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The aim of this study involved exploring qualitatively how local therapists practice psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the absence of explicit transference manifestations among the kinds of patients who never make any directly verbal or affectively intense (either positive or negative) references to the figure of the therapist. Close phenomenological analysis of the work of four therapists revealed striking parallels with the work of internationally based psychoanalysts among similar kinds of patients in analysis centering on the role of the countertransference as a key analytic tool in the seeming absence of explicit transference. While the findings of this study also revealed striking divergences from classical analysis and convergences with more contemporary psychoanalytic practice, these all emerged on Winnicottian terrain. The conceptual distinctions between interpreting or working in the transference as transference, interpreting or working in the transference as non-transference and the idea of working with rather than directly in the implicit transference emerged as major findings of this study. HOW transference material is treated and interpreted emerged as playing a key role in understanding how psychoanalytic psychotherapy is practiced among the kinds of patients with whom integrated and intact ego functioning cannot be assumed. The central role of the countertransference when working in the transference as non-transference and interpreting or working with implicit transference material rather than directly in it, emerged as playing a central role not only in doing the kind of work that according to Winnicott involves ‘managing the setting’, but in positioning the therapists to maintain technical neutrality by assuming the very role that involves meeting the patient’s ego needs for symbiosis with interpretations that bring news of sameness. Limitations of this study and implications for further research are discussed.

Missing page 305 / As the title of this thesis indicates, this work is a study of key psychoanalytic issues deemed to be central to a proper appreciation of the work of the contemporary American writer, Donald Barthelme. Much has been written about Barthelme's fiction in recent years (he has, for example, been the subject of four full-length studies in the last five years), but the approach taken by criticism in general to his work misinterprets what seems to me to be one of the most interesting and relevant issues raised by his work. Conventional wisdom assumes that Barthelme's short stories represent a uniquely successful challenge to the notion that fiction need embody meanings which originate in the author. It is asserted, in other words, that Barthelme's fiction has for all intents and purposes utterly subverted potential criticism which might attempt to establish a relationship between text and author. In the effective absence of an "author," Barthelme's prose is taken to represent a radically innovative form of discourse, a form of discourse which has influenced an entire generation of experimental writing. The context in which Barthelme's fiction is appreciated by criticism is informed by distinctively postmodern aesthetics. In particular, what critics identify as postmodernism's emphasis on "an aesthetic of process" (Hutcheon 1985, 2) has served to throw the entire concept of the artist or the author as the source of meaning in a text open to serious question. Postmodern fiction presents itself as a form of situation, a variety of experience in which author and reader are free to recreate meaning and recreate themselves in a dynamic gestalt through the process of text. What is most repugnant to postmodernism is the rule of definitions of the self that are anterior to the text, definitions that limit the existential freedom of the self to recreate itself in situation. Barthelme's fiction is widely proclaimed to be exemplary postmodern writing in the sense that it has created a form of discourse in which the author--a potentially limiting source of prefigured meanings--is effectively absent from the text, and can therefore be discounted as a factor in any interpretation of the meaning of the text. This study will show that the voice of the author in Barthelme's short fiction is neither absent nor as irrelevant as criticism would have us believe. Indeed, this study will show that Barthelme's fiction says essentially the opposite of what has hitherto been assumed with regard to the relevance of the authorial voice to the meaning of the fiction. This study is psychoanalytic in the sense that it will isolate the latent features of Barthelme's prose based on readings of patterns of association as they occur in the manifest content of the stories. To this point no criticism has considered the relevance of these patterns of association in Barthelme because it has been assumed that, in the absence of a legitimate authorial voice in his work, such patterns either do not exist, or if they do exist, they were deliberately woven into the fabric of the prose by an ironic author familiar with Freud. With a careful and comparative analysis of his earliest stories to serve as a reference point, this study proposes to demonstrate basically two things: first, that Barthelme's fictions have from the beginning implicitly affirmed the notion that an understanding of the psychoanalytic issues attached to the voice behind the fiction has been crucial to an appreciation of the full meaning of any given story; and second, that the psychoanalytic issues of concern to the authorial voice in Barthelme have not changed to any significant degree over the twenty years Barthelme has been publishing fiction. The implications of the latter point are especially worth noting: proof of the presence of a consistent authorial voice would require a radical readjustment to the popular view of the meaning of Barthelme's fiction. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 83). Also available on the Internet.

Baron's work has not been extensively studied nor is it known in full. Critical writings and scholarly attention have focused on the work as representative of Holocaust suffering. This thesis intervenes in that assumption by arguing that it is possible to understand Baron's processes of making collage as a significant case study in the problematic of signification and a complex of differences none of which are reducible to or deducible from each other. Drawing together a range of biographical information, primary source material and close readings of many of Baron's collages (including two hitherto unseen series) traces are revealed of both a maker, an artistic subject finding itself in its own practice, and a making, in the sense of a process that cannot be bound into the singularity of the subject who made it. A framework is established using psychoanalytic theory and second generation Holocaust theory that allows for the possibility of reading into Baron's life story both the symptoms of unresolved conflicts and a particular set of strategies that enabled her to sustain a creative subjectivity. Kristeva's formulation of art as an imaginaire du pardon permits a reading, however tentative, of Baron's art in terms of a poetics of imaginary restoration and reparation in which archaic and traumatic-affects are given the structure of symbolic representation. This is especially pertinent to Baron's fourteen year experience of cancer. Finally, a consideration of Baron's collage making as a process of inscription that is in relation to the body as a coalition of history, memory, corporeality and the psyche is not only significant to contemporary understandings of identity and subjectivity, but also makes it possible to propose an ethical dimension concerned with a feminine understanding of difference.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 83). Also available on the Internet.