Contemporary Psychoanalytic Theory Research Articles

Relational ecologies of psychotherapy: The influence of administrative attachment on therapeutic alliance

There is now vast and multi-faceted empirical literature on the impact of relational dynamics in psychotherapy, and relationality is a central theme within contemporary psychoanalytic theories. Yet, there is virtually no literature addressing the relational dynamics around outpatient psychotherapy that influence the wider therapeutic alliance, that is the relational dynamics that unfold between clients and administrative office staff in making initial contacts and appointments, completing paperwork, negotiating payment, discussing insurance coverage, working through crisis calls, and the myriad of other forms of interaction which serve to form the relational ecology of psychotherapy. Milieu therapy or the use of supportive and structured therapeutic environments has been given significant attention in inpatient settings; however, administrative relational factors or administrative staff characteristics have seemingly been ignored in outpatient psychotherapy and psychoanalysis literatures. Many outpatient clinical practice settings involve multiple levels and dimensions of relationality between clients, administrative personnel, and therapists which shape the potential for secure continuous containment and various forms of attachment to psychotherapeutic space. In this paper, we describe several clinical illustrations of relational dynamics between clients and office staff which influence therapeutic alliance and outline the contours of our emerging idea of administrative hospitality based on relational psychoanalysis, attachment theory, symbolic anthropology, and stigma research. In doing so, we draw on our collective experience working in several outpatient clinics and insights from our current context in an urban outpatient training clinic which emphasises psychodynamic practice. Our goal is not a comprehensive analysis of the relational ecology of psychotherapy but to offer an initial exploratory account of some of the administrative relational dynamics in and around outpatient psychotherapy which go beyond the therapist-client dyad. The anthropological concept of liminality is connected to relational psychoanalytic theories to describe the important dynamics of transitional space in an overall process of relational transformation.

Desire, Forgetting, and the Future: Walt Whitman’s Civil War

How might issues of desire, trauma, and memory have been understood before the cultural primacy of psychoanalytic discourse? This essay argues that Walt Whitman’s war writing in Specimen Days and Drum- Taps offers an alternative landscape for the psyche, one quite distinct from the psychoanalytic emphasis on interiority, privacy, and the priority of the past over the present. In these texts, Whitman’s solution to the devastation of the war is grounded in idiosyncratic notions of desire and forgetting, which are characterized by the immediacy of physical contact and an externalized collectivity that knits bodies together. This vision of psychic life is distinct from early twentieth-century Freudian treatments of sexuality, trauma, and repression; it also presents an alternative way to think about the work of the death drive in contemporary psychoanalytic queer theory.

The Two Analyses of Mr. X: Two Analytic Voices and the Emergence of Something New

In a bridging session after the sudden death of his analyst, I realized that Mr. X and I were both grieving for her. V had been my teacher, supervisor, and friend, and I knew her analytic voice from the inside. I heard it in my consulting room not only in Mr. X’s words but also in his relational patterns and expectations as they emerged as we moved along. Hearing V’s voice stand in such stark contrast with mine led me to reconceptualize the venerable concept of analytic voice from within contemporary psychoanalytic theory. My analytic voice freed Mr. X from V’s complex constraints, and my experience as Mr. X’s analyst unexpectedly came to free me. I have come to understand analytic voice as an emergent property of a complex dynamic system.

Psychic vampirism in contemporary psychoanalysis: Issues of pathological identification and sadomasochistic perversion

Abstract In this article, I consider the use of the metaphorics of vampirism in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. I examine the concept of psychic vampirism as a clinical phenomenon as evinced in two case studies and argue that psychic vampirism includes a sadomasochistic perversion and a specific identification with a narcissistic (m)other that leads to a general manner of identifying that is in itself pathological. Further, I argue that in the psychoanalytic clinical situation a psychic vampiric transference may manifest with either masochism or sadism predominating. I also demonstrate the pertinence of the literary vampire, via Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1976), to this clinical development. Finally, I suggest that psychic vampirism is likely to become more salient clinically, given the vampire’s current cultural popularity.

