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For a long time, I have been interested in belonging: in how we are forced but also need to belong in communities, in how collective identifications form our subjective identities, in how belonging is the subject-matter of our very sense of self. I have also been interested in un-belonging, in what happens to us when we are refused or choose to refuse a collective affiliation, in the dynamic of alienation, betrayal and freedom that ensues. The paper delves into these themes by journeying through the landscape of my own difficult belonging in the land where I was born: Israel-Palestine, sunk these days in a state of catastrophic war; my experience of belonging as it is being negotiated in my own analysis, carried over the phone between Tel Aviv and New York. It is a personal-theoretical postcard from a place of existential crisis but also hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalysis has the capacity to explain how and why people join together and against each other. If we understand identity and identification, if we understand belonging, we might be able to see how we could free ourselves from the visceral forces that pull us into mad, warring factions, making us destroy each other when we could be neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contemplates two notions that I have been exploring in relation to the frontier between subjects and collectives. The first is what I call homo-nationalis, the subject formed by and along the organizing principles of nationalism. This subject, I argue, reflects the ideology and reality of the nation-state. It is animated by its imaginaries and unsettled by its fragilities in the deepest psychological sense. The second is what I call the trans-subject. I use this notion inspired by, and wishing to extend the sense of, transing as it pertains to trans-gendering to other categories of subjecthood, aiming to capture the subject's potential to re-form the precepts of subjectivity as it is prescribed for them. I engage these two notions as I reflect on my (countertransference) experience while working with an individual moving across various collective-social frontiers in the process of a religious conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proceeds from my continued exploration of the relations between the subjective and the collective, and from the assumption that the subject, and subjectivity itself, are always a reflection, an iteration, an embodied instantiation of the social universe in which they emerge. In this article, I turn to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls states of exception, those times and places where the law and the norm are suspended, such as we have seen most recently in the context of the COVID pandemic, but is always the case sometimes, in some places, most often regarding particular groups of people. I examine, as examples, two particular exception categories, a status in the Israeli legal code called present/absent, and our modern concept of childhood. I use the notions of present/absent and of childhood to think about what we call in psychoanalysis "the unconscious," the unconscious as a subjective/collective terrain where what is socially excepted and forbidden becomes that which is psychologically dissociated and disavowed. And I reflect on how a social-theory driven perspective on subjectivity can both complicate and deepen our ability to address the intricacies of human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, psychoanalysis has become more aware of, and concerned with, the ways in which social forces affect the development and experience of subjects directly. Yet as a discourse and theory of human development, contemporary psychoanalysis still lacks sufficient accounts for how the social becomes psychological. Freud's psychoanalysis offers the concept of the superego as a means of explaining how social realities and norms enter and play a part in the psychological life of the subject. But if we were to disengage this useful concept, the superego, from the now problematized notion of the Oedipal as its raison d'être, we are left with an empty construct, and a phenomenon to which new developmental accounts need to be attached. I suggest in this article that psychoanalysis provides us with two major conceptual frameworks up for the task: Ferenczi's seminal notion of "confusion of tongues," and Laplanche's notion of the enigmatic message. Reading Ferenczi closely, I suggest that although he speaks explicitly of one confusion of tongues, his body of work implies two confusions, the second more general and perhaps more profound. I use this reading to expand both Ferenczi and Laplanche beyond their original field of reference, the play of sexuality between adults and children, to the more general question of how our relationships with our parents function as an intimate socialization mechanisms. I argue that as both Ferenczi's notion of the confusion of tongues and Laplanche's notion of the enigmatic message are concerned with the enigmatic and potentially traumatic differences and attachments between adults and children, they are well suited to account for how we all become social subjects, that is, the subjects of social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contemplates the tension between apathy and hope, between the dystopic and the utopian as drivers of the human condition, and our theories about it. I look, more specifically, at how these two tendencies manifested in the aftermath of WWI; the dystopic in Freud's invention of the death drive, the utopian in Ernst Bloch's exploration of hope. I argue that our present poses a challenge similar to that posed by WWI; a collapse of the frameworks around which subjectivities and societies are organized, and a potential for the development of both better and worse outlooks. I argue that as was the case then, psychoanalysis has crucial theoretical and ethical choices to make. I suggest that rather than follow Freud's death driven fatalism, we should seek inspiration in Bloch's view of hope as a driving force of human experience and destiny. I