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In this essay, we pose the question of psychoanalysis and national character. We explore the Americanness of psychoanalysis in this country through an examination of the history of its emergence in the early and mid-20th century, and through an examination of the impact of pragmatism on the formation and evolution of psychoanalysis in the United States. We consider American models of change and the impact of theoretical movements such as feminism and queer theory. We explore a particular quality and meaning of unconscious phenomena through an examination of American visions of nature over the past century and a half. The impact of elements of national identity and dominant American ideas and practices on relational psychoanalysis is also addressed.
This paper emphasizes the clinical relevance of Sander's work and links it to the contemporary relational turn in psychoanalytic thought. Similarities to the original work of Sullivan and Fairbairn are noted, and broader commonalities with the new psychoanalytic developments are then developed. From this vantage point, two specific clinical advantages of Sander's approach are discussed. First, it focuses on interpersonal behavior, that is, on what people actually do with each other. Second, it explores a series of dialectics that are central to psychoanalytic process. These include those between complexity and unity, differences and continuity, and change and recurrence. Finally, a clinical vignette is presented, in which a shift in the tone of the supervisory interaction had a direct effect on the therapist – patient interaction and thus on the outcome of the therapy.
Reply to Review Essay
(2001)
Dr. Fairfield's paper brings a radically deconstructivist, postmodern perspective, with great thoughtfulness and wit, to current concepts of >multiplicity.< I consider here the importance of the points she raises yet express some discomfort with deconstructionism as a conceptual methodology. I also show why I believe that some concepts Fairfield considers irreversibly modernist, like >authenticity,< can be retooled within a postmodern perspective.
Reply to Commentaries
(2000)
Reply to commentary
(2000)
The experience of self is partially a narrative of one's history without memory, there is no self. Central to personal histories are accounts of significant relationships and their successes and failures. Accounts of failed relationships tend to gravitate toward two narrative themes: selfpity and guilt. This essay explores some aspects of the nature of guilt and self-pity, the different forms in which they surface, and their relationship to each other.
I take this occasion to reflect on the relation between the flourishing attachment tradition established by Bowlby's work and the psychoanalytic tradition. I want to show how Bowlby's virtual expulsion from mainstream psychoanalysis in the early 1960s makes some sense in terms of the history of psychoanalytic ideas, as he was several steps ahead of his own time. I then consider the ways in which other major psychoanalytic authors, W.R.D. Fairbairn and Hans Loewald, as well as the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, struggled with the same problems Bowlby did. There is now a marked receptivity among psychoanalysts to the same ideas that earned Bowlby his place, along with Fairbairn and Sullivan, in the psychoanalytic Gulag. Finally, I consider the way in which an integration of these different angles on the same phenomena can be helpful both conceptually and clinically.