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This commentary is a response to Veronica Csillag’s exploration of the influence of historical and transgenerational trauma on the lives of immigrants, and on the psychoanalytic process (this issue). Dr. Csillag’s paper deepens our understanding of the intrapsychic life of immigrants who have suffered collective trauma pre-migration and continue to suffer from “ghosts” from the past. Her ideas are critical to examining not only the specific traumas incurred in Europe related to the Nazi Holocaust and totalitarian and socialist regimes but also to contemporary traumas related to social identity and position in the United States. In this commentary, I elaborate three primary areas within Dr. Csillag’s contribution: (a) the illusion of choice in traumatic migration, (b) secrecy and privacy, and (c) experience of the outsider and the insider. My discussion underscores the importance of engaging with historical and ongoing trauma in psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a path to healing within individual and collective dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

first measure of freedom In this discussion of Mitchel Becker and Boaz Shalgi's paper “On Being, Disappearing, and Becoming: A Journey of Surrender,” I briefly discuss the context of the idea of negation and the negative in psychoanalytic thinking, and suggest the need for a more nuanced and specific language to distinguish the multiple kinds of being and not-being the authors invoke. I suggest, for example, that there are constitutive kinds of negation and traumatic ones. I resonate with the authors’ emphasis on flows and movement and the necessity of tolerating nothingness in the process of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my discussion of Janine Puget's deeply thought-provoking paper, I focus on her central argument that the subject's interior world and the world of intersubjective relationships answer to different logics and evolve along separate developmental paths. Puget's argument hinges on a notion of the other, and of otherness as disruptive and traumatic to the subject. My discussion aims to problematize this notion on two fronts. First, I suggest that otherness is not only external to the subject. I point to some ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of otherness and of the other as integral to the constitution and development of the subject. Further, I argue that individuals sometimes desire and actively seek otherness. I engage in this context the question of social displacement and immigration, Puget's other main concern in her paper. Life tourists, as Puget calls them, are a paradox of will and necessity, where the prospect of confronting otherness and being othered is both a threat and a life-affirming recourse. Yet there seems to be more involved in immigration than the psychology of individuals or their relationships. Drawing on my personal and clinical experience as an immigrant working with other immigrants, I suggest that beyond the self-other relation, we can recognize otherness on a third dimension, that of collective, socio-political, normative discourse. Looking at the psychoanalytic notion of Oedipus, I suggest the possibility that Puget's view of the subjective and intersubjective as disparate captures the effect this third, social dimension of human life on the construction of subjectivity and of human relating. I argue that the fault line Puget recognizes may be understood as the effect, within subjectivity, of social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parsons's paper, “An Independent Theory of Clinical Technique,” is discussed. Agreement is expressed with many of the theoretical points made by Parsons, and the creative and freeing historical role of the British Independent tradition (recently attacked by Kleinian authors such as Segal) is praised. However, the author sees some of the clinical examples in the paper as expressing a traditionalist conception of psychoanalytic practice, with a strong one-sided emphasis on the analyst as a knowledgeable expert offering deep interpretations. Parsons does not question the nature of the actual intersubjective relationship in each dyad, with its fluctuations and its subtle nuances, which can go far beyond the proclaimed roles of the two partners, at times even reversing them. More radical points of view can be found in the work of Ferenczi and Winnicott, two authors who are significant both for Parsons and for the author; for example, Ferenczi's emphasis on the patient's capacity to interpret the analyst's countertransference, and the experiments with the setting both made in their search for an adaptation to the unique 'analysand's needs. In conclusion, the paper calls for continued departure from standard techniques of any kind, critically deconstructing all traditional assumptions regarding the analytic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Riccardo Lombardi's paper is considered from a British (Independent) object relations perspective. Although the paper deals with the experience of shame and its relationship to fantasies about sex and death and how these are experienced (including in the body), shame is also a profoundly object related mental state, perhaps one of the most damaging when suffered in infancy, leading to reflexive functioning. The nature of shame is touched upon and its impact on personality development, and how this is handled in the transference and countertransference by Riccardo Lombardi with his particular patient. Although the patient's struggle to own his own hate is Lombardi's principal focus in the clinical account, this author suggests that Lombardi was attuned primarily to the patient's developmental failings due to the impact of shame and, by working primarily in the countertransference, was able to facilitate growth of certain personality