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In this paper, I explore the profound potential, and the challenges, of mutual vulnerability in psychoanalysis. I describe ways in which analysts are penetrated by shards of our patients’ trauma, and how this interpenetrates with our own vulnerabilities and ungrieved losses (Harris, 2009; Levine, 2016). In my patient Lisa’s fierce determination to come into being, and in our mutual efforts to survive each other’s ruthlessness (Winnicott, 1969) we each struggle to recognize and own malignant “not-me” versions of ourselves (Bromberg, 1998), as we reach toward reparation, mutual recognition, and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts forward the idea that “relationality” can exist onlyin relation tosomething that is necessarily non-relational, and by extension argues in favor of such open structures for psychoanalytic theorizing. After making the distinction between relational theory and the Relational movement, it takes up and elaborates two registers of “non-relationality,” the domains of place and of the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud and Winnicott have expressed the opinion that if their psychoanalytic ideas are correct, then poets and writers will have thought of them first. The author of the present article, who, in a previous work, has developed the concept of “actual time” on metapsychological grounds, concurs with their opinion by showing that variants of “actual time” can be found in the works of the American poet W. S. Merwin, the British writer Virginia Woolf, and the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Their poetry, literary prose, and philosophy, respectively, are shown to resonate with the time dimension of the psychoanalytic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the difficulties that arise with patients who experience a compromised capacity in working on a symbolic level when ensnared in specific transference/countertransference entanglements. In these kinds of situations, patients often operate in what is referred to as the concrete mode of psychic functioning in which there is an inability to think psychologically about their own mind, as well as the minds of others. Similarly, the analyst often has trouble thinking with the patient in processing the actions between them, unable to recruit the patient’s mind in becoming athinking coupletogether. Having exhausted conventional technique and interventions in trying to observe the enactment with the patient, the author argues that the analyst’s ability to grab hold of fleeting associations and memories that have not been fully processed not only expands his own mind but also facilitates symbolic functioning in the patient’s mind. By using the imagistic and sensorial substrates of these remembrances to further symbolize personal experiences, the analyst may gain entrée into the patient’s mental life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lauren Levine’s paper illustrates how she straddled the lines between helping her patient to grieve his substantial loss and exploring new psychic possibilities. As she discusses the transformation of traumatic loss into developing capacities for mourning and regeneration, she also examines the analyst’s limits that are directly and indirectly expressed to the patient. This discussion examines the intrinsic relationship in analytic work between grieving, the depressive position, and psychic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore ways in which a mutual survival of destructiveness became a source of agency, passion, and creative change for both analyst and patient. I describe how my patient, Jack pushed me to the brink, to the edge of my capacity as an analyst, and how each of us needed to free ourselves from old identifications and constraints in order to have the courage to swim together in dangerous, deadly waters. This deep mutual vulnerability helped us envision a sense of psychic future (Cooper, 2010; Loewald, 1960), allowing for catastrophic change (Bion, 1970/1984) and creative transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to the generative commentaries by Stefanie Solow Glennon and Steven Cooper, I address issues taken up by the two discussants, including the analyst’s challenges to both work in and help her patient work in the depressive position, and to envision a sense of psychic future. I also explore questions related to Relational notions of therapeutic action, in the context of a recent panel inPsychoanalytic Dialoguesthat considers whether Relational psychoanalysis has gone too far in the direction of relationality and away from privacy, contemplation, and reverie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a dynamic systems contextual model, I expand Daniel Goldin’s ideas about narrative and the “storied self.” I identify two issues that are key to the development of a coherent life story: first, the identification and integration of the multiple psychic self-states and external cultures with which and in which people live, and second, the meeting and melding of important minds in the person’s environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the foundational status of the concept of human dignity in relational thought. The author highlights the importance of dignity in everyday clinical work, as well as the role this notion has played in inspiring what has been called the “relational turn” in psychoanalysis. Utilizing concepts from ethical theory and current analytic ideas regarding the multiplicity of self-states, the author sketches a model of psychic experience in which dignity plays a defining role. This model emphasizes the ongoing dialectic between dignity-based processes (in which Self and Other are experienced as unconditionally valuable) and processes in which we experience Self and Other as onlyconditionallyvaluable, or in many cases of pathology, unconditionally bad. Adignity-basedvision of analytic process is proposed, wherein analyst and patient are engaged in the co-construction of an intersubjective space that is progressively more consistent with their intrinsic worth as human beings. It is suggested that, by explicitly affirming human dignity as an overarching value of relational thought, we would be encouraging continuous revision of our theories in order to further reflect the worth of the human subject, a process that could lead to more humane theories of analytic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finally, when Freud unveiled the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, it turned out that our ego does not even rule its own house. — Slavoj Žižek,How to Read Lacan Get up off the pavement, brush the dirt up off my psyche … — rapper Earl Sweatshirt, “Chum”In the Kitchen Psychoanalysis is known primarily for its preoccupation with the “truth” that “speaks.” Following the critical tradition pioneered by Lacan and now Žižek, I would instead like to shift our attention to the “site[s]” where these pivotal experiments in truth take place—the environments we transform and the objects we fashion as we “learn to live with” the social plight we have inherited. Simply put, the aim of this paper is to explore the architecture of the unconscious. To develop this argument, I draw upon an array of genres and cultural artifacts, including personal memoir, cartoons, and hip hop lyricism.1 This description of cooking is likewise a pun referring to the symbol for Arm & Hammer baking soda—a crucial ingredient for transforming powder cocaine into crack. For annotations on this lyric, see http://rap.genius.com/Los-dont-get-in-my-way-lyrics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Infant development research has proposed links between early development and adult personality and psychopathology. Although clinicians have long taken these for granted, these research approaches raise a number of methodological and clinical issues worth exploring. Analysts have relied on varied formulations of “psychic structure,” but these are sometimes elusive and have not lent themselves to the precision, specificity, and validation that some analysts and many developmentalists prefer. New models have emerged over the last decades, including conceptions of internal working models of attachment, implicit relational knowing, and the like. Attachment research has shown strong correlations between infant attachment classification and adult personality. Recent research such as that of Beebe, Jaffe, and their colleagues has extended the correlations between early mother–infant interaction patterns and adulthood. All of this supports clinicians' interest in attention to the details of analyst–patient interaction, emotion regulation, inersubjective meaning-making, and other markers that can be observed in both infancy and adult analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore instances of enactment related to the analyst's feelings and fantasies about how analysis will proceed. As I discuss a patient who was developing a new capacity to experience conflict, I explore how the analyst's fantasies about the impact of his interpretations may be utilized in helping him to elaborate and understand the patient's unconscious fantasies and identifications and unintegrated feeling states. In so doing, we sometimes discover how we are unwittingly influencing or avoiding understanding our patient's own version of their psychic catastrophe. As we develop language where there was previously no integrative language for the patient's internalized and interactive version of catastrophe, we always project particular kinds of expectations into the therapeutic situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]