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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]

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]

Postmodern psychoanalysis differs from the original practice of postmodern writers in a way that highlights the particular demand placed on psychoanalytic theory: to mediate between traditional practice and theoretical innovation. The argument is made here that it is postmodern theory to which relational psychoanalysis turns for auto-critique and to expand the horizons of practice, a process of disciplinary growth that is evident in the roundtable on Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis. This introduction locates the roundtable in a critical moment when postmodern theory, as it becomes an -ism in practice, copes with inevitable and necessary innovation and strives not to jettison the field's operational principles while retaining its critical edge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]