The "Oceanic Feeling" and Confrontation with Death.

Freud's explanation of Rolland's "oceanic feeling" is reconsidered in the light of similar phenomena that occur in the face of impending death, such as the experiences described by Socrates in Plato's , and the aesthetic and transformational experiences described by Christopher Bollas. These phenomena are included in what Karl Jaspers calls "ciphers." Other examples are presented to indicate the need to consider such phenomena in human psychology, phenomena that have been neglected in psychoanalysis due to the profound but arbitrary influence of Freud's analysis of the "oceanic feeling," an analysis based on the outmoded rigid assumptions of classical nineteenth-century science.

What hath freud wrought? Current confusion and controversies about the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

This article discusses the current state of psychoanalysis and the challenges to the fundamental premises of Freud's psychoanalysis by those who have shifted to relationship or so-called two-person psychologies in our field. The author begins by briefly describing a parallel to the recent history of psychoanalysis in the sudden rise and fall of scholastic philosophy in the 14th century. He then focuses on contemporary attacks on Freud's psychoanalysis as a science, based on the contention by two-person psychologists that free association by the patient and evenly hovering attention by the analyst are actually impossible.

Special problems for the elderly psychoanalyst in the psychoanalytic process.

The psychoanalytic process takes on a special ambience when the analyst is clearly elderly. The effects of this ambience on the the aging analyst's patients are discussed, and the sparse literature on the subject is reviewed. Clinical vignettes illustrate a number of these effects on the analytic process.

Introduction: commentaries and author's response to "The rise and fall of the autochthonous self: from Italian Renaissance Art and Shakespeare to Hediegger, Lacan, and Intersubjectivism" by Richard D. Chessick.

This article addresses the unresolved question of the existence of a private core autochthonous self, as it has been described by Winnicott, Modell, and others. The postmodern version of the self has eliminated this concept entirely, relegating the self to a changing and unstable display, or regarding it as totally chaotic, or even an illusion. The question is raised whether by returning to the origins of this notion of a private self and then tracing its apparent dissolution it might be possible to discover some evidence that it still exists.