Search

Using theory from philosophy and from race studies, the author explores the countertransference confusions and enactments that can arise in working with trans and gender nonbinary patients. Case material is presented to explore in vivo the potential for enactments and toxic anxiety in the analyst in work with patients exploring or inhabiting new forms of desire and identity. Primitive states of anxiety and dysphoria may inhibit the analyst's capacities to allow freedom and reflection in cases of complex gender construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of a clinical report by Harold Searles, attending to Searles' ways of working with psychotic patients, his influences and those he influenced, as well as contemporary thinkers (Laplanche), who speak as Searles did, of the power of the other in the construction of psychic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Janine de Peyer's paper on erotic countertransference, "Unspoken Rhapsody: Female Erotic Countertransference and the Dissociation of Desire," from the perspective of ontological and relational models of treatment. Its argument also draws on the work of Laplanche on sexuality, enigmatic seduction and the radical alterity of human sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on theoretical contributions of Ogden, Goldberg, Bleger, and others, this discussion looks at how the frame is used and misused in clinical work. Imagining the psychic, conscious and unconscious meaning of the contents of the room, the waiting room and the office space, one sees how psychic material is both hidden and revealed. Using a clinical example, this discussion explores the ways analysands project disavowed and dangerous feelings into the frame, which is a complex intermediary space, neither outside nor inside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussion of the work of Alison Howard whose diagnosis of coronavirus, made public, became a complex part of the transference and countertransference. Clinical work under these difficult conditions was discussed in terms of contemporary clinical theory stressing the potency and necessity of change in the analyst, the work of Ogden and Levenson, in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights from the article: The analyst's and the patient's cultural identities would have been visible and audible at the beginning of the treatment, in itself a dramatic and unusual occurrence. Seismic movement and fear bring them together, magically, and the chance hearing of the analyst's name opens a memory in the patient. Surely the patient's homophobia and fear of shaming from others would have played a role in his holding in mind his analyst in America. The parallel work in the analyst and in the treatment in which both fathers' catastrophes are addressed is a crucial element in the mutative action in the treatment.

Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new but increasingly present school in contemporary psychoanalysis. Lacanian psychoanalysis is a dominant presence in France and South America but far less so in the English-speaking clinical world. And there is little contact between them. Adrienne Harris, one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, and David Lichtenstein, a prominent New York-based Lacanian-influenced psychoanalyst, came together in the spring of 2012 for a rare conversation about the differences, similarities, and potential meeting points between these two psychoanalytic movements. The conversation spanned a wide psychoanalytic landscape from the origins and influences of these two movements to their conceptualization of basic psychoanalytic notions such as the unconscious, the self, the process and purpose of the psychoanalytic project, the nature of trauma, the work of interpretation, and the role of the analytic relationship. Ferenczi, Winnicott, and Bromberg offered common theoretical ground for this comparative conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 question of a theory of analytic change is approached through a consideration of analytic impasse. Impasse is considered in relation to impasse in the analyst, linked to an impasse in some forms of mourning in the analyst. The analyst's impasse is considered in the light of character formation, the relation of analytic vocations to early attachment, and object ties in the analyst leading to problems with omnipotence. Impasse then is tied to various processes and defenses that shape and contribute to the analyst's countertransference. Analytic change is considered then in the context of theories of nonlinear development, models of speech practice, and mutative action. These ideas are explored through case material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion considers the elements of mythos and story telling that frame the case material Francoise Davoine offers and analyzes. In this discussion, I highlight the role of nachtraglichkeit, the nonlinearity of time and temporality that shapes the key events in this clinical narrative. I consider the relational aspects of countertransference, enactment, and personal analysis that shape Davoine's analytic listening and the uncanny effects of historical trauma that enter both analyst and analysand. This discussion also considers the interlocking of speech effects and temporality, the role of unconscious dialogues across history and time, that arise unbidden in clinical work. The analyst's freedom to live imaginatively in a process somewhat outside her clinical management is viewed as a key to the freeing of processes of mourning and rehabilitation in the patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces a clinical case in which the danger in the analysand's destructiveness was deployed primarily through passivity and withdrawal. Problems of envy, fears of competition, and anxieties about loss and abandonment kept the treatment too frequently at impasse. The case is used to illustrate the way that countertransference collusions may mask highly destructive processes in treatments. Technical and theoretical considerations of work with such patients are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to a critique by C. Brooks Brenneis of the written account of a clinical enactment that featured countertransference dissociative effects in treatment and in supervision. The response focuses on the need to analyze power in overlapping clinical dyads, the effect of transpersonal transmission of affect states and disavowed experience, and the relation of power dynamics to transference and to meaning making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]