Bringing It All Back Home: Reply to Celenza

Abstract

In our response to Andrea Celenza (this issue), we take this opportunity to develop some of the implications of her original work and the Fred Duhl-Anne Sexton tragedy. We concur with Celenza that the ethics revolution in North American psychoanalysis, which dates only from the mid 1980s, has not entirely transformed the landscape. After reflecting briefly on Sexton’s cultural legacy, and on the concept of analytic love, we suggest that psychoanalysis as a profession needs to step up its effort to address, at the level of the institution, the problem of our chronic avoidance of “boundary trouble.” We propose that the psychoanalytic group needs to look in the mirror and see Fred Duhl—in its history, its training ideologies, its psychological theories, and also in our manner of othering and scapegoating those in the group who act out or otherwise refract our more problematic unconscious fantasies and group dynamics.