American Psychoanalysis Research Articles

In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis: Findings and Recommendations from the Holmes Commission.

In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis: Findings and Recommendations from the Holmes Commission.

Introduction to In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis: Findings and Recommendations From the Holmes Commission.

Introduction to In Pursuit of Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis: Findings and Recommendations From the Holmes Commission.

A call for an expanded self psychology: Incorporating socio–cultural perspectives in teaching and clinical practice

ABSTRACT Recognizing that psychoanalysis needs to change to meet the challenges described by the Holmes Report on American Psychoanalysis, the authors describe their journey to include socio-cultural perspectives in their teaching activities. To widen the lens of course content, they include topics of race, racial trauma, and inequality by bringing additional voices into their Self Psychology course materials including Beverly Stoute and Franz Fanon. Further, they discuss these authors’ contributions in relation to Heinz Kohut’s foundational ideas about development and clinical practice. They describe the features of an anti-racist pedagogical approach to teaching which supports encouraging and appreciating the contributions of all participants in the learning process. They provide several vignettes from their teaching experiences and argue that self psychologically-informed clinicians are particularly well-suited to meet the challenge of expanding psychoanalytic thinking to incorporate socio-cultural perspectives.

The Plague of Certitude: Why Fromm Matters Today

ABSTRACT Today, a plague of certitude is spreading within American psychoanalysis. This socially constructed virus is increasingly dominating our unmoderated list serves, appearing in our journals, and slowly seeping into our institutes. Having transcended the objectivism of traditional Freudian analysis, we seem to be revivifying its spirit. Rigorous claims to truth, superior knowledge, and contempt for those not in agreement abound. The life and work of psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm is offered as an antidote and model for resistance to this plague. He consistently objected to all forms of authoritarianism, from the Right and the Left. As a radical humanist he viewed us all as responsible selves, not mere vessels for instinctual drives or victims of unbearable circumstances. As Paul Roazan said about Fromm: “It still seems to me remarkable how he was willing to stand up for what he believed in. He should be a model of independence and autonomy for us all.”

The Reception of Lacanian Theory and Practice by American Psychoanalytic Training Programs.

This paper explores the principal reasons for the exclusion of Lacanian ideas from psychoanalytic training institutes in the United States. The history of Lacan's role in the International Psychoanalytical Association, from which essentially he was expelled, occupies a central place in this story. Significant issues arose also from his practice style and technical innovations, whose rationale remains controversial today. Another major obstacle for the reception of his work is the theoretical framework of Lacanian analysis, so different from that of other schools. Inclusion of its unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts poses practical problems for training programs. At a more fundamental level, the strong antihumanist evolution of Lacan's thought runs contrary to the increasingly relational and intersubjective orientation of American psychoanalysis. The incompatibility between the disparate languages of a scientific theory aiming at objectivity and a phenomenology of personal intentionality and meaning greatly limits the possibilities for dialogue. The tension between these perspectives cannot be resolved, but a productive exchange between them is possible if they are accepted as valid and complementary ways of speaking about human behavior.

Group Psychotherapy, Racial and Social Justice

Abstract: Social and racial justice concerns are innately compatible with group psychotherapy. Incorporating justice intentions into group therapy practices ensures the relevance of group work as a form of psychotherapeutic healing. Responding to the Final Report of the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis 2023 , this article argues that group psychotherapy organizations have a responsibility to offer unique approaches to social and racial justice healing both within group organizations and to other psychotherapy and psychoanalytic institutions. A detailed example from Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society illustrates the multiple group processes that advanced a measure of racial equity.

13Psychoanalysis

Abstract This chapter reviews four important works of psychoanalytic scholarship published in 2022: Steven Jaron, Christopher Bollas: A Contemporary Introduction; Kate Daniels, Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis; Joanna Kellond, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care; and Steven Groarke, The Feeling Intellect: An Essay on the Independent Tradition in British and American Psychoanalysis. Following a short introduction, the review is divided into four sections that treat each of the texts in turn: 1. The Unthought Known; 2. The Aesthetic Object; 3. The Politics of Care; 4. The Feeling Intellect.

