Analyst's Position Research Articles

(Re)Storying embodied running and motherhood: a creative non-fiction approach

ABSTRACT In the present study, post-partum embodied subjectivity of five competitive recreational mother runners of children under 6 years of age, was explored using narrative inquiry from a story analyst and a story teller position. This focus expands understanding of sport, embodiment and good mother ideals using narrative inquiry as a novel theory to centralize body-self stories contextualized in cultural narratives. A central theme of ‘reimagining the post-partum self’ was identified from a story analyst position whereby stories are the objects of analysis. We shifted to storytellers to present the nuanced intersecting meanings of this central theme in the form of three accessible creative nonfiction stories presented as composite vignettes. The three vignettes were: listening to, and learning from my post-pregnant body; new mum, new athlete; and running (re)connects me to myself. These findings expand critical insights into the motherhood, sport and embodiment nexus into the under-studied topic of post-partum recreational sport. Such work opens pedagogical possibilities through telling, and witnessing, stories to highlight constraining and emancipative aspects, of women’s physical participation.

Collisions in the Dark: Invisible Intersectionality and the Black Female Psychoanalyst

At the end of the 1980s, Black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw offered intersectionality as a way to shift our attention to Black female subjectivity as a complex, multi-dimensional unfolding of identity. This essay focuses on how she situated that identity within, as she termed it, whiteness as “a single-axis framework of analysis.” In this respect, her discussion converged with that of her peer, the writer Toni Morrison, in the work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993). Interpreting the psychoanalytic implications of Crenshaw’s and Morrison’s stances toward Whiteness, this essay asks, where does the Black female analyst position herself in this discussion? Drawing from the writings of Black feminist thinkers, Black female psychoanalysts, and relational and interpersonal theorists, invisible intersectionality is explored as a set of unseen forces colliding in the dark, animating the dyad in the clinical space of the Black female analyst’s consulting room.

Psychoanalysis versus adoption: analytic parenthood and parental countertransference.

As we know, Sándor Ferenczi compared the analytic and adoptive relationships as the psychoanalyst exercises a parental role to some extent. The author notes that a commonality between the adoptive relationship and the analytic one is that if the parental couple is burdened with painful counter-transferential experiences and feelings that have not been worked through, these can pose a danger for the strength of the newly developing parental relationship. In the analytic situation the analyst’s position implies the risk of conflict with the parental internal objects resulting from the primary introjections, especially if the original environment was abusive or severely neglectful. Similarly, the adoptive family is often burdened with revengeful and competitive aggressiveness of their own introjected parental objects, having as a main task to keep unified the pre-adoptive autobiographical memories that were dissociated and interrupted. In such cases it is very important to give the adoptive parents help so as to cope with their difficult “countertransference,” supporting them to reduce their sense of guilt and unsuitability to nurse their children, especially if the adoptive parents feel guilty because of their own infertility. In this paper the author describes two cases concerning both situations, emphasising the clinical risks and the evolutionary potentialities.

Female Identification in a Case of Paranoid Psychosis: Rethinking a Practice in the Light of Lacanian Theory

The authors present a clinical case of paranoid psychosis in which the issue of female identification plays a prevalent role. After a brief introduction on the clinical approach to psychosis in Lacan's teaching, the clinical case is exposed and commented on, highlighting in particular (1) the analyst's position; (2) the role of pousse à la femme ("push-towards-woman") in psychosis; and (3) the therapeutic effects of psychoanalytic treatment for the psychotic patient.

Veiled or veiling? – Turning back the gaze on the Western feminist. Understanding hijab from the socio-culturally located positions of knowing

The article draws on the analysis of qualitative interviews in which young Muslim women in South Africa talk about their hijab practices. Taking a contextual, discursive psychological approach, the study investigates how individuals negotiate their subjectivities of hijabi women within socio-culturally available discourses. Participants' relationship with veiling is examined in terms of its socio-cultural, religious and lived complexity. The analysis is used as the premise of a reflexive critique of the analyst's Occidental position of knowing, whose limitations are consequently exposed. Nuances identified in the analysis are found to belie the binary of submission and resistance, upon which the Occidental view of veiling is formulated. The mono-dimensionality of the view, limited solely to the ideological implications of hijab, is problematized by the lived (affective, pragmatic) contingencies of veiling emergent from the data. The examination of differences underlying the Muslim and the Western sartorial practices leads to the identification of their similarities and commonalities.

Off Course? A Career in Archaeology Outside of the Academy

Off Course? A Career in Archaeology Outside of the Academy

Is the empirical validity of prior experience for performance affected by rating approach?

