A New Riddle of the Sphinx?Our new masthead features an image of Oedipus contemplating the riddle of the Sphinx --a reminder that for us question is at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise.
What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening? Oedipus, famously, solved the riddle, answering that man crawls on all fours in infancy, walks upright on two legs in adulthood, and uses a cane in old age. I've always felt that that answer--correct though it be--is a disappointment, anticlimactic and fundamentally unsatisfying. (There might be a better modern answer. Maybe the question hints at an evolutionary awareness: a progression from beast on all fours, to homo sapien with upright posture, to human being in human culture dependent on his tools.)
Also famously, the answer Oedipus gives is no real solution to anything; it only leads him further into a trap. He defeats the questioner, becomes king of Thebes, marries his mother and embroils himself still more deeply in his (Freud will make it
our) tragedy. (If anyone wants to be reminded of the whole story, here's one of many summaries available on the internet:
Sphinx) The moral, I guess, is watch out for pat answers, especially if fate (or your deepest nature) is against you.
Still, the riddle evokes a timeless and compelling human situation--answer correctly or die! And there's the possibility that (at least temporarily) human reason will defeat brute supernatural force. And the matter the riddle addresses is nothing less than the nature of human nature!
The Sphinx came to the ancient Greeks from still a more ancient Egypt (for a capsule history, see
History). The Sophoclean question arose in an age we can hardly expect to apprehend directly. But the times must have privileged simple and certain answers. Today the Sphinx might pose a different riddle altogether, one expressing one or another of the puzzles of our own age. And a modern riddle would have to have a different form--an open-endedness: it would have to be a riddle without an already-known answer.
What would a comtemporary riddle about the natue of human nature be like?
What is mind that it can know and not know what it knows?
or:
What is the nature of human beings that we strive against ourselves?
or:
Why do we seek out and create the very life circumstances we'd most want to excape?
Anyone else interested in formulating a riddle?
~Henry Seiden
After trauma.... a new essayAFTER TRAUMA, HIDDEN OR OBVIOUS: POSSIBILITIES FOR TREATMENT.
Johanna Krout Tabin, Ph.D. ABPP
Note: These papers were presented at the Section V Panel, APA, New Orleans, LA, August, 2006. (They are also online as downloadable pdfs on the Section II link on the Division 39 home page .)
An important part of the mission of Section V is to keep abreast of innovation in psychoanalysis. The papers which follow offer ground-breaking applications of psychoanalytic understanding in trying to help victims of trauma. Marvin Hurvich contributes a theoretically grounded but clinically practical exploration of annihilation fantasies. Sharon Farber speaks in the same way to the use of cutting and other self-harming mechanisms. She shows the clinical importance of recognizing the adaptive function of such behaviors.
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Withholding APA dues in protest over policy on tortureGhislaine Boulanger writes:
Should we withhold our 2007 dues to the American Psychological Association?
There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether to withhold dues from the APA in light of the continuing use of psychologists in Guantanamo and other sites in which 'enemy combatants' are being tortured. Some have been categorically opposed to withholding dues, arguing that it is better to stay within the organization and work from there, saying that not paying dues is poor strategy; others have urged a wait and see attitude. For some of us this is not a question of strategy, it is a question of conscience. Which is not to say that sometimes acts of conscience cannot also be strategic. Be that as it may, let me speak for myself, I simply cannot in good conscience continue paying dues to an organization whose ethics code supports the use of psychologists in facilities that do not observe international human rights law.
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A QUESTIONBoard member and editor David Lichtenstein starts off our Open Forum with this question:
Register, and log in if you'd like to comment.
Also, general comments and questions are most welcome. Send them to:
Henry M. Seiden
Secretary
Are psychoanalysis and psychology different disciplines?
The discipline that is concerned with the formations of subjective identity, with its rigidities and its fragilities, its illusions and its functions, seems to be a discipline that is particularly susceptible to the vagaries of its own collective identity. This has been the story of psychoanalysis. We all know the history of excommunications, of debates on the one true way, of wrangles about membership played out, and still playing out, in our professional organizations as well as outside of them in the legal domain.
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