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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

The paper consists of the online discussion of Nancy Hollander's ‘Psyche, Ideology, and the Creation of the Political Subject’, summarized. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper consists of a discussion of Neil Altman's ‘Psychoanalysis and war’, which was conducted online through PsyBC in the fall of 2006. Discussants were a group of psychoanalytically oriented thinkers chosen by the author and Nancy Hollander, the author of the other paper included in the discussion. The paper represents the full discussion with only minor edits to correct typographical errors and improve clarity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [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]

In response to Gediman's paper, I argue that disclosure is really not a choice. It happens all the time, revealing how that which is co-constructed has always already been there. One discloses that which has already been (in some unformulated way) disclosed. This entails a radically different understanding of what disclosure is, how it happens, when it is judicious to disclose, and what it means to interpret than was the case in the Freudian tradition. By contrasting Gediman's view of disclosure with a postmodern one, I argue that the relational perspective understands and structures knowledge differently than its Freudian forebear and that it is not possible to choose among paradigms. The clinical theory that emerges in relational practice is contrasted to Freudian technique-based theory. A strong case is made for the interdependence of theory and practice in relational psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces various papers published within the issue, including one on the ethical-political aspect of mother-daughter relations, another on psychoanalysis and the papers awarded the Symonds Prize in 2016.