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Taking my trip to a maternity ward to visit my newborn niece as a "clinical case," I visit the phenomenon of digitally surveilling neonates with the self-same devices that were designed to enforce the house-arrest of would-be felons whose noisy place in the cultural imaginary has rendered the neonate's ankle a transgenerational "risk object" in the unconscious collective. In conversation with the ever-emergent genre known as autotheory, I invite the reader to be an accomplice as I "dramatize my unsettlement" contrasting autotheory with Laplanchean "self-theorization" via interludes about temporality, expertise, birth, gender, race, and place that come to life in the tale of The Stork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the republication of Adrienne Harris' classic essay, "You must remember this" (Harris, 2009), Psychoanalytic Dialogues continues our new feature, Après Coup. By putting a paper from the early years of the journal in conversation with contemporary readers and writers, we hope to dive into the ways in which psychoanalysts forge relationality in spaces of complexity and contradiction over time, as our experiences- collective, dyadic, or solitary – are always nonlinear and multiply configured. This Apres Coup includes commentaries by Cleonie White, Ph.D. Ken Corbett, Ph.D. Shubha Herlekar, Psy.D. MFT, Victor Donas, M.D. Donnel Stern, Ph.D. and Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D. Ph.D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalytic Dialogues is proud to present a groundbreaking panel on autotheory that pairs Leigh Lyndon's essay, The Ice is Melting, with responses by Gila Ashtor, Masha Borovikova Armyn, Adam Blum, and Maxine Chung Chow. In this brief introduction, autotheory is introduced to frame an emergent conversation that launches from the page, through the potential space carved by readers and writers, to forge an ever more open-source mode of sharing personal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historical hierarchy and division of tasks among mental health practitioners in the United States, particularly in psychoanalytic settings. It highlights the role of psychiatrists as team leaders and primary investigators, social workers as attending to systems, and psychologists as data scientists. The article emphasizes the need to move away from these hierarchical structures and embrace diversity in personal and professional backgrounds and practices. It also explores the themes of belonging, home, and transformation in the context of a chaotic and unsettled world. The article includes personal reflections, autotheoretical essays, and discussions on the work of Adrienne Harris. [Extracted from the article]

With the republication of Muriel Dimen's classic essay, "Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting, and transitional space" (Dimen, 1991), Psychoanalytic Dialogues launches a new feature, Après Coups. By putting a paper from the early years of the journal in conversation with contemporary readers and writers, we hope to dial into the ways psychoanalysts forge relationality in spaces of complexity and contradiction over time. In this dialogue, we see queerness speaking in and to the psychoanalytic frame. The Après Coups includes commentaries from Virginia Goldner, Ph.D., Ann D'Ercole, Ph.D. & Jack Drescher, M.D., Ph.D., Stephen Hartman, Ph.D., June Lee Kwon, Ph.D., and Julie Leavitt, M.D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muriel Dimen penned many introductions to books and panels. In this essay that became the first chapter of Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, I follow Dimen's manner of hopscotching among self-reflection, mentoring, and theory building. I riff on Dimen's call for a new genre of psychoanalytic text and read Dimen's 1986 memoir/novel, Surviving Sexual Contradictions, finding Dimen fomenting revolution on the page as in the consulting room, where paradox and contradiction spark innovation in personal, interpersonal, and professional space. I challenge the genre of editor's introduction to put personal narrative to political task (here, the story of my decision to shift the focus of this volume from collected works to collective writing). I place Dimen in conversation with authors whose lens trained on race during the years she pursued gender. In the vulnerability that Dimen bravely forded as she turned to the study of sexual boundary violations in her late work, I find permission to call for psychoanalytic publishing to go tilt-o-whirl in service of revolution in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of arriving and not arriving alone, as well as the importance of being counted in various aspects of life. It explores the obstacles, challenges, risks, and rewards of belonging and changing one's circumstances. The issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues presented in the article includes panels that delve into the questions of arriving at new emotional, material, political, and social places and what counts in those situations. The article also highlights the work of David Eng and Shinhee Han on racial melancholia and their exploration of the Asian triple consciousness. Additionally, it discusses Stephen Hartman's examination of digitally surveilling neonates and the politics of theory, as well as the papers by Bettina von Lieres and Afarin Kohan on political activation and trauma work. The article concludes by emphasizing the intersections of politics, action, and trauma and the potential for psychoanalysis to shed light on these areas. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the use of autotheory, a literary genre that reflects on the author's own embodiment to explore the interplay between relational experience and theory in forming subjectivity. The author argues that autotheory can be used to hold and expose the structuring and expression of subjectivity, as well as the ongoing interplay of body and mind. The article also references the work of Muriel Dimen, a feminist psychoanalyst who incorporated autobiography into relational technique. Dimen's writings explored gender, sexuality, and the complexities of identity, and anticipated the emergence of nonbinary identities. The article suggests that Dimen's work remains relevant and valuable in understanding and navigating contemporary discussions of gender and identity. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the process of producing a peer-reviewed journal and the importance of representing a range of voices and perspectives within the field of psychoanalysis. The concept of "holding the center" is explored, which involves fostering controversy and comparative thought while respecting different theoretical schools and interpretations of core concepts. The article also highlights the diverse and chaotic world in which we live and the need to feature a variety of voices to stretch beyond complacency and demagoguery. The issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues presented in the article includes panels on topics such as splitting, the more-than-human in psychoanalytic theory, the work of Françoise Dolto, and the impact of socio-political trauma on the psyche. [Extracted from the article]