functions for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion of Steven Cooper's paper, it is argued that, although Cooper's desire to hold himself "accountable" in his work with patients is laudable, the "pluralistic third" approach that he employs gives rise in his doing so to several difficulties in the way that it is described in the paper. The vivid clinical material that Cooper provides to illustrate his approach is used as a starting point to offer an understanding of what transpired between analyst and patient, which although convergent with Cooper's formulations in some respects nevertheless follows a very different line of thinking in other areas. Broadly speaking, it is suggested that although these divergences arise from many sources—a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this contribution—one particular issue involved is a rather different understanding of the role of early internalized object relations in the patient's psychic life and the way these get lived out at many levels in the treatment situation. It is further argued that Cooper's conceptualization of the approaches of schools different from his own appears somewhat circumscribed and this detracts from his desire to make an authentic comparison between his way of working and those of other schools, something that is called for by his proposed pluralistic third method of keeping himself accountable. This is not considered surprising given the difficulties inherent in our becoming adequately familiar, in more than just an intellectual way, with the approaches of schools different from our own, especially when wide divergences are involved between schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion I emphasize that the medium is the message in psychoanalytic supervision. But as supervisors, our approach often fails to communicate the clinical values we strive for in our work with patients. I speculate as to why this happens so frequently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary on Eyal Rozmarin's paper 'To Be Is to Betray' considers the place of history in the psychoanalytic encounter. Examining texts by Adorno and Ferenczi, the author cautions against 'radical cures' that conflate political values with analytic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparing psychoanalytic models there is always the danger of reducing one or more critical elements in at least one of the paradigms under consideration. This commentary aims to elaborate aspects of the intersubjectivist position, most especially at the clinical/phenomenological level, which I believe are overly reduced or underrepresented in Ringstrom's paper, thus losing much of their original significance. I also suggest a self psychological/intersubjectivist form of mutual recognition that potentially enriches, rather than challenges, this key element within the relational model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's commentary on a paper by Julie Gerhardt regarding the aspects of envy. In this article, the author attempts not to make an argument for or against theoretical positions but rather try to outline the frames that each position belongs to in order to analyze in depth their degrees of consistency, their similarities, and differences. He also highlights the concept of envy in its relation to gratitude and love and its developmental and clinical implications.

This discussion of Suchet's paper further explores Butler's double disavowal of love and loss as it relates to racialized bonds. It also examines Yoshino's concept about the cost of "covering" difference and supports the need to uncover white privilege and lack while being mindful of holding the tension of sameness and difference between the psychic and the social. Surrender is considered within a frame of multiplicity and of Buddhist thought, and the author associates to the sensory realm of childhood through her own early attachment. Finally, the author wonders about the nature and complexity of racialized shame and its delicate place in clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr. Slavin's and Dr. Elise's paper are discussed, with reference to clinical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands on Seligman's ideas about mentalization and the challenges of working with patients who cannot mentalize. Seligman's clinical presentation demonstrates that much valuable analytic work takes place without explicit reference to the transference. Drawing on Britton's notion of the triangular internal space that allows for reflective thought, we propose that analytic interest in an external object, discovered through the relationship and meaningful to both patient and analyst, helps create the same kind of space. The difference-within-sameness of shared contemplation can increase receptivity to divergent perspectives. Likewise, the “third object” can become a therapeutic metaphor, open to various meanings without being limited to any one interpretation. We trace how Seligman and his patient use a series of third objects in their work together. In this process, the patient moves from a transitional relationship of minimal differentiation to an increasingly secure sense of her own separateness, beginning to accept, and even enjoy, having a motivated mind of her own. Finally, we discuss how Ferro's concept of the analytic field offers a theoretical rationale for the effectiveness of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author considers Cooper's notion of the pluralistic third from several angles as Cooper's use of the term covers a range of applications from that of an internal supervisor to the use of ideas from psychoanalytic traditions other than one's own in evaluating one's clinical work. The impression created of the American situation is contrasted with the institutionalized pluralism of the British Psychoanalytical Society since the Second World