@article{WolffBernstein, author = {Wolff Bernstein, Jeanne}, title = {Reply to Orange}, series = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 127-130.}, journal = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 127-130.}, abstract = {This. Reply elucidates the ideas originally presented in >Countertransference: Our New Royal Road to the Unconscious< (PD 9/3, 1999) in acknowledgment of Irwin Hirsch's commentary (this issue). It refutes Hirsch's erroneous conception that my paper suggested that the personality of the analyst could be extricated from the interactional matrix of the psychoanalytic relationship and that persons could be separated from their minds. By drawing these false dichotomies, Hirsch only polemicizes rather than clarifies the complex relationship existing between an analyst's subjectivity and his or her personality.}, language = {en} } @article{WolffBernstein, author = {Wolff-Bernstein, Jeanne}, title = {Olympia: a study in perversion - a psychoanalytic pictorial analysis of Edouard Manet's painting}, series = {Free Association, No. 37 (1996), pp. 057-072.}, journal = {Free Association, No. 37 (1996), pp. 057-072.}, language = {en} } @article{WolffBernstein, author = {Wolff-Bernstein, Jeanne}, title = {Reply to commentaries}, series = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 10 (2000), pp. 347-370.}, journal = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 10 (2000), pp. 347-370.}, abstract = {Assisting the analysand in making the past a living present held within a bearable yet unpredictable future is what psychoanalysis is so much about. Events of the past can never be redone, or fully repossessed, but they must be reconstructed in the context of the transference-countertransference experience of the analytic relationship. In order to make the past a useful present and presence, we need metaphors to give it shape - metaphors that capture the memorial activity linking the past with the present and future in a meaningful manner. In this paper, I explore the ways in which the work of the American photographer Shimon Attie creates a memorial place in which the past is not simply remembered but instead is actively mourned. In The Writing on the Wall, Attie collects broken fragments from prewar German-Jewish life in Berlin, and, by projecting these found shards of former lives onto the buildings in the Berlin Scheunenviertel, which once housed these people, he creates a potential space in which a present can suddenly come alive by the superimposition of a past that was supposed to have been obliterated. In this transitional realm, the spectator is given a wide realm of to-and-fro movements between past and present that permits the creation of an object world that did not exist before. I suggest that Attie's intricate weavings of past, present, and future serve as instructive models for the psychoanalytic process in which the analyst can find himself in a similar position of opening up a playground where the past can be brought into the present and where the presentness of the past can come alive. The ability to move back and forth between the present and the past suggests a link to the Freudian concept of deferred action, later taken up by Lacan under the notion of apr{\`e}s-coup, where the impression (Pr{\"a}gung) of an earlier event, having lain dormant for a long time, breaks through into the present through a retroactive action that then completely reshapes the present impression. I draw comparisons to psychoanalytic practice, in which the superimposition (the stacking on top of one another) of recollections, dreams, and associations pries open in the analysand's mind a psychic space in which memories of a seemingly insignificant past absorb a sudden sense of urgency when revisited through this retroactive process.}, language = {en} } @article{WolffBernstein, author = {Wolff Bernstein, Jeanne}, title = {The immediate is not unmediated. Commentary on paper by Annie Sweetnam}, series = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 501-511.}, journal = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 501-511.}, abstract = {The author underscores the importance of Slochower's and Grand's papers on the misdemeanors and crimes committed by psychoanalysts during their clinical work. Both authors are described as being courageous in exploring the realm of analysts' secrets, small misdemeanors, and crimes as a valuable source of collecting and processing countertransference material. Instead of looking at every self-involved activity as a theft from the patient, the author suggests that an analyst may have to retreat to self-enclosed activities in order to be fully present for the patient. At the same time, the kind of activity in which an analyst is engaged while listening to a patient may encapsulate and foreshadow crucial aspects of the transference-countertransference dynamic.}, language = {en} } @article{WolffBernstein, author = {Wolff Bernstein, Jeanne}, title = {Paradox and process}, series = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 09 (1999), pp. 275-299.}, journal = {Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 09 (1999), pp. 275-299.}, abstract = {In this paper I am tracing the history of countertransference and how it has informed the current debate about self-disclosure as a pivotal instrument of analytic work. Now that the analyst's >subjective factor< has been understood as a central influence on the analysand and as a vital source of information about the analysand's intrapsychic life, I argue that certain currents in the relational school of psychoanalysis confuse the analyst's subjectivity with his personality. While becoming more >real< with a patient may enliven a stale analytic dialogue, it ought not be confused with, or take the place of, an analysis of unconscious desires and phantasies. I claim that a two-person psychology can exist only within a tripartite structure in which the analyst does not lose sight of his complex function of being the carrier, observer, and conveyor of the unconscious currents holding both participants in check.}, language = {en} }