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In this commentary, I build on Beverly Burch's (this issue) important analysis of race dynamics in a White-White dyad by exploring the way that the intersection of the overlapping oppressions of racism, classism, and sexism–within a neoliberal context–are enacted. I also argue that the clinical material suggests the limits of models that figure the sociocultural as an add-on to subjectivity and familial dynamics rather than as constitutive of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking a two-person (Stark, 1999) and political approach to psychotherapy, the authors discuss the potential for multiple games occurring contemporaneously in the therapeutic dyad and illustrate the psychodynamics of such games by referencing ego state relational units (Little, 2006). The article describes how an overly simplistic approach to supporting autonomy can lead to an oppressive use of theory and the potential colonization of clients. Clinical examples and the idea of dilemma transactions are offered to demonstrate therapeutic options for working with multiple contemporaneous games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalysis has paid limited attention to disability, and at times the approach has lacked political awareness. Over recent decades the international disability rights movement has argued that disabled people constitute an oppressed, systemically disadvantaged minority. Lately, a critical psychoanalytic view has connected disablist discrimination to universal unconscious conflicts evoked by impairment. Corresponding evocations emerge in the therapeutic frame, producing countertransference responses to the impaired body. Drawing on psychoanalytically oriented group psychotherapy with severely physically impaired adults, countertransference phenomena were studied in developing discussion on disability-related clinical work. The complex, uncertain role of psychoanalytic practice in combating oppression was also examined. Key issues include challenges to the traditional frame, the crossing of psychic boundaries, anxieties relating to not knowing, and the role of unconscious factors in marginalizing disabled experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]