Psychoanalytic Encounter Research Articles

The Psychoanalyst as Dramatist

ABSTRACT Extending psychoanalysis-drama comparisons proffered by prior theorists, Dr. Karbelnig introduces the novel concept of the psychoanalytic denouement. He differentiates these from Aristotle’s concepts of anagnorisis and peripeteia, and he compares them to phenomenon like Satori from Zen Buddhism or the “Aha” moment from the contemporary lexicon. Transcripts from three consecutive sessions (completely anonymized) demonstrate psychoanalytic denouements. Two sessions show clear psychoanalytic denouements; one, featuring an overtly psychotic patient, reveals intense emotional expression and cognitive insight but no psychoanalytic denouement. These clinical samples illustrate how theatrical metaphors incorporate phenomenological and theoretical perspectives, allow for micro- or macroscopic studies of psychoanalytic encounters, and confirm their inimitable nature. Dr. Karbelnig concludes by noting these analogies to drama helpfully expand extant metapsychology but, like all theories of mind, necessarily fall short.

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Losing Freud

Losing Freud

Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: The Work of Irma Brenman Pick

Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: The Work of Irma Brenman Pick

Freire and Lacan: Critical pedagogy as a radical methodology of the subject

Turning to key texts of Paulo Freire and Jacques Lacan, this paper argues that the experience organized in critical pedagogy can be rearticulated on the basis of a structural-practical connection to psychoanalysis. I pay specific attention to the methodical parallels that develop between the accounts of the psychoanalytic and pedagogical encounters in Lacan and Freire, arguing that critical pedagogy can be presented in a way that embraces the Lacanian theories of subjectivity and the unconscious, while affirming its political and emancipatory commitments. This theoretical analysis unfolds in two parts. First, I develop an account of Lacan that can militate for the critical pedagogical intervention, offering a grammar for elaborating upon Freire’s claim that critical pedagogy be understood as kind of psychoanalysis. Bringing into focus a more practically oriented Lacan, I demonstrate how his work offers a rationality for organizing an intervention in the terrain of subjectivity. Second, I apply this reading of Lacan to the pedagogical experience defined by Freire in an effort to articulate in a new key the problems and possibilities structuring his intervention, linking the question of educational praxis to traumatic/unconscious knowledge as the site of operation for facilitating the political subjectivation of students.

Nuclearity

ABSTRACT This article revisits Kohut’s concept of the nuclear self, a concept oft criticized as a reification, a relic of a bygone era that idealizes separateness and autonomy. In an alternative view, I interpret Kohut’s nuclear self not as a thing one carries along in one’s mind but as a story gathering shape over time through our interactions with others, closer to the Greek idea of fate than to Freud’s psychic apparatus. We are each of us heading through a series of transformations toward a surprising way of being that in the end feels preordained. A primary object of psychoanalysis is to track the sources and progress of this nuclear self. I coin the word “nuclearity” in contrast to Mitchell’s “relationality” and Freud’s “reality.” All three words describe a condition of the world as well as a value system, a way of thinking that shows us what we are looking for. This circularity is not a problem so long as we understand that the views we see from our viewpoints are constrained as though by literary genre. We can be truthful within a historical genre, but we cannot arrive at a final viewpoint from which to see everything. The genre or viewpoint of nuclearity is one in which the patient’s ever-evolving sense of coming into being organizes the psychoanalytic encounter.

Zoom, Embodiment, and the Analytic Third

The rapid expansion of video-conferencing in response to the COVID-19 health crisis introduces challenges and benefits to the psychoanalytic encounter. Carl Jung considered the phenomenon of the analytic third, and theorised that this mysterious constellation of a transformative liminal field emerged from the interpersonal dynamic between analyst and analysand. Implicit in the canon of related literature is the assumption of shared physical space. Today’s wide use of video-conferencing offers an opportunity to explore whether physical proximity is essential to the creation of this vital psychotherapeutic phenomenon. Three Jungian analysts explore ideas and experiences in a condensed, edited version of a podcast episode from This Jungian Life.

