TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Living in the Liminal Spaces of Mortality JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 08 (1998), pp. 225-236. Y1 - 1998 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Playing with boundaries. JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 35 (1999), pp. 054-066. Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Potholes on the royal road: Or is it an abyss? JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 36 (2000), pp. 005-028. Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Bringing in the dreamer: Some reflections on dreamwork, surprise, and analytic process. JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 36 (2000), pp. 685-705. Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Reply to Commentaries JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 10 (2000), pp. 551-568. Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Reply to Spezzano JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 385-404. N2 - This is about a small boy and his >imaginary< friend, who happens to be a gorilla – a friend the boy considers very real indeed. It is also about the fact that no part of the self, including every child's relationship to his own >gorilla,< is ever >reasoned< out of existence. It becomes, instead, >not really real,< because it has had to be relegated to >not really me< in order for the child to preserve his attachment bond with significant others. However, it will continue to make its presence known through being relationally enacted, dissociatively, in ways that eventually become repetitious enough and painful enough to bring the child (now an adult) into our office years later. As analysts, our job at that point becomes one of trying to restore the connection between the little boy and his gorilla in the face of intense pressure by the now >grown-up< patient to keep them apart and to discourage the therapist from trying to bring these old friends back from dissociation into the >really real.< The source of therapeutic action that allows this reunion to take place is discussed conceptually and described in clinical vignettes. Y1 - 2001 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Review Essay: The Fate of Romance Over Time JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 11 (2001), pp. 891-912. N2 - I offer the view that the symptom picture found in most patients with eating disorders, as well as in the symptomatology of many other so-called difficult patients, is the end result of prolonged necessity in infancy to control traumatic dysregulation of affect. I propose that the central issue for an eating-disordered patient is that she is at the mercy of her own physiologic and affective states because she lacks an experience of human relatedness and its potential for reparation that mediates self-regulation. She is enslaved by her felt inability to contain desire as a regulatable affect and is thus unable to hold desire long enough to make choices without the loss of the thing not chosen leading to a dread of self-annihilation. Trauma compromises trust in the reparability of relationship, and for symptoms to be surrendered, trust in reparability must be simultaneously restored. Because felt desire is the mortal enemy of an eating-disordered patient, this fact becomes a central dynamic in the analytic field, leading analyst and patient into a struggle over who shall hold the desire and whether the issue of control over food is allowed to become a subject for negotiation. I discuss the inevitability of the analyst's own dissociative reactions in response to the patient's internal war over desire and control, and the different types of interpersonal enactments into which an analyst is drawn. In this tension, as illustrated through clinical vignettes, analyst and patient slip in and out of a constantly shifting array of self-states and thereby have an opportunity to coconstruct a transitional reality within which the patient's impaired faith in the reliability of human relatedness can be restored, and eating can become linked to appetite rather than to self-protection. Y1 - 2001 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - >Speak to Me as to Thy Thinkings< Commentary on Irwin Hirsch >Interpersonal Psychoanalysis' Radical Facade< JF - The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 30 (2002), pp. 605-620. Y1 - 2002 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - On Being One's Dream: Some Reflections on Robert Bosnak's >Embodied Imagination.< JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 39 (2003), pp. 697-710. Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - The Language of Psychoanalytic Discourse JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 689-709. N2 - This paper examines psychic trauma as experience so shockingly strange that it exceeds the threshold for cognitive processing and begins to flood the mind with unintegratable affect that threatens to disorganize the internal template on which one's experience of self-coherence, self-cohesiveness, and self-continuity depends. A detailed clinical vignette illustrates how the unprocessed >not-me< experience held by a dissociated self-state as an affective memory without an autobiographical memory of its traumatic origin >haunts< the self. It remains a ghostly horror even in an otherwise successful psychoanalysis unless a new perceptual reality is created between patient and analyst that alters the narrative structure maintaining the dissociation as though the past were still a present danger. The analyst's making optimal use of dissociative processes in an intersubjective and interpersonal context enables the patient more readily to self-regulate affect in those areas of implicit memory where trauma has left its mark the dissociated ghosts of >not-me< are thus persuaded, little-by-little, to cease their haunting and participate more and more actively and openly as self-reflective, self-expressive parts of >me.< Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - The Use of Detachment in Narcissistic and Borderline Conditions JF - The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 07 (1979), pp. 593-600. Y1 - 1979 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - The mirror and the mask: On narcissism and psychoanalytic growth. JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 19 (1983), pp. 359-387. Y1 - 1983 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - A Gift in Return: The Clinical Use of Writing About a Patient JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 01 (1991), pp. 431-437. Y1 - 1991 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 01 (1991), pp. 399-422. N2 - >Knowing one's patient inside out< is a metaphor that is intended to capture the paradoxical quality of the intersubjective field that we call the analytic relationship. The interface among trauma, dissociation, and regression is discussed in the context of unconscious communication as a transferential enactment of unsymbolized experience.The view is offered that for certain patients in particular, past experience is not so much unconscious as >frozen in time< and that a key element of the psychoanalytic relationship is bridging dissociated aspects of self through the creation of a dyadic experiential field that is both >inside< and >outside.< The writings of Michael Balint, D. W. Winnicott, and several other British object relational theorists are explored in the context of a contemporary interpersonal psychoanalytic perspective. Y1 - 1991 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - >'Balls,’ said the queen, ‘if I had them I'd be king'<. Rreply to commentary JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 01 (1991), pp. 008-012. Y1 - 1991 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Commentary on Philip Bromberg's >on knowing one's patient inside out< JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 04 (1994), pp. 517-547. N2 - The new emphasis on nonlinear dynamics in psychoanalytic thinking is rapidly changing our view of both psychological structure and psychological growth. The conceptualization of psychoanalytic listening and technique as therapeutically mediating the lifting of repression and the resolution of intrapsychic conflict is reexamined here in terms of new types of questions having to do with such concepts as >self-organization,< >states of consciousness,< and >dissociation.< This paper presents the view that dissociation is as basic as repression to human mental functioning and as central to the stability and growth of personality. Even in the most resilient personality, an analyst will always encounter domains of dissociated experience that have weak or nonexistent linkage to the experience of >me< as a communicable entity. Before these >not-me< states of mind can be taken as objects of analytic self-reflection, they must first become >thinkable< while becoming linguistically communicable through enactment in the analytic relationship. This depends on the analyst's ability to acknowledge the divergent realities held by discontinuous self-states in the patient while simultaneously maintaining an authentic dialogue with each. By >unfreezing< the concrete, literal quality of a patient's discontinuous states of consciousness, the patient is able to embrace the full range of his perceptual reality within a single relational field, so that the process becomes a dialectic between seeing and being seen rather than simply being seen >into.< It is through this that intrapsychic bridges are built between a patient's selfexperiences that could not formerly be contained in a relationship with the same object, and a transition begins to take place from enacted dissociative experience to interpretable intrapsychic conflict. Y1 - 1994 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Dual Visions, Dual Voices. Reply to Commentary JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 05 (1995), pp. 511-528. Y1 - 1995 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Standing in the spaces: The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 32 (1996), pp. 509-535. Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bromberg, Philip M. T1 - Enactments, transference, and symptomatic cure a case history JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 06 (1996), pp. 055-071. N2 - This paper reconsiders the case of Frau Emmy von N – Freud's first effort to treat hysteria – from the vantage point of hypnoid states of consciousness and the phenomenon of dissociation. It proposes that Freud, in ultimately repudiating Breuer's concept of autohypnosis and alterations in consciousness, led psychoanalysis for the next century towards a one-sided emphasis on repression at the expense of dissociation. It is suggested here that Freud's inability to >cure< Emmy was largely due to his treating her symptoms simply as pathological pieces of her past to be removed and to his failure to attend to their immediate relevance in the here-and-now context of their own relationship. To comprehend why, as Freud states, Emmy's cure >was not a lasting one< is to accept that patients such as Emmy are not cured of what was done to them in the past rather, we are working to cure them of what they continue to do to themselves and to others in order to cope with what was done to them in the past. Y1 - 1996 ER -