Purpose– In the public sector, Training and Experience (T & E) exams assess prior experience and are one of the most often used methods for selecting job applicants. This study uses a KSA approach, where raters judge the quality of job relevant prior experience, not its duration or quantity. It was hypothesized that an additional rater and a consensus meeting between raters would increase reliability and validity.Design/methodology/approach– T & E and supervisory ratings were obtained over a 12-year period for 166 candidates seeking promotion to a budget analyst position. Validity was measured by the correlation between T & E scores and supervisory ratings. Consensus was required only for T & E scores differing by a specific amount (hybrid consensus).Findings– Intraclass reliability was 0.73, 0.84, and 0.95 in the one-rater, two-rater, and hybrid consensus conditions with each coefficient greater than the next (p< 0.05) showing the benefit of multiple raters and consensus for reliability. Validity was significant at 0.21, 0.26, and 0.251 for each rating condition, respectively (two-tail test;p< 0.01). Validity was greater in the two-rater condition than in the one-rater condition (one-tail test;p< 0.05). Consensus did not improve validity beyond that of two raters. For consensus T & Es (n=76), two raters improved validity (one-tail test;p< 0.05), moving from 0.112 to 0.231 but not reliability; consensus improved reliability (two-tail test;p< 0.05) but not validity.Originality/value– There has been a vacuum in T & E research for close to 20 years. Validity data are difficult to obtain but critical for meta-analysis. T & Es showed validity. Use of two raters improved validity but consensus did not increase the gain.

Field of Vision: Radical Uncertainty and the Analyst's Conduct: Commentary on Paper by Donnel B. Stern

There is a relationship between biography and theory. The analyst's ideas or formulations about his patients—theories really—must be determined, to some degree, by the certain and uncertain impact of his own history. Harry Stack Sullivan brought psychoanalysis squarely into the ambit of the relational/historical world by insisting that the mind is thoroughly and inherently social. In doing so, he staked a claim for the link between history, that is, social experience, and personhood. Our personalities and our theories are social-historical constructions. In relation to this, some differences between the interpersonal/relational and Bionian concepts of field theory are provided. One important difference pertains to the role of the analyst's conduct. Two meanings of conduct—to behave or to organize behavior—are at the center of what distinguishes the interpersonal/relational view of the analyst's position in the field from the Bionian view. For the relational analyst, action in the analytic field, including enactment, is conduct, and conduct is always bidirectional. The analyst, then, is a medium to alter, to reconstruct the self. He does not provide experience, he is experience. The form of an analytic exchange gives shape to the field and its content.

Intelligence Analysis and the Bureau: The Evolution of Analysis and the Analyst Position in the FBI, 1908-2013

Intelligence Analysis and the Bureau: The Evolution of Analysis and the Analyst Position in the FBI, 1908-2013

“Open Close Open”: Discussion of Raanan Kulka's “Between Emergence and Dissolving: Contemporary Reflections on Greatness and Ideals in Kohut's Legacy”

Kulka's work, taking Kohut's bipolar model to its next developmental stage, introduces the idea of an existential vibration of consciousness: between openness, prior to existence, and the ‘closedness’ of coming into being. I discuss in my response to Kulka's two clinical examples of patients who have lost their ability for this existential vibration, focusing on the quality of the therapeutic presence that is required for enhancing its return. The analyst's position of emptiness, his meditative state, his position of dissolving, is essential for the restoration of the patients' primary open nature and thereby for the possibility of moving between their infinite existential potentials and into unbroken emergences of being.

Winnicott e a Posição Ética do Analista

Based on Winnicott's theory, this paper discusses the analyst's ethical position, which should be able to give support to the individual's original condition, thus favoring his maturing process. Such support, which is linked to an ethics of autonomy, seems different from other kinds of therapy that provide only the elimination of symptoms, without offering alternatives that contribute to the development and the creative expression of the self. In order to illustrate the position maintained by the analyst's support, we will focus on the analysis of a patient of Winnicott's, analyst Margaret Little. In such analysis, the referred position played a key role in dealing with the intense psychotic anxieties of the patient and, consequently, in promoting her integration and emotional development. By respecting the specific needs of the patient's self, this is an ethical position that respects otherness.

Fragments of the other: a psychoanalytic approach to the ego in schizophrenia

This article describes psychoanalytic research carried out with schizophrenic patients. The aspects of the clinical case are paradigmatic for understanding the splitting of ego in schizophrenia and the triggering of psychosis. There will be a brief historical discussion of the concept of schizophrenia, and of the differences between the ideas developed by Eugen Bleuler and Emil Krapaelin. We compare the diverse authors’ ideas to illuminate today's discussion on clinical methodology and the relationship between psychiatric and psychoanalysis. We link up Bleuler's proposition concerning the splitting of the ego in schizophrenia and his broader conception of psychopathology with more recent psychoanalytic explanation of the disintegration, in psychosis, of all imaginary organization of the ego, as proposed in Jacques Lacan's theory. Clinical vignettes are also discussed in the light of Lacan's psychoanalytical lecture on a Marguerite Duras novel, in order to elucidate the phenomenon of transitivism, a key concept in this case. The article suggests a direction for the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia based on the analyst's position, compared with Duras's character Jacques Hold, who, as a narrator of part of Duras's plot, allows the book's subject to articulate her desire.

