Contemporary Psychoanalysis Research Articles

Finding Integration in a Splintered World: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Clinical Work.

Practitioners interested in the process of helping people change are confronted today with such a burgeoning array of perspectives, theories, and treatment modalities that even the most diligent can feel overwhelmed by the number of choices. This plethora of approaches calls into question whether there is anything that can tie them together. Asking if the psychoanalytic field is destined to be splintered into fragments that defy cohesion or if it is possible to generate a way of thinking and working that is more inclusive, this paper takes a historical and integrationist approach, grounded in a clinical focus on mental organization and Leo Rangell's total composite theory. It discusses trends in the development of psychoanalysis and argues for the importance of integration of the findings from neuropsychology and neuropsychoanalysis into psychoanalytic clinical work.

‘And Losing Thus the Boundary / Of the Finite Me, / Diffusing Outward, I Approach / The Edges of Infinity’ (Plath, 2020: 133) – The Two Dimensions of Extimacy in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Thought

The article investigates the meaning and value of Jacques Lacan’s term ‘extimacy’. It argues that there are two competing notions of extimacy at work in the literature, a negative one (which dominates the literature) and a positive (nascent) one, which is not yet fully worked out in the literature and to which this contribution offers a form of development through the recourse to the instance of the (love) letter in the unconscious. The author associates the positive ‘valence’ of extimacy with what Paul Cilliers calls ‘a certain slowness’ which is inextricably tied up with reflection as one of the fundamental features of any successful psychoanalysis, namely an analysis that passes through the Act. The author shows how the writing of a love letter – as an instance of slow reflection – not only exposes a (repressed) positive dimension to extimacy, but also (and perhaps because of this) qualifies as an instance of more or less successful self-analysis – what the author associates with a psychic progression of sorts.

On the certainty of hidden moralism: Rethinking the ethical turn in psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT It is well known that Heinz Kohut’s papers on narcissism brought forth a re-evaluation of a patient’s healthy self-regard. Indeed, those pivotal essays open up a novel perspective and, with it, clinical possibility by ceasing to cast a patient’s narcissistic concern in a purely pejorative light—as more primitive or less adaptive mode of being—to seeing it as an approvable sign of psychic health. Less well known, however, is Kohut’s corollary insight, notably that an emotional climate, what he calls the deeply ingrained value system of the Occident, is responsible, in large part, for the wholesale devaluation of narcissism. My focus in this paper is with this less well known but equally important insight, and my aim is to properly understand Kohut’s observation that an allegiance to this deeply ingrained value system may have a deleterious impact on clinical practice. I close by suggesting that we let Kohut caution us that smuggling in altruistic moral presuppositions can be a hindrance to clinical work, and that we pause before we follow the trend in contemporary psychoanalysis that encourages us to take an ethical turn.

Erich Fromm’s social psychoanalysis: Beyond the interpersonal dyad

This article addresses the place of society in Erich Fromm's pioneering psychoanalytic work and in the evolution of interpersonal theory and practice. It suggests that there is much to be gained from a re-examination of Fromm's politically progressive perspective. By bridging sociology and psychoanalysis, Fromm developed a new approach known as “social psychoanalysis,” which sought to explain and understand the centrality of society in human experience and the therapeutic process. Fromm moved beyond Freud and found an ally in the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan. Together, Fromm and Sullivan became the key founders of the Interpersonal School of Psychoanalysis located at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. Despite their commonalities, however, Fromm and Sullivan differed in central areas, particularly on the issue of “adaptation” to society. Sullivan believed that adaptation was a marker of successful personality development and Fromm maintained that society inscribed pathology into the human being. This difference would prove definitive as interpersonal psychoanalysis moved from its radical beginnings to become a dominant school of contemporary psychoanalysis that focused on the interpersonal dyad and the interactions between the analyst and patient.

Beyond fragmentation clinical journeys in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

Beyond fragmentation clinical journeys in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

Interpretation: Time, Timing, Loss, and Recovery in the Analytic Hour.

