Commemorating Mel Marshak: 1926-2010

<sup>This post commemorates the life of Dr. Mel Marshak who died in her home in Thousand Palms, California on October 23rd, 2010.  Marshak grew up in California, completing her undergraduate studies in psychology at San Francisco State University in 1951. Shortly thereafter she moved to London where she completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1956 and medical school in 1965, both at London University. She completed her analytic training with the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) in 1960 and residency training in neurology in 1966. Mel was active in the SAP as a training analyst and instructor from 1961 to 1981 as well as professional activities with the British Association of Psychotherapists from 1979 to 1981. During this time she also held consulting positions with a number of London hospitals and clinics, including the Hounslow Child Guidance Center, Woodberry Down Child Guidance Center, Hampstead Child Guidance Center (The Anna Freud Centre), and the Tavistock Clinic. She was a founding member of the Jung/Freud Clinical Group in London and later, in the USA, formed the Independent Society of Analytical Psychology, a non-affiliated inter-disciplinary psychoanalytic study group.

Upon returning to California in 1982 she became active in a number of Jungian and psychoanalytic programs in the USA, including the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, the C.G. Jung Institutes of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the C.G. Jung Institute of Pittsburgh, and was on the faculty of the Memphis Jungian Seminar (a training affiliate of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts) for over a decade.

Mel possessed a keen sense of humor, an ability to play within the analytic material, and she often provided an embodied sense of how the analyst’s love could impact the analytic situation. Although Dr. Marshak published over thirty articles during the course of her career, her greatest strength was in her role as a supportive, challenging, and stimulating instructor and supervisor. She was extremely devoted to the analytic process and effectively transmitted that passion to her students. Dr. Marshak continued tosupervise until the last weeks of her life. Mel also had strong, diverse interests in art, poetry, music and literature, and during one period of her life was a professional jazz drummer. She was endowed with a great intellect, arigorous analytic attitude,and a richness of spirit rivaled by few.  She is deeply missed by those whose lives she influenced.


"Psychoanalysis might now be seen as a combination of two perspectives, intrapsychic and intersubjective. The term 'intrapsychic' needs very little comment in that it is all we mean by internal objects and part objects. Intersubjective does not mean interpersonal, or is it interactive or interaction. Intersubjective means that two subjects relate, keeping in mind that there is a subject only for another subject. In this formulation the significance of intersubjectivity lies in intentionality. . . .'What do you want from me?' The question cannot be posed unless each of us considers our own intrapsychic world, our previous history, the organisation of our individual thoughts, desires, deeds, volitions, etc. And while each addresses the individual intrapsychic world in order to relate intersubjectively, each individual response will have an indirect and unknown effect, not only on the other's subjectivity, but also - though in a manner totally unknown - on their own intrapsychic world, inducing other intersubjective effects. . . .Intersubjectivity postulates that the other must be recognised as another subject in order for the self to experience fully his or her own subjectivity in the other's presence. The intersubjective theory constrasts with the logic of subject and object which has been predominant in philosophy and science in the western world. The intersubjective dimension of the analytic relationship aims to change the subject-object to: 'where objects were, subjects must be'."

Mel Marshak (1998) The Intersubjective Nature of Analysis, in Ian Alister and Christopher Hauke (Eds.) Contemporary Jungian Analysis: Post-Jungian Perspectives from the Society of Analytical Psychology, Routledge: London.</sup>

Grotstein on the Death Instinct and Nothingness

"To this notion I seek to introduce its dialectic the experience of the awesome force of powerlessness, of defect, of nothingness, of "zero-ness"expressed, not just as a static emptiness but as an implosive, centripetal pull into the void. I should like to link and to contrast meaninglessness with nothingness, its inexorable "Siamese-twin", where the former comprises content without meaning or deprived of meaning, i.e., those "ghosts of abandoned meaning" which Bion (1962) termed the "beta prime elements" of "nameless dread"and the latter constitutes the empty matrix and "container" of meaninglessness.

In introducing the dialectic of nothingness/meaninglessness, I also wish to refer to the paradoxical dialectic of the instinctual drives. They have always been considered to be a powerful, peremptory biological force which impose themselves upon the mental apparatus for satisfaction. It has rarely been considered, except by Lacan and those whom he has influenced, that the drives are semiotic signifiers, i.e., messengers of a state of distressful emptiness, hunger, a nothingness waiting to become filled with something. Stated another way, what is the worst fear a human being can experience, the total irruption of the drives into the ego or disintegration of the self and objects, disappearance, dissolution the advent of meaninglessness and nothingness? Further, I shall link meaninglessness with the experience of randomness and correlate them with the phenomenon of chaos.