War. The author believes that the theoretical question of the analyst's accountability to a professional authority is overdetermined in the paper because the clinical material is dominated by the patient's problems in facing up to parental authority. A crucial enactment is seen as starting at the analyst's first contact with the patient, which seems to subvert the analyst's capacity to be an authority figure. The analyst finds a working relationship with his own psychoanalytic authority in the second session of the analysis but seems to lose it through an overextension of the ideas of "play," self-questioning, and the seeking of agreement between patient and analyst. The author considers the clinical material from the point of view that his peer supervision group would take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2004 it was my pleasure to present at a cutting-edge conference entitled The Interplay of Implicit and Explicit Processes in Psychoanalysis. In addition to offering an address ("The Essential Role of the Right Brain in the Implicit Self: Development, Psycho- pathogenesis, and Psychotherapy"), I also provided a commentary to Steven Knoblauch's excellent paper, "Body Rhythms and the Unconscious: Toward an Expanding of Clinical Attention." In the following, I briefly summarize these presentations, with the purpose of showing how current advances in developmental and neuropsycho-analysis are being incorporated into the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. This work is part of an ongoing effort to expand regulation theory, an overarching theoretical model of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the implicit self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a gradient in our description of psychoanalytic process, as to how much the analyst's reactions are caused by the patient's communications and needs, and how much they are caused by the analyst's own personality, including the analyst's storehouse of experiences, wishes, needs, and motivations. I consider Dr. Sands generous presentation of three of her patients' dreams and one of her own dreams to analyze the contribution of analyst and patient to the clinical interaction, in terms of overlap and difference. Such transference/countertransference interactions may lead to tertiary revision by the analyst of the patient's dream and may raise the question of how much the analyst's reaction is due to the patient's dissociation or the analyst's psychology. I also consider the implications of conceiving of “the unconscious” as a mental place versus “unconscious” being a potential property of any mental activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ringstrom has articulated useful themes that deserve more conversation and exploration. However, his article reads as a Relational Psychoanalytic critique of Intersubjective Systems theory, rather than as the comparison that the title asserts. This commentary responds to some of the critiques raised by Ringstrom, and raises some critiques of its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion of Michael Parsons's exposition of the Independent Tradition's clinical theory of technique compares and contrasts the British Independent and American Relational perspectives in regard to their approach to technique. In this discussion I will consider the question whether, given strong object relational influences on relational psychoanalytic theory, we are able to locate systematic differences in the way that Independent and Relational analysts attempt to work, to be with, and to relate to their patients in the psychoanalytic situation. Overlapping historical roots of the two traditions are considered, along with apparent differences in the ways in which the contributions of common ancestors, such as Ferenzci, are applied. I suggest that the integration of American Interpersonal School ideas with Object Relations theory in American Relational Psychoanalysis led to a different therapeutic sensibility, different ways of thinking about and participating in the analytic process from those that are reflected in the Independent Tradition as Dr. Parsons describes it. The discussion includes an imaginative reconsideration of clinical process along relational lines, in an attempt to clarify different emphases in technique between the two schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A range of clinical psychoanalytic approaches in the United States is considered as they may parallel Parsons's presentation of an “independent” orientation in Britain. Attention is paid in particular to the analyst's sense of outsiderness and concern for otherness, along with their moral implications for clinical work. In addition, the limitations of theory and defensive misuse of theory are also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of existential exposure speaks to those encounters in which our generally successful efforts to avoid the full knowledge of our human condition utterly fail us. Despite our denial and the usually reliable dissociative mechanisms we use to support it, the truth of our unprotected, vulnerable state becomes psychically real. I make use of Pizer's narrative about his medical crisis and its impact on his analytic self states to explore how body/mind alterations that constituted his experience of existential exposure affected his analytic subjectivity and the evolving intersubjectivity with his patient. I suggest that the experience of existential exposure is registered through the body, which is the medium through which disembodied abstractions about existence are made real. Dysregulation in the body creates a powerful psychic disequilibrium marked by the loss of omnipotence and control. When they are not so overwhelming as to produce trauma, these destabilizing experiences can foster the emergence of new self states that reflect greater flexibility, elasticity, and