No Touching: Boundary Violation and Analytic Solidarity

“No Touching” argues that we can locate analytic solidarity in the boundaries drawn to protect analytic work from sexual enactment. The author traces ongoing elaborations of the notions of boundary and boundary violation as they become codified across the twentieth century in American (ego psychology) psychoanalysis and its legal and training institutions, in parallel with the retheorization of transference love toward a stable notion of erotic transference. The author argues that professional psychoanalytic institutions and associations only began to legislate boundary violation as a normative ethics problem when the feminization of psychoanalysis took place in the 1970s through the 1990s. The author then turns to the “overbounding” of analysis in its teletherapeutic contexts to ask if psychoanalytic suspicions of mediation are in part based in their capacity to suspend traditional forms of boundary violation.

Evolution of Freudian psychoanalytic thought in the twentieth-century USA: The influence of the European émigrés

This paper briefly reviews major theoretical and clinical changes in American psychoanalysis since its beginning in the early twentieth century. The immigration of European analysts in the 1930s and 40s was of major significance. Infant development research promoted a shift towards the importance of object relations, reducing the importance of the Oedipus complex. The increasing focus on narcissism and borderline personalities is discussed, as well as the applications to dynamic psychotherapy. Dogma dissipated with increasing latitude in theory and clinical work within “classical” psychoanalysis.

Man to Man: Reconsidering Who or What Men are—and Why it Matters

Since Freud, analysts often assume that the consultation room stages a drama between two personages: the patient and the therapist. Recently, some critics contend that race, class, age, etc. always mark these two figures. I consider the clinical implications of theorizing therapist and patient as men. I ask: What assumptions about men inform the treatment room and what are its clinical implications? I argue that in American psychoanalysis men are often understood through the lens of a narrow concept of phallicism—-one associated with emotional containment, self-sufficiency, and a drive to dominate. Such views flatten men’s experience and have far-reaching clinical implications: Some of men’s chief psychic struggles and forms of suffering go unrecognized in the consultation room. Sketching a revised view of phallicism, I offer a nuanced, layered view of men, underscoring their precarious and anxious state even as they claim a privileged status.

A Diagnosis for Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century: Freud as Medicine

This paper assesses the history of psychoanalysis in the United States in order to inform a “professional memoir” of the author’s experience of analytic training in the 21st Century. The mix of historical and personal landscapes supports a contention that there is something missing or lost in American psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis has lost sight of the radical and subversive nature of unconscious processes. I argue that only by returning to a study of rigorous and comprehensive theory, seated in Freud’s work, can this absence be addressed.

Return of the Repressed: Revisiting Dissociation and the Psychoanalysis of the Traumatized Mind.

Psychoanalytic treatment is often indicated when trauma and its psyche/soma companion, dissociation, severely disrupt symbolic functioning and associative linking. After Freud's initial thinking on these matters, repression replaced rather than supplemented dissociation (which occasions segregating units of experience) as the primary defensive response to severe trauma. Because psychoanalysis had "repressed" the salience of dissociation as actively motivated (though passively experienced), an unnecessary schism has occurred between trauma theories and mainstream North American psychoanalysis, and within psychoanalysis itself. To fully restore dissociation's role in primitive mental states and provide a more integrated approach to technique, it is necessary to comprehend the triadic nature of trauma, which entails economic/drive, structural conflict and deficit, and object-relational factors. For a treatment model that addresses defensive dissociation in the here and now, primary and secondary dissociation must be distinguished, with each differentiated from splitting and repression. Technique requires addressing unconscious, repressed fantasies associated with the "trauma," object-relational patterns that interfere with linking, and psycho-economic issues that have disrupted ego functioning. A clinical example illustrates both the analyst's persistence in suffering the dead, eerie space of dissociated trauma and efforts to find language that helps structure the patient's somatic and enacted expressions (and accompanying dissociative and repressive processes) by which traumatic experiences are registered and conveyed.

The Organizational Structure of the American Psychoanalytic Association: The Politics of Exclusion.