Strachey's Shadow: A Re‐examination of the Use of the Mutative Interpretation

James Strachey published his seminal paper on the nature of therapeutic action in 1934 in which he introduced his ideas on the mutative interpretation. He saw interpretation as the cornerstone of the psychoanalytic method. Since then, there has been a great deal of work looking at the essential nature of the interpretation and how it can promote change. By the1960s, Loewald and others were discussing how interpretation needed to incorporate new psychoanalytic thinking, particularly in the area of object relations. As the intersubjectivity of the psychoanalytic encounter gained more prominence, the use of the structural interpretation decreased. The author suggests that there is still need for further work on how interpretation can promote change. Using theoretical ideas and clinical examples, the paper concludes that the mutative interpretation continues to offer something potentially transformative, but that the technique has to take account of relational aspects of the treatment and the developmental issues of the patient. However, the clinician's relationship with the ideas about a mutative interpretation can also affect the clinician's ability to use it to a therapeutic effect.

A Discussion of “Accompaniment in Jazz and Psychoanalysis”

The author discusses the contributions of Markman’s text (this issue) focusing on similarities and differences in how he and this author use rhythm as a musical metaphor for the interactional processes constituting a psychoanalytic encounter. This review emphasizes 1) Markman’s unique sense of reverie, 2) his thinking about rhythm in terms of embodied registrations, and, 3) the difference between Markman’s unit of analysis and that frequently used by this discussant for describing embodied registrations.

The psychoanalytic encounter with settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel

AbstractThe paper explores the relationship between the legacy of Western imperialism and the complicity of the “international community” in the settler colonial project taking place in Palestine/Israel. It analyzes some key aspects of Western discourse that inhibit an appreciation of non‐Zionist perspectives, and which obstruct action to challenge the systemic human rights abuses to which Palestinians are subject. It argues that psychoanalysis, as a discipline and a profession, participates in a wider societal failure, adapting itself to priorities that conflict with its ostensible ethical foundations. Recent years have seen a strengthening of the worldwide movement in support of Palestinian rights in general, and the growth of activism within the mental health community in particular. The exchanges between activists and mainstream professional organizations are here interrogated to identify key points of contention. The paper considers the impact of the settler colonial enterprise on Israeli society as a whole, and on the politics of Israeli psychoanalysis, to support the argument that neutrality is not an option for the international mental health community. It concludes that principled engagement initiatives are necessary to meet mental health workers' professional responsibilities to do no harm, and to contribute to the future health of the relationship between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli societies.

Hot Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, and Bad Objects: Discussion of “Contempt Management: You’re Crazy, I’m Not”

I reflect on Larry Josephs and Jett Stone’s informative article (this issue), which provides a scholarly review of contempt and contempt management, theorizing links between contempt, shame, hierarchy, and power. The authors explore and illustrate how contempt/shame cycles can be enacted and worked with therapeutically. I value the project of deepening our understanding of an affective/interpersonal dynamic that often emerges in difficult clinical encounters in which contempt and shame are frequently tossed about like hot potatoes. While appreciating Josephs and Stone’s ideas, I reconsider the clinical material through my own relational lens (informed by object relational and developmental perspectives) and offer a second look, focusing on singular meanings and unique relational dynamics. I ask, in essence, “Whose contemptible object are we anyway?” Additionally, I discuss the authors’ contribution as it relates to a larger inquiry into the survival of destruction in psychoanalysis. I conclude by suggesting that this paper points to the importance of continually attending to power dynamics and the attendant risks of unconscious coercions in the mutual but asymmetric psychoanalytic encounter as relationally conceived.

The Frame, Within and Without: Discussion of “The Therapeutics of the Fee in Psychoanalysis”

The author picks up and expands on themes of fusion and separation brought up in Pauley’s discussion of the therapeutic uses of the fee in the psychoanalytic encounter. She asserts that the elemental nature of the exchange of goods speaks to us in the language of corporeal experience, making it a powerful disruptive force that can reshuffle defenses at the level of our most primary experiencing selves. This affords the fee the potential to reach us in the registers of sensation and enactment that bypass conscious, verbal communication making our authentic and ongoing attempts to grapple with it vital to the analytic project.

Musicality in the consulting room

ABSTRACTI describe the ubiquity of the musical—non-metaphorical, actually musical—dimension in the psychoanalytic encounter. I point out that this needs underlining since, strangely, it has been neglected in psychoanalytic literature until recent years, which I suggest is a legacy of Freud’s aversion to music. I look at a wide range of psychoanalytic literature which invokes music metaphorically while neglecting its literal musicality. I also explore the possible musical dimension of texts which explore non-verbal emotionality. I consider the long-term effects on internal object relations and personality of pre-verbal, infantile musicality and also of musicality within the womb. I conclude with an extended clinical example.