Enclosing the Subject

This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theory to critique Louis Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of the subject. I argue that rather than ideology interpellating the individual as a subject, bourgeois ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. By “bourgeois ideology” I mean the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The advantage of reversing the Althusserian account is that the subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form, a form that is itself always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. In Althusser’s version, the individuality that emerges in history is posited as universal, a given. In mine, the individual form is itself the problem; it’s a coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity. The individual is thus a form of capture. Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives. There is nothing necessary about the link between subjectivity and individuality; it is an effect contingent to the array of processes that converge into bourgeois modernity.

Zen meditation, reverie, and psychoanalytic listening.

The author reviews the literature on the relation between Buddhist meditation and psychoanalytic listening and argues that the influence of the dynamic unconscious is not addressed in this literature, which engenders a pragmatic overvaluation of attention and an accompanying unexamined devaluation of the analyst's experiences of inattention. The article emphasizes contemporary psychoanalytic theories that are consistent with basic Buddhist principles and their influences on recommendations for psychoanalytic listening. The author also examines the role of intention as a guiding principle in psychoanalytic listening by elaborating the issues at hand in terms of both Zen Buddhist and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptualizations of various fluctuating mind states, such as reverie.

What Is Cultural Psychoanalysis? Psychoanalytic Anthropology and the Interpersonal Tradition

In light of the recent emphasis on social and cultural factors in psychoanalytic theory and practice, this article will elaborate earlier attempts to bridge psychoanalysis and the study of culture. I begin by considering the disciplinary tension between the fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology and the emergence of a “psychoanalytic anthropology,” which began in the 1920s and lasted through the 1950s. I then turn to the works of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, who developed an approach known as “cultural psychoanalysis.” I suggest that Sullivan and Fromm anticipate today's sociocultural turn in psychoanalysis and that their work on culture and its role in psychological development and experience continues to be relevant. Rather than embracing a social or cultural determinism, Sullivan and Fromm focus on the interaction between culture and the person, thus creating an “integrationist” approach. Sullivan and Fromm develop a broad conception of culture that encompasses a critique of social and cultural norms and values. I suggest that this is particularly valuable because much current discussion of culture focuses chiefly on diversity and difference, thus overlooking the implicit social and cultural values at work in all human experience. I build on Sullivan and Fromm's insights to illustrate the significance of early interpersonal psychoanalysis for the sociocultural turn in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Austen’s Persuasion and the Comedy of Remarriage

The paper reads Jane Austen’s Persuasion in light of Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage , focusing on three main links between Cavell’s analysis of seven Hollywood films and Persuasion : the concept of remarriage itself, the social agenda and the cultural/feminist vision. In addition to applying the Cavellian idea of remarriage as “a reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness” to the renewed romance between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, the paper borrows the term “co-creation” from the business world and, associating it with the idea of the “analytic third” in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, defines Anne's and Wentworth's evolving rediscovery of each other as a “knowing again” or a co-creation, assisted by the novel’s temporality, in which the fictional present consists of a mutual evolving relationship intertwined with the events of the past, which must be faced and worked through. In Persuasion , the newly created mutuality between Anne and Wentworth also signals social change in which the old, stagnant aristocratic way of life must give way to the energy of the middle class, here represented by the navy. For Cavell, the comedies of remarriage reflect a hidden agenda of culture in which the previous generation’s feminist gains are worked through in the private sphere. The paper claims that Persuasion , and more specifically its heroine, Anne Elliott, also reflect a phase in the struggle of gender equality in which the radical feminist notions go “underground” and are worked through in the private domain, to serve as building blocks for the public feminist struggle of the late nineteenth century.