Interpretation remains relevant in contemporary psychoanalysis and serves a crucial linking function between patient and analyst. Interpretation provides an important link with temporalities: the time of the analytic hour and the time of the patient's history as it unfolds in the present. Analysis, it is argued, is bounded by time and loss. Two case vignettes, presented from a Kleinian perspective, exemplify these propositions.

Limits on Love: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Psychoanalytic Texts.

Critical discourse methodology and a Black feminist lens were used to examine the discourse of contemporary psychoanalysis, specifically to investigate the relationship between language, love, and power. Findings of the analysis include the following. The discourse encourages engagement with linguistic shortcuts, wherein concepts such as oppression and bigotry are used as conduits to discuss intrapsychic experiences. The discourse frames whiteness as the center of experience and marginalizes Blackness, Indigenousness, and other nonwhite perspectives. The discourse is vague about what constitutes love and what place love should have in clinical work. Ultimately, the discourse of the texts in this analysis suggests there is more work to do, more areas in the discipline to disrupt, and more love to give.

What would Freud have made of it? Notes on a “normal pathological organization” within contemporary psychoanalysis

AbstractPsychoanalytic discourse in relation to the situation in historic Palestine is subject to both ideologically‐based and anxiety‐driven inhibitions and restrictions that conflict with the discipline’s claim to be able to “stay with” difficult issues, to “think the unthinkable”. This situation is understood as a social pathology, and its impacts are explored through a literature review (explaining the paper’s length). It considers works that directly seek to protect Zionism from its critics, and texts whose purpose is to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic concepts to the study of social injustice. The qualities of this contemporary discourse are considered alongside Freud’s comments on the conditions for freedom of thought within psychoanalysis, and the example he provided in his comments on politics and society. Rather than a psychoanalytic contribution to understanding an issue of public concern, the paper attempts to describe aspects of psychoanalytic culture itself. It aims to facilitate deeper reflection amongst clinicians, on both an individual and collective level, regarding their contemporary engagement with coloniality and the social responsibilities of the psychoanalytic community.

Le complexe d’œdipe : un organisateur temporel toujours actuel

ContextThis article prolongs questions raised in the author's doctoral thesis. It engages with contemporary psychoanalytical research that questions the psychic modalities that organize the relationship to time and the subjective inscription of temporality, within the framework of the processes that begin at the time of puberty. These processes operate, in fact, as fertile moments of reorganization and psychic organization of the relationship to time of individuals. ObjectiveBased on the psychoanalytical works carried out since Freud as well as his own elaborations, the author underlines the importance of considering the Oedipus complex in its double valence, as a psychic organizer of the difference between the sexes and between the generations - this second valence having been very often left in the background compared to the first one. This psychoanalytic reading of the Oedipus complex, in its dual register, is set against other perspectives (gender studies and the historical study of myths). MethodStarting from the fundamental texts in the Freudian corpus and completing them with contributions from contemporary psychoanalysis, and illustrating this with a clinical vignette, the author underlines the heuristic value of recourse to the Oedipal myth as a representation of subjective and inter-subjective temporal organization. ResultsIn the wake of contemporary psychoanalytical research, the author's work demonstrates the interest of thinking about the place of the Oedipus complex as a psychic organizer of the relationship to time – the psychic modalities of investment in time appearing, in themselves, as organizers of psychic life. This is done from a complementarian perspective, which does not exclude other approaches to the problem. ConclusionsThis reflection invites us to think about the complexity of the Oedipal myth in order not to reduce it to its gendered dimension. If social and societal evolutions, as well as the anthropological context, must lead us to reexamine the value of our conceptual tools and their limits, the Oedipus complex as a nodal organizer must be grasped here in all its dimensions – sexual and temporal. As the author's reflections draw on clinical work with juvenile psychopathology, they deserve to be completed and discussed in the light of other complementary fields.

In the footsteps of Francesco Corrao: Reflections on a number of key problems in contemporary psychoanalysis

In his work, Francesco Corrao has addressed cutting-edge themes developed in psychoanalysis between the 1960s and the 1980s. A contemporary re-reading of his writings offers a valuable opportunity to highlight central themes in today’s psychoanalysis, such as the epistemological approach to the reality of the unconscious, the theory of the drives, countertransference, new and different perspectives on the transference, the centrality of the Oedipus complex, and the way in which digital technology has affected both culture and psychoanalysis. It seems particularly noteworthy that, while on the one hand Corrao’s thinking preserves and integrates a part of the more recent contributions, on the other hand it provides a more solid redefinition of the fundamental elements of psychoanalysis, showing both the tensions that emerge from contemporary developments in psychoanalysis and culture, and a number of potential solutions.

