Confusion of tongues: Chinese/English/German psychoanalytic dialogues.

Translation of psychoanalytic texts is notoriously complex, amplified by differences between Western languages/cultures and China. Freud labelled translation "traitorous". A current challenge is the trend among some professional translators to diminish or eliminate hierarchies of accurate and inaccurate translations.

Caravaggio four centuries later: psychoanalytic portraits of ambivalence and ambiguity.

Rome celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio's death with an historical exhibition of his brief lifetime's work. Yet psychoanalysis has not studied this work extensively, despite the artist's compelling portrayal of a full range of human affects, including ambivalence. Psychoanalysis has studied artistic pioneers such as da Vinci (Freud 1910) and Michelangelo (Freud 1914), Giotto's use of blue sky as psychologically innovative (Blatt 1994), and Magritte's play with external reality (Spitz 1994).

Zombies, vampires, werewolves: an adolescent's developmental system for the undead and their ambivalent dependence on the living, and technical implications.

While vampires haunt contemporary American pop culture, the undead have populated psychoanalytic literature from Abraham's March 15, 1915 letter to Freud to today. PEP lists 439 psychoanalytic references to the undead (99 on zombies; 288 on vampires; 52 on werewolves). A selection of papers are cited, focusing on clinical cases, ethnography media and literature, even breast-feeding fantasized as blood sucking, associated with primitive dynamics.

Mothers of children with inflammatory bowel disease: a controlled study of adult attachment classifications and patterns of psychopathology.

We inquire into parental correlates of illness expression in three pediatric diagnoses: Inflammatory Bowel Disease, cancer and renal disease. Children with cancer and renal disease were the comparison groups, using valid pediatric measures for comparison across diagnostic categories in chronic illness. We found compromised parental support in families with IBD children, comparing relations among child's medical adjustment, parental attachment and psychopathology profiles.

Clarity and ambiguity in psychoanalytic practice.

The author explores the presence and the essential tension between clarity and ambiguity as processes within our minds that become prominent in psychoanalysis. We learn from aesthetics and literary criticism that ambiguity can shade from taut disorganization to tolerating life's richness; clarity can range from a concrete fixity to a lucid grasp of one's state of mind. This article responds to Wallerstein's (1991) challenge to find common ground in psychoanalytic practice: We attempt this by avoiding metapsychological jargon and relying on more experience-near terms, such as clarity and ambiguity.

Dante's Comedy: precursors of psychoanalytic technique and psyche.

This paper uses a literary approach to explore what common ground exists in both psychoanalytic technique and views of the psyche, of 'person'. While Western literature has developed various views of psyche and person over centuries, there have been crystallizing, seminal portraits, for instance Shakespeare's perspective on what is human, some of which have endured to the present. By using Dante's Commedia, particularly the Inferno, a 14th century poem that both integrates and revises previous models of psyche and personhood, we can examine what features of psyche, and 'techniques' in soul-healing psychoanalysts have inherited culturally.

My life is a longing: child abuse and its adult sequelae. Results of the Brody longitudinal study from birth to age 30.

The psychoanalytically oriented Brody longitudinal study has followed the psychological development of 76 individuals from birth to age 30. Ten suffered severe maltreatment in childhood in the form of rejection and/or physical abuse at the hands of one or both parents. This report describes the effects of child abuse on the emerging personalities of the children, as well as on their adult personalities and mental health.

Transition to young adulthood: a prospective study.

In this paper, the authors report on the transition to young adulthood (18-25) in the highest functioning 18 individuals in our cohort (GAF > or = 90) from a prospective longitudinal study of 76 lives followed from birth. These 18 individuals provide as clear a view as possible into the inner lives of people least distorted by psychopathology. This gives us a more crystalline photograph of psychic structure: the precipitant of family, society and psyche itself.

Seasonal variation in postnatal depression.

Background: We evaluated the occurrence of postnatal depression in general and during different seasons as part of a larger longitudinal mother-child follow-up study.