Imagining Fear: Attachment, Threat, and Psychic Experience

Attachment theory is today considered an integral part of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, and yet the theoretical and clinical implications of Bowlby’s emphasis on fear and the search for safety have been largely overlooked. From Bowlby’s perspective, the dynamic relationship between the experience of threat and attachment shapes the development and maintenance of essential relationships, the organization of psychic structure, and the nature of defenses and adaptation. This element of attachment theory—which alerts us to the ways in which the infant or child is compelled to seek safety when in a state of fearful arousal—is particularly relevant to the clinical situation. It helps us imagine moments of fearful arousal in our patients’ pasts, attend to their manifestations in the present, and understand current suffering in light of the long-term sequelae of adaptations that were crucial to survival. Finally, it helps us find language that brings alive or mentalizes these aspects of the patient’s early experience such that transformation is possible.

Sexual Aberration or Instinctual Vicissitude? Revisiting Freud’s “The Sexual Aberrations”

The author reconsiders Freud’s “The Sexual Aberrations,” the first of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Are the concepts of sexual aberration and norm still viable? The author argues that they are necessary but insufficient elements in current theory. He then presents a competing model in which sexuality can be reduced to a more elemental level of disturbance and wish, where it is an expression of a nonsexual wish—for example, to possess or control the object to eliminate separateness. The author presents clinical material to demonstrate this alternative model.

Reconstructing Freud's prototype reconstructions

Although at age 75, Freud asserted “deep within me there continues to be the happy child of Freiberg” (Příbor), his statement may now be regarded as an idealized version of his infancy and early childhood, devoid of trauma and stress. His reconstructions of his first three years of life, reported in his letters of October 1897 to Wilhelm Fliess, are subject to their own reconstruction. He had just repudiated seduction trauma as an exclusive etiology of psychopathology. Freud was then in the throes of an intense transference–countertransference relationship with Fliess, with reactivated unconscious conflict and developmental challenge. The reconstructions of his nursemaid, of his reactions to the birth and death of his first sibling, and of seeing his mother “nudam” require re-evaluation and revision in the context of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and new knowledge. While the specific reconstructions are of continuing interest, the methodology of analytic inquiry into early childhood and parenting transcends the inevitable limitations of the infancy of psychoanalysis. The concept of reconstruction potentiated the development of psychoanalytic thought, although with recurrent controversy, especially concerning retrospective meaning, psychic reality, and historical reality.

Moonlit Mirrors, Bloody Chambers, and Tender Wolves: Identity and Sexuality in Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice”

Who are you? said Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied rather shyly, I--I hardly know, Sir, just at present--at least know who was when got up this morning, but think must have been changed several times since then. --Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland FROM ONE IDENTITY TO ANOTHER In her well-known collection of stories about fairy stories, The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter revisits and revises traditional folklore; or, rather, she continues tradition of revision inherent in this originally orally transmitted literary form. The shifting structures inherent folklore, she claims, made it easier for her to deal with shifting structures of reality and (Notes 25). Carter's appropriation of fairy tale form is a conscious infiltration and disruption of western patriarchal ideologies and binary modes of thinking traditionally embodied therein, an effort question nature of gendered reality and extent which our experiences of self are defined by the social fictions that regulate our lives: in demythologizing business. I'm interested in myths--though I'm much more interested in folklore--just because they are extraordinary designed make people unfree (25). Overtly, here, in her revisioning of folklore, and elsewhere, as in her analysis of Marquis de Sade's novels in The Sadeian Woman and Ideology of Pornography, Carter's agenda is one of dismantling myths of human sexuality that amount oppression of all but of women and feminine in particular. Myth deals in false universals, dull pain of particular circumstances. In no area is this more true than in that of relations between sexes, she claims (Sadeian Woman 5-6). In Women's Time, an essay contemporaneous with The Bloody Chamber, Julia Kristeva argues for a feminism that allows for plurality of identity and individual differences in notions of woman and rejects dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical: the dichotomy between man and woman as an opposition of two rival entities is a problem for metaphysics. What does 'identity' and even 'sexual identity' mean in a theoretical and scientific space in which notion of 'identity' itself is challenged? (368). The deconstruction of sexual identity is authentically feminist practice engaged by both Carter and Kristeva, and both rely on materialism of body do so (Moi 12). Fundamentally, Carter seems be critiquing mythology of western philosophy, beginning with that father of lies Plato and his subjugation of body and material world realm of ideal forms (Notes 27). Her writing undermines basis of oppositional logic and kind of mind/body divide propagated as a love of wisdom. Carter once said in an interview, I do think that body comes first, not consciousness ... remember there's a materiality symbols and a materiality imaginative life which should be taken quite seriously (qtd. in Roemer 7). Her emphasis on materiality of body and language recalls work of Julia Kristeva, (1) which gives body a place of primacy in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and reconnects body and its drives language. Kristeva, though building on ideas of Freud and Lacan, emphasizes undecidable element of language, semiotic disruption of symbolic, and thus posits speaking as a heterogeneous, always questionable subject-in-process. She not only advocates an analytical theory that searches for the unsettling process of meaning and subject rather than for coherence or identity, but she also locates origins of such a process in pre-oedipal, pre-linguistic body (Kristeva, Desire 125). In The Bloody Chamber, Carter presents an array of characters whose subjectivity is often quite literally shown be in process, whose condition is always somewhere in-between. …

