Their History *
2003
FROM DISAPPOINTING ART TO DESIRABLE SCIENCE IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DOMAIN
Unpublished
This, the first of three books, was written between 1990 and 2001. It was necessarily very long, approximately 1200 pages, with extensive contrasts and comparisons and many detailed examples.
Note: It is a remarkable detailed account of the development of an original real science of Psychoanalyses and the related Psychotherapies. In 2003, I put it aside and wrote a detailed 580-page account of the MF Method without the contrasts and comparisons in, “From an Art to a Science of Psychoanalysis: The Metapsychological Formulation Method“. To publish this long book myself was an impossibility. Apart from the formidable barrier of publisher disinterest,getting permissions to quote from the “copyright jungle”, would have taken me to the grave with incomplete results, a touch of the pauper, and nothing of the research in circulation for the right reasons.
With its many examples, it complements the later book enormously, and one such example is of particular interest. I made and recorded predictions from small parts of the concrete material in an audio recording of an analytic session in the book, Analysis of Transference, Volume II (Merton Gill, Irwin Hoffman, 1984; Int’l Universities Press). They were formulated from the point of the first analysand’s first words without access to the rest of the recording, and the results were astoundingly accurate. And in the course of the experiment, it became clear that Gill’s belief that analytic material was necessarily a weave of the real and projected was an unchecked and incorrect assumption. The Glover Effect was unwittingly operative throughout the session studied, and, in spite of its discovery in 1982 and years of testing by prediction, neither the audio session’s therapist nor those who analysed the session afterwards knew of it.
The book’s content is also timeless, and it would be well worth an effort to publish it after my death when some, who are in or going into the analytic professions, take up the rewarding development that I described in the paper, Towards a New Breed of Psychoanalytic Psychoanalysts: Desirable New Directions in Institutional Structure, Research, Education, Training and Practice.
A taste of the book’s quality can be found in the Paper, A New Theory of the Genesis of Symptoms in the “Papers Presentations and Abstracts” section of this website. A brief introduction to the subject was reprinted from the book’s Chapter 11.
2011
FROM AN ART TO A SCIENCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE METAPSYCHOLOGICAL FORMULATION METHOD
Published
This book of 580 pages was a condensed, essential version of the first (including research updates) in which there were only a few copyrighted quotes. That made the project manageable by the “Jack of all Trades” author who, from 2000 to 2011, extended the research, supplied the content, did the writing, got the copyrights, fixed the typos, worked thousands of hours, paid for everything, arranged a self publication, and developed a website to make it known.
It is a cornerstone entry into the development and creation of a real science of the field, as far as it had emerged at the time of publication. Several new, tested theories in previously impenetrable clinical areas are described in extensive detail (e.g. Clinical Research Methodology and Design, Surfaces and Layers, the Aggressive Drive, Multiple Transferences, the Factors Essential for Complete Analysis ( i.e. for permanent cure). Other unclear aspects of the clinical situation such as the Defenses, the Superego and the Ego Ideal are also identified and demystified. And an extension of the research that the book’s Chapter 21, (The Future of MF Research) requested – i.e. a further study that would answer to the question, “Why do some analyses take an unnecessarily long time?” – was also successfully undertaken, and the results will be made accessible in this website at a later time.
2013
THE DIARY OF A REJECTED SCIENTIST
Unpublished
In the above year (2013), as I was getting old, I collected and organized my life’s work – the papers, presentations, grant applications, books, formal discussions, submitted abstracts, book reviews, organizational briefs, Societal projects (a Newsletter), workshops, designed experiments, research method accounts, courses taught, efforts of political activism (Societal, Provincial), and voluminous correspondences from 1966 to that year, and I was struck by how much there was. I was also amazed at how much of my life had been filled with research and practice, along with the extent to which I had completely funded the latter. I also read some of the widely and internationally-presented papers I had forgotten, along with the responses of editorial reviewers, etc., and, as rejections for publications came one after another, I was dumbfounded by the lack of objectivity that had determined they would not be circulated and discussed. Some journals had provided me with word-by-word reviews that, on re-reading were irresponsible and insulting (if taken seriously), the authors of which had hidden under the defense that anonymity had provided.
