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- 2000 (569) (remove)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
An account is given of the intellectual process by means of which I wrote my first book, White Racism: A Psychohistory. The process included an incorporation of society and history into the discourse of the unconscious – that is, a way of treating external reality nonreductively while remaining faithful to a radical depth psychology.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Three dreams from the first few years of an analysis of a significantly traumatized woman were selected to demonstrate their resonance with, organization of, and consolidation of certain pivotal themes emerging in the clinical process itself. These dreams occurred chronologically but not sequentially and are posited in the affective and thematic contexts in which they were reported. The dreams selected herald the beginning of a new phase in the patient's development, which had previously been mired in darkness and despair.
Reply to Commentary
(2000)
This paper explores the interrelationship between patients' exercise of will to make advances in an analysis and their readiness to forgive their analysts for their human limitations. There is a thin line between idealization of the analyst, probably a necessary component of the process, and resentment of the analyst for his or her privileged position in the world and in the analytic situation itself. The patient's >progress< emerges as a kind of reparative gift, one that implicitly overcomes the patient's tendency to withhold such change out a sense of chronic, malignant envy. Particularly poignant in terms of its potential to elicit the patient's reparative concern is the situation in which the analyst is struggling with his or her mortality because of aging or life-threatening illness. In this essay two clinical vignettes are presented to illustrate some of the issues that this situation poses. One begins with an elderly patient appearing at the door of the analyst's (the author's) home the day of his return from the hospital after coronary bypass surgery. The other begins with an analyst who is terminally ill appearing at the door of a patient who is threatening suicide. The two stories are compared in terms of their implications for human agency, the exercise of will, and the coconstruction of meaning in the face of mortality in the analytic process.
Reply to commentary
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
The author comments on Dean and Dyess's >Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.< They provide a valuable critique, based on Lacan's work, of postmodern gender theories. However, Dean and Dyess's argument for the >impossibility of meaning< in regard to gender may erect a new false dichotomy (gender as endless possibility versus gender as total impossibility) in place of the problematic dichotomy (gender essentialism versus gender constructivism) they so usefully deconstruct.
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
This paper on Benjamin is part 1 of a series presenting the wor of three contemporary theorists whose ideas are associated with the intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis. Part 2, on Bollas, and part 3, on Ehrenberg, will appear in subsequent issues of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Although we have made a minimal attempt to critically review the different theories, we have allowed ourselves the fiction of trying to produce a representational text in which the different arguments of the different theorists are presented, more or less, in their own terms. While this version of textual production on our part may be troubling, as it obscures as much as it reveals, insofar as our own position is never quite declared, our intent is to try to minimize our own mediating voice and focus on the different theorists in their own right by giving clinical examples to demonstrate their claims. The irony, even folly, of attempting to eliminate our own presence from this series on intersubjectivity is not lost on us – and neither is our plea for special circumstances. However, given the growing interest in the intersubjective turn, in order that it not be construed as privileging the emotional authenticity of the two-person exchange, we believe it is absolutely essential to understand the theorists' self-articulated arguments and to keep alive their differences rather than to assimilate the intersubjective perspective as a unified or hegemonic approach. It is in the spirit of keeping alive these differences – itself a crucial commitment of the intersubjective approach – that our somewhat exegetical text should be understood.
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Barnaby Barratt
(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.
Review Steven D. Axelrod: Work and the Evolving Self: Theoretical and Clinical Considerations
(2000)
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.
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.
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.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(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.
What Is Psychoanalysis?
(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.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reality
(2000)
Review Donnel B. Stern: Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis
(2000)
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to Bergman and Foster
(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].
Reply to Benjamin
(2000)
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.
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 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.