A clínica psicanalítica na universidade: reflexões a partir do trabalho de supervisão

Partindo do trabalho como supervisores de estágio acadêmico, desenvolvido em uma clínica-escola do curso de graduação em psicologia, levantam-se questões pertinentes à condução de processos clínicos, fundados na perspectiva psicanalítica, nesses ambientes. É confrontado o lugar do saber e do sujeito na universidade e na psicanálise como elementos que fundam uma ética que é própria a esta - questionando, com isso, alguns efeitos aí produzidos sobre a inserção do aluno no campo psicanalítico e a possibilidade de sua transmissão pelo trabalho de supervisão. Privilegiando os efeitos suscitados pela imposição de um prazo para o encerramento dos atendimentos clínicos desenvolvidos no estágio, o posicionamento freudiano frente a esse dispositivo é tomado como paradigma da posição do analista frente aos impasses que lhe são apresentados no exercício de seu trabalho.

18–19 November 2008 Washington, D.C

18–19 November 2008 Washington, D.C

The analyst's desire in the era of intersubjectivity

The increasing discourse of the concept of intersubjectivity in modern psychoanalysis has pushed the interest in the intrapsychic and its emphasis on drive and object into the background. Authors who wish to avoid a one-sided focus on intersubjectivity usually subscribe to a dual dimensional approach, taking both perspectives into account. In this article, the analytic situation is described not in two, but in three dimensions, the analytic function constituting a third dimension necessary for the interplay between the other two dimensions. Focusing on the analyst's position, the author presents a model that consists of (1) the-analyst-as-subject, (2) the-analyst-as-function, and (3) the-analyst-as-object. The analytic function is understood to be invested with a particular form of desire and it is argued that the asymmetry between this desire of the analyst and the desire of the analysand is a central characteristic of the analytic situation.

Hamlet e o problema da verdade

Este artigo discute o problema da verdade, a partir da obra Hamlet e da produção teórica da Psicanálise. Objetiva mostrar a centralidade de tal problema, tanto no teatro quanto no processo analítico, e explorar alguns de seus aspectos tais como a estrutura de ficção e as relações com o desejo e as pulsões. Após ressaltar a dimensão mortífera da verdade, problematiza as suas ligações com o saber e a posição do analista. Para tanto, utiliza-se da clássica interpretação de Freud sobre a peça shakespeariana e de avanços teóricos e interpretativos efetuados por Jacques Lacan. Por fim, o presente estudo reafirma a posição segundo a qual o que se espera de um analista é que ele faça funcionar seu saber em termos de verdade, e não o contrário. Nessa direção, sublinha que é impossível uma apreensão totalizadora da verdade, apontando que sempre algo resta por conceber.

Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don't: On the Pragmatics of a Postmodern Psychoanalytic Stance

Bringing the Plague highlights the relation between postmodern theory and technique. I explore Layton's application of postmodernism's concern with the analyst's subjectivity and subject relation position in her discussion of a male analyst's treatment of a female patient. Arguing for a pragmatic therapeutic approach, I dispute the efficacy of being excessively transparent in certain instances. After outlining implicit tenets of relational and postmodern theories, I highlight the importance of ensuring that theoretical belief systems do not blunt our sensitivity to patients' therapeutic needs.

Politicize or Perish! The Importance of Policy for Australian Psychiatric–Mental Health Nurses

As the largest professional group within the Australian mental health nursing workforce, psychiatric-mental health nurses are well positioned to influence mental health policy. However, the dominance of nursing by the medical profession has limited the extent to which this potential has been realized, with nurses remaining relatively unheard within the political arena. In recognition of this situation, the Centre for Psychiatric Nursing Research and Practice implemented a position for a policy analyst. Three primary aims were identified for this position: networking and relationship building, building profile, and providing a voice for psychiatric-mental health nursing. This article provides an overview of these three aims and the achievements to date. It is concluded that the policy analyst position has made a significant contribution to increasing the profile of psychiatric-mental health nursing and, therefore, to its capacity to influence policy.

Orwell, Winnicott, and Lacan: Notes of a Psychoanalyst from Project H.O.M.E.

This essay describes the author's experience as a pro_bono psychoanalyst/consultant at a residence for homeless women in Philadelphia. She has found most cogent to that work the ideas of Donald Winnicott (e.g., the holding environment, projective identification, countertransference) and those of Jacques Lacan (e.g., desire, the jouissance of the symptom, the insistence of the signifier). The article points to the interplay between social class and desire and suggests that the analyst's position may be that of a good-enough saint.

Private Terrors Sexualized Aggression and a Psychoanalyst's Fear of Her Patient

This clinical paper explores the meanings and evolution of an analyst's reaction of fear in relation to her patient's sexualized aggression. From both an intrapsychic and an intersubjective perspective, the author analyzes the coconstruction of this transference—countertransference phenomenon. Case vignettes illustrate the author's attempts to address her patient's sexualized aggression while struggling to free herself from the feelings of intimidation and fearfulness stirred by his sadomasochistic fantasies and patterns of interaction. The analyst's unconscious identification with the patient's disowned femininity and narcissistic vulnerability is seen as central to this countertransference “stranglehold.” Release from the analyst's masochistic position comes through a shift in her own affective participation. The importance of the analyst's recognizing her own unconscious contributions to this sadomasochistic dynamic is emphasized and elaborated. Discussion also focuses on the relevance of gender to the issue of countertransference fear, as illustrated in this particular male patient—female analyst dyad.