American Psychoanalysts Research Articles

Asian American Experience: The Illusion of Inclusion and the Model Minority Stereotype

ABSTRACT The stereotype of Model Minority is often applied to Asian Americans, whose educational and economic achievements are held up as a sign of successful inclusion into American society. Yet the deadly anti-Asian attacks following the Coronavirus pandemic have shattered this illusion of inclusion. Using trauma theories, I explore Asian Americans’ belief in the American Dream, alignment with whiteness, and the illusion of inclusion afforded by the Model Minority stereotype. In particular, I examine how the illusion of inclusion has obscured recognition of an Asian fetish, the sexualized objectification of Asian women and feminization of Asian men. Clinical examples illustrate the workings of racialized stereotypes and mutual dissociation of racial traumas in Asian therapist and Asian patient dyads. Finally, I add a plea for Asian American psychoanalysts and therapists to write and speak about their experiences from their own frame of reference for fuller recognition of Asian American subjectivity.

Identity and Political Independence

Identity and Political Independence

Relire Jean Laplanche : pour une métapsychologie de genre queer

ContextPsychoanalysis has been criticized for fostering an understanding of the human being based on a majoritarian norm while overlooking alternative sex, gender, class, and race experiences. ObjectivesMy goal in this article is to lay the foundations for an inclusive, non-axiological, and non-hegemonic metapsychology, disencumbered of male biopower and heterocentrism. I therefore hope to contribute to restoring the intrinsically subversive nature of psychoanalysis, which was compromised by its institutionalization and historical situatedness. MethodI focus on the gender paradigm by proposing an archaeology of Jean Laplanche's texts from 1973 to 2003. This approach is enhanced by the contributions of feminist studies, queer theory, and contemporary American psychoanalysts informed by the social sciences. ResultsI delineate the primitive acknowledgement of gender difference based on a diversity of anatomical, psychological, and sociocultural features, which I distinguish from the perceptive of sexual difference governed by a binary logic specific to the urges of the phallic phase and marked by the influence of primary caregivers driven by a sexual unconscious and their social inscription. The plurality of gender expressions, as a challenge to contemporary clinical work, is thus understood to result from complex interactions between the following: the enigmatic gender assignments primarily implanted into the child's body ego by a constellation of libidinally invested and socially inserted adults; perceptual genital difference between the sexes; the multitude of messages vertically and horizontally received by the subject in the course of their life; the translation of all these experiences in accordance with the subject's idiosyncratic particularities; and, finally, their perpetual retranslation under the sway of afterwardness with the assistance of socially and culturally situated hermeneutic grids. My epistemological proposal in this kaleidoscopic framework is that of a primary queer sexuality, secondarily transformed into a less inclusive psychic bisexuality through the introjection of the culturally prevalent gender binary. Moreover, I consider the hierarchical relations in regard to identity categories as enigmatic messages “to be translated”, inculcated in the child's psyche by adult bearers of powerful binary norms (masculine/feminine, dominant/submissive, normal/perverse). By means of this intergenerational transmission, gender, sexual, class, and race ideals are likely to perpetuate and thus consolidate the “normative unconscious” formed from the identifications that are refused because of their social non-conformity. Finally, I will show the heuristic importance of the over-inclusive model of enigmatic signifiers, which I propose in this article, by studying a material stemming from various sources: personal clinical practice, novels, films, autobiographical narratives, field investigations. The guiding thread of this heterogeneous corpus is the experience of subjectivities situated in the margins, likely to shed light on the mechanisms that govern the centre. ConclusionsTheoretical constructions are likely to generate effects inside and outside the analytic space due to the performative power of language: hence, the importance for analysts to challenge the ideal of pure neutrality by recognizing the potential infiltration of their theories by their own infantile sexuality as well as institutional, social, and cultural norms. The scope of a metapsychology of gender open to diversity is simultaneously clinical, epistemological, and political.

