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H C Halberstadt-Freud

Publications and source records attributed to H C Halberstadt-Freud.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

Electra versus Oedipus. Femininity reconsidered.

The author discusses the arguments in favour of an Electra rather than an Oedipus complex to describe the vicissitudes of female development and explores the value of using a different paradigm. She concludes that girls do not have to change their primary object to become female. Pathological forms of the normal ambivalent attachment to the mother are vehement rejection, as with Electra, or the opposite, a close symbiotic bond. Both outcomes testify to the centrality of the maternal love object for the girl, and either can lead to masochistic resolutions of the mother-daughter bond. The girl must steer between the Scylla of a symbiotic illusion vis-a-vis her maternal object and the Charybdis of hatred of it. The inner relationship with the maternal image can foster a woman's development, serve as a source of strength or be a well of pathology. Electra illustrates her preoccupation with her mother in a combination of latent approach and manifest avoidance. Women do turn to their male object of desire, not instead of, but in addition to their first love object, the mother. In healthy development, not the inner mother, but the childhood fantasy of the phallic mother is given up, allowing the difference between the parents to be recognised and genuine heterosexual desire established. Female heterosexuality will always be accompanied by a strong homosexual undercurrent.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Studies on hysteria one hundred years on: a century of psychoanalysis.

In this paper the author shows how 'Studies on Hysteria' ushered in a new century of psychiatry. While hysteria as a clinical entity remains as difficult as ever to define, the entire theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis rests upon it, as it allowed the discovery of the laws of conscious and unconscious thought and fantasy and thereby made it possible to explain symptoms and dreams. The author points out that many of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis are already to be found in the Studies and that, although some important ideas were thereafter forgotten, these have now come to be regarded as essential again. The notions of splitting and dissociation featured prominently in that seminal work and have now been reintegrated into mainstream theory. Present-day psychoanalysis is considered to have returned to its roots as embodied in the Studies, much less emphasis now being laid on the later concepts of drives, phases and libido theory. Female development and the woman's Oedipus complex are, in the author's view, as problematic as in Freud's day, perhaps because of his countertransference problems and neglect of the role of the mother, as exemplified in the Dora analysis. As the author shows, only the French analysts have remained consistently faithful to the concept of hysteria, whereas in other countries it no longer exists as a diagnosis. Yet the concept is stated to be important both historically and for clinical practice today.

Dreams↗
PubMed1995

Clara Schumann: 'A woman's love and life': a psychoanalytic interpretation.

This study was undertaken to demonstrate how psychoanalysis can shed new light on a much studied life history. Clara's emotional life knew a sequence of losses and "prohibited" intimate relationships that created grave loyalty, identity, and identificatory conflicts for her. Since her early childhood, when her father forced her to give up her mother, she had been forced into a choice between the love objects most dear to her and the one on whom she depended for her emotional survival. This resulted in her later repetition compulsion to maneuver herself into the same conflict of loyalty and in her hesitation to decide when choosing one object meant losing the other. Clara had never known a normal separation, only loss and abandonment. She strove to combine the incompatible and succeeded in remaining loyal not only to her mother and father, but also to Robert Schumann, and eventually to Johannes Brahms. Clara Schumann's ideals were conflicted not only because she was educated by two men who were fighting each other, but also because her father, as well as Robert, had internally inconsistent and ambiguous ideas about women. Clara not only had to be obedient and creative, but self-sufficient at the same time. She was partially able to satisfy her own and her partner's needs and solve her deficiencies by projective identification, choosing taciturn men, more maternal than she.

Female↗
PubMed1995

[50 years after Anne Frank: reactive of a transgenerational trauma in countertransference].

Traumatizations suffered in the course of the atrocities perpetrated by the National Socialists defy symbolization and, if unresolved, are passed on to subsequent generations. With reference to the psychoanalytic treatment of a forty-year-old homosexual of the "second generation", the author traces the problematic of the transgenerational handing-down of unresolved traumatizations. The son of a Jewess whose brother was murdered in a concentration camp, the patient had to stand in for his lost uncle and remained caught up in a "symbiotic illusion" with this omni-present/absent object and with the mother, thus being unable to attain to a personality of his own and achieve the Oedipal triad. The article concentrates entirely on this case and provides an impressive record of the mechanisms of transference and counter-transference involved and the various stages of the psychoanalytic process.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

[Postpartum depression and the illusion of symbiosis].

Post-partum depression is an important clinical phenomenon that has been neglected in psychoanalytic research. The author's approach to the problem proceeds on the basis of the postulation of a cross-generational constellation, a specific, pathological relation between the mother and the daughter who has herself become a mother. This relation is termed the "illusion of symbiosis". The central factor here is the mother's fantasy that her baby can fulfill for her all the desires that she herself was denied in childhood by her own mother. In order to sustain this illusion of symbiosis, frustration and anger are split off and frequently projected onto the father, who thus becomes the object of those hostile fantasies. To elucidate this constellation, Halberstadt-Freud draws upon a highly suggestive and impressive case history.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Proust and perversion: some clinical and theoretical considerations.

Relationships may be perserve without"normal" sexuality being replaced by deviant acts and fantasies. The link between perversion and genital sexuality can be loosened without the term becoming inapplicable. Moreover perversions manifest themselves in almost any idiosyncratic form, just like defences. Next to a seemingly not for perverse aim and object, split-off fantasies and acts exist, which form the condition for the "normal" genital sexual relationship. Such a fantasy may be the idea that one's partner has a secret homosexual adventure like in Proust's novel. It can be the need to be unfaithful, or the fantasy of having two lovers instead of one husband, as in the examples given. Perversions can be understood as regulators of self-esteem, and defence against (pre)oedipal conflict. Proust, an expert on perversion and the pre-oedipal, gives us insight into its development, and manifestations: in the mother-child relationship, in love life, in social life and as a sexual perversion in the strict sense of the term. We go into some detail regarding what he tells us about the sado-masochistic fantasies in a love relationship, where paradox seems to be another word for perversion. This is followed by three clinical examples of perverted relationships between partners, with safeguarding of genital aim and object. Perversion seems still more pervasive, more enigmatic and difficult to delineate than in Freud's time.

Adult↗