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The Dream Unbound
(1999)
Since the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, the psychoanalyst has been concerned with how to bring the unconscious mind closer to consciousness. This paper reflects the shift in understanding the use of dreams for the psychoanalytic exploration of the vicissitudes of the self and a shift away from the notion of wish fulfillment as a core motivational force in wish production. Another important change in psychoanalytic theory is the relevance of the analyst's subjective experience of the patient, which enhances the understanding of the therapeutic process. From the acknowledgment of the importance of a countertransference dream, the analyst has greater access to thoughts, feelings, and images which enable the analyst to work through the resistances to change, which occur in the consulting room. Two clinical vignettes depict the use of self-state dreams which reveal the patient's self-experience and a countertransference dream which gives greater access to the analyst's inner world and thus wards off a potential dismantling of the psychotherapeutic relationship.
On intimacy between men
(1999)
In this essay, I argue that it is in the very process of establishing a personal relationship to psychoanalytic theory and to the profession that one becomes a psychoanalyst. If our identities as psychoanalysts are established through our relationships to the psychoanalytic community, and to the values and ideals established by this society and embodied in its theories and practices, then psychoanalysis itself functions as the Third to analysts’ dyadic relationships with their patients. Although contemporary psychoanalysis emphasizes the subjective, the intersubjective, and the unique relational matrix, the view presented here of the psychoanalytic relationship as always existing within the context of the psychoanalytic community and its history provides a context that allows us to place some (relatively objective) constraints on what we mean by psychoanalysis, and these restrictions are imposed not only by the individuals directly involved (subjectively) but by a wider set of forces, including not only contemporary influences, but the voices of history and tradition as well. Idiosyncratic, personal, and subjective factors (the romantic vision of psychoanalysis) must be continually counterbalanced by more general, objective, and impersonal considerations (a classicist vision), and, among the analyst's many professional responsibilities, one is to manage the polar tension between these forces. The analyst's only hope in managing this tension comes from the very fact that he or she can rely on the sustaining background of professional allegiances to theory and community, psychoanalytic values and beliefs. The exploration of a clinical vignette from the perspective of three different supervisors illustrates how the theoretical and the technical form a complex system of mutual influence with the personal, the subjective, and the intersubjective and how, in the teaching and practice of psychoanalysis, these factors need to be considered together as functioning in complex and often elusive ways.
Sándor Ferenczi's first paper (1908) on the subject of premature ejaculation – in its stress on the repercussions of the symptom itself in the other (in this case, the woman), rather than its unconscious significance or the patient's pathology – is an early signal of the ethical directions his future clinical work would take. Ferenczi – displaying a decidedly relational, not merely intrapsychic, orientation – underlines the peculiar idiosyncrasies of each partner in the couple and also the fact that any relationship worthy of the name must take place in conditions of mutual pleasure and advantage. In particular, Ferenczi strikes a blow for the >legitimate< needs of the weaker partner to whom the stronger must allow and offer mental space and voice by virtue of his knowledge and power. For the above reasons this first paper is a >calling card< which announces Ferenczi's later reflections on the specific affective qualities that may render the psychoanalytic environment non-traumatic, as well as his criticism of the narcissistic aspects of the analyst (one of the most important motives for subtle and hidden trauma), who views the work of interpretation as the product of a single mind (in my terms: a kind of colonisation and expropriation of the other) rather than as fruit of an encounter that would take into account both the unique characteristics of the partner as well as the rhythms appropriate to such a relationship.
Playing with boundaries.
(1999)
Is There a Future in Disillusion? Constructionist and Deconstructionist Approaches in Psychoanalysis
(1999)
This paper addresses the gender of the analyst as an important factor in the shaping of the analytic experience. Specifically, it focuses on the notion that female analysts bring something different from what male analysts bring to the analytic dyad and that this influences and shapes the analysts’ translation of the patients’ experience – determining treatment course and therapeutic enactments. It begins with the idea that, for some men, working with a female analyst may ease the processing and metabolization of their aggression – allowing for a (re) integration of it with their sexuality and desire. The clinical material of a male analysand who sought treatment from a woman analyst is used to explore this idea within a post-Lacanian framework incorporating Kristeva's work on the maternal chora, the imaginary father or third, and the journey that the infant must make from the real to the symbolic, from biology to desire.
Passionate Love
(1999)
A Case of Primary Vaginismus
(1999)
Sometimes human sexuality manifests itself in forms that must be interpreted as symptoms of a severely disturbed psychological situation. The author presents a case in which primary vaginismus – a long known symptom in the gynaecological field and difficult to approach both from a gynaecological and a psychological point of view – is the manifestation of a personality with psychotic elements.