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Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
This paper begins with an analysis of race as a social construction and then follows the argument that, at a deep structural level, race and racism are organized by the same rational–irrational polarity of Enlightenment philosophy that informs psychoanalytic structural theory. The heart of the paper is formed by two case examples, one from my own practice and one from Leary (1997). I argue that unconscious racism is to be expected in our clinical work at this point in history and that truly reparative efforts depend on an acknowledgement of racism in the transference–countertransference matrix.
Preface
(2000)
The use of space as an image for engagement is the framework of the dialogue between architect, Richard Meier, and psychoanalyst, Valerie Tate Angel. The interrelated nature of architecture and psychoanalysis heightens the awareness of experience in the self's relation to intimate spaces.The homogeneity between architecture and psychoanalysis is the bringing together of a sense of openness and a freedom of possibilities in the place where one lives.
Reflections on White Racism
(2000)
An essential principle of psychoanalytic practice is the maintenance of strict confidentiality, and yet the presentation and publication of psychoanalytic case histories necessitate considerable public disclosure of the lives of our patients. Inasmuch as psychoanalysis is a particularly frequent, intensive, and lengthy process, a report of the unfolding of an analysis necessarily entails considerable revelation concerning patients, their inner worlds, and their life circumstances. This use of confidential material raises innumerable ethical concerns, and psychoanalysis, with its unique emphasis on unconscious mental processes, also adds to the complexity of ethical considerations by demanding that we take unconscious factors into account. When we speak, for example, of >informed consent< as an ethical principle, we as psychoanalytic clinicians must grapple with the problem of whether to take a patient's manifest acquiescence at face value. This article explores such ethical considerations along with other ethical and clinical complications in the presentation of analytic material for professional purposes.
Reply to Dimen
(2000)
This essay, a commentary on Sorenson's >Psychoanalytic Institutes as Religious Denominations,< explores a number of questions concerning the fate of psychoanalysis and the institutions that support it. How can psychoanalysis best survive its current travails, transcend the internecine conflicts that have always plagued it, and ride its contemporary reformation into a vital, relevant and creative second century? Approaches to training and to institutional structure at several contemporary relational psychoanalytic training programs are discussed and contrasted with more traditional models as a way of suggesting some promising directions for the future growth of psychoanalysis as a discipline.
Reply to Benjamin
(2000)
Reply to Chodorow
(2000)
It is not difficult to suppose that under the domination of a civilized sexual morality the health and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment and that ultimately this injury to them, caused by the sacrifices imposed on them, may reach such a pitch that, by this indirect path, the cultural aim in view will be endangered as well [Freud, 1908, p. 181].
A clinical case is presented at length with a view to understanding how the healthy fear of incest, which favours the process of individuation, may come into conflict with the fear of leaving childhood and becoming adult. Among the consequences of this conflict is a sort of paralysis or impediment to living which may be converted into hate. The inquiry mainly regards anxiety, fear, hate and aggression as factors which conspire in holding an individual back from his path in life. The affects are taken into consideration in accordance with Fromm's theory of aggression and his >'syndrome of decay'< diagnostic scheme, which results from the confluence and interaction of incestuous symbiosis, narcissism and destructiveness. Emphasis is placed on mechanisms of repression and splitting of hate not employed in aggression. Repressed and split hate may sustain parahallucinatory symptoms and produce terror. This view offers an explanation of the perturbing symptomatology that afflicted the patient presented here and also shows the power.
The Institute intends to contribute to the formation of a Frommian research tradition and to its development in Italy. During his lifetime Fromm carried out a daily clinical work on which he based all his theories. The Institute is interested in collecting this wealth of clinical experience through study and research. On the subject of technique, written and recorded documents consist of valuable notes, which are found in various books, and of posthumous works and recorded seminars and interviews. After a brief historical note on the Institute, the Frommian perspective is presented at length with a view to understanding how psychoanalysis reacts to the radical humanism. Emphasis is placed on the idea that Fromm's thought orientation is not an organised school of psychoanalysis but an open and critical contribution. This view offers an explanation of Fromm's abstention to codify a psychoanalytic technique to be applied in a standardised way. Although this report regards above all the clinical psychoanalysis, we must remember great thinkers such as Meister Eckhart and Spinoza, who inspired Fromm's perspective and gave strength to it.