The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy By Steven Kuchuck. Confer Books, 2021. 198 pp.

The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy By Steven Kuchuck. Confer Books, 2021. 198 pp.Robin YoungRobin YoungRobin Young, PhD, is a senior member, training analyst, and instructor at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP); an assistant adjunct lecturer at New York University (NYU); and founder of an international Loewald reading group. Young has published research on the revised psychoanalytic theories of female development; studied the mother/infant dyad under Lousie Kaplan at NYU; made international and national psychoanalytic presentations; and undertaken private studies with Lew Aron and Jessica Benjamin. She is a member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and has had a private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy since 1980.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:June 2023https://doi.org/10.1521/prev.2023.110.2.229PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutReferencesAron L. (2006). Analytic impasse and the third: Clinical implications of intersubjectivity theory. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 87, 349–368. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarBalsam R. H. (2008). The essence of Hans Loewald. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 56, 1117–1128. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarBenjamin J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46. Crossref Medline, Google ScholarFerenczi S. (1949). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 225–230. Google ScholarFreud S. (1912). Recommendations to physicians practicing psycho-analysis. In Strachey J. (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 109–120). London: Hogarth Press, 1957–1974. Google ScholarKuhn T. (1949). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Google ScholarLoewald H. (1951). Ego and reality. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 32, 10–18. Google ScholarMaroda K. J. (2005). Legitimate gratification of the analysts’ needs. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 41, 371–388. Crossref, Google ScholarRenik O. (1999). Playing one's cards face up in analysis: An approach to the problem of self-disclosure. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 68(4), 521–539. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.1999.tb00546.x Crossref Medline, Google Scholar Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 110Issue 2Jun 2023 Information© 2023 N.P.A.P.PDF download

Is This My Home? How Psychoanalytic Training Led to My Cultural Reawakening

ABSTRACT In this paper, I reflect on how cultural selfobject experiences shape one’s sense of identity and how contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved in order to recognize the impact of extra psychic factors on emotional development. I use my personal experience as a Jewish, first-generation daughter of immigrants to focus on culture, fantasied whiteness, intergenerational transmission of the trauma of immigration, and the role of dissociation in formation of identity. I also elaborate on how an expanded psychoanalytic theory and practice that includes the socio-cultural as part of the relational field has helped me to understand how these experiences become internalized.

Remembering, repeating and working-through as a step in Freud’s ongoing struggle with the “what”, “why” and “how” of analytic knowing in the curative process

ABSTRACT In this paper the author offers a new reading of Freud's “Remembering, Repeating and Working-through”, examining the complex nature of central concepts that Freud presents within it. She demonstrates the text's special role in an ongoing effort of Freud's to articulate and ground the heart of his analytic insight that knowledge cures. While the insight itself is very well-known, the fact that Freud struggled throughout his life with its articulation and grounding is not. The struggle centered on questions pertaining to how analytic knowing could, not only enlighten the patient, but actually change his unconscious dynamics, and why the patient, having already “opted” for pathology in place of knowing would come to accept it; and ultimately, what was the nature of the knowledge offered in analysis and the individual's relationship to it that allowed for such dramatic changes to occur. The author briefly presents some of her earlier work on Freud's struggle with these issues and how Melanie Klein resolved them. It is in this context that she demonstrates how in Remembering, Repeating and Working-through” Freud may be seen to be taking important steps towards developing his ideas on analytic knowing and in ways that anticipate Klein's resolutions. This points to the close tie between Klein's and Freud's thinking on the nature of the analytic process and the person's desire for self-knowledge on which it relies, brings out the richness of this thinking and grounds its value to contemporary psychoanalysis.

Friendship of Virtue-The Place of True Friends in the Psychotherapeutic Process.