Moederschap en materialiteit - Diane, Stephen, Liam en Joel Blood

In 1998 and 2002, U.K. citizen Diane Blood conceived sons from a sample of her late husband Stephen’s sperm in a private Belgian fertility clinic. Although Stephen’s sperm was illegally harvested from his comatose body in 1995, the British Court of Appeal decided in 1997 that Diane was not to be prevented from consuming commercial infertility service in a European member state pursuant to the terms of the Treaty of Rome (1957). As a result, I try to show, Stephen’s sperm was effectively reconstituted as a material resource, passive and dispossessed, for usage in a commercial transaction. This article discusses the ramifications and implications of this case and the developments it pinpoints, and calls for a reconsideration of the consensus view according to which (material) sex and (discursive) gender are seen as distinct from each other, if not altogether opposed to each other. From the perspective of the Diane Blood case, the article revisits the advantages and drawbacks of the sex/gender split in influential writings by Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, then to move to indicate a persistent association between an excessive materiality and femininity running from Aristotle to contemporary psychoanalytic theory (Kristeva). After analyzing the paradoxical and anachronistic forms of maternity that inform the Blood case, I conclude that medical, commercial and technological advances have forged the full materialization of the male body and its reproductive capability, thus questioning the very form of gender in the future.

“Poison Cookies”: Glimpses From the Psychoanalytic Laboratory: Introduction to Case Presentation and Commentaries

This introduction presents the context and background of the case presentation and commentary. Katherine (Kate) Oram's beautifully presented study and the commentaries from four different points of view raise issues and questions that are central to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Among these topics are the following: the relation between verbal and nonverbal aspects of treatment, technical considerations in the analyst's sharing personal reactions and feelings, the role of deficit versus conflict in the treatment of a traumatized patient, clinical aspects of termination and especially of posttermination contact, the place of siblings in the patient's family dynamics, the applicability of attachment theory to in depth psychoanalytic practice, the handling of sadomasochistic dynamics in the analytic interaction, and the role of mutual gift-giving between patient and analyst during the course of an analysis.

The companion to the unknown. With the question as a starting-point and the mystery as a destination?

Many authors have shown that Freud, irrespective of his own claims, was influenced by his Jewish background, and that this background forms part of his scientific contribution. Today, many psychoanalysts say that we have parted from many of Freud´s basic assumptions, and that contemporary psychoanalytic theory is based on empirical evidence. One may thus ask if the Jewish origins have vanished from the scene of psychoanalysis. The claim of this paper is that this is not the case. As an influential example of contemporary psychoanalytic theory, the authors present the basic ideas of the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG). Following that, they describe the defining moment of Jewish belief and identity, i.e., the covenant at Sinai. The authors argue that there are many parallels between the myth of Sinai and the “moments of meeting” of the BCPSG: in both descriptions (1) we have a meeting; (2) the counterpart of the meeting includes an Other; (3) in the meeting one leaves one´s idiosyncrasies behind; (4) and becomes oneself through (5) an alliance. As a conclusion, the authors briefly discuss how this parallel influences the scientific credibility of psychoanalysis, how specific the outlined characteristics are for precisely Jewish thought, and to what degree contemporary psychoanalysis has really changed from Freud´s time.

