TY - JOUR A1 - Slochower, Joyce T1 - Flirting, post-oedipus, and mutual protectiveness in the analytic dyad. Commentary on paper by Jody Messier Davies JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 06 (1996), pp. 379-390. Y1 - 1996 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Slochower, Joyce T1 - Psychoanalysis, dissociation, and personality organization reflections on Peter Goldberg's essay JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 09 (1999), pp. 789-809. N2 - In this paper, I consider the feeling of interiority as it evolves within the treatment relationship. A capacity to access and sustain one's interiority reflects a sense of personal solidity within which the validity of subjective process and privacy is taken for granted. When this capacity is relatively undeveloped, individuals rely on the >other< (including the analyst) to help them contact, elaborate, or manage their affective experience. Quite paradoxically, the analyst's active investigation of dynamic or intersubjective process may obfuscate rather than clarify this core difficulty. I suggest two alternative approaches to the treatment situation that stand in some tension and yet also complement each other. One emphasizes the >active< investigation of dynamic and dyadic process, wherein the analyst works interpretively and/or around relational issues. The other is organized around the >interior< dimension of the treatment experience, emphasizing the patient's need to develop or manage her affective process in the relative absence of input from the analyst. Two clinical situations are described, the first illustrating the use of silence with a patient whose difficulties involved affect articulation, and the second involving a patient whose need for affect regulation made her highly dependent on the analyst for soothing. Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Slochower, Joyce T1 - Psychoanalytic technique – diversity or chaos – Commentary on paper by Lewis Aron JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 09 (1999), pp. 839-850. Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Slochower, Joyce T1 - The Grünbaum debate introduction JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 451-469. N2 - Despite a burgeoning literature on major analytic boundary violations, there has been little investigation of what might be called analytic delinquencies or misdemeanors – the small and virtually ubiquitous ways in which analysts deliberately withdraw from the therapeutic endeavor. I consider the impact of professional misdemeanors on patient and analyst and compare both with more serious analytic >crimes< and enactments. Professional delinquencies may reflect a therapeutic reenactment, an expression of the analyst's split-off or disavowed need, or an unconscious attempt to self-regulate or to negotiate space within the constraints of the treatment setting. Because the professional ideal leaves so little room for the analyst's humanity, it is often difficult for us to address and work with evidence of our own need when it clashes with what we regard as the analytic contract. Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Slochower, Joyce T1 - The internalized primal scene JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 521-525. N2 - I respond to two key issues raised by Bernstein and Frankel. One concerns the complex and potentially useful impact of misdemeanors on the treatment process. Without, however, minimizing this dimension of misdemeanors, I focus instead on how we deal with instances when we fail our patients by deliberately placing our own needs ahead of theirs. Bernstein raises the possibility that we are most likely to commit misdemeanors when we embrace an idealized Winnicottian model. I disagree, suggesting that all theoretical positions exclude some aspect of the analyst's personhood. Ultimately, we cannot escape the conflict between the analytic ideal and the reality of our nonideal humanity. Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Slochower, Joyce T1 - Finding the Lost Girls: Multiplicity and Dissociation in the Treatment of Addictions JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 06 (1996), pp. 323-353. N2 - The constructivist/relational perspective has challenged the analyst's emotional superiority, her omniscience, and her relative removal from the psychoanalytic dialogue. It at first appears to be antithetical to treatment approaches that emphasize the analyst's holding functions. In this essay I examine the holding model and its resolution from a relational perspective. I propose that the current discomfort with the holding function is related to its apparent, but not necessarily real, implications. I discuss the analyst's and patient's subjectivity during periods of holding. I believe that the holding process is essential when the patient has intensely toxic reactions to >knowing< the analyst and is therefore not yet able to stand a mutual analytic experience. During holding, the patient experiences an illusion of analytictic attunement. This requires that the analyst's dysjunctive subjectivity be contained within the analyst, but not that it be abandoned. Ultimately, it is the transition from the holding position toward collaborative interchange that will allow analyst and patient explicitly to address and ultimately to integrate dependence and mutuality within the psychoanalytic setting and thereby engage in an intersubjective dialogue. The movement toward mutuality will require that the analyst of the holding situation begin to fail in ways that increasingly expose her externality and thus her subjectivity to the patient. Y1 - 1996 ER -