This paper offers a new take on friendship, its specific qualities, how it is subjectively experienced and changes over the course of a patient's life and how it might serve as catalyst for positive change in the therapeutic process. The premise is based on the Aristotelian definition of friendship as a friendship of virtue, as well as on insights stemming from intersubjective thinking, and observations about horizontal relationships in contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. A review of the scant psychodynamic and psychoanalytic literature on friendship is presented and the author notes its marginal place in the lexicon compared with other more extensively studied relationships. Three clinical cases are presented to illustrate the potential of "friendships of virtue" as paths toward positive transformation in the course of treatment.

Reflections on the Relationship between Orthodox Christian Theology and Psychoanalysis: A Review Essay

At a time when mental health is generally deteriorating, editors Eudoxia Delli and Vasileios Thermos have opportunely produced a volume that closely examines the intersection of Orthodox Christian theology and contemporary psychoanalysis. This volume provides access for English-speaking readers to a vibrant conversation on this topic, as it currently occurs in the Greek context. This review essay considers the insights this volume provides, and the application of these insights to the life of the church. The volume is a valuable contribution that argues persuasively from a variety of perspectives that the church and psychoanalysis can and ought to enjoy a fruitful and beneficial partnership. The art of looking within is as important today as ever, but more so in our age of widespread mental health issues.

The Age of Perversion and The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis by Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco

The Age of Perversion and The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis by Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco

Raised in the world of psychoanalysis: an interview with Judith Dupont.

This interview with Dr. Judith Dupont contains her reminiscences and thoughts about two topics of importance for the historiography of psychoanalysis. First, Dr. Dupont recalls her growing up among and meeting with pioneers, such as Vilma Kovács, Alice and Michael Balint, Melanie Klein, Imre Hermann and others. Second, Dr. Dupont reconstructs the chronicle of Ferenczi's manuscripts: how they were entrusted to Michael Balint by Ferenczi's widow, the complex reasons Balint could not publish them for more than 30 years, and finally, how Dr. Dupont succeeded in bringing the Clinical Diary to the public, and thus enriched contemporary psychoanalysis with the presence of Ferenczi after more than 50 years of silence and censorship.

Review of The new sexual landscape and contemporary psychoanalysis.

Review of The new sexual landscape and contemporary psychoanalysis.

The Politics of Anger: Putin and the psychology of rage

The Politics of AngerPutin and the psychology of rage Josh Cohen (bio) it's just gone 7 a.m. in my consulting room. I'm staring into the thin powder blue of the early March sky as the day's first patient readies himself on the couch. I look over, notice the taut knotting of his brow, the tight squeeze of his lowered eyelids, and feel the air between us thicken. Gerard* is beset by physical and emotional afflictions that stick to each other like a codependent couple. Crippling headaches and [End Page 57] insomnia merge into his fear of being consigned to permanent, irremediable loneliness. He then frequently discharges this double malaise in breathless monologues, fraught with panic and rage. Gerard begins by telling me it's just not working with Amanda, the woman he's been seeing for the last couple of months. He's tried to tell her what it's like, carrying these pounding headaches through the working day, practically hallucinating after another sleepless night, but she doesn't really get it. Barely two months and she's already fed up, and who can blame her? He goes on to rail against the dating apps he's forced to use, and their steady drip-feed of misinformation—out-of-date pictures, misleading self-descriptions, sometimes outright lies. Whom does any of it benefit beyond the platforms themselves, venal parasites on human vulnerability? I can feel his breath quicken, his blood heating as he inveighs against people's preference to present themselves as generic fictions online rather than as fleshly human beings in the real world. And then he moves on to me, sitting there smugly, no doubt possessed of a lovely wife and adorable children, feeling sorry for him. Well, he doesn't need my pity, he won't be patronized. Speaking of which, did I see Boris Johnson's puffed-up speech in Parliament yesterday? How do the people of this country tolerate that hideous tone of entitled condescension? He wants to grab a big tuft of BoJo's mussy blond hair and bang his fucking forehead on the desk till his skull cracks. A nice textbook interpretation of Gerard's behavior ought to be brewing at the back of my mind, perhaps built on the observation that he pivots to Johnson as a way of redirecting the violence he'd like to inflict on me. But his rage sends me instead to images of Vladimir Putin, tank battalions advancing, and frightened mothers pushing strollers across the rubble of their flattened homes. It's as if Gerard's rant concentrates something of the inexorable momentum of rage that suffuses politics today—the rage to make war on neighboring countries, on migrants, social-media adversaries, health advisors, welfare claimants—the diffuse and boundless [End Page 58] rage that feeds, and feeds off, itself. It is there in the targets of Gerard's ire: women's autonomy, the reign of misinformation, the nerve-shredding speed of a 24/7 culture, the soul-crushing impersonality and rootlessness of the virtual world, the casual corruptions of the political class—all motifs Russia has enlisted in the effort to open and infect the wounds of Western civil society and corrode its already worn democratic norms. I reproach myself silently. "What has this got to do with anything? Don't wander off. Stay with him." But the images of global conflict defiantly refuse to disperse, as though insisting on their own relevance. And Gerard's anger makes me want to scream, to scream at him or with him, to discharge some tiny portion of the massive agitation he sends through my clogged mind and enervated body, saturated as they are with the violence in the room and in the world beyond. And if this scream could speak, it might say, What the hell is going on? ________ to answer that question, it might be useful to think of Gerard's unexceptional middle-aged discontents and the unbound aggression of Putin and the Russian military as two instances, albeit of radically different orders of magnitude, of the operation of what psychoanalysis calls the drive. There is some resistance in contemporary psychoanalysis...