This article traces the history of the American Psychoanalytic Association since its reorganization in 1945. This reorganization established the hegemony of the Board on Professional Standard and the secondary status of the larger membership. It considers the centrality of the requirement of certification for becoming a member, for running for office, and for voting on bylaw amendments, all of which have since been undone, and for training analyst appointments, which continues to this day. A context for this discussion is the decline of APsaA since the 1970s and its struggle to maintain its place in American psychoanalysis and in psychoanalytic education.

Bringing It All Back Home: Reply to Celenza

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.

From “What’s American about American Psychoanalysis (2004)” to “What’s American History and Politics Got to Do with the Emergence of the Relational Turn (2012) and on to the American Nightmare: 2017”

ABSTRACTThis 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.

A Ghost in Contemporary Theory: Selma Fraiberg’s Social Work Identity and Her Contributions to Modern Psychoanalysis

Re-examining the work of Selma Fraiberg, an early psychoanalytic social worker, reveals the prediction of two dominant strains in contemporary psychoanalysis: attachment theory and the study of trauma. On the hundredth anniversary of her birth, reading her papers is a reminder of clinical social work’s natural partnering with psychoanalysis. As American psychoanalysis has moved away from its primary focus on intrapsychic conflict toward relational models, it has incorporated the sine qua non of clinical social work: the person-in-environment. Fraiberg’s original identity as a social worker strongly informed her research, casework, writing, and approach to education, and forecast current strains in American psychoanalysis. Reclaiming Fraiberg’s unique contribution should cement both her rightful place as a psychoanalytic pioneer and as an originator of clinical social work identity, as well as the influence of clinical social work on American psychoanalysis.

From the discourse of the university to the discourse of analysis

This article examines Lacan’s critique of American culture and contemporary psychoanalysis through his theory of the discourse of the university. Of special importance is Lacan’s analysis of scientism, consumerism, and the post-postmodern culture of narcissism. Lacan’s style and the history of his reception inside and outside the APCS are also addressed.

John Chynoweth Burnham (1929-2017).

Presents an obituary for John Chynoweth Burhham, who died May 12, 2017. An acknowledged "historian's historian," Burnham's critically acclaimed books and articles dealt prominently with American psychoanalysis, as well as other varied topics including accident proneness, health care in America, bad habits, and the question of "how superstition won and science lost." In his first major book, the 1967 Psychoanalysis and American Medicine, 1894-1918. Burnham approached his controversial subject not from the standpoint of practitioner or partisan, but rather that of an impartial historian placing psychoanalysis within the larger context of American culture and history. Throughout his long career, he continued to emphasize the cultural importance of psychoanalysis in America, most recently by spearheading a "New Freud Studies" movement, intended partly as an antidote to the emotionally overheated "Freud Wars" of the late 1900s. Burnham was named a fellow of APA and winner of the Career Achievement Award by the Society for the History of Psychology in 2009. (PsycINFO Database Record

“Love’s Not Time’s Fool”: Some Continuities, Discontinuities, and Alterations in Psychoanalysis During My Lifetime

ABSTRACTIn this lecture the author reviews some important developments in North American psychoanalysis over the years since 1933. The most important of the changes is the recognition of the psychoanalyst as a participant in the analytic process rather than as an interpreter of unconscious meaning only. Beginning with some verbatim “interpretations” from the first recorded psychoanalysis in the 1930s, the lecture proceeds to consider a variety of topics, especially the importance of the relational tilt in U.S. psychoanalysis.

“I Should Like to Point Out that There is an Air-Raid Going on Outside!”: Psychoanalysis and the Denial of the Analyst’s Trauma

This paper examines the question of whether psychoanalysts today are as inured to their own traumatizing environments as were the members of the wartime British Society. Although trauma arguably is at the forefront of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, it is always the trauma of the other about which we are concerned. It is argued that with the election of Donald Trump, therapists are as likely to feel as traumatized as many of their patients. Given the post–World War II consensus within American psychoanalysis that deemed the social and the political to be outside or beneath its purview, psychoanalysts may be particularly vulnerable to failing to acknowledge our own destabilization and vulnerability. If we do not find forms of containment and understanding of our suffering, for having to endure the daily onslaughts of the unimaginable while serving as support and containment for our patients, our work will become increasingly difficult, potentially both hurting ourselves and negatively impacting our patients.