TY - JOUR A1 - Kaftal, Emmanuel T1 - Retaining classical concepts - hidden costs. Commentary on Lewis Aron's >the internalized primal scene< JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 541-548. N2 - The paper >Unlawful Entry: Male Fears of Psychic Penetration< is discussed. The paper's author, Dianne Elise, argues that the key to masculine development in contemporary Western culture is the imperative to penetrate and not to be penetrated. Therefore, penetration of either the body or the mind becomes a threat to the stability of many men. Men begin life with an experience of passive excitement – they are penetrated in the nursing situation. Elise argues that subsequent developmental experience forecloses the capacity for penetration and, with it, for emotional capacity. She suggests that men who have great difficulty allowing emotional access should be considered to be suffering from the >citadel complex.< In this commentary, it is argued that Elise confounds the metaphor and the actuality of penetration. Furthermore, she adopts a rhetorical position that creates a meta-message. She adopts a scientific voice to describe masculine development in concrete, positivist terms. This choice of stance undercuts her stated intention to question traditional psychoanalytic gender stereotypy. Although she advocates emotional openness to penetration, she establishes herself and by extension the analyst as an all-knowing, impenetrable authority. Y1 - 2001 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kaftal, Emmanuel T1 - Idiom as an inherent intelligence of form thoughts on Lawrence Jacobson's essay on the work of Christopher Bollas JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 07 (1997), pp. 341-345. Y1 - 1997 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kaftal, Emmanuel T1 - Book review. Pre-object relatedness: Early attachment and the psychoanalytic situation. JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 35 (1999), pp. 335-341. Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kaftal, Emmanuel T1 - >To Sleep, Perchance to Dream< … on the Couch: The Interpersonal Nature of Dreams and Other Dissociative Processes – A Case Illustration JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 01 (1991), pp. 305-328. N2 - The fantasy self-image of the hero is common to many men. When these men come to psychotherapy, they present a variety of symptoms that may be linked to this self-image. These include grandiosity, the need to control the therapist, empty depression, and a preoccupation with the imagery of death and battle. These patients tend to evoke in the therapist emotional responses that the patients subsequently deny. These characteristics are so pervasive among men that they may be endemic to manhood. The heroic model of manhood is an attempt to strengthen and stabilize the gendered self-representation. Because fathers tend to be absent from the nurturing matrix, their sons have little early experience in an affective, preverbal relationship of mutual influence with another who is essentially like themselves yet outside their omnipotent control. Men, therefore, are raised with a pervasive experience of >otherness,< their infantile experience and affectivity forever trapped in the world of women. Although the yearning of men for their fathers is recognized in psychoanalytic theory, the wish for the nurturing father has been underemphasized. The underemphasis causes the f nalyst to miss, or misunderstand, important transferential constellations. Y1 - 1991 ER -