Psychoanalysis Journals

When Elliot first took over as editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology and invited Jeremy to join the editorial board, we met for lunch to brainstorm about new directions for the journal. One of the schemes we hatched was the idea of developing a special issue consisting of articles by prominent figures in the field, reflecting on the future of psychoanalysis. This article discusses some of the details of this issue. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

Presents an interview that was conducted by Jeremy Safran with Lewis Aron on the topic of psychoanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

While greatly facilitating ease of interaction across time and geographic boundaries, the virtual world presents an unreal universe comprised of instant connection and gratification. Our culture has embraced this alternate reality in the form of online journals, chat rooms, and excessive involvement with video games, as well as Internet pornography and sexual solicitation. Psychoanalytic principles can greatly illuminate our understanding of individuals' involvement with virtual reality as it becomes disruptive to work and meaningful relationships. Two cases will be used to illustrate overinvolvement with the virtual world as a form of dissociation in which the individuals retreat from the painful memories, deficits, and helplessness they experience in the real world to a subjective state in which they can attempt to exercise control and aggressively capture the supplies they lack. In the course of treatment, the dissociated material must be invited into the therapeutic dyad so that it may become a conscious and accepted part of the self. The process involves both verbal interpretation and relational grounding in the person of the therapist. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

Reports an error in "The role of the transitional realm as an organizer of analytic process: Transitional organizing experience" by Joe Cancelmo (Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2009[Jan], Vol 26[1], 2-25). The author’s name was incorrectly printed in the toc and in the author byline. The author’s name should read Joseph A. Cancelmo, PsyD, FIPA, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2008-19341-002.) D. W. Winnicott's construct of the transitional realm of human experience has been widely applied and creatively extended since its introduction more than half a century ago. The author describes the extension of this construct beyond its roots in the phase-specific need for the transitional object to a paradigm for psychic structuralization. He then considers a larger implication of this construct as an organizer and vehicle of transformation in analytic process via the transference. In this more elastic use of Winnicott's construct, the analytic process becomes organized along the lines of the earliest transitional experiences: the developmental progression from a nascent to a separate self, the organization of drive experience via the other, and the sorting out of one's own mind in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. Transitional organizing experience is used as shorthand for these far-reaching structural and dynamic transformations that take place within and between patient and analyst in the dyadic interplay of the analytic process. Via familiar dynamic constellations that emerge within the analytic process, the analytic dyad comes to reexperience (as a 2-person psychology) and reorganize (as a 1-person psychology) toward less "pathological" transitional forms of experience, allowing for a resumption in development of creative transitional space. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

The authors discuss 4 verbatim sessions of a treatment of a difficult-to-reach patient who can be said in classical nosology to manifest a perverse narcissistic character configuration. The authors discuss the clinical material seen through 2 different lenses based on the classical and relational paradigms. The therapist, Michael Shoshani, worked in a rather classical psychoanalytic model in which perversion was understood in a 1-person or 1-mind mode. With this lens, perversion is seen as a result of the distorted primal scene in which the child is narcissistically inflated, creating the psychotic-like symbolic equation that the child is the father. The father is annihilated and the unique perverse world is created. In contrast, within the relational perspective, the authors see the intersubjective dynamic of mutually knowing and not knowing as being a paramount theme in the treatment of Mr. A. The known and unknown character that a child possesses of his mother's sexuality creates a potential for a relational third. The perversion is the experience of child and parent mutually feeling a sense of being too full of mutual knowledge and not knowing each other at all, leaving a sense of suffocation and stifled vitality. The relational perspective strives to create a transformation from suffocation and stifled vitality to move to a third place offering potential, thus enabling the enigmatic, seductive encounter of the knowing and not knowing to create a sense of mystery, lying between fact and fiction and between sameness and difference, seducing one to want and be, to love while respecting the given universal boundaries. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

This paper illuminates how the “inner world” of wishes, fantasies, affects, and self- and object-representations and the “outer world” of overt behavior and social reality continuously and reciprocally co-create each other. Basing its presentation both on case material and theoretical analysis, it demonstrates the limitations of a linear, archaeological theoretical vision of surface and depths. In its place, the paper shows how daily life and conscious and unconscious subjective organization mutually shape and maintain each other and in the process maintain the individual's dominant personality patterns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

In the past 20 years, much has been written about the death of psychoanalysis and, along with it, its founder, Sigmund Freud. In this article, it is argued that a great deal of what has been erased is Freud's thinking on the importance of memory and the uncovering of repression for the therapeutic process and for mental health. From the beginning of his psychoanalytic writings, Freud was interested in the function that memory played in psychoanalysis, both as theory and as therapeutic technique. Although he continued to develop and revise his theory well into his eighties, Freud never ceased to believe in the utmost significance of uncovering repression for the human psyche. The aim here is to revive what is believed to be some of Freud's most important contributions on the subject of memory and to offer some suggestions as to why these intellectual gems have been neglected in recent years or, when not neglected, divorced from their originator. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

The psychoanalytic literature has not been particularly attentive to the longing for home, this despite the fact that it has been central to the organizing narratives of the Western world since ancient times. Indeed, a nonpathological mourning for a lost home and efforts both real and symbolic to return would appear to be universals in human experience. The author examines the longing for home by presenting a series of narratives drawn from sources both heroic and quotidian in a kind of theme and variations. Appreciation of and clinical attentiveness to the longing for home would do much to broaden the understanding and investigation of some of our most important psychoanalytic ideas—even, and surprisingly, the Oedipus complex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

The author extends his conception of emotional trauma as a shattering of the tranquilizing “absolutisms of everyday life” that shield us from our finitude and our existential vulnerability, to a consideration of collective trauma. Using the collective trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath as his prime example, he illustrates how traumatized people fall prey to “resurrective ideologies” that promise to restore the sheltering illusions that have been lost. He suggests that an alternative to these grandiose illusions can be found in our “kinship-in-finitude.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

This essay addresses certain complexities of dealing with the God-concept in psychoanalytic terms. Preanalytic philosophical and theological parallels to understanding the existence and nature of God find their echoes in psychoanalytic formulations of the God-concept. Centered on the idea of the God-representation, questions arise concerning the function of this representation as expressing the person's internal psychic reality as opposed to having some reference to a really existing divinity. Tensions in current analytic approaches to this problem are discussed, and suggestions are offered for advancing the potential dialogue in terms of the God-representation as a form of transitional conceptualization. Implications for the therapeutic handling of related issues are also suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)