freedom in one's sense of self. I underscore the complex intersubjective impact of the analyst's embodied experience of existential exposure: how it shifted the transference/countertransference by introducing an “existential Third” into the treatment, leveled the playing field between patient and analyst, and may have served not only to expand but also to constrict aspects of the analyst's subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bodnar and I urge therapists to understand and address not only a person's conflicted desires, which Roth advocates should be the only focus of psychoanalytic treatment, but also the role space and place play in a person's psychology. The psychoanalysts Bodnar cites, who advocate the importance of understanding environments, follow the positivistic assumptions of ecopsychology. I argue why the dialectical-relational model I outlined should be followed. From the viewpoint of this model, I discuss Bodnar's patients who are wasting environments and commend Bodnar for addressing the role body experiences with places and spaces play in the conflicts of these individuals. I explain why I disagree with Roth's opinion that Bodnar and I are romanticizing nature in our discussions of environments. I join Bodnar's challenge that treatment should include helping a person learn how he or she can repair and recover the ability to interact and negotiate with all environments. I also challenge therapists to understand the embodied metaphors they carry that give meaning to human and nonhuman environments and to explore why, when, and how therapy should be conducted in different environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding consciousness as either hierarchical—as a single reality with various levels of depth—or nonhierarchical, as a self-organizing multiplicity of embodied states with an emergent intelligence greater than the sum of its information, makes a decisive difference in clinical practice. It leads to a fundamental difference between imagination and illusion. Imagination is understood as an efficacious aspect of reality, not as its opposite. To this perspective the dreamer did not create the dream but belongs to the dream. Images possess us more than we have them. The efficacy originates in the images. Using an example of a dream worked by Freud, which locates its meaning in a historical event, the author demonstrates the difference between historical interpretation and correspondence between dream image and historical fact, creating a meaningful reverberation. He shows how the body can be used as a receptacle of multiple sense memories corresponding to multiple embodied states, which when experienced simultaneously give rise to fresh consciousness. He concludes by showing the difference between a co-construction of meaning, which ascribes meaning, and the emergence of meaning from the multiplicity of embodied states enveloping analyst and patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion I consider several influences on the contemporary project of deconstructing racism and the concept of racialized subjectivity. This discussion applauds the turn in Suchet's work toward self-examination in a consideration of the experience of race and racism. Suchet's work moves the debates about racialized subjectivities into a deeper and more complex understanding of all the ways in which identifications and attachments cross race and class lines for many individuals. This discussion focuses on Suchet's treatment of the power of hybridic and biracial identifications, beginning with autobiographical material from Suchet's own childhood in South Africa. In this discussion of "Unraveling Whiteness" I integrate psychoanalytic concepts of enigmatic signification (the work of Laplanche) into a discussion of early attachment, and relational configurations with children and nonparental caretakers. The question of trauma or potential transformation in interracial experience is discussed, and some distinctions between American and South African experience are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using metaphoric dance imagery, the author playfully engages the theme of inhibition of desire through an audio-visual-kinetic listening style. She explores potential alternative self-states and dissociated self-other configurations between patient and analyst in the form of multiple dance "couplings." The analyst's role in the awakening or inhibiting of his or her patient's sexual desire and personal agency is discussed, drawing on potential transference–countertransference configurations and the influence of shame, disempowerment, and stereotypes of gender and race on the formation of sexual identity. How does each patient call for her analyst to change? Will eroticism, dissociated rage, victimization, or betrayal find expression in Amanda's treatment once Slavin renounces his position of idealized holder of knowledge? How does Elise's exploration of the contrast between the female analyst's conventionally desexualized "analytic costume" and her patient's more colorful hyperbolic imagery of her sexuality, further the pursuit of liberation from culturally contextualized shame and devaluation of female sexuality? The author proposes a model of self-acceptance on the part of the analyst of the embodiment of her own fluctuations in sexual desire, along with openness to transference explorations, where relevant, about her own body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francoise Davoine sees madness as a research project involving the uncanny presence of ghosts arising from the realm of the transference as well as the "big" history of wider social catastrophes across the generations, in effect "cut-out" pieces of the unconscious. Madness is a rupture in the social link that needs repairing. The therapist is a coresearcher with the individual whose madness tells a story embedded in the heart of madness itself. Davoine presents her work with a woman who has a history of multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. She invites her patient to link up with and speak of that which formerly resided in the Lacanian Real, that is, the unsymbolized haunting absence of her mother who was tragically murdered by the Nazis. The therapist's dream becomes a bridge to this world of ghosts for both patient and therapist. The dream ushers in an enactment and a transference interpretation by the therapist, which leads to a disappearance of madness from the analytic stage. I attempt to apply the theories of PostKleinians, as well as Harold Searles and Gaetano Benedetti, to help illuminate the processes of therapeutic action. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to dreams and a relational view of madness are also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I attempt, in this discussion, to deconstruct the jouissance present in the witnessing of a deliberate annihilation of a human being. I propose that the crisis in the analyst's subjectivity is linked to an unconscious identification with that which is most abhorrent and unacceptable. The unknowability of trauma ensures that its presence will be enacted in a complex system of mutual influence between analyst and patient in which the roles of victim, perpetrator and bystander oscillate between and within the participants. Taking the discussion to the broader sociopolitical level, I make an analogy between the destructiveness of the South African regime under apartheid and the current destructiveness of the U.S. engaging in a pre-emptive war. In a similar way to how Straker may feel contaminated by her patient's complicity in annihilation, so too are we contaminated by the atrocities perpetuated in the name of our country, even if they are policies we condemn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With difficult patients who seek to engage the analyst through struggle rather than through warm connection, analysts struggle whether to interpret or contain. I use Cooper's case example to consider these two initial treatment approaches. I argue for the approach that is most difficult for all analysts—to let the patient be himself guiding us toward what he does and does not need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his commentary on Jill Salberg's integrative and contextualizing article, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited," Aron examines several ideas related to Freud's ironically "Jewish science." First, this commentary takes up the question of what it has meant to speak of a "Jewish science" historically, and what it might mean today. Shockingly, Aron shows that the rise and fall of psychoanalysis has been traced to Jewish influence. He then expands on Salberg's article by reviewing the relationship between circumcision and castration and considers the impact of Freud's Jewish identity and his anxiety about anti-Semitism on the structure of the psychoanalytic method and specifically on Freud's discovery of the "royal road." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalytic field theory is integral to relational praxis. In his study of the analytic field and its interpersonal complexities and relational intricacies, Tubert-Oklander emphasizes its clinical promise. Tubert-Oklander's field orientation, however, is a conservative and limited one. This commentary proposes a new, more radical coparticipant theory of analytic praxis. As a unique form of clinical participation, coparticipant inquiry is marked by an emphasis on patients' and analysts' relational mutuality, coequal analytic authority, and dyadic uniqueness. Coparticipant inquiry represents both a one-person and two-person psychology—an integral of classical individualism and the social emphasis of the interpersonal/relational viewpoint. Coparticipant analysis calls for a new, multidimensional concept of the self that reconciles the seeming paradox that we are simultaneously communal and individual beings—from birth embedded in a series of social field, yet always uniquely individual. This psychoanalytic dialectic between personal, nonrelational selfic "I" processes and an interpersonal "me" pattern brings into relational play such concepts as will, self-determination, and agency. Coparticipation promotes a technically freer, more self-expressive, and spontaneous inquiry and emphasizes the curative immediacy of new relational experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion I agree with Anthony Bass, who shows how the analytic frame has properties that involve both the process and the structure, and I suggest replacing the term structure with the term constraints. Bass considers analytic frames as contexts: Different frames organize different contexts of experience. He says that the frame is cocreated by patient and analyst and evolves over time. I think that Dafna's case presented by Ilana Laor is a good example of this aspect. I agree with Laor, who shows how the frame reflects the negotiation process between patient and analyst, emphasizing that this process itself is therapeutic. Following Bass I emphasize that a polarization between stability versus flexibility should be replaced by the dialectic between stability and flexibility. I conclude wondering how Bass's and Laor's "wisdom" regarding flexibility and elasticity can be passed over to younger psychoanalysts who are beginning their clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the paper of Philip A. Ringstrom concerning the improvisational form of relational psychoanalysis. He considered this as a beginning and not a finished product. He noted that Ringstrom well positioned this view in the context of and literature of relational psychoanalysis. He added that Ringstrom distinguishes improvisation from spontaneity since the improvisational technique is dangerous.