The situation was an odd one in which they could “talk to me” ad lib, but I could not respond, and after my initial (2013) shock, as I analyzed the responses, I realized that they were the result of acted-out transferences. I then began “talking back” in the compilation of papers that became a book by accident. As I filed the papers and recorded the reviews and other responses, I added my analyses and comments.
I have no intention of publishing this 885-page piece (humorously named Big Opus), but it is a very telling and useful account of the sorry state in which Freud’s scientifically validatable concepts and principles have been left, by a regressive movement from objectivity to subjectivity in the analytic professions. Many parts of his Metapsychology hold up wonderfully to tests for predictive capability, but current theorists claim “Freud is dead”, meaning all of his theories are wrong. And meanwhile the popular shift to “relational” “two-party”, “modern”, “contemporary”, etc. concepts of the clinical situation is putting an unwitting seal on the possibility of a real science. It is encouraging clinicians to turn from objectivity to subjectivity and close the door to testing old and new “hypotheses” (I reserve “theories” for hypotheses that have survived hundreds of tests for predictive capability). Then no one can ever know what is so (i.e. proven) and what is not, and subjective elements can determine choice. Then that means no professional can ever entertain the idea of having the pleasure of a complete analysis and freedom from countertransferences forever – not a good scene for anyone involved!
If this book is ever published, it would serve well as part of a “Life and Times” history of a particular collection of professions that are unknowingly vulnerable to a subtle, seductive and elusive obstacle to their presumable efforts to mature. And as far as I have been able to understand their immense resistance to a real science, it is an underlying fear of the deepest depths of the conflicts that produce symptoms and put a seal on the sorry limitations of current treatments.
2015
INTO AND OUT OF THE SPIN: A unique integration of artistic creations, the artistic creative process, and its root sources in the artist’s repressed unconscious
Unpublished
This book describes and illustrates an unusual (and what appears to be a first) successful research into the repressed unconscious origins of an artist’s art. It begins as a collection of poems and other art pieces (paintings, prose, sculptures) created between 1972 and 1994, with a much later addition of two more sculptures in 2014. It then moves to an unplanned scientific journey to the initially unknown and unknowable depths of the process that created them. And because of its equal research emphases on three areas, the art, the science and the convergence of the two, the art pieces have neither been edited nor selected for special quality.
The convergence was described in detail in the 1986-2003 paper, In Search of a Window into the Artistic Creative Process in Progress with one poem selected as an example of how the author’s scientifically-conducted depth self analysis, after his training analysis, opened its origins. In this book, however, the run-up of many poems from 1972 to the point of convergence, and the time of their most complex and interesting quality in 1985 and 1986, adds a dimension to the book’s related goals. Thus a detailed, on-the-spot segment of the research described in the Window paper allows the reader to experience the convergence without requiring references to that paper.
The E-Books *
2002
THE METAPSYCHOLOGICAL FORMULATION METHOD
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BASIC AND APPLIED “HARD” SCIENCES OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY BY CLINICAL RESEARCHERS ROOTED IN THE PRINCIPLES OF THE “SCIENTIFIC METHOD”
2011
FROM AN ART TO A SCIENCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS:
THE METAPHORICAL FORMULATION
(M.F.) METHOD
2011
2015
INTO AND OUT OF THE SPIN
A unique, integrative sequence of Artistic Creations, the Artistic Creative Process, and an eventual, unexpected release of their unconscious roots from the Repression Defence by means of the Metapsychological Formulation Method
2018
CLINICAL AND SELF ANALYTIC RESEARCHES
INTO THE QUESTION
“Why Do Many Analyses Take Longer than Necessary and Never Go To Completion?”
