself in relation to those who embraced hermeneutics...

Hans Loewald's work was relatively marginalized in its day and it is little known outside the United States. It is, however, assuming increasing importance in American psychoanalysis. Loewald's attractiveness as a theoretician is due, in no small part, to his rigor and synthetic reach. He is able to accomplish the difficult feat of remaining non-sectarian and systematic at the same time. Indeed, Loewald's work contains an integrative vision that is unusual in today's fragmented psychoanalytic world. This author tries to show how Loewald attempts to reconcile many of the rigid oppositions that often become reified in analytic controversies: structural theory versus relational psychoanalysis, traditionalism versus revisionism, oedipal versus pre-oedipal, modernist versus postmodernist and hermeneutical versus scientific...

Hans Loewald is a comprehensive and original theorist on a par with any major post-Freudian thinker, yet neither his ideas nor his person have become the basis for a Loewaldian school or approach, and he is not as well known as other innovators of comparable quality. In this paper the author attempts to characterize the scope and depth of Loewald's theory--his vision of the psyche and psychic life, or metapsychology, his characterization of the psychoanalytic process, and his vision of the clinical and human goals of psychoanalysis...

Loewald's understanding of ego development offers a way to conceptualise, from a psychoanalytic perspective, those aspects of religious experience that can reflect or contribute to the enrichment of the ego, in contradistinction to the defensive and regressive elements of religious experience that have been well detailed in the psychoanalytic literature in the past. In Loewald's view, a dynamic and metabolic interplay between ego and reality characterises the developmental process. With increasing levels of internalisation, differentiation, individuation and integration, ego and reality are restructured into increasingly resilient and durable forms...

This article introduces and suggests characteristics of the poetic analyst, as distinct from the traditional "scientific analyst." Using the writings of poets Wallace Stevens and Donald Hall, as well as writings of psychoanalysts Arieti Silvano, Thomas Ogden, Roy Schaefer, Donald Spence, and Hans Loewald, it explores the craft of the poet and demonstrates how the process of writing and reading poetry informs the process of doing psychoanalysis. It also touches upon the essential roles of imagination, intuition, and intersubjectivity in a poetic analysis, as well as how the poetic perspective builds upon narrative theory and how finding the right words in an interpretation or interaction leads to moments of transforming truth...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.