Interpersonal Psychoanalysis Research Articles

Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Breaking Boundaries

Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Breaking Boundaries

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.

Considering the Intersubjective Perspective of Therapeutic Action

The concept of therapeutic action among most schools of psychoanalysis has solidly progressed from the original Freudian catharsis-insight model to an intersubjective-insight perspective. This article will focus on the re-conceptualizations of therapeutic action that have evolved over the past 80 years in interpersonal psychoanalysis and among many other psychoanalytic orientations. A clinical example will follow to illustrate an intersubjective-insight model of therapeutic action.

The Three Cures of Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O): the Talking Cure, the Writing Cure, and the Social Cure

Bertha Pappenheim was the real name of Anna O, the first psychoanalytic patient. In her treatment with Joseph Breuer, Pappenheim invented what she called “Chimney-sweeping,” the procedure of tracing a symptom back to its origins using free association. After her treatment and several subsequent hospitalizations, Pappenheim went on to become a pioneer of German-Jewish social work, a leading feminist, campaigner for women’s rights, and protector of unwed mothers and orphans. I have obtained multiple documents that reveal aspects of her life that have been unappreciated. She was cured not just by her psychoanalytic treatment, but also by realizing her intellectual gifts via her writing and by changing the society that was making her ill. In these ways, she resembled Harry Stack Sullivan, the founder of interpersonal psychoanalysis. Both faced a major crisis in late adolescence and went on to create environments that insulated victims of prejudice and allowed them to flourish.

A systematic review of psychodynamic theories in community psychology: Discovering the unconscious in community work.

The aim of this systematic review is to provide a narrative synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature regarding the role of psychodynamics in community psychology. The authors screened 301 records on the topic, found in major citation databases (Scopus and Web of Science) without time or language restrictions. Ten articles addressing the review question were identified, showing the contributions of interpersonal psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, the Tavistock psychodynamic model, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Several points of synergy between community psychology and psychodynamics were outlined mainly concerning empowerment theory, preventative and ecological perspective, power, and social order. Besides, the view on the community life, the role of emotion, and the conceptualization of the unconscious domain are discussed. Implications for community interventions are highlighted, regarding clients' demands, the role of community practitioners, and the use of transference/countertransference in consultative work. Limitations and future directions are also considered.

Book Review: Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s–2010s: Evolving Interest in the Analyst’s Subjectivity

Book Review: Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s–2010s: Evolving Interest in the Analyst’s Subjectivity

Donnel B. Stern and Irwin Hirsch (Editors): The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960’s–1990’s: Rethinking Transference and Countertransference; AND Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980’s–2010’s: Evolving Interest in the Analyst’s Subjectivity

Donnel B. Stern and Irwin Hirsch (Editors): The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960’s–1990’s: Rethinking Transference and Countertransference; AND Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980’s–2010’s: Evolving Interest in the Analyst’s Subjectivity

The Interpersonal Legacy of Chestnut Lodge

This article addresses the context in which Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium evolved its legendary status. Early years of interpersonal psychoanalysis (1920s–1950s) locate the Washington, DC, and Baltimore areas as crucial contexts, both for the professional support they provided to the beginnings of an interpersonal viewpoint, and for the derisive, dismissive attitudes targeting the early proponents of the interpersonal perspective. Chestnut Lodge and the developing White Institute evolved along parallel organizational lines. The development of a compatible clinical sensibility is noted, conceptually linking those identifying as “interpersonal.” Both organizations (“The Lodge” and “White”) share a common intellectual ancestry and a comparable approach to clinical technique. Likewise, both organizations share an emphasis on rejecting dogma and managing to resist organizational pressures in favor of nonconformity and defiance of rigidity. Both organizations are shaped by theorists who are drawn to work intensively with “difficult” patients, as well as with facing powerful personal and political challenges and credible threats of professional exclusion.

Unformulated Experience and the Relational Turn

ABSTRACTI describe the development of my views from interpersonal psychoanalysis, a development I hold in common with many other relational analysts. I still consider myself both. Both the background from which I grew and the differences we early relational analysts had with standard psychoanalytic technique are described. In the second part of the article I summarize the theory of unformulated experience, including the modifications and elaborations of it that I have made in a new book due to appear at about the same time as this article.

Edgar Levenson, Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness and the Purloined Self

I am deeply fond of a quotation, variously ascribed but at least to Isaac Newton as early as 1675: “Standing on the shoulder of giants.’ It’s a comment that encourages us to acknowledge our sources...

La psicoterapia pianificata (White Institute New York, 1947)

This is the text of a paper delivered by Fritz Perls at the White Institute in New York. That institute was founded by H.S. Sullivan as an interpersonal psychoanalytic institute, an alterna-tive to mainstream Freudian institutes. It was still relatively conservative at that time. Today it is one of the centers of relational psychoanalysis. Before founding Gestalt therapy with his wife and Paul Goodman, Perls hoped to find at the White Institute a group of psychoanalysts with whom he could be welcomed and feel at home. For example, he already knew Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, members of the White Institute. Perls’s approach shared with interpersonal psychoanalysis its focus on relation, on the present moment, and on the integration of the personal and social field perspectives. The principal differences were in Perls’s radical idea of creative adjustment and his concrete and very creative way of integrating spontaneity, awareneness, sensation, and reason. In the clinical cases he presents, you can also see Perls at work, following a dialogic and relational method that he used in his later years.

Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: History and Current Status

Interpersonal psychoanalysis is not well known outside the northeastern United States, yet it has been present since the 1930s and has influenced psychoanalysis all over the world. In this article, the origins of interpersonal psychoanalysis are described, providing at least a partial explanation for this widespread ignorance. Interpersonal psychoanalysis no longer finds much of its definition by an opposition to ego psychology, as it did in its early days. Today, instead, the more significant question for interpersonal psychoanalysis is how, and whether, it can be differentiated from relational psychoanalysis. This is especially important for those who, like me, identify as both interpersonal and relational. Interpersonal thinking was the heart of Mitchell's original conception of relational psychoanalysis. I argue that interpersonal psychoanalysis remains a coherent psychoanalytic perspective, defined by radical field theory; a deemphasis on unconscious fantasy and repressed memories as templates for conscious experience; an emphasis on fantasy as mystified experience; a correspondingly greater emphasis on the embeddedness of the past in the forms of the present; and most of all, the continuous, unconscious, mutual influence of the subjectivities of analyst and patient on one another.

When Sleeping Dogs Awake, There Is Wisdom: Holmes’s Response to Guralnik, White, and Tummala-Nara

Whether the three discussions are framed in terms of the pull on all of us to the socio-political world in which we live (Guralnik), the usefulness of interpersonal psychoanalysis as a way of working (White), or the need to legitimize culturally imposed trauma in the face of resistances to doing so (Tummala-Narra), each commentator offers meaningful elaborations on what I have offered and/or alternative perspectives to be considered. This response affords me a welcome opportunity to celebrate and elaborate the multiple ways in which culture and cultural trauma can be conceptualized, understood, and worked with in the consultation room. I hope these papers, considered together, will make cultural trauma more accessible to work with for all psychoanalytic clinicians.

Reflections on Ferenczi, Analytic Subjectivity, and Analytic Hierarchy

For the most part, contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing situates the analyst as a subjective other in the analytic dyad, implicitly reducing the hierarchy seen in earlier conceptions of the psychoanalytic relationship—analyst as objective observer, patient as subjective participant. The seeds of this revolution begins in the 1920s with Ferenczi's recognition that the quality of the two-person analytic relationship usually carries more weight in successful analyses than does insight per se. Albeit in quite different ways, the roots of both interpersonal psychoanalysis and middle school object relations theory can be traced to Ferenczi's emendations of the classical Freudian model.

The Interpersonal Field: Its Place in American Psychoanalysis

Today the concept of the interpersonal field, while seldom credited to those who created it, is widely used in psychoanalysis. After reviewing how the concept of the field defines interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, I take up the rejection of the idea in American mainstream psychoanalysis in the decades just after it was proposed by Sullivan and Fromm, why that rejection took place, and how the entire discipline of psychoanalysis in North America might have fared if the idea had been widely recognized earlier than it was.

Psychoanalysis in Spain: A Brief Account of the Transformative Pathways Between the Psychoanalysts and Their Institutions

Psychoanalysis in Spain has a plural history. Rooted in the Freudian and Kleinian traditions, it has developed in different directions and incorporated trends from contemporary psychoanalysis. The impact of socio-political factors forced several migratory movements that came back to Spain under the form of criticism to classical psychoanalysis, following ideas that were emerging from Latin America (e.g., Pichon Rivière) and North America (Cultural and Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, Self Psychology, and Intersubjective System theories) that enriched psychoanalytic thinking, and promoted new psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, Steve Mitchell’s relational perspective plays a crucial role among present developments.

A response to LaFarge

LaFarge and I come from two different North American psychoanalytic traditions. Mine, interpersonal psychoanalysis (and, starting in the 1980s, relational psychoanalysis), diverged in the 1930s fro...

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.

Field Conditions: Discussion of Donnel B. Stern's Field Theory in Psychoanalysis

In this discussion we applaud Donnel B. Stern for undertaking his rigorous comparison of the “field” concept in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis (IRP) and Bionian field theory (BFT). Stern offers a balanced presentation of similarities and differences between these two conceptual models, but we focus primarily on certain differences, starting with what we perceive as differing notions of the nature, purpose, and clinical function of the field itself. We distinguish the interactional view of an essentially relational model of the field in IRP (where the clinical aim is to enlarge the domain of the interpersonal dialogue and the capacity for mutual recognition) from the BFT model of a field viewed in terms of emergent phenomena, realized in multiple modalities of experience (here the clinical aim is to expand the scope of contact with unconscious life and to facilitate the capacity to transform emotional, psycho-sensory and proto-emotional experience). We also take up the differing relationships to external reality and authority within these two models, with special reference to the role of the frame in the function of the field.

Analysts in Search of an Author: Voltaire or Artemisia Gentileschi? Commentary on “Field Theory in Psychoanalysis, Part 2: Bionian Field Theory and Contemporary Interpersonal/Relational Psychoanalysis” by Donnel B. Stern

The authors comment on Stern's characterization of differences between interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis and Bionian field theory. The critical points on which a consensus is not, for the time being, readily possible concern the relationship between the external and internal worlds and the various conceptions of unconscious experience. They believe that, before forging a link with the external world (whose role we would be foolish to deny), it is clinically more useful to apprehend this internal world as rigorously and over as wide a range as possible—which they do by radically transforming the external world into a dream of the field. Conversely, in their view we may be reassured but partly misled by the concept of a dialectic between the external and internal worlds that fails to take account of the utter pervasiveness of the unconscious and the fact that it speaks even when seemingly silent—not only negatively in micro- and macroenactments but also positively in waking dream thought, which is an expression of its poetic activity that unceasingly confers meaning on experience.