Gender and “Race” Enigmatic Signifiers: How the Social Colonizes the Unconscious

ABSTRACT This article highlights the process by which cultural messages relating to the contingent categories of gender and “race” manage to infiltrate the individual unconscious. The author first discusses the introduction of gender into French psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and its original expression with the sexual drive theory. He thus explores the ambivalent gender assignments implanted in the child’s body ego by a constellation of seducing caregivers and other invested adults who, as cultural purveyors, inscribe the social. These prescriptions, which are contaminated by the adult’s drive-fueled and overknowing unconscious, are enigmatic for both the sender and the receiver. Hence, they need to be deciphered through the psychic work of translation by drawing on relational, anatomical, and social codes. The author subsequently calls on the contributions of feminist and gender studies as well as contemporary American psychoanalysts in order to propose an “overinclusive” model of the enigmatic messages “to be translated.” This model underscores an intersectional approach to identity categories by considering power relations and cultural patterns of oppression. The suggested analytic grid is then extended to the paradigm of “race” by reading skin-color bias in the light of clinical, artistic, and theoretical examples.

Sandor Rado, American psychoanalysis, and the question of bisexuality.

The Hungarian-born physician and psychoanalyst Sandor Rado (1890-1972), who practiced for most of his career in the United States, played a central role in shaping American psychoanalysts' views toward homosexuality. Historians have pointed to Rado's rejection of Freud's notion of constitutional bisexuality as the key theoretical maneuver that both pathologized homosexuality and inspired an optimistic approach to its treatment. Yet scholarly analysis of the arguments that Rado made for his rejection of bisexuality is lacking. This article seeks to provide that analysis, by carefully reviewing and evaluating Rado's arguments by the standards of his own day. Because one of Rado's main arguments is that bisexuality is an outdated concept according to modern biology, I consider what contemporary biologists had to say on the topic. The work of behavioral endocrinologist Frank Beach (1911-1988) is important in this context and receives significant attention here. Rado ultimately distanced himself from Beach's behavioral endocrinology, appealing instead to evolutionary discourse to buttress his claim that homosexuality is pathological. This tactic allowed him to refashion psychoanalysis into a moralistic discipline, one with closer ties to a medical school. (PsycINFO Database Record

Reading Italian Psychoanalysis

The book springs out from the will, expressed by some American psychoanalysts in 2010, to have a collection of some of the most representative Italian contributions to psychoanalysis, in that Italian psychoanalysis had undertaken an original and interesting theoretical and technical configuration yet not fully known abroad. So, history and epistemology of psychoanalysis needed of such a source.

Transference, relationship and the analyst as object: Findings from the north american comparative clinical methods working party

Data from the North American Comparative Clinical Methods (CCM) Working Party a is used to 1) explore how psychoanalysts in North America conceive and address the transference and the relationship between analyst‐analysand and 2) to study what kinds of ‘objects’ psychoanalysts become, explicitly and implicitly, within psychoanalytic treatments.The North American CCM Working Party closely studied 17 clinical cases presented by North American psychoanalysts across the spectrum of analytic schools at their meetings. We found that the 17 analysts fell into three different groupings according to the internal consistency of their method and their approaches to transference, relationship and analyst‐as ‐object. We also found that analysts' individual work, while heavily influenced by their schools of thought, also involved unique interpretations of their particular paradigms.

From No Name Woman to Birth of Integrated Identity: Trauma-Based Cultural Dissociation in Immigrant Women and Creative Integration

This paper explores the challenges in integration of ethnic identity among a certain segment of immigrant women who have experienced sexism related traumas in their culture of origin. Unlike other immigrant women who may come from a nontraumatic, average expectable environment of their culture of origin into American culture, these women’s assimilative experiences and integration of identity are more complicated by the fact that their ethnic identity is tied to trauma. These women may find a refuge in the American culture, while defensively dissociating from their culture of origin, disavowing ethnic ties, severing contact with family, or avoiding contact with people from the same ethnic group. Their avoidance of their culture of origin amounts to cultural dissociation. Cultural dissociation is hard to detect and work with because cultural phenomenon in general is a blind spot for most American psychoanalysts. I contend that in order to successfully engage dissociated cultural states, a therapist’s ability to self reflect on her cultural situatedness is crucial. The creative challenge of the analyst-patient dyad is to disentangle the patient’s particular traumatic experiences from nontraumatizing normative aspects of the culture of origin in order to promote a viable ethnic identity.

