Who Do the Words Come From: A Psychoanalytical Tale

The Other Scene, 2013

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2002

The current debate over the conflicting interpersonal and intrapsychic views of the analytic process may or may not help us to distinguish between psychoanalysis and analytic psychotherapy. A comparison of psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world-especially in the United States-with French psychoanalysis reveals the features that unite and at the same time divide these different psychoanalytical tendencies, both of which are the heirs to Freud's thought, in terms, in particular, of the setting (couch and chair) and of technique (interpretation, transference analysis and technical neutrality). Whereas all psychoanalytic work belongs within the framework of an interpersonal relationship, that relationship becomes meaningful only when linked to the intrapsychic dimension, which alone can open the way to the unconscious and to infantile sexuality.

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2008

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2019

perspective on the nature of psychoanalysis. All of these trends, called for throughout this volume, are evident today. This book is written for a psychoanalytically sophisticated audience. Some of the difficult theory (Jurist, Naso, Lichtenstein) and research (Graf and Diamond; Waldron et al.) material is unlikely to find a readership among nonanalysts, but the ideas and information the book contains must be circulated beyond analytic circles. It is important for the larger world to know that psychoanalysis has changed, and that analysts have changed. We might suggest that progress begets progress (unless it doesn't), but that at least we can mark as progress whatever makes further progress more likely. And the attitudes presented by the contributors to this book are welcoming of new theory and applications. This is a crucial message to convey to analysts and nonanalysts alike.

What connects thinking and poetry is metaphor. In philosophy one calls concept what in poetry is called metaphor. Thinking creates its -concepts‖ out of the visible, in order to designate the invisible.‖ Hannah Arendt, Thought Journal, 1969 1 My topic tonight is the use and abuse of psychoanalytic theory. Using Plato's image of a divided line, I will develop a context for thinking about aspects of psychoanalytic theory. More precisely, I shall explore the modes of knowing and aspects of being at issue when we study psychoanalytic theory. We learn about psychoanalysis indirectly, I shall argue, by studying various -images‖ of the analytic process [e.g. case histories or written reports]. We also learn about it directly by analyzing and being analyzed, by practicing and being supervised. Finally, we learn to think about what we are doing when we practice analysis by studying the major hypotheses about the unconscious that constitute the psychoanalytic tradition.

Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2007

This article discusses the question of the basis of changes in psychoanalytic concepts, theory, and treatment. Illustrative examples discussed include the "widening scope" of the use of "parameters" in psychoanalytic treatment; the rejection of the "Enlightenment Vision" and the concomitant de-emphasis on the role of insight; the concept of "narrative truth"; and the "totalistic" reconceptualization of the meaning of countertransferase. I then discuss the relationship between research and clinical practice and argue that if it is to grow, psychoanalysis must be open to and attempt to integrate findings from other related disciplines.

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2006

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

H ow do we become analysts? In this essay I will present a trajectory of my use of my self and my understanding of the mutual influences my patients and I have had on each other over my professional life. The use of my self and the mutual influences my patients and I have on each other, of course, are about the patient-analyst match. I believe our engagement reflects a process of working through for me, as well as for each of my patients. Events in our lives also affect who we become as people-sometimes only in subtle ways and sometimes more significantly. Changes in our selves have reverberations in our work with patients. When I began my psychoanalytic training in 1968, we were taught that analysts were meant to be "blank screens." Patients could and would project their difficulties onto us. Who we were, our conflicts and character, were to have been smoothed out in our personal analyses and our personalities purged of the tendency to appear in our offices. Analysts were assumed to be interchangeable. I know this sounds like a parody of analysis. I also now know that many analysts, even then, were not like this, but it is what we were taught. I admit to having been incredulous. Really? Who we were as people would not enter our work with patients? Before my training, I had worked primarily with children and been relatively free in using my self intuitively in the work. My classical analytic training did help to provide a discipline for my spontaneity that was useful, but the idea that I, or anyone, could be grayed

2017