An Archaeology of the Analysing Instrument
Otto Isakower's Self-Experiment
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21717528 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Benjamin Dawson (London, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 189-221 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Psychoanalysis and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1460-8235 • E-ISSN: 1755-201X |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/pah.2023.0469 |
| OpenAlex | W4385372856 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 34 |
The article offers an intellectual reconstruction of Otto Isakower’s concept of the ‘analyzing instrument’, the vehicle by which the analyst’s mind becomes joined to the patient’s, each in a comparable state of regressed self-observation. This view of technique is shown to have grown out of Isakower’s pre-war research (shaped by the work of Paul Schilder and Paul Federn) on a variety of pre-dormescent hallucination that still bears his name, ‘the Isakower phenomenon’. Primarily, however, it is Isakower’s amateur, apparently peripheral interest in the history and epistemology of science which was, the article argues, central to the evolution of his ideas. In particular, Isakower’s study of the scientific practices of self-observation and self-experimentation used by the nineteenth-century sensory physiologist Johannes Müller is shown to have been a decisive relay point between his earlier clinical research on hypnagogic states and his later reflections on technique. In underscoring the significance of that study, the article suggests that something of the transitional character of Müller’s scientific practices – his location on the threshold between Romantic and modern, positivist styles of investigating the senses – is retained in Isakower’s fascinating model of the analytic situation
Aesthetics · Amateur · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Mainstream · Phenomenon · Positivism · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Computer Science · History · Neurology and Historical Studies · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History · Psychology
Ghostly Apparitions
Freud's Free Clinics
The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism
The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy
Novalis
Science in the Age of Sensibility
Racker and Heimann on Countertransference
On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia
Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen
Reconsideration of the Dream Screen
Sleep, Narcissistic Neurosis, and the Analytic Situation
On the Analyzing Instrument
Spoken Words in Dreams
Between the basic fault and second skin
The Art and Science of Dream Interpretation
The Place of Paul Federn's Ego Psychology in Psychoanalytic Metapsychology
Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century
Self Evidence
Phantasmagoria
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |