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PhD Students (completed)

Dr Bjorn Larsson

E-mailcpsgen (non Essex users should add @essex.ac.uk)
Thesis titleOn Knowledge and Creativity in Inter-subjective Psychoanalysis Development, Clinic and Epistemology
AbstractThe underlying question in this work is: “What are the implications of the fact that the object of inquiry in psychoanalysis is a subject?” If subjects are, as Bion points out; “unknown because unknowable”- what does knowledge mean? The possibility of getting knowledge of another is discussed in a constructivist perspective called knowledging. The issue of inter-subjectivity is the contextual framework for the discussion. The theoretical basis is post-kleinian, with special emphasis on Winnicott, Bion and several thinkers in the independent tradition.

Part I discusses Winnicott’s paradox of infantile creation versus finding of objects. The question of self-realisation is understood in terms of K-, L- and H-linking in the transitional space. This is seen as a process of maturation called subjectivation. Maternal intrusion by creation of the infant’s psyche is a cause of false maturation causing pathological self-relations as contrasted to finding the infant as subject.

Part II, discusses the implications of this in clinical inter-subjective psychoanalysis. The necessity of a point of objectivity is discussed in terms of an “analytic third”. The aim of the psychoanalytic work is understood as facilitating True Self-realisation. The interplay of analyst-as-object (dependent) and analyst-as-subject (independent) is essential in development of –K (compliance) into K (knowledge of true self).

Part III discusses the issue of how psychoanalysis can be understood as a science. The fact that the single subject is the object of inquiry makes the conditions specific. Yet, saturation of truth is possible to establish as inner self recognition. Again, inter-subjective intrusion is seen as the cause of false knowledging.

Key words: inter-subjectivity, maturational processes, independent tradition, primary creativity, normopathy, the Grid, transitional space, true self, realisation, epistemology 

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