The Transformative Odyssey of James T. McLaughlin

James McLaughlin was one of a handful of eminent American psychoanalysts, trained within the confines of the then-dominant ego psychology mold in the 1950s and 1960s, who led the growing acceptance of the more flexibly nuanced two-person psychology, associated with the "relational turn." This transformation is traced in McLaughlin's writings as they evolved from his early papers through his capstone summarizing book. McLaughlin is shown to have been an underappreciated psychoanalytic theorist and clinician.

The Couch in Psychoanalysis

For many American psychoanalysts the couch is the default position used with all analytic patients. This paper reviews empirical studies of the relation between the patient's position, sitting or lying, and free association. Findings are inconsistent; the patient's position may have an effect in some dyads and not in others. There have been no studies of a possible relationship between the patient's position and therapeutic outcome. Therefore, there is no empirical foundation for putting all analytic patients on the couch. We propose that selection of a position for the patient requires a careful, empathic, flexible, clinical judgment by the analyst, including consideration of the analyst's own theory, as well as of the patient's personality characteristics and diagnosis.

Fertile Ground at the Edge of Difference: Self, Other, and Potential Space: Commentary on Paper by Gillian Straker

This discussion of Gillian Straker's paper represents one of multiple efforts among American psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to reach across geographical and political boundaries and to engage in dialogues with colleagues across the globe. The author addresses questions raised by Straker regarding the world of politics and morality and the choices we make as individual citizens and as psychoanalysts. The historical links between East and West of the Atlantic are discussed, focusing on the politics of colonization and on racism, particularly as these have exerted powerful influences on cultural narratives and on the process of identity formation. The author argues that, as race is a social construct established for the benefit of the financially and politically powerful (who claim “whiteness”) at terrible costs to those lacking such power (the “Others”), it cannot be understood solely from the position of the “Other.” Whiteness, too, must be interrogated, the author proposes, if we are to grasp fully the conflicts, the anxieties, and the ambivalence of whiteness itself (Bhabha, 1984) that are integral to the experience of being “raced.” We know well that difference, though natural to the human condition, can nevertheless potentiate deadly human conflict. Thus, sharing Straker's profound concerns regarding the current traumatogenic state in which our world is situated, the author joins the call for psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners to exercise our clinical and intellectual expertise in the service of promoting mutual understanding.

Introduction to Papers from the Conference Dionysius' Ear: Trauma, Tragedy, and Psychoanalytic Listening

In this paper I describe the origin and spirit of the meeting of about 200 European, Israeli, and American psychoanalysts for a week in Siracusa, Sicily, to consider our work as embedded in our Greco-Roman cultural roots while we reveled, Dionysius-like, in that culture in many forms: drama, archeology, food, wine, and music. Organized by five institutes and hosted by ISIPSé (Rome), in June 2004, this meeting revolved around evening performances of Medea and Oedipus Rex in the ancient Greek theater and was entitled “Dionysius' Ear: Trauma, Tragedy, and Psychoanalytic Listening.”

Writing about patients: I. Ways of protecting confidentiality and analysts' conflicts over choice of method.

Thirty American psychoanalysts who have published articles using clinical material from their patients were interviewed about their method for ensuring confidentiality. Almost twice as many analysts chose to disguise material as regularly requested permission for the use of patients' material. The other analysts in the sample varied their approach, depending on circumstances, between using disguise alone and using disguise but also requesting consent. Methods of disguise, the timing of request for permission in relation to the phase of analysis, and changes in analysts' ideas about the benefits and detrimental effects of these choices are discussed and illustrated. Each decision is reconsidered in light of its potential effect on patients and their analysis. The dilemma posed by the importance of writing about patients for the health and growth of psychoanalysis as a field and the potential negative consequences for patients and their analyses is considered.

