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With the republication of Adrienne Harris' classic essay, "You must remember this" (Harris, 2009), Psychoanalytic Dialogues continues our new feature, Après Coup. By putting a paper from the early years of the journal in conversation with contemporary readers and writers, we hope to dive into the ways in which psychoanalysts forge relationality in spaces of complexity and contradiction over time, as our experiences- collective, dyadic, or solitary – are always nonlinear and multiply configured. This Apres Coup includes commentaries by Cleonie White, Ph.D. Ken Corbett, Ph.D. Shubha Herlekar, Psy.D. MFT, Victor Donas, M.D. Donnel Stern, Ph.D. and Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D. Ph.D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year leading up to Victory Day on 9 May, Russian screens, large and small, show feature films, documentaries, and miniseries about the Second World War. These films have helped unify Russian citizenry and develop patriotism. The year 2015 proved to be notable for war cinematography: three feature films and one twelve-part miniseries premiered in honour of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. While all of these cinematic releases retell or engage with wellknown narratives, these remakes reflect tensions surrounding the conflict that erupted in Ukraine following years of increasing strained relations with Russia. 'Performing Identities and Negotiating Memory in Contested Spaces: Ukrainian Folk Songs in Contemporary Russian War Films' analyses the incorporation a Ukrainian folksongs into Sergei Mokritskii's feature film Battle for Sevastopol and Leonid Pliaskin's twelve-part miniseries, The Young Guard. In every cinematized version of The Young Guard, music has played a significant role. The author asks how directors use these songs to respond to the annexation of Crimea and conflict that erupted in the Donbas in 2014 as the films take place in these two regions. Contextualizing her analysis in scholarship related to collective memory, nationality, nostalgia, and intertextuality, she argues that the directors use the films to take two different approaches: symbolically reuniting the Soviet Union in film one and appropriating a Ukrainian song to underscore suffering caused by Ukrainian and German 'fascists' in the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this discussion, I concentrate on Levine's engagement with the problem of race and racism as it inhabits and grows and complicates clinical treatments with people different from the analyst in matters of race and class and caste. There are radical and painful differences between analyst and analysand, differences that are emotional, social, financial, and professional. Levine's agenda is to open the painful and often humiliating places of difference and oppression and social possibility when racial differences enter and shape a treatment. In this discussion, using racial theorists like George and Gay, I explore how Levine writes and illuminates the moral and emotional stakes, including shame and guilt, that dominate discourses that cross race and class lines in the consulting room. I consider how Levine's bravery must be our model for movement and change in analytic work and theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of structured nurse-surgeon bedside rounds to improve perceptions of communication, collaboration, and teamwork. Topics covered include the value of interdisciplinary bedside rounds on quality of patient care, and a limited study which showed that a structured joint participation had a favorable impact on communication, collaboration, and teamwork perceptions. Also noted is the need for further research to evaluate measurable patient outcomes.

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]

This introduction presents the key elements in Laplanche's theorizing about sexuality. The model focuses on what he has termed "radical alterity," noting that sexuality is both transactional, arriving from the other and constituting both the unconscious and the lived experience of sexual desire. In this theory, there is space for trauma and normative experiences of forms of desire and excitement arising and arriving from the Other; links to relational theory are suggested and the novelty and importance of considering the clinical, the theoretical, and the cultural from a Laplanchian perspective are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier in the chapter, Frosh conjures images from Christina Sharpe's book about slavery, I In the Wake i (2016), and we must try and absorb the experience of capture, enslavement, shame, violence, and pain. On Stephen Frosh, Those Who Came After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness Frosh brings the reader into complex unsettled conceptions of post-trauma work, both individual and collective. In several chapters, Frosh brings us into an intellectual and moral encounter with the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, the philosopher and cultural theorist Judith Butler, and later the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, three figures whose ideas both overlap and are crucially distinct. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, six analysts describe theory and practice in the time of COVID-19, examining the quality of après-coup in the way that the pandemic and its attendant crises trigger early memory and early experiences of helplessness. In the clinical events we see that the age of the patient, the circumstances and approach of the analyst, the novelty of the frame are all crucial determinants of clinical outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the pandemic and the social protest that followed in the United States, this article looks at the history of writing on climate change in psychoanalysis, the different effects of social, mental, and ecological factors, the changing space of clinical work and its meanings and the interweave of the pandemic and social protest movements and analysis of structural racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discussion of Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro's model of fractal epistemology as clinically useful in the exploration of uncanny resonances in clinical dialogue. Arguing for the relevance of fractal epistemology for both the presence of resonance and of complex difference. [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]