In his beautiful mediation on the sights and sounds that crest in waves of oceanic feeling, Adam Blum challenges a false binary between intuiting the moment and understanding the moment – and, by extension, being in love and knowing love. With attention to how temporality inheres differently during listening and seeing, I describe how psychoanalysts and anthropologists differently locate structure in the manner of being in time that their method posits. Surfers and yoga practitioners span perception immersively – as does Blum – such that listening and seeing, being and knowing, inhere as union, in an Ocean that, when encountered in the simultaneity of possibility and constraint which translates as the love fellow surfers share, joins accomplices in the arc of history at the peak of momentum, as a community vested with the challenge of the next climactic wave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document is an introduction to Issue 34:1 of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, written in November 2023. The authors acknowledge the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel and the impact it has had on communities worldwide, including within the field of psychoanalysis. They emphasize the importance of dialogue and recognition of the Other in the face of intergenerational trauma. The issue includes papers that explore topics such as enactment in therapy, the analyst's mortality, and working with traumatized Afghan students. The authors hope that these papers will facilitate a transformative dialogue for readers. [Extracted from the article]

This article, titled "Introduction," discusses the concept of splitting as a defense mechanism in psychoanalysis. The concept was first elaborated by Melanie Klein in her 1946 article, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms." Splitting refers to the separation or division of positive and negative experiences within the developing ego. Since Klein's formulation, other theorists have explored this concept in relation to borderline personality functioning, the development of endopsychic structure, and responses to unbearable experiences. The article highlights the relevance of splitting in understanding issues such as othering, whiteness, racism, and socio-cultural divides. The authors have invited various psychoanalytic thinkers to reflect on their use of the concept in clinical practice and in understanding the current world and professional communities. [Extracted from the article]

The article introduces the last issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues for 2023. The three panels presented in this issue are rooted in the relational tradition of psychoanalysis, exploring topics such as mystical experiences and time travel in the treatment of psychopathy, the role of shame in cults, and the challenges of coming into being as a mother. The authors engage with innovative and new content, forms, and foci, contributing to the ongoing evolution and originality of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. The article invites readers to explore these panels and looks forward to the ideas and conversations that will emerge in the future. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the upcoming 53rd Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Cartagena, Colombia. The conference will feature a roundtable panel on psychoanalytic journals and their approaches to the conference's social and eco-conscious theme. The article also explores the emic and etic approaches to psychoanalysis, as well as the evolving nature of relational psychoanalysis. It highlights several papers that will be featured in the journal, including one on mutual processes in the relational matrix and another on the impact of COVID on a poetic approach to treatment. Additionally, the article discusses a paper that examines racism and white rage in American evangelical culture, and the differing perspectives on working from an emic or etic position. The journal also introduces a new series called Après Coup, which presents previously published papers followed by current reflections from diverse authors. [Extracted from the article]

