Psychoanalytic Project Research Articles

The Good Object Process as Developmental Achievement

ABSTRACT This response to Koshkarian and Larralde first clarifies the term “kinship object” placing it within its cultural and psychoanalytic context, then offers an alternative theoretical conceptualization based on the developmental achievement of the internalized good object as a necessary prerequisite for the experience of kinship. The response then connects the idea of kinship to the thinking of Searles and his work on the nonhuman environment. These themes emphasize the importance of the unconscious, its centrality to the psychoanalytic project, and our responsibility as psychoanalysts to bring the dark undercurrents of repressed thoughts and feelings into our awareness,

Splits in the fabric: A community psychoanalytic project during COVID-19

ABSTRACT Demonstrating how psychoanalysts can be useful in community settings outside the conventional consulting room, this paper describes consultation and group interventions conducted at a San Francisco mental health agency serving a largely Asian community. In the traumatic context of the COVID-19 pandemic, agency staff became fragmented, due to remote working conditions and differential work assignments, including mandated deployments to emergency sites. Two psychoanalysts worked with agency leadership to devise a weekly process group held by video conferencing over 6 months, in an attempt to heal resentments and splits in the fabric of the agency. Examples of the group process, interventions, and major themes that emerged are described, as well as recommendations made, including the formation of an ongoing clinical consultation group. The paper situates these interventions in the greater context of the pandemic which exposed not only a universal threat to life and health, but also structural vulnerabilities organized along lines of (racial) difference and inequity. The dynamics at the agency are thus described as rooted within greater nested histories: of the clinic, its leadership, and their relationship with a strained public health system, and more broadly, of the tangled intersection of these histories with anti-Asian racism. These are understood as manifestations of the Social Unconscious, and the intervention as an example of Community Psychoanalysis.

A Case of You: Leigh Lyndon’s “The Ice Is Melting”

ABSTRACT This discussion contemplates theoretical incantation as a convergence of auto-theory and music. The relevance of this mode of expression to the history and future of psychoanalytic writing is reviewed and extended. A comparison to the form that psychotherapy-informed auto-theory has emerged in pop and hip-hop music in recent years is presented. These various considerations are reconciled with the psychoanalytic project of negotiating freedom.

Edward Glover, John Bowlby, psychiatry, Bion, and the War Office Selection Boards—towards a context for the emergence of group analysis

This paper is a reflection on the context from which group analysis emerged in Britain during the Second World War. Edward Glover’s objections to the work of army psychiatry in a radio broadcast in November 1943, and the difficult collaboration between the War Office and psychiatrists as they sought to develop officer selection and training procedures, influenced developments in psychoanalysis, including the emergence of group analysis. It considers the response of the British Psychoanalytical Society whose members were engaged in army psychiatry work alongside colleagues from the Tavistock Clinic. Bion’s and Rickman’s collaboration and the experiments at Northfield were an outcome. The abrupt ending of the first Northfield experiment, and the development of psychiatry more broadly, prompted serious questioning within the Society about its isolationalist policies. The Society’s move to develop its training role, and to participate in post war health, mental health and welfare services was a result. Not only did it ensure the Society’s survival, but enhanced the emergence of group analysis as a discipline within the psychoanalytic project.

A critique of leftist gaming

This article presents a discussion between Jan De Vos and Alfie Bown on leftist gaming. Bown wrote a well-read and well-referenced book entitled The Playstation Dreamworld (2018a) in which he also advanced the idea of the necessity to develop gaming for the left. In his book The Digitalisation of (Inter)Subjectivity (2020), De Vos challenged and critiqued the concept of leftist gaming in a chapter entitled ‘Digital Mass Effects’. In this article, Alfie Bown introduces the discussion after which Jan De Vos rehearses the main arguments of his book, adding a few extra elements to his critique. De Vos’s main question is whether the fact that digital technologies, historically underpinned by mainstream psychological theories, undermine Bown’s psychoanalytic project for leftist gaming. In his response, Bown then pleads to scrutinise not only the pre-digital history of coding but also the future of it, so as to rewrite the history of the digital infrastructure as inherently tied to the history of capitalism. De Vos closes this article with a brief afterthought.