contemplate these ideas as I record events taking place in the world and in my practice during the weeks just before and after the 2020 elections in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tend to think subjectivity, and the subject, as somehow discrete and distinguishable, self-defining, even self-sufficient. The subject as owner of his own essence, capable of charting his own course, willful, and at least in potential free. An unethical self-deception according to Levinas (1935/2003). A dangerous delusion according to Adorno (1966/1973). Because the subject of self-awareness and freedom is also the subject of sovereignty, given to, and molded by, what Foucault (1975/1977) called power/knowledge matrices. A socially constructed and yet somehow self-experiencing existent. An abstract, and yet deeply felt location of being. This paper is an attempt to journey closer to the heart of this paradoxical, conflictual condition. It does so by putting certain ideas developed in social theory in discourse with Psychoanalysis. First, I follow Michel Foucault in his use of the notion of homo economicus as a means for theorizing the condition of the subject of neo liberalism and his preoccupation with life as enterprise and parenting as investment. I trace a parallel psychoanalytic trajectory seeming to address a similar kind of subject, a trajectory that, I suggest, finds its expression in attachment theory and relational Psychoanalysis. I follow Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities to suggest that the subject of nationalism, homo nationalis, reflects nationalism in his own particular sense of self and preoccupations, most of all with an unstable experience of inside and outside, unclear boundaries and interminable conflict, maintained in an always fragile balance. I trace a parallel collective-subjective construction in the original conceptions of Psychoanalysis, with its models of territorial conflicts, both within and between subjects. In both cases, I argue, even as it continues to make claims of discovery, Psychoanalysis reflects and serves the dominant zeitgeist of its time. I follow Giorgio Agamben in his attention to the ancient Roman concept of homo Sacer in an attempt to imagine subjectivity otherwise than as a hapless reflection of the social power constellations of its place and time. I suggest that we think of subjectivity as a border concept, and of the subject as a threshold, something defined in-between, as an in-between, in relation to, rather than in itself - a frontier, an endless interaction, an imagined, fleeting location through which things continue to pass but never quite reside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Neo-liberalism is now a dominant ideology and sociopolitical-economic organizing principle. Following Nancy Hollander’s (this issue) illuminating foray into its psychological demi-monde, and in full agreement with the understanding that the subject contains and reflects the social, my commentary aims to elaborate on neo-liberalism’s subjective and intersubjecrive correlates. I also raise some more general questions about the relations between the subjective and the social, and our ways of thinking about them. I begin in exploring the value attached to caregiving and attachment. Attachment as goods exchanged and as investment. I follow by highlighting the slippage between ethical and economic meanings in terms such as “value,” “debt,” “guilt,” and “redemption,” a slippage that points to the the probable co-emergence of ethics and markets. Leaning on Foucault’s notion of homo economicus and on the psychoanalytic concept of libidinal economy, I outline some questions about the psychology of the homo economicus of neo-liberalism. I question what seems to me a nostalgic sentiment that runs through neo-liberalism as well as recent psychoanalytic theories, suggesting that this similarity demonstrates how psychoanalytic thinking itself reflects the current order of things. Finally, I wonder whether, under this ideology, we are encountering not only a new kind of subjectivity but also the end of subjectivity as a fundament of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigration is in the unconscious of the unconscious of psychoanalysis. Immigration as a dramatic instance of the always precarious social and political registers of human living. Immigration as the movement of people from one place to another, across regions and national borders and oceans, by choice or necessity. Immigration as movement across other types of social boundaries, always defining an outside and a way into a desired inside. Immigration as an inverted reflection of our deep need to belong. This paper reflects on immigration as a clinical reality and as a clinical metaphor. It uses the notion of immigration to question the perceived, often if not always illusory settledness of the analytic practice, and its tendency to privilege a sense of well-inhabited center vis-à-vis the margins we all travel through and persist in. My aim is to join Veronica Csillag in deliberating a more uncertain and daring potential for our theory making and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This discussion reflects closely on Dominique Scarfone’s call to consider psychoanalysis as a practice founded on ethics, and to rely on this premise in charting a fundamental common ground such that has eluded psychoanalysis for most of its history. Out of the three points Scarfone centers on, I dedicate most attention to the third—psychoanalysis as modeled on the notion of translation—because I find his suggestion inspiring, and promising toward the goals he sets for his paper. Building on the basis Scarfone offers in this context with the help of ideas developed by Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, I suggest that the vision that can pull us together as psychoanalysts indeed relies on an ethics of attending to the other’s speech, its meaning as well as its fundamental yet complicated striving for comunicability. More specifically, we need to recognize that words can hide our need to say them. That what we say obscures our vulnerability and