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H Shmuel Erlich

Publications and source records attributed to H Shmuel Erlich.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Working at the frontier and the use of the analyst: reflections on analytic survival.

Certain connotations of 'working at the frontier' for the practicing psychoanalyst and for psychoanalysis are discussed in terms of movement along spatial and temporal dimensions. I then selectively highlight three currently significant frontier areas: moving between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy; psychoanalysis under conditions of terror and social traumatization; and the pursuit of the definitive as against the elusive subject. I suggest 'the use of the analyst' as the theme that underlies and epitomizes analytic presence and activity at these frontiers. Psychoanalysts are 'used' in innumerable ways, but especially by surviving the destructiveness--deliberate and unconscious, real and symbolic--aimed at them. The psychoanalytic presence at these frontiers fashions and reaffirms its unique, life-embracing stance out of chaotic formlessness.

Humans↗
PubMed2003

Experience--what is it?

The author takes a renewed look at the constitutive aspects of experience, looking at it as process rather than contents. Recently more psychoanalytic voices are discernible that argue for the complexity and multi-leveled nature of inner experience. Yet the predominant and preeminent psychoanalytic voice has traditionally emphasized the linearity and single-factored nature of experience and all that is based on it: development, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment. The author offers an understanding of experience as stemming from the operation of two contiguous, ongoing modalities of processing internal and external input, and reflecting two polarities of the subject-object experience: of separateness and instrumentality, and of oneness and ongoing being. Such a conceptual reframing of experience harbors multiple implications for understanding subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, inter-relatedness as well as single-person psychology, and the all-important role of an experiential 'goodness-of-fit' in the analytic situation and elsewhere.

Humans↗