This discussion focuses on review of writing about phantom penis and phantom limb, considering how these data and research address the question of pleasure and sexuality in trans and gender-nonbinary persons. Implications of this work on phantom penis and prosthetic penis forms for thinking of brain structure, embodiment, and fantasy as sexuality are shaped and expressed in many different kinds of persons. [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]

This essay examines the implications of premature demands for autonomy and separation in many male children. Terming such developmental processes a form of melancholy, we notice the pressure for idealization and omnipotence on male development. The essay uses clinical material to consider the implications of these developmental pressures on men as forms of intergenerational transmission of traumatic identities, expressed through processes of attachment and separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussion of Stern's essay (this issue) on the clinical demands of work with disturbed patients with catastrophic gaps in functioning stresses a number of perspectives on gaps and disavowal with patients across a wide spectrum. Gaps, absences, negation and dissociative states are all linked to the phenomena Stern is describing. The strong influences of Ferenczi are stressed in this discussion and the sometimes contradictory clinical experience which is both of absence and invasive presence. Patients of the sort Stern is describing are both haunted and evacuated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, a panel of papers is introduced organized around a target paper by Guiseppe Civitarese on the aesthetics and pragmatics of clinical psychoanalytic practice. Questions of the metapsychology, the clinical utility and the role of the nonverbal are addressed by two discussants (Steinberg and Goldberg) Links between relational and intersubjective analytic practices and theorizing such practices are linked to the development of the aesthetics, sometimes spoken of as "negative capability", in the work of Wilfred Bion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, the highlights of three papers addressing the questions of immigration, traumatic migration and exile are presented. The papers give clinical details of the work with persons inflight from dangerous and potentially fatal homeland situations, offer theoretical guidelines to thinking about the different implications of trauma upon refugees and migrating persons and families and also consider the particular demands on migration and exile in communities and families within the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an introduction to a roundtable comprising three papers and a discussion considering the interweave of psychoanalysis and social and political life. Prepared for a 2017 conference in Prague, the three papers (and one discussion) address political and social changes in Central Europe and globally as they effect internal conscious and unconscious experience. The roundtable centers on how changes in political order, and in the environment, past and present, produce ongoing new and renewed trauma in citizens, both locally and globally. The introduction sets this work in the context of the 2017 conference and the subsequent election of Donald Trump to president of the United States, speaking to the unsettled "radioactive" effects of social and political change on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, through four sections, looks at the philosophical and social backdrop to the relational turn, the particular pressures on psychoanalysis in the Second World War and post-War years. Drawing on Gampel's ideas of radioactive identifications, the force of political and social experience on theory and practice in psychoanalysis is considered in the current political climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of a clinical case in which severe demands on the analyst were made to bear silence and trauma unprocessable by the analysand. This discussion draws on the work of Coltart and Ferenczi to consider the demands of such work on the analyst. Intergenerational transmissions of trauma are also considered in the understanding of this case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion of Lama Khouri’s paper looks at the meaning and extension of interpellation and various ways of forgetting or disavowing racial and cultural identities. The complex accomodations and dissociations that accompany intergenerational transmission of trauma is examined both for the oppressed and oppressing group. The paper ends by questioning how and to what extent white privilege can be transformed into genuine reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron introduce remarks delivered at The Sándor Ferenczi Center at the New School for Social Research, one of the North American launch sites for The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, 12-Volume Set. Harris and Aron discuss the experience of seeing Winnicott—the man, doctor, psychoanalyst, and public intellectual—unfold over time, an experience they credit to the “brilliant choice” of the volumes’ editors to present Winnicott’s work in strictly chronological order. The authors, founders (with Jeremy Safran) of the Ferenczi Center, go on to argue that theirs was a particularly relevant and meaningful venue for the Winnicott launch given Ferenczi’s significant influcence on Winnicott, albeit one that Winnicott did not explicitly credit. With references to the existing literature on the topic of Ferenczi’s undocumented influence, they detail the theoretical points that make this case and argue that Winnicott represents a development within the Ferenczian legacy. Speakers include collection editors Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, as well as volume editors Vincenzo Bonaminio, Angela Joyce, and Arne Jemstedt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is an individual reflection on the analyst's personal history of loss and developmental trauma, as well as part of a theoretical exploration of the unconscious forces always at play in analytic work. The author recalls her early life with her nanny, a woman whose tragic and difficult life history significantly interacts with her own family history of war, loss, and migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents author's views on effect of political regimes on intimate life including involvement of gendered subjectivity and intimacy. Topics discussed include recovery psychoanalytic work by contemporary analyst Martin Mahler, traditions in the U.S. psychoanalytic work, and radioactive identifications.