I appreciate Noelle Burton's courageous paper in which she movingly demonstrates how the analyst's opening to her own vulnerable child self, as evoked by the analytic interaction, creates parallel openings between the patient and analyst and within the patient. At the same time, I wonder if there is a not-fully-mentalized enactment occurring in the analytic process—an enactment that is reflected in certain aspects of Burton's clinical narrative. And I wonder if the containment of Burton's childlike feelings—a central focus of her paper—is even more interactive than she has recognized. These questions are, however, overshadowed by the paper's significant creative (clinical and conceptual) contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how the personal sense of time—temporality—is organized and experienced in different clinical situations. It uses examples from infancy observations to draw links between caregivers’ response to infants’ capacities for motor activity and emotional communication and the development of the senses of personal security, vital intersubjectivity and temporality, that is, the feeling of a meaningful self and an open future. In illustrations from both early child–parent interaction and an extended case, it suggests how moment-to-moment interactions reflect and sustain these core, highly personal experiences of what it feels like to live in the world, that is, how an accretion of “micro” interactions can contribute to and help us understand the “macro” structures that analysts usually describe, such as intersubjectivity, the sense of self, and here, the senses of time. With that in mind, the paper evokes a few specific “disorders of temporality.” One group of these involves the blurring of past and present, especially following trauma. Much of the paper, though, is concerned with a basic deficit in the sense of time that can be observed, when the patient presents without the hope that new experiences can emerge, however fitfully, with the feeling of a forward-moving future. In an imaginative move, the paper links this image with the experience of an infant with an unresponsive parent, one who does not afford that infant the most basic senses of personal agency that come from having her feelings and gestures recognized and responded to in a way that gives her the feeling that she is having some effect on her world. Clinical implications are drawn, often demonstrating how brief moments of analytic interaction reflect the macrocosms of the broader analytic relationship and the patient’s psychological organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to demonstrate the vast importance of the non-being experience in the human psyche. Both from an intra-psychic and an intersubjective perspective, the experience of non-being and of disappearing, and the soul's surrender to this experience, are essential for the creation of the self and of relations. The first part of the paper tries to emphasize, from an intra-psychic perspective, the way presence, when disconnected from the presence–absence dialectic, can become reified and thus lead to what is termed “presence anxiety.” The self's will to surrender to the no-thing is a prerequisite to change. The second part presents intersubjectivity as the movement between multiple I–You creations whose essence is the movement between being and not-being. The way two people create, experience, recognize, shape, love, and hate, each other, is based upon their mutual and conjoined movement between presence and absence, the movement of surrender. Furthermore, the most inner sanctuary core of surrender is its infinite quality, and the most sanctuary core of infinity is absence, the essential ingredient that differentiates being from becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes clinical and personal challenges when the therapist had to disclose his illness to long-established patients as a clinical and ethical imperative. Uncertainty about duration of treatment was processed in ways unique to each dyad. Mutual efforts at affect regulation became potent avenues of repair in some cases, although unexpected conundrums arose at the interface of privacy and disclosure, recognizing the intrusiveness of illness and its highly personal meanings. Vivid clinical vignettes and key pieces of clinical reading appeared to the therapist like visitations, spanning his career, corresponding to sustaining thoughts, admonitions, and former self-states. In kinship with authors of fiction, the therapist looks for a way through, to rebuild a holding environment capable of containing and utilizing the unwelcome news, responding very differently to each patient’s expression of compassion and caretaking, with particular sensitivity to those he feared were reenacting their own suppression of need. These became pivotal elements to explore relationally in trying to broaden the field in which topics of illness and mortality could rise above pathos, guilt, pity, despair, and other forms of isolation. In each relationship, a different wilderness was navigated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My response to Kathleen McPhillips’s paper focuses on the pervasiveness of vicarious trauma for those working with survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Attempts to avoid the impact of vicarious trauma may in fact lead to denial, dissociation, or amnesia. Cultural trauma, as unearthed by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse Commission, can also be linked with the wider theme of Australia’s history of migration. Migrants who came to Australia fleeing various forms of trauma, have, at times, felt betrayed by the new country. This sense of betrayal is compounded if, for example, institutional sexual abuse suffered by their offspring, is ignored or denied. The abuse suffered by children in Australian institutions has led to trauma on both personal and cultural levels. Healing, therefore, may require both individual help, and ethical responsiveness on a more collective level. The Royal Commission serves to provide a container for its examination. Such public recognition is but one step in processes of reparation that need to take place on individual and cultural levels. McPhillips’s work may also serve as a vital part of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper's purpose is to differentiate what is essential to psycho-analysis to what is actually not part of psycho-analysis at all but something peripheral that has become associated with it. The paper makes therefore a differentiation between what is secondary to psycho-analysis and what is primary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages the secular mind's struggle with mortality from a relational perspective. It critically reviews the legacy of Freud's refusal to grantmortality psychic significance and the ways in which the fear of death has consequently been understood theoretically and addressed clinically. Analytic omnipotence is foregrounded as an impediment to the kind of intersubjective engagement that minds need from other minds in grappling with the loss of the self through death. Aclinical illustration is used to explore the ways in which the analyst found himself relating with a patient around her extreme fear of death, which over the course of treatment became modified into a more bearable anxiety about her own mortality. A conceptual framework is offered to account for these changes, emphasizing the analyst's personal relationship with mortality as a crucial variable in how the fear of death is engaged psychoanalytically. The author calls for a revisionist psychoanalysis that allows for death's centrality in both theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction outlines a paper by Rina Lazar and discussions by Anthony Bass, Sam Gerson, and Stephen Seligman. The target paper, an extensive clinical case, is described: a case where regression, countertransference dilemmas and opportunities, and intergenerational trauma are all in play. I consider the contribution of the discussants: their unique interpretations of relational work, the distinct focus on intersubjectivity, shifting self states (Bass), intergenerational trauma (Gerson), and regression and the role and status of development (Seligman). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper attempts to work out a distinction between two forms of envy: Libidinal Envy versus Destructive Envy—terms on loan from Rosenfeld's (1987) Libidinal versus Destructive Narcissism—and suggests that because libidinal envy phantasies inhabit a fine line between desire/need and frustration, when the self's desire for the mother and the need to identify is not unconsciously reciprocated (see Benjamin's, 1988, 1995, theory of identification), over time libidinal envious cravings transform into phantasies of spoiling, destructive envy. The paper also develops a response to my discussants (Ronald Britton, Robert Oelsner, Paul Ornstein), each of whom suggests various counterpoints to my original paper on envy. One idea which I suggest is that Klein may be correct in assuming that envy has an instinctual basis but incorrect in deriving envy from instinctual aggression. Rather, envy may have an evolutionarily adaptive value to cope with certain threats to survival when living within a social group: the threat of being too different from the other and the threat of occupying too low of a position on the social hierarchy. Also, the intersubjective basis of envy as failed unconscious identification due to the absence of a felt sense of reciprocal identification on the part of the mother/analyst is noted throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As generations of young men and women return from combat scarred not only physically but also psychologically by their experiences, as civil wars and genocide proliferate and refugees seek sanctuary in America from persecution in their native countries, even while others are held in violation of their international human rights by the United States government, this paper asks what role psychoanalysts can play in working with those who have survived violence and terror as adults. Offering a relational formulation of adult onset trauma, the author reviews some of the difficulties inherent in being called upon to bear witness to destructive social forces. The paper concludes with the case of a man who has been detained in Guantanamo Bay for the last 6 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each discussant approached my paper on embedded levels of illusion from a different perspective, representing schools as diverse as those derived