Chasing infinity: Why clinical psychoanalysis' future lies in pluralism

ABSTRACT Part of an ongoing political and scholarly effort to move the psychoanalytic project towards greater cohesiveness, the author proposes a standard method, borrowing the phrase from physics, for a structured, eclectic clinical pluralism. She [or he] uses psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments, as well as considerations of patients’ personal idiosyncrasies, to conclude that achieving one, over-arching metapsychology will prove impossible. In other words, and despite their ardent efforts, psychoanalytic theorists, including Freud (1895/1991), Rangell (1975, 2006), Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), Wallerstein (1988, 1990, 2002, 2005, 2013), and others, failed to create models accounting for the dynamically interacting variables creating human subjectivity. Their struggles to bridge psychoanalytic theories of mind and method also fell short. As a result, the author suggests, clinical psychoanalysis’ ultimate fate lies in organizing what Wallerstein (2005) called the “common ground” (p. 626) into methodology which invites psychoanalytic practitioners to mine the psychoanalytic opus for its “plethora of theoretical metaphors” (Wallerstein, 2013, p. 36), “controlling fictions” (Greenberg, 2015, p. 17), “useful untruths” (Lament,020, p. 196), or “regional dialects” (Fulgencio, 2020, p. 15). Cohesively applying a pluralistically based metapsychology to guide clinical processes, rather than provide maps of the mind, offers much-needed unity to psychoanalysis’ applied wing.

The Psychoanalyst As Revolutionary

By comparing psychoanalytic transformational processes to political revolutions, the author advances the psychoanalytic project in several ways. The analogy extends British object relations theory by elaborating upon Fairbairn's (1952) observation that psychoanalysts arduously compete with their patients' devotions to their internal worlds. In essence, he argues, and by exploiting the ‘mutual but asymmetrical’ (Aron, 1991) intimacy of the psychoanalytic dyad, psychoanalysts foment change in individuals like revolutionaries alter governments. The comparison to political revolutions also highlights how changes in the behaviour of other persons in patients' lives are necessary for transformation. Clinical insurgencies, when successful, alter patients' intra‐psychic structures, interpersonal relationships, and overall behavioural patterns. The paper includes two case examples, one a successful revolution and the other not, as illustrations.

Laying the death drive to rest

While respecting the ontological assumption of the unconscious, the author systematically critiques the concept of the death drive. It clashes with the dictates of contemporary biology, disrupting communication between disciplines. In clinical application, the death drive as metaphor demonstrates little utility. It also invites reductionism, risking oversimplification of extremely complex phenomena like aggression. Perhaps most importantly, the construct places the entire psychoanalytic project, already in an existential crisis, in peril. The author briefly introduces a complex alternative view of aggression, driven solely by eros but involving many complicated intrapsychic, interpersonal, and sociocultural factors. He suggests the death drive, however thoughtfully utilized, hinders the forward movement of psychoanalysis for reasons of consilience, incommensurability, clinical utility, cross-disciplinary communication, and political survival.