In this essay I recall a 40-year experience knowing and working with Muriel Dimen. This is a reminiscence of a shared activist life in the late 1970s and 1980s and later our lives emerging in psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis after the mid-1980s. It is an appreciation of the particular turns and potent hot spots in Muriel Dimen’s evolving theorizing of sexuality and power, body and gender and culture from this point in the mid-1980s to her death in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay draws on Winnicott's deep insights developed in a series of texts over the last decade of his life and addressing questions of gender and sexuality, as these phenomena shape and are shaped by core experiences in the evolution of intersubjectivity. Interweaving Winnicott's work with that of Loewald, Laplanche and Matte Blanco, the essay speculates about possible developmental processes through which complex and shifting gender identifications intersect and interact with experiences of sexuality and desiring. The essay tracks Winnicott's evolving ideas about gender and madness and opens a way of thinking about one process by which gender may emerge, in a complex, 'softly assembled' encounter with desire and being desired. This approach also seeks to reframe and expand the current move in gender theory 'from etiology to teleology'. The term 'etiology' locates us in causation, diagnosis and the sites of pathology, and I think we should continue to be wary of the intrusion of these socially driven biases and ideas into reflections about sexuality and gender in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on notions of primal scene and Bion’s theorizing of groups, this essay looks at the elements in institutional groups where transgressions and corruption may appear and develop and examines the difficulties group members have in working through the violations and potential disruptions to the institution’s functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This response to Stephen Seligman’s “Disorders of Temporality and The Subjective Experience of Time: Unresponsive Objects and the Vacuity of the Future” considers Seligman’s ideas in the context of field theory. Seligman’s notion of becoming a self in time is elaborated through the concept, derived from field theory, of how time assumes an “essential ambiguity” that may facilitate analytic change and psychological development. This response suggests further that such “essential ambiguity” in relation to time opens both the patient and analyst up to a variety of complex, bidirectional influences, such as unconsciously mediated intergenerational transmissions of trauma. In addition, this response explores Seligman’s ideas associated with an analyst’s moment-to-moment recognitions and a patient’s corresponding development of a self in time in terms of their implications for analytic participation and analytic self-care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 discussion explores the far-reaching consequences of betrayal of patients, both at the individual and at the social level. Considering the variety of betrayal’s Elise describes, there are many deep effects on patients, on the field, on institutions, on a sense of the ethics of the profession and public trust. Particularly interesting and important in Elise’s paper is the long-ranging effect on many treatments beyond the original dyad. I would argue that betrayal is among the most profoundly important and damaging situation psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis faces. This discussion notices Bleger’s theory of the setting to consider how deeply events outside a treatment but connected to institutions and communities can impact psychoanalytic work. Crises and betrayals in the field (large and small) deserve our most careful attention. In this discussion the role of shame in the context of betrayals and damage to patients is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction presents the work of three colleagues—Stephen H. Cooper, Ken Corbett, and Stephen Seligman—writing on the importance of reverie, silence, internal work in and by the analyst as a crucial interface with relational and intersubjective analytic work. All three consider their work an engaged critique of the focus on action and interaction in relational accounts of process. The panel includes commentary by Anthony Bass and Donnel B. Stern and a collective response to the discussions by Cooper, Corbett, and Seligman. This introduction considered the potential for internal critique within a relational community, considers the group process in which critique may be produced, and encourages the development of ways of exploring difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion addresses the importance of fear as a key feature of attachment, examining some of the implications of Slade’s argument both for clinical work and for understanding of developmental process. The discussion also is focused on the kinds of genetic and evolutionary theories most useful in thinking about interactive effects, namely epigenetics, the study of genes in context. Finally the discussion identifies relational theory, which focuses on fear as an implicit dimension of attachment. Bromberg’s work on dissociation is cited as an example of work in which fear plays a prominent role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion reviews the psychoanalytic and developmental psychological theories that utilize nonlinear dynamic systems theory to situate Sperry's paper in its theoretical and historical context. The power of such nonlinear models for clinical work and theories of mind is argued. The essay then argues that the shift in theory entails a shift in ways of clinical writing and that the clinical discussion in the paper does not always feel consonant with