Brain plasticity as a convergence of intrapsychic and intersubjective

Contemporary neuroscience has demonstrated the radical plasticity of the brain – its ability to change with experience at the synaptic, circuitry, and whole-brain levels – which has profound implications for neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and their interrelationship. With the concept of neural plasticity as an ongoing mobilization of neural form, neuroscience converges with psychoanalysis, which has built its theory and therapeutic practice on the flow of forms in the unconscious. We have attempted to integrate evidence and ideas from contemporary neurobiology, neurophysiology, psychopharmacology, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, mainly based on Lacan, Bion, and Winnicott, and we suggest that the recovery of form, as a tool of investigation in these fields, may promote a neuroscientifically informed psychotherapy. We also suggest that plasticity captures the primacy of the dynamic, interactive surface of both intrapsychic and intersubjective processes and allows a conceptualization of the unconscious, facilitating a new understanding of psychic trauma. It is also compatible with the idea of the subject versus the ego of the unconscious, unconscious transformations, intersubjectivity, and freedom of will. We conclude that a new area of research has been identified at the interface between neuroscience and psychoanalytic theory, with promising epistemological, scientific, and therapeutic implications.

Can You Hear Me Now? Twinship Failure and Chronic Loneliness

This article tracks the course of chronic loneliness from its roots in impoverished regulatory twinship selfobject experiences in infancy to its emergence as a serious health concern, and discusses clinical implications. Incorporating infant research, social psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive and social neuroscience with contemporary psychoanalytic theory, the paper outlines the function of twinship selfobject experiences in the development of regulatory and other capacities linked to devastating experiences of alienation and isolation. The concept of chronic loneliness is illustrated with abbreviated clinical material.

The Performed Self in College Writing

This article describes how contemporary psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories inform my teaching of writing. It suggests that the psychological and academic challenges confronting freshmen recently placed in a new social/academic environment may be abated by a pedagogy that highlights a poststructuralist understanding of identity as multiple and performative.

The Art of Regulation: Therapeutic Action in the Shared Implicit Relationship

Therapeutic action in Christine Kieffer's treatment of “Dina” inheres in the re-organization of Dina's implicit patterns of affect and arousal regulation, which, in turn, facilitate moments of mutual recognition and enhanced reflective capacities. This article explores the case in the context of contemporary psychoanalytic theories that embrace the fundamental significance of implicit, non-linear mutual and self-regulatory processes. The discussion highlights the role of maternal disrupted affective communication patterns in the development of dysfunctional attachment and the acquisition of controlling strategies that further compromise an individual's ability to form healthy relationships. Dina's growth in the context of her relationship with her analyst illustrates many of the key concepts in theories of intersubjectivity, mentalization, and psychoanalytic complexity.

Navigating Trauma in Joseph Conrad's Victory: A Voyage From Sigmund Freud to Philip M. Bromberg

In Victory, Joseph Conrad (1915/1924) revises his earlier treatment of trauma as a singular cataclysmic event in the life of a potentially heroic adult, usually male (as depicted in Heart of Darkness [1898], Lord Jim [1900], and Under Western Eyes [1911]), to a conception of trauma as the corrosive effect of a child's repeated exposures to emotionally invalidating caregivers. Abandoning a view of trauma that would accord with Freud's account of a single shocking incident, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Conrad adopts instead a view that parallels Philip Bromberg's account of trauma as a series of toxic childhood occurrences. Thus Conrad's novel Victory presciently anticipates the corrective vision of contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory, which has largely supplanted Freud's more dramatic narratives with a subtle and nuanced understanding of trauma as a long-term lack of validation in childhood that forecloses adult possibilities. In Victory's portraits of two characters whose lives are constricted by pathological dissociation, Conrad presents literary examples that confirm and illumine Bromberg's clinical and theoretical explications of this pervasive psychological phenomenon.