Psychoanalysis and Interdisciplinarity With Non-analytic Psychotherapeutic Approaches Through the Lens of Dialectics.

Psychoanalysis, in its purist mainstream sense, tends to be considered as an isolationist discipline that steers clear of interdisciplinary connections with other psychotherapies. Its drive for purity does not open up to influences that cast as alien and a threat to its core principles. We refer to Hegelian dialectics in an attempt to offer an alternative approach to interdisciplinarity in clinical psychoanalysis.

Facts and Sensibilities: What Is a Psychoanalytic Innovation?

Psychoanalytic innovation is easy to recognize but difficult to define. There is a dearth of literature exploring the nature of innovation in our field. My main thesis is that psychoanalytic innovation can be of two types.

The Cognition of Severe Moral Failure: A Novel Approach to the Perception of Evil.

I describe the perception of evil as a categorization judgment, based on a prototype, with extensive feedback loops and top-down influences. Based on the attachment approach to moral judgment (Govrin, 2014, 2018), I suggest that the perception of evil consists of four salient features: Extreme asymmetry between victim and perpetrator; a specific perceived attitude of the perpetrator toward the victim's vulnerability; the observer's inability to understand the perpetrator's perspective; and insuperable differences between the observer and perpetrator's judgment following the incident which shake the observer no less than the event itself. I then show that the perception of evil involves a cognitive bias: The observer is almost always mistaken in his attributions of a certain state of mind to the perpetrator.

Psychodynamizing and existentializing cognitive-behavioral interventions: The case of behavioral activation (BA).

From the point of view of Cognitive-Existential Psychodynamics (Shahar, 2015a, 2016; Shahar & Schiller, 2016; Ziv-Beiman & Shahar, 2016), active techniques-primarily cognitive-behavioral therapy ones-might not only reduce distress but also bolster the therapeutic relationships and serve as powerful vehicles for self-discovery and growth. This, however, is contingent upon therapists' ability to view, and present to patients, the psychodynamic and existential nature of active techniques. Our focus herein is on behavioral activation, an intervention that consists of encouraging patients to participate in enjoyable and meaningful activities, in the face of depressive anhedonia.

From ethics of care to psychology of care: reconnecting ethics of care to contemporary moral psychology.

Moral psychology once regarded ethics of care as a promising theory. However, there is evidence to suggest that nowadays moral psychology completely ignores ethics of care's various insights. Moreover, ethics of care's core concepts - compassion, dependence, and the importance of early relations to moral development- are no longer considered to be relevant to the development of new theories in the field.

The ABC of moral development: an attachment approach to moral judgment.

As with other cognitive faculties, the etiology of moral judgment and its connection to early development is complex. Because research is limited, the causative and contributory factors to the development of moral judgment in preverbal infants are unclear. However, evidence is emerging from studies within both infant research and moral psychology that may contribute to our understanding of the early development of moral judgments.

The dilemma of contemporary psychoanalysis: toward a "knowing" post-postmodernism.

It is in the best interest of psychoanalysis that new schools of thought (earlier examples of which are the classical, Kleinian, and self psychological perspectives) evolve. Generating a new school of thought, however, is almost impossible in this postmodern era. The postmodern paradigm in psychoanalysis (intersubjectivity, dialectical constructivism, two-person psychology) does not strive to generate a "true" theory of mind that claims to fit reality, nor does it claim to be another school of thought.

Some utilitarian influences in Freud's early writings.

The author argues that (1) the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were an important source for Freud's early metapsychology and (2) the two theories are radically different in many aspects. The facts that link Freud with the British utilitarian school are described in the first part. These include Freud's translation of three of Mill's essays, a course Freud took on utilitarianism as a student and a book written by Mill which Freud cited and held in his library.