shame. That when we try to recall, the language we speak is distorted by the personal and historical forces collaborating to make us forget ourselves. I argue that the task of the psychoanalytic translator is therefore to uncover and resignify the scattered, coded fragments; to help us restore our ability to tell our stories; and to recognize that more than everything, we want to tell them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article tells the stories of 2 little boys, one a contemporary boy who falls off his bicycle in New York City, the other the mythical biblical hero Samson. I use these 2 stories to explore the role of abandonment in the formation, in boys, of a gendered sense of self. I argue that boys and men evolve under the shadow of parental and societal abandonment, a selective process where some aspects of personhood are accepted while others are refused recognition. Through subtle as well as sometimes dramatic abandonments, boys are stirred to negate their vulnerabilities and take care of themselves, with lifelong consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article attends the intersection of personal and collective memory. Drawing on the author's childhood memories, particularly those of his grandmother, the article explores the ways in which one's past is registered and reexperienced as an ongoing relation between intimate recollections and grand historical narratives. The article contrasts Homi Bhabha's (1994) use of the psychoanalytic concept of Nachtraglichkeit to a parallel conception of past-present interaction in the writings of Franz Kafka (1954), Ernst Bloch (1963), and Walter Benjamin (1955). Reflecting on the heavy charge carried from the past into the future, on what Emmanuel Levinas (1995) called in this context 'insoluble problems' (p. 88), the article argues for a notion of agency that reaches beyond the subject, toward a consideration of subjectivity as a focal point, and link, between collective tradition and its potential trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores an open frontier between psychoanalysis and critical theory, the relations between subjective experience and collective history. Its drive is a concern with the question of freedom: How might contemporary psychoanalysis help us think about freedom? How could it, as a practice, help us to be free? On the theoretical level, the paper follows the critique of psychoanalysis offered by Foucault and Adorno, particularly the latter's close reading Ferenczi in Negative Dialectics and his notion of 'the spell.' I employ their critique in order to articulate the dilemma psychoanalysis faces vis-a-vis the notion of freedom in social context. I argue that, unlike traditional psychoanalytic discourse, relational psychoanalysis can address this dilemma in a generative way. I find this prospect in the readiness of relational psychoanalysis to realize the potential inherent in the psychoanalytic setting: the creation of a mutually constituted intersubjective space. I tell the story of a young woman for whom love seems impossible, and of a psychoanalytic expedition that finds her ability to love being held hostage. I suggest that what appears in one register as gender and sexual trouble appears in another as a dilemma of attachments and loyalties: my patient's ability to love is spellbound, trapped in a subjective-collective no man's land between her desire to be for herself and the unconscious demands of collective heritage. I argue that for psychoanalysis to be a practice of freedom, it must address the ways in which subjective experience answers to social forces and collective history. I question in this context the relations between freedom, guilt, and responsibility. Re-engaging Adorno, I agree that selfhood may always involve a guilty betrayal of others but argue against him that we must allow this guilt to be reconciled with living. I suggest, in conclusion, that theory is the bearer of collective responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My reply to the commentaries first addresses the question of the relations between psychoanalytic theory and practice. Drawing on the ancient Greek concept of theoria, I expand on this question by evoking a third register, that of psychoanalysis as a collective that theorizes and practices in a particular socio-historical context. I argue for a view of psychoanalysis as a collective residing at the intersection of general discourse, social power, and subjectivity, a position that should be consciously considered as part of its ethos and its ethics. I examine in this context Stern's notion of clinical philosophy and the potential for a variety of dialogues between clinical psychoanalysis and critical theory. I look at the unique possibilities offered in this domain by relational psychoanalysis, and argue that mining these possibilities may require that we explore new kinds of theoretical narrative. Looking at the history of the psychoanalytic theoria, I raise the question of theoretical and clinical activism. Given its discursive and social position, what is the responsibility of psychoanalysis vis-a-vis individuals and societies? How might it address what Kafka refers to as collecting and uncollecting? I conclude in turning to psychoanalysis' own collective trauma, the destruction during World War II of its German-speaking centers, and the theoretical-political shifts that followed, as its central European pioneers became exiles in the now dominant centers of the United States and the United Kingdom. I suggest that our collective trauma might hold some clues for our contemporary limitations, and potentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the group of essays that follows by Sam Gerson, Jean-Max Gaudilliere, Miri Rozmarin, and Udi Aloni, I trace the inspiration for this project, a collective contemplation of the figure of the biblical Samson using as its springboard David Grossman's book about Samson, Lion's Honey (2005). I write about how the project emerged out of my work with a patient who recommended Grossman's book to me and my effort to grapple with the dilemmas of familial and collective loyalties that transpired as a core aspect our joint endeavor. How does one let go of one's child, in life or in transference? And what kind of letting go should, on the other hand, be resisted? How can we think about this conundrum of freedom and responsibility? This is the crucial clinical and ethical concern underlying the collection of essays published here. [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]

