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This paper places maternal subjectivity in an embodied, intersubjective context through the use of personal narrative. In response to the work of Helena Vissing (this issue), who lodges a critique of how psychoanalysis has negated aspects of maternal experience, it both extends and challenges her ideas, reacting to the disembodied nature of her critique and relocating it into the realm of an autobiographical story. It also problematizes cis-heteronormative biases in scholarship around maternal subjectivity through the inclusion of queer experience and queer family configurations in the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with Kohut's classic 1959 paper on the subject, empathy has been conceptualized as a process of finding something in one's self (introspection) that has resonance with one's experience of the other. This paper, inspired by advances in queer studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the Black American theater, identifies the limitations of this understanding. By putting Kohut's ideas about empathy in dialogue with French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, Black American playwrights Jeremy O. Harris, Michael R. Jackson, and James Ijames, and the author's own clinical experience, a queered empathy is theorized that relies less on self-reference and more on passibility. The theoretical and clinical implications of this shift are explored, and the possibilities for a queered Psychology of the Self that contain a heightened possibility for responsiveness to marginalized experience are suggested. The hope of this paper is that the reader, from a multidisciplinary perspective, will be inspired to imagine a psychoanalysis and Self Psychology for all that has the potential to flourish for generations to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of contemporary psychoanalytic writers have characterized gay childhood as a profoundly isolating experience. Within a developmentally informed self psychological framework, the loneliness of gay childhood is theorized here as a deficit in requisite twinship experience in early life. A detailed clinical example illustrates how these thwarted twinship needs may reemerge in the transference to the analyst, and how patients may escalate their acting out when the analyst misattunes to, or altogether misses, manifestations of twinship longings in the transference. A bridge between Freud's theory of the repetition compulsion and Kohut's theory of selfobject transferences suggests how specific moments of thwarted twinship needs may be repeated within the analytic relationship in an attempt to master the earlier experience. The experience of the analyst being pulled into the patient's attempts at mastery is detailed. A broader theoretical trend is hypothesized whereby psychoanalytic theories may have a pull toward twinship between each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the paper "Nicki, Nicholas, Nicole: Play as Relational Therapeutic Action on the Transgender Edge," Virginia Goldner and Charla Malamed have offered supportive comments and important critiques. Goldner has raised questions about the process of mourning gendered self-states that present themselves earlier in development. This paper, as a response to the respondents, puts Goldner's questions in dialogue with the concepts of après coup and psychic time, problematizing notions about what is past and present vis-à-vis varying gender configurations. Malamed links my lack of explicit disclosure around certain positionalities to creating a space that was dangerous for therapeutic play. Here, I take issue with the concreteness of that position, suggesting that the intersubjective fabric of a treatment—and subsequent democratization of the clinical relationship—is a more appropriate benchmark for evaluating the potential for exploitative dynamics. The nature of risk and safety in clinical encounters is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalytic thinking about gender is shifting in new and exciting ways. Over the past several decades, theories from feminist and queer studies have found their way into psychoanalytic theorizing, challenging heretofore bedrock notions around binary gender and Oedipal development. Even more recently, queer theories of trans phenomenon and the experience of transgender patients and analysts have been receiving attention in the literature. This paper expands on these developments, positing that traumatic—particularly transphobic—experience can have a foreclosing impact on softly assembled gender states, and that play within the psychoanalytic relationship can reawaken traumatically collapsed gender states. Special attention is paid to gender states that exist on the "transgender edge." In considering such experiences, the paper underscores the importance of an ethos of fluidity, fluctuation and movement rather than a phased, vectored developmental identity model in thinking about non-normative gender experience. The potential utility of such an ethos for all persons, regardless of identity, is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]