from Jung and Bion. It is interesting that, although my paper was not primarily about dreams or how to interpret them, but rather about the way in which multiple levels of illusion may open a potential space in treatment, each discussant centered his comments around a dream that I had reported in one of my cases. In this reply, I compare the discussants' approaches to the dream with mine. I also wonder whether the dream itself represents an embedded level of illusion within my paper. If so, it may function as a transitional space in which we may entertain different viewpoints around not only the nature of dream work, but also around questions including the nature of the mind and the therapeutic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the topic of shame in relation to the body, viewing it as the expression of a basic conflict that threatens to obstruct the growth of personality by breaking up the body-mind relationship. The paper presents the psychoanalysis of a psychotic patient whose paranoid shame was associated with the delusion of being noticed. During this analysis, the patient's bodily manifestations and hatred were acknowledged as related to his getting closer to an authentic existence of his own. Particular emphasis is given to the analyst's involvement in the analytic process, in the form of both bodily countertransference and dream activation. The containment and working-through of concrete aspects of hatred and death anxiety, together with the analysand's recognizing the value of sensory perception of his own body, fostered an abatement of symptoms, including his tendency to flee and to attempt to burst the confines of his body. The activation of a connection with the body seems a prerequisite to the development of abstract thinking. The paper describes similar dynamics in two vignettes of less dramatic clinical cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In responding to the insightful papers of Suchet and White I explore further my own hybrid identifications in regard to the socially constructed category of race. The paper explores the dangers of both idealization and denigration of otherness. It shows how a traumatic confrontation with otherness may destabilize later identifications in favor of earlier more archaic ones. Melanie Suchet, in her very gracious response to my paper, comments that I refuse to "reside in the comfortable." However, any wish I may have had to reside in the comfortable was derailed by the thought-provoking comments of both Melanie Suchet and Cleonie White. Both authors prompted me to confront myself and to examine a number of painful issues. These included not only a resistance to owning my own vicarious traumatization but the fact that I was subject to the return of the repressed as the personal meanings of the signifier black shifted and changed in the course of my paper. But most significantly, both authors confronted me with the challenge of Otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the author's perspective on Jill Salberg's paper of the situation of Sigmund Freud's Jewish Vienna and the complicated relations to gender. The author contends that one of the major contribution of the research is its focus on Freud's affect in relation to his mother. He remarks that the paper presented some queries which are advanced on the relation of historicistic to psychobiographical modes of research.

In this discussion of papers by Gillian Straker and Melanie Suchet, the author draws some links between the two papers in the interest of expanding analysts' understanding of the nature of whiteness as part of a racist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthony Bass's paper is viewed from the perspective of the object relations orientation of a member of the British Group of Independent Psychoanalysts. The perceived transference - countertransference "equality" in the interpersonal model is described in the light of the asymmetry of the analytic relationship implied in the object relations relation model used by many Independents. The structuring role of object relationships in analysis is touched on, and the relationship between exploration of the unconscious and internal construction processes is raised. In addition, Bion's model of "O," which seems to me to reflect many of the inherent qualities of Singer's and Bass's model, is not referred to in Bass's paper. To what extent has Bion's thinking influenced the interpersonal model? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reflects on the metaphors of time that Dr. Seligman’s piece make available to us, specifically on his deep and inspiring account of the role of time in the analytic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this paper I make use of my experience as a rock guitarist to draw some analogies to psychoanalytic technique, practice, and education. It also serves to introduce this panel: “Race, Roots, and Rhythm.” The panel features contributors who are clinical psychoanalysts as well as some who are academic scholars, all of whom use music (blues, rock, reggae, hip-hop, and jazz) as a theme in discussing topics of interest to psychoanalysts, examining not only psychoanalytic theory and practice but also the interrelation of psyche, society, race, roots, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]