Inspired by Steven Knoblauch's paper, Fanon's Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice (this issue), I urge White analysts to (individually and collectively) pursue acts of self-examination that risk destabilizing routines and convictions that bind our practices to Whiteness. Among terms to be interrogated, mutual recognition, diversity, integration, vitalization, and resilience are queried for the violence that is evacuated into the phantomatic register in support of a White ongoing being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hungarian analysts Tihamer Bakó and Katalin Zana describe the collapse of the social container in a homeland overwhelmed by COVID and ultra-nationalist rhetoric. Veronica Csillag contextualizes Bakó and Zana's observation revisiting two Soviet era films that chart the vicissitudes of the I We Reality i during World War II and its aftermath. George Bermudez reads Bakó and Zana's post-Bionian theorization of social dreaming from a community psychoanalysis perspective and then describes his own efforts to work in that clinical space. [Extracted from the article]

I Psychoanalytic Dialogues i is happy to present three papers by Sarah Schoen, Jean Petrucelli, and Susan Sands, originally presented at the IARPP 2022 meeting in Los Angeles. Schoen, Petrucelli, and Sands' work is noteworthy for its attention to lacunae inscribed in embodiment's intersubjective capacity. Schoen, Petrucelli, and Sands explore how interiority may or may not show itself on the body and, by extension, express interiority outwardly. [Extracted from the article]

Taking the online symbol # ("hashtag") as my guide, I conceptualize mania as a psychic space where collective and individual registers of meaning collide at warp speed with the effect of highlighting the uneasy but recursive intertwining of individual and collective object relations. I coin the term ultrapsychic to describe the transpersonal flow of objects between the individual and the collective as brokered by human and non-human meaning-makers in an ultra-broadband society. Ultra-subjectivity highlights the affects, definitional problems and crossed-temporalities that are in play when individuals negotiate in the collective to locate themselves among others in an intersectional matrix. By reviewing the philosophy that gave rise to the hashtag as well as its transformation into a taxonomic symbol, I return to mania's uncanny collectivist quality and explore what happens when people who perceive themselves at-risk use a #cyberobject to risk self-disclosure in the collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are also grateful to our teachers, supervisors, analysts, and mentors whose words in I Dialogues i nurtured our growth. We are so grateful to Jeff Jackson, our managing editor, for all the work he does to keep the journal on track, and to our colleagues at Taylor and Francis whose production team keeps the journal in print. We argue about form and content, engaging deeply in conversation about the future of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic writing and, of course, our plans for the journal. [Extracted from the article]

By way of a vignette about my childhood mix of British and American accents, I explore how the Mother of the primal scene becomes a nodal point in the recursive iteration of psyche and society that is given voice in the child's mother tongue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assemble this issue of I Psychoanalytic Dialogues i 32-4 alert to the backdrop of a horrific war raging in Ukraine that exacerbates an already stark global refugee crises and accentuates a human capacity for unchecked cruelty, violence, racism, xenophobia and nationalism. There is tremendous hope to be found in the diverse contributions we received for Snapshots on the Climate Emergency and Climate Activism. The Ukraine war unfolds in the context of the ongoing exhaustive impact of COVID-19, a full-scale attack on women's reproductive rights expressed in the U.S. Supreme court draft decision on Roe vs. [Extracted from the article]

It is March 2, 2022, as we gather in our zoom boxes for our Editors meeting to finalize our work on Issue 3 and share our thoughts as we compose In This Issue. Levit's reply clarifies his formulations, contributing to this theoretically and clinically rich panel that explores the ongoing evolution of psychoanalysis. David Levit explores the interweaving of Somatic Experiencing (SE) with psychoanalysis in trauma therapy, illustrating his ideas with an extended vignette of his work with a woman struggling with catastrophic dissociative dissolution linked to early childhood sexual abuse. [Extracted from the article]

Paper, discussions, and replies: each has its own cast of characters. Lauren Levine argues powerfully for a radical shift in our conception of the analytic frame through clinical encounters as a White analyst working with three women of color. Virginia Goldner offers an appreciative read of Guzzardi, asking for more of the arc of Nicki's development and the mourning of gendered self-states that are part of that arc. [Extracted from the article]

