Relational Perspectives Book Series , Vol. 19 Summary With scholarship at once searching and imaginative, James Grotstein has emerged as a highly influential contributor to psychoanalysis over the past several decades. He has not only tackled some of the most difficult theoretical and clinical issues but has done so in a creatively original way. To wit, Grotstein has synthesized and extended diverse currents from various psychoanalytic schools of thought and is unique in bringing together the work of Klein, Bion, Fairbairn, Lacan, Matte-Blanco, infant researchers, and contemporary trauma theorists. Displaying extraordinary familiarity with many different domains of human experience and knowledge, he has used astronomical, mythological, and literary metaphors to generate a distinctive vision of psychic structure and psychodynamic process and a powerful theory of object relations. In Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences, Grotstein integrates some of his most important work of recent years in addressing fundamental questions of human psychology and spirituality. He explores two quintessential and interrelated psychoanalytic problems: the nature of the unconscious mind and the meaning and inner structure of human subjectivity. To this end, he teases apart the complex, tangled threads that constitute self-experience, delineating psychic presences and mystifying dualities, subjects with varying perspectives and functions, and objects with different, often phantasmagoric properties. Whether he is expounding on the Unconscious as a range of dimensions understandable in terms of nonlinear concepts of chaos, complexity, and emergence theory; modifying the psychoanalytic concept of psychic determinism by joining it to the concept of autochthony; comparing Melanie Klein's notion of the archaic Oedipus complex with the ancient Greek myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur; or examining the relationship between the stories of Oedipus and Christ, Grotstein emerges as an analyst whose clinical sensibility has been profoundly deepened by his scholarly use of mythology, classical thought, and contemporary philosophy. The result is both an important synthesis of major currents of contemporary psychoanalytic thought and a moving exploration of the nature of human suffering and spirituality. Table of Contents Foreword by Thomas H. Ogden
Preface
Chapter 1-The Ineffable Nature of the Dreamer
Chapter 2-Autochthony (Self-Creation) and Alterity (Co-Creation): Psychic Reality in Counterpoint
Chapter 3-A Fearful Symmetry and the Calipers of the Infinite Geometer
Chapter 4-Inner Space: Its Dimensions and Its Coordinates
Chapter 5-Psychoanalytic Subjects
Chapter 6-Internal Objects
Chapter 7-The Myth of the Labyrinth
Chapter 8-Why Oedipus and Not Christ? - Part I
Chapter 9-Why Oedipus and Not Christ? - Part II
Chapter 10-Bion's Transformations in O |