On the subject of countertransference we attempt to establish a line of continuity between Freud's own expression >blind spot< and Fromm's idea of >counterattitude<. It is pointed out that both expressed the idea of the analyst's unconscious as an >instrument< for understanding the patient's unconscious. It follows that the decision to openly use or not to use countertransference in analysis also depends on the concept we have of it and on its extent. The psy-choanalyst's real and illusory values and his convictions with regard to human nature influence the countertransference and the analytic relationship. Analytic listening itself may be distorted by it. We must be highly aware of this to avoid enclosing what the patient says in a theoretic scheme. What is needed, there-fore, is an open theoretic scheme, more oriented towards understanding than in-terpretation. Aspects of analytic communication and of the relationship between language, thought and insight are examined. A humanistic point of view is as-sumed in distinguishing between the transferral and the real plane, and the rea-sons behind the legitimacy of such a distinction are expounded.
Reply to Bergman and Foster
(2000)
With permission of the Finnish artist Juhana Blomstedt, a selection of his thoughts on art collected in the book >Muodon Arvo< (The Value of Form) and from an interview with the psychoanalyst Veikko Talvitie, have been translated and reproduced in this issue. Aphoristic sentences, reflecting his views on the value of form, on time and memory, art as communication, abstract painting, or on the artist and his role in society, build up some of the chapters of his book, but the same sentences can also be found time and again in longer and more coherent texts. They seem to contain the essence of the artist's reflections on art and on >the enigma of being in the world<.
The way we plan and live our built environments reflect unconscious forms of thinking realised through architecture. Cities become holding environments that offer inhabitants differing forms of psychic engagement with the object world. The way they are planned and the types of objects they offer add up to degrees of >imageability<, an attribute of any city that could become part of a psychoanalysis of the built world, or what Bachelard termed a >topoanalysis<. Cities also play with life and death as those who inhabit built structures will be outlived by the places they inhabit, yet they enliven the inorganic spaces they construct. All buildings may, then, be forms of death brought into lived experience, and architects negotiate complex issues involving the matriculation of forms of death into human life. The >spirit< of human endeavour needs representation in the built environment and we may consider the ways in which a psychoanalysis of the built world could lead to a psycho-spiritual representation of human life.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Review Donnel B. Stern: Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis
(2000)
Reality
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
This. Reply clarifies the ideas originally presented in >Beyond Milk and the Good Breast: Reconfiguring Psychoanalytic Dyads< (PD 9/5, 1999) in response to Steven Reisner's commentary. It faults Dr. Reisner's reading of Lacan and Kristeva, as well as his use of male-gendered metaphors to transform my clinical material into a different analytic treatment. I conclude that, by arriving at such differing conclusions regarding theory and clinical treatment, he inadvertently proves, and enacts, the basis of my argument: that the gender of the analyst is an important variable that affects psychoanalytic formulations, treatment, and outcome.
What Is Psychoanalysis?
(2000)
The patient's containment of the analyst's affect occurs in a broad range of situations that extend far beyond the more visible instances when the analyst is directly expressive of his or her own affects. This paper begins to explore how patients help analysts contain various kinds of affects within the analytic process, particularly more routine and less heroic types of containment. Although this containment is generally a far less prominent feature of analytic work than is the containment provided by the analyst for the patient, it is omnipresent. Routine elements of containment that the patient provides for the analyst involve working with the knowledge of the limits of the other – including the possibility that in a long-term treatment the patient will often get to know quite well some of the quotidian aspects of the analyst's personality and its relation to the patient's conflicts. Mutual aspects of containment are extremely important in the expression and titration of anger and disappointment, desire, hope, humor, and the negotiation of psychic possibility within the analytic dyad.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
This symposium addresses a psychoanalytic lacuna: race. The papers it comprises, drawn from both clinical and academic precincts, pick up the thread of social commentary that runs through the psychoanalytic fabric. Here Psychoanalytic Dialogues joins other like-minded efforts to position the psychic and the social, the clinical and the cultural, in the same discourse, and to consider the painfulness of political inequity amid therapeutic intimacy. These essays demonstrate the clinical and intellectual benefits of the engagement with the disciplines characteristic of psychoanalysis in the previous generation. They also reveal how the evolution of psychoanalytic practice itself potentiates recognition of psychoanalytically marginalized dimensions of society and culture that constitute subjectivity and inform everyday clinical life.
