Addressing Psychoanalysis's Post-Tower of Babel Linguistic Challenge: A Proposal for a Cross-Theoretical, Clinical Nomenclature

Abstract

After noting how psychoanalysis has fragmented into theoretical and methodological clusters lacking a common language, the author proposes a unifying nomenclature for clinical psychoanalysis. Specifically, he suggests psychoanalysts, regardless of theoretical orientation, frame psychoanalytic relationships, bring presence to their patients, and engage them. These methods facilitate transformation most commonly by bringing features of the unconscious into consciousness. They also disrupt patients' internalization processes—phenomena synonymous with what Fairbairn (1941) called the “schizoid background” (p. 250), Klein (1946) “schizoid mechanisms” (p. 99), Steiner (1993) “psychic retreats” (p. 1), Kernberg (2007) the “narcissistic spectrum” (p. 510), and Summers (2014) “narcissistic encapsulation” (p. 233). The author provides a clinical vignette demonstrating how framing, presence, and engagement describe psychoanalytic work, and concludes by discussing how such nomenclature could enhance psychoanalysts' capacity to communicate with one another while also making the field more accessible to the general public.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• nomenclature
• clinical
• theory
• models
• terms

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alan Karbelnig

Alan Karbelnig, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., a training and supervising psychoanalyst, provides psychoanalytically-oriented individual and couples psychotherapy in Pasadena, California. Board certified in forensic psychology, he also offers psycho-legal services—mostly in the realms of administrative and employment law. He earned doctorates in counseling psychology from the University of Southern California and in psychoanalysis from the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He founded Rose City Center—a not-for-profit psychoanalytic clinic serving the economically disadvantaged. Dr. Karbelnig writes extensively and also lectures locally, nationally, and internationally including, most recently, in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, China, and in Delhi and Ahmedabad, India.