This paper celebrates Muriel Dimen’s unique manner of conceptualizingthe fieldwith regard to the recursive relations she theorized among psychic and social components of sexual subjectivity. Recursion is a structural force in the field that implicates the analyst in the history of fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China has implemented a model of state capitalism while the growth of the United States in the same time period occurred using a market-driven liberalism model. While evidence indicates that China’s state-owned companies are less innovative and productive than their private competitors, China’s control pattern of free-market competition has been amazingly successful. This article shows that there are distinct differences between China’s state capitalism model and the U.S. economic model. China and the U.S. are not competitors in a zero-sum game. The dynamic between the American and Chinese economies continues to develop into a more mature relationship than an outright competition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We end our "trip" into psychedelic psychoanalysis with a "Coda" by Karen Rosica and Melanie Suchet. After exploring psychedelic experience through a psychoanalytic lens, Megan Rundel offers an essential clinical perspective with a nuanced portrayal of her use of the psychedelic agent ketamine in a long-term psychoanalytic treatment. Rather than discuss the three papers, we invited Rosica and Suchet to explore the big picture of what this psychoanalytic-psychedelic dialogue offers and where it might lead. [Extracted from the article]

That the effects of global warming are most dire for Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) and subaltern communities alerts us further to the need for psychoanalysis to frame interventions with an ear to inequality and justice. Rarely a day goes by without dire news about global warming. The consequences of climate change are apparent daily as we watch ice caps melt, wildfires blaze, and droughts starve the global landscape. [Extracted from the article]

And we return to the front lines of community work with a diverse collection of Snapshots from colleagues around the world engaging in a wide range of Community Psychoanalysis projects. We travel first to Peltz and González's description of the Community Psychoanalysis Track and Consortium in San Francisco. "Collaboration is the principle which sets the frame for the un-learning and deconstruction of analytic shibboleths", write Rachael Peltz and Francisco González (this issue, p. 418). [Extracted from the article]

In this discussion, I contrast Knafo’s worry about onlineinhumanitywith a perspective informed by Katherine Hayles’s humanistic work on cybernetics, the posthuman, and the technological unconscious. Drawing upon my own writing about cyberobjects and reality, I argue that Knafo’s claim that “technology has invaded our intimate lives” is wildly overstated and that it hinges upon a curious manipulation of a false active/passive binary that is then used as a litmus test for perversion. I challenge Knafo’s “evolutionary” and materialist claims with reference to the intercourse of perversion and neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue ofStudies in Gender and Sexualitytakes up the problem oflookingas viewed from an array of theoretical perspectives on film, clinical interaction, music, literature, and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jade McGleughlin’s textured paper frameswriting enactmentsthat help describe breaches in narrative consequent to trauma. I work from my own understanding of enactmentas a particular readerof McGleughlin’s fieldwork: moving from ceramics to photography to Bionian Field Theory to ethnography to Betty Woodman to Gadamer’s player/played distinction to call attention to the anticipatory processes involved inreadingand inreading enactments—by which I meanthe enacted dimensions of the act of readingthat pertain to the experience ofreading about enactments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If psychoanalysis is to offer its words to a broader, more diverse audience, and to readers who do not and, perhaps, cannot afford to subscribe to the journal in print, enhanced online search afforded by this format is a necessary tool to foster change and growth. Likely you've noticed that I Dialogues i has a new look. "A Few Regrets" is a powerful stand-alone paper in which Joyce Slochower, a central figure in relational psychoanalysis, looks back on the evolution of her thought. [Extracted from the article]

