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Listening three frost poems
(1998)
This article discusses binary, or dichotomous, thinking as it develops in normal classification, in pathological splitting, and in shifts of cultural awareness such as that from Classicism to Romanticism. It relates these to states of subjective and objective self-awareness as induced and regulated by the early parental environment. A number of clinical examples demonstrate how pathological splitting may arise and how the therapeutic process works to alter dichotomous thinking and raise it to higher levels of integration. It also suggests that a similar process of integration can take place over time in our historical understanding of cultural paradigm shifts. We do not know the Hells and Heavens of people we pass in the street. There are two possible perspectives. According to the first, on a miniscule ball of earth, in a smudge of mold called a city, some microorganisms move around, less durable than mayflies. And the internal states of [such] beings, deprived of any reason for their existence, perfectly interchangeable, what importance can they have? According to the second perspective, that of a reversed telescope, every one of these beings grows up to the size of a cathedral and surpasses in its complexity any nature, living or inert. Only in the second case can we see that no two persons are identical and that we may at best try to guess what is going on inside our fellow men [Milosz, 1986, p. 120].
Social-constructivist and other postmodern currents within contemporary psychoanalysis put a great premium on an epistemological critique of positivism and the authority of the analyst. This focus on the essential ambiguity and constructed nature of experience implicitly tilts the analyst's interest away from a disciplined attempt to develop systems of validation that rely on observable patient responses as confirmatory data with which to judge the analyst's interventions and understandings. As a result, even while defending themselves against charges of relativism and solipsism, many postmodern writers still tend to idealize uncertainty and implicitly discourage the clinician from seeking greater accuracy and clarity about the patient. Epistemic doubt and an ethic that celebrates surprise, although useful as a corrective to tendencies toward rigidity and arrogance in technique, unnecessarily clouds the ubiquitous existence and possibility of accurate intersubjective understanding. This bias can be seen as historically linked to similar processes in academia in which progressive intellectuals abandoned a social change agenda in response to a growing political conservatism and cultural cynicism and, instead, became increasingly involved in >theory for its own sake.< Similarly, the epistemological position of the postmodernists sponsors a bias against therapeutic activism and inadvertently rationalizes a growing pessimism in our own clinical practice.
J. D. Sutherland in memoriam
(1998)
In a Glass Darkly
(1998)
For a surprising number of analysands, many with above-average intelligence and facility with language, words do not adequately capture or convey emotion or symbolize experience. This often subtle difficulty can have a powerful impact on the ability to verbally communicate emotions, process affect, and utilize traditional psychoanalytic interventions. Analysands with these problems therefore often have difficulty using analysis to explore and understand their own experience, yet the reasons for such difficulties are often not recognized by either analyst or analysand. In this article, I suggest that the concept of alexithymia can provide a valuable tool for understanding this gap between affects and language and, in its broadest interpretation, can aid therapists in their pursuit of meaningful approaches to the analytic process. Using the concept as a starting point, I describe and illustrate an approach in which paying attention to apparently insignificant aspects of an analysand's experience gradually helps analysands identify and explore personal symbols and meanings in their lives.
Mannie and Music
(1998)
Shadow of the Other. Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York (Routledge) 1998.
(1998)
>Like Those Crystal Balls of Yore...< Fragility Within the Analytic Relation: Real or Fancied?
(1998)
Patients’ use of language in the analytic setting can undergo extreme and sometimes surprising fluctuations. Seemingly articulate and engaging patients retreat to the concrete in their use of words, disconnecting verbal expression from one's internal experience. Are these fluctuations indications of limitations in the patient's capacity to put experience into language, or are they indications of the emergence of otherwise unacknowledged aspects of self into the treatment arena? Shifts in the use of language (both patient's and therapist's) can be opportunities to question the work of the analysis. Whether one uses these moments to expand the boundaries of the analytic technique or to expand the boundaries of the analytic relationship – or both – is the question posed in this commentary.
Keeping it moving. Commentary on Judith Butler's >melancholy gender – refused identification<
(1998)
In this paper we explore a few points emphasized by both Fairbairn and American Relational Theory related to conceptualizations of the new and old object and the implications for working in the analytic situation. Underlying much of our discussion is the belief that there are useful tensions between, on the one hand, Fairbairn's emphasis on our attachment to bad and old objects and refractory clinging to these bad objects in the face of receiving something new, and, on the other, a construal of a push or willingness toward integrating externality and newness of objects (e.g., Winnicott, 1969 Benjamin, 1988). American Relational models which explore complexities of interaction augment an understanding of Fairbairn's formulations of why we hold on to old objects. Fairbairn's theory also offers ways of understanding aspects of repetition, even, and sometimes especially, in trying to provide new experience.
Love. Its Forms, Dimensions, and Paradoxes, Basingstoke et al. (Palgrave Macmillan) 1998, 239 pp.
(1998)
The book is concerned with questions about love: questions about its many forms, strands and aspects, and the relation in which they stand to each other. It is concerned with the way different aspects of sexual love conflict with each other, with the way self-regard and self-interest can corrupt love, and with spiritual love and its difficulties. It seeks the views of some writers who have suggested some distinctive solutions to the existential problems that love poses in the face of its obstacles: Plato, Proust, Sartre, Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Erich Fromm, C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Kahlil Gibran. [Taken from Publisher's Website: http://www.palgrave.com/]
Reflections on Culture
(1998)