This commentary addresses two themes: parallels between religious and psychoanalytic education and the question of group survival in a world of competitive groups, whether religious (>strict< vs. >weak<) or psychoanalytic (differing psychoanalytic approaches). >Strict< religious education involves teaching both critical thinking and identification with the particular religion. This blend of critical thinking and identification with psychoanalysis is crucial in psychoanalytic education. We want to graduate students who see themselves as psychoanalysts rather than as being >interested< in psychoanalysis. This goal is accomplished when students have close, positive experience with personal analysts, supervisors, and teachers who are strongly committed to psychoanalysis but in a manner that encourages students to think critically and find their own psychoanalytic perspective. With regard to the second theme, I discuss how our narcissistic commitment to one or another psychoanalytic model interferes with open integration of new insights. Individual analysts privately integrate competing ideas in their own idiosyncratic ways. When these individuals publicly represent competing psychoanalytic groups, however, they tend to emphasize differences among these groups. They then find ways to appropriate new ideas as extensions of their own evolving tradition. In this way, a theoretical school is able to integrate new developments while preserving its own identity.
After a brief exploration of Hegel's writing on the formation of self-consciousness, including the place of religiosity in this formation, the article examines Kojeve's response to a Hegelian homo religiosus, followed by a counter-response to Kojeve's atheism through a peculiar, Jaspersian reading of Erich Fromm's discussion of the >X< experience. Finally, it will be argued that the desire for mutual recognition, and humanity's yearning for transcendence, are essential experiences in the formation of self-consciousness.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
This. Reply to the commentaries by Corbett, Hansell, and Stern explores whether Lacan's concept of the real can – or should – be translated into more readily recognizable terms. It extends our previous discussion of impossibility by arguing that not all ideas and experiences can be brought within the realm of the known and familiar. We suggest that impossibilities of meaning should not be understood primarily in phenomenological terms, and we demur from the assessment that our concept of impossibility offers nothing for clinical work. Claiming that what resists meaning also impedes relationality, we encourage relational theorists to address the nonrelational processes that subtend relationality, including the relation between analyst and patient. We acknowledge that the theory of impossibility – or what we now call >negative mediation< – raises a fundamental challenge to relational theory, but we insist that disruptions of relationality need not be considered pathological. Taking into account the nonrelational may enhance rather than impoverish relational psychoanalysis.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
This paper offers an antiessentialist, psychoanalytic account of gender by arguing against Butler's deconstructive critique of gender essentialism. We develop an alternative to Butler's conception of gender as performative by focusing on those aspects of gender that resist meaning and representation. Using Lacan's concept of the real, we argue that any viable theory of gender must account for the limit conditions of cultural discourses that constitute subjectivity and sociality. Once gender is understood in terms not of proliferating possibilities for meaning, but of a certain impossibility of meaning, then gender's bearing on human relationality requires reconceptualizing. Claiming that various cultural narratives about gender (including traditional psychoanalytic narratives) should be recognized as symptomatic attempts to come to terms with a fundamental impossibility at the heart of sexual difference, we conclude by suggesting ways in which psychoanalysis may productively illuminate the failures of meaning that structure human relationality.
Review Steven D. Axelrod: Work and the Evolving Self: Theoretical and Clinical Considerations
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
As Freud's privileged theory of unresolved grief, melancholia presents a compelling framework to conceptualize registers of loss and depression attendant to both psychic and material processes of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization. Freud initially formulates melancholia as a pathological form of individual mourning for lost objects, places, or ideals. However, we propose a concept of melancholia as a depathologized structure of everyday group experience for Asian Americans. We analyze a number of Asian American cultural productions (literature and film) as well as two case histories of university students involving intergenerational conflicts and lost ideals of whiteness, Asianness, home, and language. Exploring these analyses against Klein's notions of lost objects, we propose a more refined theory of good and bad racialized objects. This theory raises the psychic and political difficulties of reinstatement and the mediation of the depressive position for Asian Americans. In addition, this theory suggests that processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization are neither pathological nor permanent but involve the fluid negotiation between mourning and melancholia. Throughout this essay, we consider methods by which a more speculative approach to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice might offer a deeper understanding of Asian American mental health issues.
Reply to Barnaby Barratt
(2000)
The Transforming Power of Affect. A Model for Accelerated Change. New York (Basic Books) 2000.
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
This article discusses the role of philosophy in humanistic psychology. Specifically, the author draws on concepts from Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Socrates, and others. The author discusses what it means to be human, the characteristics of the self, and the division between feeling and thought. Finally, the author concludes with some speculations on dialogue between persons, especially the interactions between therapist and client.