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This paper looks at the harms of superimposing normative theorizing on communities who live and love outside the psychoanalytic norm, particularly transgender individuals. Writing in 2019/2023, an especially perilous period for transgender people's rights and safety in the United States, McGleughlin critiques a published paper by Alessandra Lemma to illustrate the analytic tendency to rely on normative theory that may harm patients. Lemma's pieces focuses on a patient called "Jane." The 18-year-old wishes to pursue body modification to change their gender, but the analyst believes Jane is not "truly" transgender, and she creates a narrative of Jane's repair. While Lemma's rhetoric suggests that she does not believe that transgender life is inherently pathological, McGleughlin exposes a beneath-the-surface treatment rife with normative assumptions. Uncritically bringing these assumptions to clinical work has the potential to distort or even erase the story of the other, the author argues, harkening back to treatments in which the clinician is said to have "helped" the gay or lesbian patient show sexual restraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grossmark describes enactments as arising from the patient's own unknown, unrepresented history, that remains unmarked by time or place – the patient's "unpast"- to be delivered to the analyst in enactive "untellings." This discussion extends the idea of mutual enactment suggesting that the analyst necessarily shapes and contributes to the enactment and might need to access and call forward their own unpast for transformation to occur. Using a vignette from the film Hiroshima mon amour, the necessity of introducing separation and distinction, not just companioning, is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oedipal theory is rife with ghosts of gender and racial trauma. In this discussion of Nathans' paper (this issue), I argue that the Oedipal landscape is stubbornly alive with history, meaning and atmosphere and it is not possible to render it free of its ghosts in order to repurpose it for LGBTQ inclusion. Ignoring differences between queer and heteronormative families, we continue to understate the complexity of queer living and see a sanitized notion of queer sexuality and family. Instead, I argue we can only disrupt Oedipal theory's hegemonic reach when alternative narratives disrupt the shared symbolic register. When we expand and supplant traditional theorizing in our social unconscious, we are freer to imagine new ways of living and loving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to commentaries on my paper The Analyst's Necessary Nonsovereignty and the Generative Power of the Negative, by Donnel B. Stern, Antonino Ferro, and Amy Schwartz Cooney (this issue), I grapple with queries including defining subjectivity and sovereignty (Cooney); the negative in relation to subjectivity (Stern); the power and problematic nature of the analyst as both part of the field and interpreter of the field (Ferro); and the asymmetry of the analyst/patient relationship. More significantly I return to my own emphasis on knowing as assurance and wonder how our writing may engage less sovereignty and include more performance, play, risk and vulnerability. I query what we achieve when knowing is interrupted by the negative and suggest a shared sensory experiencing may allow access to a transformational process where the force of the negative runs through us all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the most part psychoanalytic scrutiny of what remains unregistered and unsymbolized has focused on its power to disrupt thinking or prevent integration. Yet what is not represented in words or affect can just as well be nonpathological, ubiquitous and a generative condition of being human. This paper reorients analytic focus on the powerful elements of unrepresented subjectivity, in other words "the negative," that contribute to generative experience by unleashing energy that fosters creativity. This paper is not meant to be read forward to a prescriptive end. Engaging post-Bionian field theory, experimental clinical writing and the art of Agnes Martin, I write in three sections to explore the possibilities and limits of the analyst's assumption of a nonsovereign position vis a vis the negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I offer a personal story, seen through contemporary queer theory, to turn positivity on its head and imagine how the "queer art of failure" disrupts the reproduction of compulsory ways of loving and making family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pools the language of psychoanalysis with other disciplines to illuminate the very real and ephemeral experience of working with patients who experience states of nonbeing. Using the powerful imagery of Francesca Woodman’s photographs, my patient and I enter the breach in her mind that trauma creates. Barthes, Benjamin, and art criticism enable me to relate to my patient’s condition of trying to exist suspended between life and death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is the answering gesture to my discussants who entered the reading/writing field with punctum and helped me clarify notions of liminality as an alive and creative response to the experience of psychic breach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The euphemistic phrase “the difficult to reach patient” often refers to work with patients who have serious difficulties relating. The author examines the basic construct of “reach,” its pitfalls, and potentials. In the author's view, often we are talking about patients who do not fully experience their own subjective existence or the existence of others. This requires unusual efforts to “reach” the patient in order for the patient to consolidate a sense of self and other, creating the possibility of reflective relating. In contrast to views that see such psychoanalytic “reach” as associated primarily with the analyst's needs or pathology, the author views the analyst's extraordinary efforts as responsive to the patient's need to move the analyst into the foundations of the analyst's own being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a first-person narrative/reflection that explores the contradictions and paradoxes of a personal decision to marry in light of a political critique that recognizes and names the ways that marriage creates and replicates stultifying and restrictive notions of normalcy. The author grapples with her own ambivalences: support for the critique of marriage's power to define normal and its simultaneous marginalization of anyone living outside its construct on the one hand, and an understanding of the ways we remain deeply psychologically tied to the social structures that shape our own longings and desires. Within the context of a political movement to protect the rights of same-sex couples to marry, the author articulates a wish for a radically transformed culture that decouples social legitimacy and economic benefits from family structure or choices. Can a feminist queer activist and psychoanalyst have everything? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]