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A while ago, I was asked whether psychoanalysis had anything special to say about tears. Thinking through this question, it became clear to me that we cannot think about tears in psychoanalysis without thinking about gender—more specifically, the particular view of gender that psychoanalysis has been built upon, and for the most part retains, because this particular view solves for psychoanalysis some basic problems that it does not have the conceptual repertoire to address. This article goes on a journey through the story of boys, Samson from the Hebrew bible, a young New York boy who falls of his bike, Freud's three sons and his theoretically adoptive son Karl Abraham, and one of my patients. It is a journey through the civilization-long prohibition on parents and boys to attach, a prohibition that I argue serves the arch-value of sacrifice by which patriarchy is driven. I also trace in this journey the story of the controversial and powerful analytic concept of the death drive. And I argue that this concept, born during and after World War I, bears the mark of the frightened, homo-attachment-phobic impulse that has taken over a psychoanalysis unable to cope with the madness of a world war without blaming the victim. I offer toward the end a glimpse of an alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to view the relation between mind and politics is to see society as oppressive. But here the author also understands discourse, including interpellation, as facilitative: subjects of ourselves and subjects to social forces, we can have the social context we need only if we find ourselves through it. In relating his work with Dori, like him an Israeli immigrant, Eyal Rozmarin wants to connect the idea of discourse in critical theory to a notion of the collective unconscious. He reflects on the way, separately and together, he and Dori relate to the Third of discourse in the room: how to live out their shared cultural mission to realize their potential for the nation and to realize themselves, an enterprise in which they may lose themselves as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that psychoanalytic discourse in the English-speaking regions has undergone significant change. According to the author, gender is present as a crucial concept but opinions on sexuality are complex and more positive across political strands. He adds that perspectives on gender and sexuality have not transformed in Europe.

This introduction to a collection of essays by Adrienne Harris, Gregory Tentler, and Laurence Hegarty briefly highlights the main theme explored: central aspects of Forrest Bess's work and their relations with his personal struggles and with the artistic discourse that provided him with points of reference and audiences during the 1940s through the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor talks about the influential papers of Muriel Dimen on gender and sexuality which is "Inside the Revolution: Power, Sex, and Technique in Freud's "‘Wild' Analysis."