A Visit to the Budapest School

Within the past ten years, there has been a growing interest among American psychoanalysts in the work of Sandor Ferenczi and his followers, the so-called Budapest School. Several collections of essays on Ferenczi have appeared, while his correspondence with Freud and his Clinical Diary were finally published and translated. In this paper, I will give an overview of the historical importance of the Budapest School analysts, and then focus on three overlapping areas of their interest that have been and will continue to be particularly challenging. First, their exploration, stimulated by Ferenczi, of clairvoyance and telepathy, as these relate to the analytic situation, to transference and countertransference. Second, the mother-child dyad in the first year of life and the importance of trauma in early development. Third, the theory of psychosis.

American psychoanalysts who influenced Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Eugene O’Neill’s finest play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, owes enormously to the direct and personal influence of two American psychoanalysts, Smith Ely Jelliffe and Gilbert VanTassel Hamilton. Each independently taught O’Neill as well as some of his co-workers psychoanalytic theory, and collaborated in projects leading to publications. Jelliffe and Hamilton steered O’Neill and his colleagues to the writings of Freud, Jung, Edward Kempf, and Adolf Meyer, and discussed the material with them. Thus, their orientation and therapeutic efforts infuse this American classic. Eugene O’Neill, a Nobel laureate often cited as the “father of American drama” (Gassner, 1967), spotlighted the troubled family, writing first of families in crises and later depicting them over many generations. Fascinated by family dynamics, he had embarked on a series of nine plays he called “the Cycle,” involving a single family line spanning 150 years, including their transition from Old to New World (Sheaffer, 1968; Weissman, 1957). Long Day’s Journey into Night is not in the Cycle, but it is O’Neill’s own autobiographic family drama. Dedicating the play to his wife, Carlotta, O’Neill wrote, “I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones” (O’Neill, 1956, p. 7). O’Neill acknowledged that writing the play let him work through his conflictual feelings toward his family. Thus, the play illustrates the principles of reparation in a creative act as defined by Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984, p. 405).

Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of Trauma

Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of Trauma Angelika Rauch (bio) 1 Classical Analysis: Problems for Trauma Therapy According to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, American ego psychology has taken a leading role in debunking what it considers antiquated Freudian approaches to the study of trauma. As neutral observers and students of the facts, ego psychologists have purportedly reclaimed the study of trauma as the search for an objectifiable traumatic event in the past, one that can be accessed as recovered memory, as a specimen of pathogenic development, or as cognitive and behavioral effects that point to an inaccessible implied memory buried in the psyche. Central to this revision of psychoanalytical trauma therapy is the dismissal of Nachträglichkeit as an antiquated and irrelevant concept. Harold P. Blum, for instance, writes in a recent article of JAPA that “‘deferred action’ is an ambiguous concept, a dubious, antiquated, theoretical legacy.” According to Blum, “deferred action overlooks the immediate and potentially powerful effects of preoedipal trauma and is dissociated from considerations of cumulative trauma and developmental disturbance.” [1155]. With respect to Freud’s case of the Wolf-Man, Blum states that “[d]eferred action emphasized traumatic events and memory rather than cumulative developmental effects of shock and strain trauma, and pathogenic object relationships.” Key to Blum’s view, then, is the assertion that “the concept of deferred action deterred consideration of real infantile experience and the complex overdetermination of pathogenesis through development” [1156]. Blum apparently takes the side of those who like to argue that trauma is more real than imagined. Whereas oedipal trauma is an imaginary or illusory trauma, preoedipal trauma is comprehensible as real shock and, as such, is empirically true. This is an idea that is very compatible with “recovered memory” therapy, a subject that has become controversial in recent debates about child abuse and recovered memory syndrome. In contrast, Arnold H. Modell in Other Times, Other Realities points out that “[t]he concept of Nachträglichkeit is virtually unknown among American psychoanalysts. This may be due in part to Strachey’s faulty translation; but this idea is also inconsistent with the belief in an orderly hierarchical psychic development such as that envisioned by ego psychologists.” [3]. In other words, Freudian Nachträglichkeit violates the principles of space and time assumed by empirical scientists whose conceptions are founded on the causality of such principles as stimulus/response. It is here, of course, that ego psychology’s treatment of trauma would come into conflict not only with Freudian analysis, including its French Freudian variants, but with the kind of trauma studies being conducted by the contributors to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory. They include Bessel [End Page 111] van der Kolk, Onno van der Hart, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Robert Lifton, and, of course, Cathy Caruth herself. Emphasis on the reality of traumatic shock (as abuse, stress, accident, and so on), however important it may be, loses sight of a hermeneutical dimension of psychoanalytic therapy that Caruth and her contributors emphasize: the question of how meanings are associated or bound to the understanding of life’s events. My own clinical approach to psychoanalysis favors the introduction of an even stronger hermeneutical perspective that is sensitive to the kinds of issues raised by philosophers like Dilthey, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Gadamer, for whom the question of experience is not reducible to restricted understandings of stimulus/response, nor—as in the case of Caruth (for example, in Unclaimed Experience)—to the privileging of language as a formal (that is, literary) construct. Rather, I am interested in emphasizing a hermeneutics of the therapeutic encounter within which questions of language, culture, history, and behavior are situated. With respect to trauma therapy, I will introduce a number of well-known analytical contributions even as I take the following statement of Arnold Modell’s as my point of departure: The analyst or therapist becomes an unwitting collaborator in the recreation of the past, while still retaining a proximity to present time. The therapist becomes the person with whom one can reexperience trauma within a new context or experience for the first time what has been absent in the past. Affects belonging to...