Although I affirm Klein's (1935) belief in the inherent origins of primal destructiveness and her conception of the death instinct, as originally formulated by Freud (1920), I shall argue that the death instinct is also a passive vehicle of expression (signifier) of the anticipation and realization of the apocalyptic experience of the "black hole" phenomenon (the signified). The death instinct is our preparedness to anticipate and therefore to adapt to (regulate) this ultimate horror. The death instinct, in other words, constitutes our reminder that we all inwardly cringe on the "event horizon" of "annihilation's waste"with entropy (meaninglessness) and nothingness as our companions. Thus, the operation of the death instinct can be thought of as a dialectic, one aspect conveying the inherent preconception and apocalyptic pre-perception of the "black hole" as an experience-"released" anticipation and the other aspect including the pre-adaptive aggression, assertiveness, and self-and-species protectiveness to cope with prey-predator danger. (pp. 258-259)

James Grotstein (1990). Nothingness, Meaninglessness, Chaos, and the "Black Hole" I: The Importance of Nothingness, Meaninglessness, and Chaos in Psychoanalysis, Contemporary. Psychoanalysis, Vol. 26, pp. 257-290.

Bisagni - Some Conceptual Parallels Between Bion and Jung

"Apart from the notion of archetype as unsaturated expectation of the encounter—which can help us in assuming a potential for an outgrowth even in autistic children—Jung’s concept of symbolic attitude is crucial. Jung says: ‘the symbolic attitude . . . is the outcome of a definite view of the world which assigns meaning to events, whether great or small, and attaches to this meaning a greater value than to bare facts’ (Jung 1937, para. 899). This is in my opinion very close to what Bion calls the psychoanalytic mind, as a primary quality of the mother to give meaning and build sense in her baby, with regards to the human disposition to search for sense. Such a quality, that may look obvious when we work with more evolved analysands, is terribly hard to keep alive in the analyst when working with the absolute non-mental states of autistic children, and it is even harder again to assume it to be a potential in them.

The notions of pre-conception (Bion) and of archetype (Jung) are very helpful in working with autistic children and, in general, with those analysands who suffer severe impairments in their capacity for symbolization. These notions actually help the analyst in assuming that some proto-trace of representational potential is always present in the individual, and may be appropriately developed if the object is able to provide its fundamental action as a complex and multidetermined subject, deeply involved as a reclaiming object in the analytic relationship. Such a role is essentially played in the function of transforming adhesive bi-dimensional identifications—that trace back to a flattened nonmental world—into projective tri-dimensional identifications, which result in a move from the use of reality in terms of autistic shapes and autistic objects, towards a more evolved and live symbolic use. Such a transformative action can be defined as the prototypical work of the transcendent function." (pp. 269-270)

　

Francesco Bisagni (2010) Out of nothingness: rhythm and the making of words, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 55, pp. 254–272

Richardo Bernardi on the Need for Controversy in the Development of Psychoanalysis

"Scientific controversies are necessary, despite their difficulties. Some of the difficulties mentioned above probably crop up in all fields of knowledge. Other problems, which I will concentrate on here, are typical of debates between theories that, though they belong to a single discipline, diverge in their way of comprehending the particular discipline's methodological and epistemological criteria. This is frequently the case with psychoanalysis and with the social sciences. The possibility of true debates between members of different psychoanalytical cultures challenges psychoanalysis on two fronts. From the epistemological side, it tests the discipline's capacity to create a unitary field for argumentation when there are differences in premises. But, as the same time, this invites us to work on the psychoanalytic understanding of whatever unconscious factors encumber the dialogue.

When controversies erupt between psychoanalytic approaches differing in their premises, it becomes so difficult to circumscribe the discussion to particular theoretical or technical problems. Though not always explicitly, examining argumentative discourses reveals that what is being discussed, too, is each party's way of conceiving the rationality and scientific nature of psychoanalysis, that is, the type of scientific reasoning each party uses to substantiate its theoretical and technical postulates. For their part, the points where the discussion founders indicate problems the discipline cannot resolve because it has not been able to establish pertinent procedures acceptable to all parties.