Tracy L. Simon's case of Nora and her eloquent discussion of the traumatic dimensions of assisted reproductive technology portray the psychic burden of indebtedness when one's viability depends on an Other from whom one feels psychically and corporeally estranged. Inherent in a claustrophobic drama of indebtedness such as Nora's, be it rendered to the appellation “miracle” child or commanded by a technological marvel, socio-historical and intersubjective fonts of meaning lurk internally as mordant self-satire—all the while held as an intention and contained as viable representatives of meaning in the embodied space that awaits transference. In the first part of this essay, I write while trapped in my reverie (captive to Donald Meltzer'sClaustrumand Ridley Scott's filmAlien). Then, in a calmer tone, I parse the intersubjective and embodied meaning of viability—a quality of therapeutic movement during psychic standstill held gracefully by Simon in her work with Nora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dana Amir's paper, “The Chameleon Language of Perversion,” provides an opportunity to consider the discourse of perversion on two fronts: as a stalled mode of representation in the articulation of desire (Freud, 1905) and as an elusive harbinger of normative discourse in the psychoanalyst's countertransference. By drawing us into the intricacies of perverse communication, her paper invites us to elaborate a relational perspective on perversion that accounts for both qualities of discourse. I use clinical vignettes to argue that by holding the double meaning of countertransference, as discourse that aims for affect to be contained and represented and as a way of knowing endowed by the analyst's occupation of normative discourse, the relational analyst may coaxperversionfrom inert scene into the domain of object representation, making reparation to the idolized countertransference (Khan, 1989) so as to vest chameleon language with intersubjective capacity for recognition and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of vignettes that span 30 years, I tackle the desire to be generative, an urge I came in contact with during an intergenerational romance and in the transference with a patient who, like me, struggles with the powerful seduction of flash-frozen desire: you want, but you can't. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given this opportunity to reflect onThe Bonds of Love(Benjamin, 1988) 25 years later, I read Benjamin's text as a bridge between political theory and psychoanalytic practice. In so doing, I hope to recognize Benjamin's profound influence on my thinking about recognition and destruction in collective erotic experience. I suggest that Benjamin opens the door to the investigation oferosin a collective unconscious. Yet, perhaps becauseThe Bonds of Lovepredates the rise of the Internet, aspects of recognition that connote libidinization by an erotic collective are sequestered from intrapsychic phenomena and housed in a protointersubjective realm,the ideal, sustaining a long held psychoanalytic priority on loss and narcissistic injury in subject formation. I champion opening the intrapsychic realm to the fantasmatic collective by discussing Grindr, an iPhone app that provides public space for homoerotic desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines features of cyberreality that are reconfiguring loss and mourning. In turn, it queries a transformation in the nature of object loss that is taking place on the Internet. As we move from a reality based on the acceptance of loss and limit to one of infinite access, concrete losses may be less necessary to mourning than forms of access that propel the object's capacity for collective re-use toward immortality. If we focus too intently on loss at the level of the individual and the group, we will surely overlook how cyberspace is transforming loss into a collective event. Clinical examples illustrate how the burden of loss is increasingly mitigated by mourning's sudden twin: cybermourning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality are pleased to award the 2012 Symonds Prize to Shirly Bahar for “Coming Out as Queen: Jewish Identity, Queer Theory, and the Book of Esther.” Here, I introduce Bahar's article, as well as Erin Williams Hyman's “Hedging Against Heritage: Jewish Identity Reconsidered” and Jill Salberg's “Reimagining Yentl While Revisiting Feminism in the Light of Relational Approaches to Gender and Sex.” Taken together, these articles contrast generalized Jewish identity (an essentialist premise iterated in discourse when literary subjects come out as Jewish) with multiplicity that adheres in Jewishness when legible features of the subject such as sexuality and gender are brought into play through coming out. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inspired by Kyoko Taniguchi's article (this issue), I deploy the Japanese concept amae to engage the mother as a collective erotic object. Amae also helps me express gratitude to my psychoanalytic mothers for their tireless efforts on behalf of this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyberspace is provoking a dramatic shift in our cultural understanding of reality. A transition is taking place, from a reality marked by loss and limit to one experienced through infinite access. This paper begins to map Reality 2.0 with the conviction that we need to revisit traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as loss and fantasy within the framework of this new reality so that we may appreciate how online experience does and doesn't facilitate the formation of subjectivity and multiplicity. In Reality 2.0, access trumps the need to accept limits as a tool to self-discovery, and networking replaces containment as the bulwark of meaning. How then might we appreciate ways that online life turns what many see as a kind of psychic retreat into a generative space for psychoanalytic dialogue? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sorting among Stephen Seligman and Vittorio Lingiardi's wealth of links to my paper, I take up Seligman's question, 'What is authenticity when you don't even have to show your face to be on Facebook?' Inspired by insights from each of their commentaries, I turn to the question of the analyst's texuality and offer an approach to therapeutic disclosure when the metric of discovery is searching rather than loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion, I situate Guralnik and Simeon's argument about depersonalization and interpellation among ways that different psychoanalytic theorists have understood the interaction of the psychic and social domains. I elaborate on what Guralnik and Simeon mean when they refer to the role of “the State” in dissociation, interpellation, and depersonalization. Upon showing how self-states simultaneously incorporate and resist the State, Guralnik and Simeon provide a clinical rationale to confront interpellation's “discursive instructions.” This leads me to explore the curious status of the term state in psychoanalytic theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]