Le développement psychique dans les liens familiaux

ContextAccording to the theorists of primary bonds, contemporary psychoanalysts have shown that the familial psychic apparatus (Ruffiot, 1981) leaves an imprint of different modalities of bonds in the subject. ObjectivesUsing the concepts of the earliest moments of life, we demonstrate that the development of psychic life is continuous and supported by the environment. MethodWe present a qualitative work based on two clinical situations that facilitate the transformation of the modalities of bonds and access to subjectivation, during individual and couples psychoanalytic treatment. ResultsPsychic development continues throughout life, in various encounters, including the psychoanalytic encounter. ConclusionsAnalysis allows the subject to become aware of experiences from infancy and of past suffering that are often trivialized, and that will become the suffering recognized in the bond with the analyst who receives them in intersubjectivity, hears them with empathy, then reassures, accompanies, and allows access to ambivalence.

May mo(u)rn: transitional spaces in architecture and psychoanalysis — a site-writing

Addressing the architectural concept of the ‘social condenser of a transitional type’, the research traces this idea’s progress from the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow (1928–29), to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1947–52), to the Alton West Estate in London (1954–58). At the same time, with reference to the work of Sigmund Freud, D.W. Winnicott, André Green and Jean Laplanche, the research investigates the inherently spatial vocabulary of psychoanalysis, in particular notions of the transitional space of the ‘setting’. This physical and psychic scene of the psychoanalytic encounter is shown to offer new approaches for understanding relationships between subjects, objects, concepts and sites in architectural historical research and practice.

Anorexia and the Trojan Horse: a reflexive review of written psychoanalytic encounters with anorexic patients

ABSTRACTA selective and limited sample of clinical case studies of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with anorexic patients, focussing on the author/therapist’s experience of working with such patients, is examined. Patients’ depressive and often angry states of withdrawal, and projections, are frequently noted. A summary of more hopeful interactions, as selected from the literature reviewed, is offered. An understanding of anorexic defences is explored in relation to the ‘Trojan Horse’ mythology, in the sense that that which purports to be emotionally nourishing and sublime can be suspiciously viewed as seeking to enter and conquer, through subterfuge. Some existing challenges to traditional tenets of psychoanalytic clinical practice with anorexic patients are presented.

Book Review: Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts

Book Review: Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts

The Psychotic Part of the Personality: Bion'S Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life.

The psychotic part of the personality is seen as a multidimensional mental realm that is fully comprehensible only through intuition and tolerance of approximations, transience, and the notion of infinity. It is suggested that a major differentiating factor between the psychotic and nonpsychotic parts of the personality is the capacity to tolerate the infinite complexity of the human mind. With the use of mathematical concepts, Bion tries to describe the state of mind required of the analyst who endeavors to tread on psychotic territories of the personality. Bion is in effect trying to describe the intensity, violence, and fortitude of the transformation of the emotional experience generated by the psychotic as opposed to the nonpsychotic part of personality. Viewed from this vertex, transference is the path by which the unrepressed and unrepresentable unconscious can evolve and express itself. It is the function by which the individual can live through for the first time aspects of his mental life that have never been experienced. This is illustrated with a number of clinical vignettes highlighting different aspects of our capacity to get in touch with this nonsensuous realm of the psychoanalytic encounter.

Ethical Presence in the Psychoanalytic Encounter and the Role of Apology.

This paper discusses aspects of ethical presence in psychoanalysis, and the possible use of apology in the therapeutic process. The author roughly delineates two periods in the history of psychoanalysis regarding the ethical dimension-the early classical period which is influenced by Freud's ethics of honesty, which gradually evolves towards the more recent intersubjectively-influenced period, necessitating the assimilation of an ethics of relationships. It is suggested that explicit theorizing of the ethical dimension into psychoanalysis offers added value to its effectiveness, and a framework is presented for combiningrelational, intersubjectively informed ethical dialogue, with contributions of classical technique, enriching the therapeutic potential of psychoanalytic work.

Islands of Encounter: A Reflection on the Place of Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACTWhat is an encounter? What is an island? How can discourses on islands speak to our understanding of the place of practice and the placing of affect in the psychoanalytic encounter? Using notions of the island in philosophy and Caribbean Studies, this essay offers a brief reflection on the psychoanalytic encounter as an islanded field of interaction. The psychoanalytic frame islands analyst and analysand, setting the experience in the consulting room off as different from other forms of social interaction. But this is a dyadic island in an archipelago of relations, where overlapping and interlapping waves of relation keep shifting the frame.