Two situations of this kind deserve special notice. First, there is the difficulty of discerning the particular nature of each issue that could be included in the debate. Absent this, there is no way of identifying the most appropriate methodology for approaching each issue. For example, in the above-mentioned discussion on structuralism and Brentano's philosophy, for the debate to advance it would have been necessary first to specify the different levels of the problem, and then separate the purely philosophical debate from the consequences for psychoanalytical practice of particular philosophical ideas. This distinction would have also made it possible to take the discussion on to a terrain accessible to analytical experience. Let us mention a second example: if the discussion had considered the consequences of the two ways of conducting an analysis, it would then have been pertinent to debate the different methodologies that could be used to ascertain the results of analysis, thus broadening the scope of the discussion. Emphasising methodological problems imparts a particular direction to the debate, for it implies debating not so much what is known as how we get to know (Tuckett, 1998, p. ).

A second obstacle jeopardising progress in the controversies was how difficult it was for each party to include their premises and suppositions in the discussion. When each position locks itself into its suppositions, the situations of seeming incommensurability that I have analysed here are created. In this case, divergences at the epistemological level made it difficult to find common criteria for evaluating the quality of the argumentation. Even so—as we have seen—it is possible to create a shared argumentative field if people accept comparing the different positions on the basis of what each of them contributes in terms of theoretical intelligibility or clinical efficacy. More than a comparative confrontation of theoretical or clinical arguments piecemeal, what proves useful in these cases is a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the way each position interweaves theoretical ideas with clinical practice.

At this juncture, we can see that reaching consensus is not the sole aim of controversies. Rather, we must manage them so that the different hypotheses interact and in so doing acquire better foundations. This is the way to further the development of the discipline. We might also expect that the effort of looking at the problem from different perspectives should lead to personal development. Debate can materialise only if there is the willingness to engage in it, that is, if desire and hope predominate, so that in the course of the discussion we find something we had not thought about previously, or at least not thought about in that way. If as analysts we lose the desire and hope of finding something new, perhaps—to avoid the consequences of professional burnout (Cooper, 1986)—the time for reanalysis has arrived.

Controversies demand a particular intellectual and emotional effort, connected to the acceptance of the other as different. The reward we can expect from such effort does not reside exclusively in a reduction of disagreements; indeed, controversies are also good for developing better substantiated theories, encouraging more careful examination of our clinical evidence and reminding us that there always are alternate hypotheses, whose careful consideration can both lead us to strengthen our previous convictions or see the need to revise and modify them, in both cases carrying us forward in the search for new ideas." (pp. 869 - 870).
　

Ricardo Bernardi (2002). The Need for True Controversies in Psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 83, pp. 851-873

Schwartz-Salant - Abandonment Depression

"To begin with I should like to focus upon two qualities of consciousness that inform our work as Jungian analysts. One quality allows us to experience events within a space-time matrix. Another allows us to experience the nature of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. Within the transference-countertransference process we can move back and forth between these different modes of consciousness. As has often been stressed, personal and archetypal dimensions cannot be separated but they can be experienced as related aspects of an indivisible process (Williams, 19, Eigen 2). To use Jung's metaphor, the sea is the carrier of the individual wave (Jung 9, para. 354).

Jung describes the soul as ‘the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life’ (Jung 10, para. 56). There are, however, deeply alienated areas of the soul, which, as a result of the experience of abandonment, appear to be lifeless. The process of integration of these split-off ardeas highlights the importance of seeing the organic linking of personal and archetypal dimensions within the transference-countertransference process.

Abandonment is a catastrophic experience, different, as Michael Fordham emphasizes, ‘From other forms of separation in which sadness, pining, and grief are experienced’ (Fordham 4). On the one hand, the abandoned one suffers a consummate betrayal, the loss of a loved and needed person. On the other hand, persecution by that same person is experienced. As a result, one's sense of reality is totally threatened: the good has become the bad, the nurturing has become persecutory. From a seeming state of well-being a chaotic state of panic becomes imminent because the entire fabric of one's perception of reality has come into question.

A frantic search for a good object immediately takes over, but the persecutory despair remains so intense that the search is doomed to failure, undone by the chaos and pain which defies the attempt at restitution. The individual's makeshift reality is threatened with each additional possibility of abandonment, and a deep-seated depression, the abandonment depression, dominates the inner world.

In general, the difficult act of engaging this depressed and persecuted quality of a patient's inner life must include establishing a heart-centered, imaginal awareness within which one can experience the dread suffered by the soul. A contact can then be made, but only when the analyst becomes astutely aware that his or her own soul suffers that which the patient suffers. Before this is possible, however, a tortuous path must be traveled, one which is dominated by interactive fields that preclude empathy or any real contact (Schwartz-Salant 18)." (pp. 143-144).

Nathan Schwartz-Salant (1990). The Abandonment Depression: Developmental and Alchemical Perspectives. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 35, pp.143-159.