the theory. Moving to a model of nonlinearity, intersubjectivity, and uncertainty is likely to entail shifts in conceptualizing and conveying clinical material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay was inspired by Robert Gober's moving and brilliant creation of a room of Forrest Bess's work and life, set within Elisabeth Sussman's paradigm smashing 2012 Biennial. I read Bess as an artist and a man in struggle, creatively and personally, with several binaries: inside/outside, metropolitan and hometown, gender binaries, and binaries in artistic practice. In all spheres, highly consciously and perhaps also unconsciously, Bess's encounter with, defeat by, and victory over these binaries produced an extraordinary body of work. In this very postmodern modernist, we see the complexity of materiality in body, sexuality, gender, and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the medium of film to analyze masculinities at the intersection of the regionally specific with the typical: the peripheral factory town with the universalizing panelák, or apartment block. This article addresses how the private spaces in industrial regions achieve new meaning when the role of the factory or public space, idealized in communist propaganda, has undergone a dramatic transformation. After the narratives that made spaces “great” became irrelevant in 1989 and the paneláky and factories lost their metaphorical meanings, they became simply apartment buildings and privately owned worksites. Within these spaces, many working-class men in industrial regions have faced more difficult transitions than women because they, as idealized workers under socialism, were more invested in the system and lost more from its collapse. Through an analysis of common themes in films released roughly fifteen years after the Velvet Revolution, the author asks how these men relate to the panelák, or private space, when excluded from the masculine, public space of the factory. How does the employment situation impact the family unit? What solutions do directors present to these men who find themselves ill-equipped for life in the industrial periphery after the post-1989 transition? This article draws from and contributes to recent work in the field of Czech gender studies and functions as a Czech case study on the relationship between gender and space in the former Eastern Bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I track three ways of confronting the question of whiteness and its attendant problematic of racism. I look at two personal episodes one involving inheritances from white explorer forebearers and the place of racism in fetishized objects and second in the institutional difficulties within psychoanalysis in finding ways to speak about race and the dilemma of being a beneficiary of racism. Finally I look at the hidden racism in a much lauded psychoanalytic article, Joan Riviere's (1929) “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” and in the light of these three problems speculate on “whiteness.” I argue that the intergenerational transmissions of guilt and disavowal together leave a blank psychic space that makes an authentic expression of racial consciousness and genuine reparation currently difficult and certainly, even if well intentioned, partially compromised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses monuments to World War II martyr Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. The array of monuments to Kosmodemyanskaya stands apart from other sets of Soviet monuments to war heroes, both in terms of sheer number and in variety. An analysis of the most significant sites informs us about the multiple mythologies associated with this Soviet 'saint'. This article asks how the plurality of bodily representations in memorials of Kosmodemyanskaya gives insight into the confluence of collective memory, national myth-making and constructions of gender in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. A study of Kosmodemyanskaya's monuments, situated in symbolic locations, shows how competing trends, Soviet political needs, private commemorations, and public responses shaped the representation of this war hero. The evolution of monuments to Kosmodemyanskaya illuminates both the tensions that arise when disparate groups commemorate one individual, and the political role of war monuments in a broader context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 6, 2011, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis presented a special colloquium on the maternal body. This colloquium featured a public dialogue, a semistructured conversation between Rosemary Balsam and Adrienne Harris, exploring psychoanalytic understandings of images and experiences of the maternal body. The conversation wove chaos, gender, feminist and psychoanalytic theories with the speakers’ respective intellectual autobiographies. Asking each other questions about culture, generation, medicine, politics, and ideology, the dialogue took shape around how these categories were lived by the 2 analysts and how they helped form how Balsam and Harris conceptualized femininity, gender, and embodiment. This format highlighted differences and spaces of integration. We are delighted to provide the transcript of this stimulating public dialogue here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion, the biology of loss and separation, the enmeshment and intersubjective interdependence of dyads are explored as aspects of the particular dimensions of mourning in the analysand upon the death of her analyst. Considerations from linguistics, from attachment research, and from the relational theory of intersubjectivity are used to explore the particular demands of mourning and reparation in analytic dyads. The work of dreams in recovery is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]