Method: One hundred and eighty-five mothers, from the maternity wards of University Hospital of Oulu, Finland, completed a self-rating depression scale, the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) twice: first at hospital 2-7 days after delivery and the second time at home 4 months after the delivery. Different psychosocial variables were mapped out to avoid any confounding factors.

The relationship between mothering in infancy, childhood experience and adult mental health: results of the Brody prospective longitudinal study from birth to age 30.

This longitudinal study has followed seventy-six individuals from birth to age 30 using films of the mother-child interaction, psychoanalytically informed interviews of parents and children, and psychodiagnostic testing to assess how the quality of mothering a child receives in the first year of life contributes to his/her subsequent emotional well-being. The thirty-year follow-up of the now adult participants found that those who had received more effective care in infancy in terms of maternal empathy, consistency, control, thoughtfulness, affection and management of aggression had higher-level psychological defence mechanisms as adults than children receiving less effective nurturing--suggesting a process in which the children internalised their mothers' own defence mechanisms. Other measures at 30 years (Global Functioning, Erikson psychosocial attainment, mental representation of security of attachment to parents and presence or absence of a psychiatric diagnosis) did not achieve statistical significance.

The ontogeny of a sexual fetish from birth to age 30 and memory processes. A research case report from a prospective longitudinal study.

From a longitudinal study that began at birth, a case is described in which a man at the age of 30 recalls the onset of a sexual fetish in his fifth or sixth year of life. The memories activated and dreams reported during the thirty-year follow-up interview, were synthesised with parent-infant film data and historical information contained in the research record concerning the child's development, his parents' behaviour and traumatic experiences. Taken together they provide a detailed description of the psychological ontogenesis of the fetish.

The child's conception of psychiatric cure.

Twenty-two sequentially hospitalized children on a preadolescent psychiatric unit were videotaped with a semi-structured Piagetian-type interview that focused on assessing their understanding of why they were in the hospital, how they conceptualized their problems and how they thought they would get better or cured. We found six categories of "cure": 1) there was no cure for their problems; 2) cure meant reversal of some behaviors; 3) cure involved some internal change; 4) cure was equivalent to being discharged; 5) cure meant changing other people; and 6) idiosyncratic answers. Our findings suggest that it is useful to clarify a child's understanding of treatment and cure in order to target more understandable and effective treatment.

Toward a conceptual alliance about therapeutic alliance: a voyage through the Inferno.

I suggest that there is not a conceptual consensus in psychoanalysis regarding the therapeutic alliance. Some argue that the unobjectionable part of the transference should be facilitated; some argue that there is no unobjectionable part of the transference, that all parts should be subjected to analysis. There are those who argue that the therapeutic alliance exists in early treatment; others who argue that it exists later.

Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome: countertransference as a diagnostic tool.

The authors report on an unusual reaction in clinicians interviewing known perpetrators of Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome (MBPS): an uncanny, ego-dystonic, and cognitively dissonant sense that the parent could not be the perpetrator, despite all clinical/forensic evidence. The authors suggest that this reaction can have various sources: One may be "as-if" character pathology in the parent, with the capacity to evoke, unconsciously, disbelief in the clinician. Given the poor treatment outcome reported in MBPS perpetrators, the authors suggest that, if confirmed, this finding will lead to more accurate psychiatric diagnosis of the parent, and more informed treatment of this potentially harmful or lethal syndrome.

Rape, torture, and traumatization of Bosnian and Croatian women: psychological sequelae.

The first 25 Bosnian women admitted to the Zagreb Obstetrics and Gynaecological Clinic or its associated regional psychiatric centers were assessed using both clinical and post-traumatic stress disorder interviews. Most of the women had been multiply traumatized; all had been repeatedly raped. Psychological status was assessed for those women who were not impregnated, for those impregnated who received abortions, and for those impregnated who carried the fetus to term.