Amnesias of a Freudian Kind, Part II

Amnesias of a Freudian Kind, Part II Diane O'Donoghue (bio) Part II This essay is the second of a two-part series that examines Freud's constructions of amnesia as they participated in "forgetting," both within the mechanisms of his psychoanalytic project and, far less investigated, as a way to fix the borders of his idea of an unconscious. As argued in Part One (O'Donoghue, 2021), the operations of forgetting that Freud would identify with repression were in fact constituted by a preceding removal from memory, one that was discursive rather than psychical. Significant events were banished from view—or, better, hidden in plain sight—by being enunciated as valueless, or as Freud said of his early years in Vienna, "nothing was worth remembering" (Freud, 1899, p. 312). What remained were selected fragments of one's past that were interpretable as markers of repression, and as such tied to specific a priori drives whose sexual or aggressive impulses necessitated their inaccessibility to consciousness. This allowed for a schema to be placed on the vagaries of an individual life and desires, and those that were irreducible to such characterizations, originating with Freud's own early life, were rendered forgettable. Freud's specific uses of the term "amnesie" have received surprisingly little attention, a fact that can be attributable to its lack of psychoanalytic gravitas—in contrast to repression—and as such it functioned as a descriptor that could be applied more fluidly. Several of its streams, including Freud's earliest published discussion of amnesia, as well as its later "infantile" version, were charted in the first portion of this study. We turn now to its presence within Studies on Hysteria (1895), where we find a striking example of expungement as Freud attempted to treat a patient by making her "reminiscences" permanently [End Page 601] inaccessible. After discussing this case, we will consider several genealogies that have been offered for Freud's attempt at such an extreme memory effacement. The essay concludes with a discussion of suppression, posited here as a form of amnesic erasure that, enacted by Freud as a conscious way to delimit the content of unconscious phenomena, was never, not surprisingly, privileged within the construction of psychical life that resulted from it. Hysteria, Amnesia, and Discontent In his treatment of "Emmy von N," likely occurring in brief periods during 1888 and 1889, Freud, in his "first attempt" (Breuer and Freud, 1895, p. 48) at hypnotic intervention—and his first recorded clinical case—was able to remove "melancholy things" from her memory by "not only wiping out her memories of them in their plastic form [but] by removing her whole recollection of them" (p. 61). The narrative of "Emmy," his pseudonym for Fanny von Sulzer-Wirth Moser (1848–1924) was documented in Studies on Hysteria (1895) as a series of journal entries detailing the episodes of sustained contact that Freud had with her. He added a subsequent self-reflection on the case in 1924, in a footnote to a later edition (1925) of Studies that Strachey added at the conclusion of the case, where Freud observed that "no analyst can read this case to-day without a smile of pity" (p. 105, n. 1). Such a comment intimates that Freud, by this point in the codification of his psychoanalytic project, was comfortable enough to proffer such a retrospective revelation of naïveté. Over a decade after this admission he penned a letter, in July of 1935, to Fanny Moser's daughter and namesake that appears to be his last word on the case.1 There he defended his inability to correctly identify the elder Moser's condition (rather baldly stated to her daughter as "unconscious hatred for her two children") because at that point he "didn't know anything," having not yet understood the workings of the "hidden psyche" (Tögel, 1999, p. 1165). In an earlier correspondence with this younger Fanny Moser, in 1918, he claimed that he had stopped his use of hypnosis (it was "meaningless and useless") because of this case, with [End Page 602] this abandonment resulting in "the incentive to create psychoanalytic therapy more in accordance with reason" (Andersson, 1979, p. 14). These...

Amnesias of a Freudian Kind

Freud's psychoanalytic project was indebted to mechanisms and effects that were made visible by acts of forgetting. Certain terms for that, such as repression, became dynamic constructions within his notions of unconscious functioning. But there is a notable example of a relevant concept, with currency in some later nineteenth-century scientific discourses, that seemingly remained purely descriptive for him: amnesia. This essay, the first of two parts, looks closely at the genealogy of Freud's uses of amnesia in his early writings, arguing that its meanings, and functions, were more complex that might be readily apparent.

On Wittgenstein's Notion of a Surveyable Representation: The Case of Psychoanalysis

Abstract I demonstrate that analogies, both explicit and implicit, between Wittgenstein's discussion of rituals, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis (and, indeed, his own philosophical methodology) suggest that he entertained the idea that Freud's psychoanalytic project, when understood correctly—that is, as a descriptive project rather than an explanatory-hypothetical one—provides a “surveyable representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) of certain psychological facts (as opposed to psychological concepts). The consequences of this account are that it offers an explanation of Wittgenstein's admiration for and self-perceived affinity to Freud, as well as of his apparent “know-nothing approach” to empirical psychology.

Psychosis Therapy Project: A Psychoanalytic Project in the Community

This paper discusses the benefits and the challenges of running a specialist psychoanalytic project in the community in the current economic and political climate. As the founder and clinical lead of the Psychosis Therapy Project, an Inner London service for people who experience psychosis, the author reflects on the pitfalls currently facing the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis and exposes the ideological violence underlying the dominant model of recovery and rehabilitation in mental health care. From her frontline perspective, she recounts the devastating impact of social exclusion and discrimination on the welfare of those living with severe mental illness.