Trauma and Illusion: A Conversation between Robert D. Stolorow and Peter N. Maduro

ABSTRACT Reproduced below you will find the transcript of the interview I, Peter Maduro, conducted of Robert Stolorow, on April 17, 2021, respecting the forty-plus year history and conceptual development of his theory of emotional trauma. My interview of Dr. Stolorow was the centerpiece of an international on-line program co-sponsored by the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, in West Los Angeles, CA (ICP), and Psychoanalytic Inquiry (PI). (This program is available for viewing in its entirety upon request to ICP.) Around 1996, as soon as I began my clinical psychotherapy practice as a psych-intern here in West Los Angeles, CA, I joined one of Bob Stolorow’s clinical supervision groups. Toward the end of my first case presentation to Bob in that group he asked me what transference implications I saw in my patient’s trauma-soaked emotional experience. After a brief self-conscious hesitation, I replied, “What is transference?” Over the twenty-five-plus years since that first meeting with Bob, and that first encounter with the notion of trauma transferences, I have been steeped in Bob’s elucidation of psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological-contextual inquiry, including notably his phenomenological-contextual inquiry into emotional trauma, and its literature. I have also been deeply affected by him as a person. Just during this time that I have known Bob, his psychoanalytic inquiries, including his distinctive illuminations in the phenomenology and contextuality of trauma that are the focus of my below interview, have borne the fruit of 5 books. 1 Each of these works is richly interdisciplinary at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. I hold myself quite privileged to have been at a place and time – namely, West Los Angeles from the mid-1990ʹs to the present – in which Bob’s progressive contributions to psychoanalytic understandings of trauma washed over me implicitly and explicitly as a person. They washed over me as a young boy who lost his father within a family system of denial, as Stolorow psychotherapy patient, as eager psychotherapist-in-development, as ICP psychoanalytic candidate and Stolorow supervisee, and as scholar of relational psychoanalysis, particularly of Bob’s and his collaborators’ intersubjective-systems framework. Additionally, over the last few years of the coronavirus pandemic, socio-political unrest, and climate change we have all been thrown more forcefully into seeing and feeling our own and our planet earth’s vulnerabilities. In this context, I have benefited personally, clinically, and as a citizen of our finite world from Bob’s trauma insights as he extended them from the traumatized individual to collective trauma. The interview proved remarkable in many ways. Among them, it was intellectually illuminating by virtue of Bob’s characteristically succinct, systematic articulation of his trauma thinking, and emotionally affecting by virtue of the vulnerable way Bob weaved his trauma concepts in with poignant clinical material and his own tragic losses.