The Contemporary Kleinians of London

Roy Schafer, Ph.D., notes in his epilogue to The Contemporary Kleinians of London that he has held an interest in Kleinian theory and writings since the 1950s. One assumes that Dr. Schafer's well-known autonomous and original thinking allowed him to transcend the political forces within the field that operated to suppress exposure to Kleinian thinking in many of us who obtained psychoanalytic training in the United States in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Schafer emphasizes throughout the book that Kleinian thinking is firmly grounded in the thought of Sigmund Freud; he emphasizes this point by referring to the contemporary British Kleinians as “Kleinian Freudians.” Melanie Klein seems to have seen herself as Sigmund Freud's spiritual if not biological daughter.1 Her theories of early infantile experience arose directly from the foundations of object relations theory found in Mourning and Melancholia. The contemporary Kleinians of London (“these Kleinians,” as Schafer calls them, to distinguish them from their South American brethren) seem to have expunged from their perspective most of the colorful but highly controversial concepts that Melanie Klein espoused and that apparently gave American psychoanalysts such pause. The U.S. vision of Klein was of a non-physician with questionable clinical bases for her ideas (read “wild speculations”) who was destroying the psychoanalytic scaffolding that the much more conservative Anna Freud was staunchly upholding in the decades after her father's illness and death. Sigmund Freud's apparent determination not to undercut his daughter by agreeing with Klein must have been tormenting to a talented and ambitious woman whose psychoanalytic birth was through the (originally) mainline giants, Abraham and Ferenczi. As Schafer effectively demonstrates in this collection of essays (most previously published), the contemporary descendants of the grande dame seem almost to stick to the party line. Steadfast interpretation of the transference from an objectivist stance is their main focus, and this is certainly ego psychologically and psychoanalytically fundamental. To be sure, little or no attention is given to the Oedipus complex, and one wonders if these Kleinians are not inclined to reduce even straightforward neurotic formations to their core concept of the dyadic struggle to achieve the depressive position. On the other hand, seasoned psychoanalysts and beginning psychotherapists alike are increasingly faced with patients who manifest serious disturbances in the borderline and narcissistic spheres and who present formidable technical problems for the therapist. Fundamental Kleinian concepts such as projective identification and containment, splitting, the paranoid-schizoid position, and pathological organizations, elusive though they may be in definition, are helpful in unlocking the “stuckness” and the negative therapeutic reactions that beset many a therapy and leave the therapist gasping for a breath of understanding. The Contemporary Kleinians of London contains 18 essays written by 12 authors. Only two chapters are original; many are printed with permission of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, which of course was founded by Ernest Jones in 1920 and whose pages saw much of the original Kleinian thought unfold. One might quibble with an expensive volume containing so much previously published work, but Schafer has chosen these essays with care (and with clear regret over space limitations and omissions) and with attention to the use of detailed clinical descriptions to demonstrate the elusive concepts and the way these Kleinians do their work. Schafer adds a personal introduction to each essay and thereby serves as a guide for the uninitiated. Hanna Segal and Betty Joseph, perhaps the most widely known of the contemporary Kleinians, contribute two and three chapters, respectively. Irma Brenman Pick is here, as are John Steiner and eight others. Schafer encourages the reader to give careful study to the case material and to read beyond this sampler. The reviewer found Grosskurth's biography of Klein a helpful companion volume.1 The Contemporary Kleinians of London is not an easy read for the Kleinian novice, but such a reader will emerge from the experience with a wish to read and know more. The dark veil imposed by fear of Klein has been lifted, and her ideas, becoming better known, will now be explored for their usefulness and truth value. Roy Schafer has helped lift the veil.