‘A Marriage of Freud and Euclid’: Psychotic Epistemology in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

The writings of J.G. Ballard respond to the sciences in multiple ways; as such his (early) writing may productively be discussed as science fiction. However, the theoretical discipline to which he publicly signalled most allegiance, psychoanalysis, is one whose status in relation to science is highly contested and complex. In the 1960s Ballard signalled publicly in his non-fiction writing a belief in psychoanalysis as a science, a position in keeping with psychoanalysis’ contemporary status as the predominant psychological paradigm. Various early Ballard stories enact psychoanalytic theories, while the novel usually read as his serious debut, The Drowned World, aligns itself allusively with an oft-cited depiction by Freud of the revelatory and paradigm-changing nature of the psychoanalytic project. Ballard’s enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis in his early 1960s fiction mutated into a fascinatingly delirious vision in some of his most experimental work of the late 1960s and early 1970s of a fusion of psychoanalysis with the mathematical sciences. This paper explores how this ‘Marriage of Freud and Euclid’ is played out in its most systematic form in The Atrocity Exhibition and its successor Crash. By his late career Ballard was acknowledging problems raised over psychoanalysis’ scientific status in the positivist critique of Karl Popper and the work of various combatants in the ‘Freud Wars’ of the 1990s; Ballard at this stage seemed to move towards agreement with interpretations of Freud as a literary or philosophical figure. However, despite making pronouncements reflecting changes in dominant cultural appraisals of Freud, Ballard continued in his later writings to extrapolate the fictive and interpretative possibilities of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas. This article attempts to develop a deeper understanding of Ballard’s ‘scientific’ deployment of psychoanalysis in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash within the context of a more fully culturally-situated understanding of psychoanalysis’ relationship to science, and thereby to create new possibilities for understanding the meanings of Ballard’s writing within culture at large.

Towards a New Chestnut Lodge

The author, who was a staff psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge from 1976 until it closed in 2001, reflects on the history of the Lodge and her experience working with psychotic patients. This spanned a period when the Lodge moved from treating schizophrenic patients without psychotropics to the current age of medication. The author makes a case for the earlier Lodge treatment model and questions the extensive use of anti-psychotic medication that she believes stalls the psychoanalytic project and—as current research is showing—may have a negative effect on the patient’s neurobiology. She imagines a return to the Lodge’s earlier days.

Finding Freedom: Exploring the Relationship Between Agency, Motility, and Aggression.

After an overview of the opposed concepts of freedom and psychic determinism, and of the compatibilist reconciliation between the two that is most appropriate for psychoanalysis, the importance of agency as a psychoanalytic idea is considered. In particular, two ways in which the term agency may be used are examined: agency as fact and agency as experience. The former refers to the degree of relative freedom an individual possesses from "inner" constraints, whereas the latter refers to the experience of oneself as having an active impact on the self, other people, and/or the world. Importantly, these two senses are not coextensive. With this distinction in place, it is argued that agency as experience is rooted in the infant's earliest experiences of motility. As an extension of Winnicott's reflections (1950) on the relation between motility and aggression, it is argued that inasmuch as it involves the overcoming of opposition, aggression is integral to the developmental unfolding of the experience of agency. Further developmental conditions needed for a full experience of agency are noted. Ultimately, it is suggested, agency is central to the psychoanalytic project itself.

The Use of Benign Authority with Severe Borderline Patients: A Psychoanalytic Paradigm

Kernberg has suggested that work with severe borderline psychopathology requires limit‐setting interventions to mitigate the possibility of life‐threatening enactments. These actions constitute a deviation from the classical analytic stance of technical neutrality. Taking up these modifications, I argue for a re‐calibration of the analytic task with severe borderline patients predicated on the use of benign authority. Abandoning therapeutic equidistance, I propose a model based on interventions organized around ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’ functions and the dialectical and generative intercourse between these two poles. Such engagement requires close attention to the countertransference, as enactments are inevitable. In this context I reflect on the way ‘action’ in psychoanalysis is considered pathological, as a countertransference enactment. Clinical vignettes are presented arguing for ‘actions’ based on limit setting and active emotional engagement as therapeutic in their own right, which is consistent with psychoanalytic practice. This realignment of the psychoanalytic project embodies the ideas that Gabbard and Westen introduced in ‘Rethinking therapeutic action’. They suggest that it is now more accurate to speak of therapeutic actions in psychoanalytic treatment, rather than the ‘single‐mechanism theories of therapeutic action’, which may have implications for psychoanalytic practice beyond the treatment of the personality disordered patient.