Suchet's paper is an inspiring demonstration of the power of openness and vulnerability. It offers a clinically daring and theoretically far-reaching account of the transformation that can sometimes occur in the psychoanalytic relationship. My commentary focuses on two of the paper's major threads: the interplay of subjective experience, intersubjective space, and collective forces, and the ethical dimension of the psychoanalytic project. From the outset, the meeting between Ara and Suchet is not only a meeting of bodies and minds, but also a meeting of collective histories and politics. Suchet finds, and in her account powerfully demonstrates, that addressing her patient's trouble requires an exploration of how collective traumas and political narratives infuse the possibilities of intersubjective exchange and subjective meaning. In my commentary I trace and elaborate on the trajectory of this analytic process, contemplating the ways in which identities and identifications involve both familial and social attachments. I attempt to highlight Suchet's contribution to our understanding of how what happens, and is made meaningful, in the register of collective identification and experience, forms the very substance of subjective and intersubjective life, and should be therefore formulated as an intrinsic aspect of the analytic endeavour. Turning to Suchet's engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I consider her drive to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of psychoanalytic discourse. Following the same drive, I add some ideas developed by Theodor Adorno, as means of illustrating the trouble and the potential for reconciliation inherent in the experience and politics of identity. [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]

This paper suggests that social and historical forces play an unconscious yet decisive role in our lives. Telling the story of a conversation between Israeli parents about the prospect of their children becoming soldiers, and of an analytic relationship between two Israelis, the paper aims to bring to light a hidden balance of power between family bonds and collective attachments. The paper uses ideas developed by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari in the field of critical theory to examine the ways in which families function as social agents, that is, as socializing institutions. It suggests that, as a result, in some situations, families may face a conflict of identifications, a dilemma between responsibility to kin and responsibility to the collective. If the dilemma commonly persists unheeded, it becomes painfully evident in extreme situations. Such is the case when parents are asked to allow their children to become soldiers, or when individuals strive to care for themselves against a binding ethics of communal and intergenerational responsibility. The paper examines the effect of the collective trauma underlying the dominant discourse of the Israeli society, and the hypercollectivity of the Israeli Kibbutz, in generating powerful unconscious conflicts that haunt subjective and family life. The paper argues that collective affiliations and consequently, collective politics are inseparable from individual psychology and interpersonal relations. It suggests that, for this reason, political awareness and political exchange can play a crucial, liberating role in the therapeutic relationship, and life in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study described in this paper was to develop a method for measuring the therapeutic alliance from an intersubjective perspective and to evaluate the efficacy of the measure in predicting psychotherapy outcome. We conducted the study using data from 22 patient-therapist dyads engaged in a 30-session protocol of a brief relational therapy. The alliance measure chosen for this purpose was the short form of the Working Alliance Inventory. We used the subjective patient and therapist versions of the measure and created a correlation index representing the intersubjective congruence between patients and therapists on their ratings of the alliance. We examined the relations among the measures, as well as their predictive relation to an outcome measure. The results showed significant intercorrelations among the three alliance measures, suggesting that all captured aspects of the therapeutic alliance. In addition, all three measures were significantly predictive of outcome, with the correlation index appearing more powerful. [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.

In this brief introduction to the collection of essays that follows, I point to what in my mind are some of the most pertinent and powerful aspects of Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love (1988), the author and book to whom this collection is dedicated. I tell of my first encounter with Jessica Benjamin and the impact the encounter had on me. I comment briefly on the book's place in contemporary psychoanalysis. Using Jessica Benjamin's own words, I highlight what in my mind is one of the book's greatest achievements: the reframing of the relations between knowledge and ethics in the light of a feminist critique of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” is offered in tribute to the memory of a cherished friend and mentor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including second-wave masculinity, diasporic masculinity, and psychosocial study of schizophrenia.

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."

The article introduces various papers published within the issue, including one on the ethical-political aspect of mother-daughter relations, another on psychoanalysis and the papers awarded the Symonds Prize in 2016.