Establishment of the Institute of Psychotherapy

In the 1950s there was a lack of possibilities for training in individual, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in Norway. In 1962, the author and a psychiatrist, Endre Ugelstad, who had cooperated for many years, started a training institute in an old flat in Oslo. Later, Per Mentzsen was included as administrator and teacher. The author describes the initial pioneer spirit, the inspiration given by influential American psychoanalysts and later the recognition by the Directorate of Health which led to financial support.Psychotherapy Training.

Freud's Antipathy to America

Freud first saw this in America's attitude toward the use of cocaine. It was freely and legally used and even promoted by American physicians as beneficial in many medical conditions. Freud was first swept along by America's prococaine enthusiasm. He narrowly missed destroying his own medical reputation by his continuing close connection and advocacy of cocaine. Freud made his only visit to America in 1909. Despite the success of his visit and the congeniality of Americans toward him, he was already programmed toward a negative response. He allowed minor everyday inconveniences and cultural differences to spoil the trip for him. The chronic intestinal distress that had bothered him previously now was labelled as his "American dyspepsia." He developed additional reasons for disliking America. They accepted his three key dissenters, Adler, Jung, and Rank. He even believed that these three men achieved greater notoriety and popularity in America than he did. In fact, the Freudian psychoanalytic movement became much larger and more powerful in America than did the followings of any or all of his defectors. Freud did not like the shortcuts and lack of mastery of the basics of psychoanalysis that he believed happened in America. Some of this was true, but it was mainly exaggerated in Freud's mind. The gold of psychoanalysis was never transformed into a practical but deficient psychoanalytic alloy as Freud feared it might. There was a genuine disagreement about whether a psychoanalyst should have to become a medical doctor or not. It was a complicated issue in America because of laws that said that doing psychoanalysis was practicing medicine. Freud viewed the American stand against recognizing lay analysts as more evidence of American's being a rebellious son. Economic factors also played a significant factor in Freud's dislike of America. Freud was initially enthusiastic about President Wilson and his plans for peace. He found after World War I that all of his savings were wiped out and that Vienna suffered from a crippling inflation. As a result of this he had to take increasingly more American analysands as they paid him in valuable American dollars. He resented this financial dependency on Americans. He also had difficulty communicating with these American analysands and largely blamed them for their undisciplined way of speaking. What I have presented is a survey or overview of the reasons for Freud's dislike of America.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Concurrent Individual and Individual-In-A-Group Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

This paper's thesis is that concurrent individual-in-a-group and individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be conducted in conformance with psychoanalytic principles of treatment as well as can individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy alone. American psychoanalysts have shown little interest in group psychotherapy, probably because of earlier criticism that transference is diluted by the greater reality of the therapist in group psychotherapy. This is a misconception extrapolated from the mirror model of dyadic analytic technique. The criticism was formulated during a period when that model was prominent and there was little awareness that the actual personal relationship between patient and analyst played an important facilitating role in the dyadic analytic process, including providing a basis for investiture of transference. Also, the criticism was based on one-session-per-week group psychotherapy, whereas concurrent individual-in-a-group and individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy utilizes two group sessions plus one or two individual sessions per week, enabling a more intensive patient-therapist relationship. Concurrent group and individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy constitutes a contribution to the widening scope of application of psychoanalytic treatment.