Desire's Politics: Félix Guattari and the Renewal of the Psychoanalytic Left

The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is experiencing a considerable revival in the early twenty-first century, among queer, disability, economic justice, and environmental activists, but also among psychoanalysts across a global geographical range. This essay revisits the key coauthored text of Anti-Oedipus (1972) – with its innovative mix of ideas taken from the work of Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, and Frantz Fanon – as well as an array of Guattari's subsequent writings in order to make an argument for Guattari as not just a critic of stultifying existing forms of psychoanalysis but also as a highly creative revitalizer of the psychoanalytic project. This project was, under the impact not least of the sexual revolution, feminism, and gay rights as well as New Left, anticolonial, and antiwar activism, undergoing substantial transformation as the locus of intensive productivity was shifting from the US to Western Europe and Latin America.

To Whom Does the Subject Speak? Between the Relational and Lacanian Schools of Psychoanalysis: A Conversation With Adrienne Harris and David Lichtenstein, Moderated by Chris Christian

Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new but increasingly present school in contemporary psychoanalysis. Lacanian psychoanalysis is a dominant presence in France and South America but far less so in the English-speaking clinical world. And there is little contact between them. Adrienne Harris, one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, and David Lichtenstein, a prominent New York-based Lacanian-influenced psychoanalyst, came together in the spring of 2012 for a rare conversation about the differences, similarities, and potential meeting points between these two psychoanalytic movements. The conversation spanned a wide psychoanalytic landscape from the origins and influences of these two movements to their conceptualization of basic psychoanalytic notions such as the unconscious, the self, the process and purpose of the psychoanalytic project, the nature of trauma, the work of interpretation, and the role of the analytic relationship. Ferenczi, Winnicott, and Bromberg offered common theoretical ground for this comparative conversation.

Beckett’s Everyday Psychopathology: Reading Male Nervous Hysteria in Murphy

Psychotherapy is an artistic profession. Samuel Beckett Psychology Notebooks On 23 January 1934, samuel beckett, then twenty-eight years old, moved from Dublin to London to undertake a course of psychotherapy at Tavistock Clinic (Fehsenfeld 175). He complained of a series of severe anxiety symptoms, which he described in his opening session: a bursting, apparently arrhythmic heart, night sweats, shudders, panic, breathlessness, and, when his condition was at its most severe, total paralysis (Knowlson 169). His subsequent two-year course of therapy with Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, soon to make a career for himself as a leading psychoanalyst of shell shock during World War 11, allowed Beckett to work through anxieties that sprang from his relationship with his mother, his unwillingness to pursue an academic career, and his arrogant superiority and isolation (Ackerley and Gontarski 467). This therapy, perhaps surprisingly, was immensely successful: it turned arrogant, disturbed, narcissistic young man of early into man noted later for his extraordinary kindness, courtesy, concern, generosity, and almost saintly 'good works' (Knowlson 173). Conversely, from 1927 to 1930, years preceding his therapy, Beckett came to be known as one of foremost translators of surrealist poetry and prose. Some of his translations included Andre Breton and Louis Aragon's celebration of hysteria as a supreme means of expression (quoted in Albright 10) in La Cinquantenaire de l'hysterie (1928) and portions of Breton and Paul Eluard's L'lmmaculee conception (1930), a text which attempts to simulate various mental illnesses, debilities and paralyses (Albright 10). Beckett's involvement with surrealism, then, is closely linked to characteristic avant-garde and surrealist impulse to reclaim mental illness, particularly hysteria, and critique bourgeois medical professional project to cure mentally ill and suppress their non-rational modes of expression. These two early moments of Beckett's career--the later treatment of his own nervous health, earlier access to an aesthetic of critique against those very therapeutic methods--seem at odds, perhaps irreconcilable. But during his psychotherapy, Beckett began to compose his first published full-length work, Murphy (1936), a novel that centres upon its title character's search for a kindred which he finds in a hospital for better class mentally deranged (87), whose subject matter mirrors his direct experiences with therapeutic systems and whose criticism of those systems and its aesthetic of absurdity recall surrealist aesthetic that Beckett encountered in Paris. This paper argues that Murphy places surrealism's aesthetic and formal critique of psychoanalytic project in tension with desire in psychoanalysis to understand structure and content of psychopathological mind. It is a question of surrealist treatment of form and psychoanalytic interest in structure and content. Hysteria is diagnostic category effecting this tension, Beckett's simultaneous appropriation of both surrealist and psychoanalytic approaches to what Freud famously entitled the psychopathology of everyday life. Murphy constitutes a key moment in representation of male nervous illness in 1930s and in afterlife of hysteria. At this time, legitimacy of male nervous illness was to some extent in question: Freud had relegated hysteria to feminine, and Bion and Tavistock Clinic would not reach prominence in their treatment of shell shock until war. However, tension in Murphy between therapeutic and aesthetic elements of hysteria suggests a continuous discourse of hysteria in a late-modernist moment. And this late-modernist moment is one expressed through a masculine hysterical aesthetic: Beckett deliberately departs from his experience of female nervous illness (his proximity to Lucia Joyce's breakdown) and his awareness of feminization of hysteria in surrealist conceptions. …

Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (review)

Reviewed by: Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg Shuli Barzilai Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. 245pp. incl. bibliography and index. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics presents a detailed intertextual study of the complex relationship between the lifework of Anna Freud and the legacy of Sigmund Freud, the singular figure who played many roles in her life: father, teacher, mentor — and psychoanalyst. Since this is a father-daughter relationship that has been repeatedly and comprehensively explored in the existing scholarship, Stewart-Steinberg demarcates from the outset what her project will not do. It will not be a biography of Anna Freud’s life, nor will it focus on an analysis of “her personal intentions and motivations” (2). Moreover, it will not offer readers an assessment of the daughter’s “relative loyalty or not to the psychoanalytic cause” of her father, nor [End Page 192] provide a history of her wars with two major implacable opponents: Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan (2–3). What, then, does concern the author of this volume? and how does she delineate her contribution to an already crowded field? The aspects of Anna Freud’s work that serve as the focal point of Impious Fidelity are not initially transparent. As Stewart-Steinberg somewhat broadly puts it, her interest lies in Anna Freud’s “defense of the ego for a viable, democratic existence” (3). However, after several reformulations of this statement, a significantly innovative thesis does come into view. In Stewart-Steinberg’s well-grounded judgment, Anna Freud’s lifelong project was to safeguard and maintain the ego, an especially vulnerable psychical agency in the aftermaths of World War II and the Holocaust. A traumatized and/or irrational human subject, as Stewart-Steinberg argues, undermines democracy and abets totalitarian institutions and regimes. That is why Anna Freud was so intent on — and so rigorously devoted to the cause of — seeking “adequate defenses for the ego in order to create stable democratic institutions, whether these be states, schools, or psychoanalytic institutions” (5). In this respect, Stewart-Steinberg finds her subject’s psychoanalytic project admirable in its humanitarian political commitments. But therein also lies the proverbial rub. In advancing the vital necessity for the staunch defense and shoring up of the ego through her theoretical writings, as well as through her own analytic practice, Anna Freud was often perceived by members of the psychoanalytic community as betraying the fundamental discovery of her father: the unconscious. She could not help but be aware of the allegations and, at times, the vituperative charges of betrayal brought against her. Controversy constantly accompanied her independent lines of thought. (As a student of Lacan’s writings and, to a lesser extent, of Klein’s, I was occasionally struck by the oppositional rage she aroused.) Consequently, as Stewart-Steinberg demonstrates in this study, Anna Freud’s lifework became a delicate balancing act between two competing claims: fidelity to the teachings of her father and allegiance to her deeply-held belief in the urgency of shifting the psychoanalytic emphasis away from unconscious processes (the Id) to conscious defenses (the Ego). How, then, could the daughter honor and obey the “Father of the Law,” in Lacanian terms, without compromising her personal and professional integrity? How could she uphold his faith without abnegating and abandoning hers? The means she conceived (or, rather, contrived) to resolve this bind was “always in her father’s name — to construct a form of democratic politics founded in the stable and therefore viable defense of the ego.” It is this modus operandi that Stewart-Steinberg chooses to designate, oxymoronically, “impious fidelity.” Anna Freud, she argues, “entered psychoanalytic history with a certain burden, with the (perhaps self-imposed) demand of a ‘piety’ that nonetheless always verges . . . on the edges of the ‘impious’” (3–4). The problems raised by this central tension, which may be summarily formulated as the question of how-far-can-you-go-without-leaving-the-fold, [End Page 193] are the explicit focus of Stewart-Steinberg’s discussion in the four chapters of her book. Chapter One, “A Wider Social Stage,” interrogates two main...