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In this paper five members of the "Community Psychoanalytic Track and Consortium" (CPT&C) in San Francisco, California, each holding different positionalities and functioning in different roles, come together in dialog with the shared aim to bring themselves and their readers inside the CPT&C. This writing project recapitulates principles of the CPT&C's vision itself: to form polyvocal groups with the shared task of supporting each other in our various roles, and members of community mental health organizations in their work and lives. From that effort new forms of psychoanalytic learning and work are generated; in this instance the process translates into a new writing form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces and elaborates the establishment of the first formal training program in Community Psychoanalysis at an accredited psychoanalytic institution: the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and the affiliated Community Psychoanalysis Consortium. We see this as a ground-breaking step in which the formal definition and scope of psychoanalysis is fundamentally transformed; it marks a sea change in what can be formally considered the domain of psychoanalysis, who it serves and what is deemed teachable in a psychoanalytic institute. We situate the development of this training model in a larger psychoanalytic history, and describe fundamental principles that undergird it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this paper is to close in on the register of what James Wood calls "lifeness" in his writing about fiction. I maintain that such "lifeness" establishes the ground of being in psychoanalysis, which is itself the ground of vitalizing and critical contact-making. I will maintain that this focus represents a paradigm shift in psychoanalysis from an explanatory, causal to a more emergent and phenomenological perspective in which we enter into the field of the relationship, including all of its' non-symbolic-embodied, pre-symbolic-descriptive and symbolic-representational dimensions. Only from this ground can we approach our patients' more treacherous death haunts. I will offer clinical material from one analysis to illustrate what I mean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I view Stephanie Pass's paper (this issue) as an instructive illustration of what therapists who do not work with children stand to learn from child therapists. Despite the reality that much psychoanalytic meta-theory was generated by theorists treating children, in addition to the contributions made by infant researchers and developmentalists, psychoanalysis has yet to fully attend to these domains of clinical work and research especially as regards their implication for the psychoanalytic process (commonly referred to as "technique"). The privileging of the capacity for representation and communication through language/verbalization in psychoanalysis has limited our theories and our conversations. However, the tide is shifting in favor of exploring what I would call the "ground" level of our work. By that I mean the non-verbal, non-conscious, unpredictable and intuitive contact-making dimension that establishes the foundation upon which the house of meaning-making is built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion of Amy Schwartz Cooney's paper I heartily endorse her use of the ideas of Anne Alvarez, particularly as regards the vitalizing dimension of our clinical work with adults. I link these ideas with the current sea change in psychoanalysis about the need for theories addressing the ground level of contact making. I question the continued reliance on the concept of enactment and propose instead the establishment of a new language for working at this level, drawing on the writings of field theorists, infant-parent research, and child analytic work in the hope of discovering the medium that best captures the imagination and embodied and vital sensibility of our patients. I end by picking up on Cooney's reference to necrotic zones and their relationship to "death equivalents" and what we may consider the life/death continuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion we applaud Donnel B. Stern for undertaking his rigorous comparison of the “field” concept in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis (IRP) and Bionian field theory (BFT). Stern offers a balanced presentation of similarities and differences between these two conceptual models, but we focus primarily on certain differences, starting with what we perceive as differing notions of the nature, purpose, and clinical function of the field itself. We distinguish theinteractionalview of an essentially relational model of the field in IRP (where the clinical aim is to enlarge the domain of the interpersonal dialogue and the capacity for mutual recognition) from the BFT model of a field viewed in terms ofemergent phenomena,realized in multiple modalities of experience (here the clinical aim is to expand the scope of contact with unconscious life and to facilitate the capacity to transform emotional, psycho-sensory and proto-emotional experience). We also take up the differing relationships to external reality and authority within these two models, with special reference to the role of the frame in the function of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I venture into the inside of psychoanalysis. John Berger wrote the book Ways of Seeing in June of 1972. Twelve books later, in The Shape of a Pocket, I discovered an extraordinary likeness between Berger's description of the relationship of the artist and model that yields an authentic painting, and the relationship of the analyst and patient that yields an authentic psychoanalysis. Using Berger's terms, I will describe how, if the painter and analyst have the nerve to be receptive enough, an “encounter” will emerge in a “place” for the “face” of that encounter to show itself—the signature of a true “collaboration.” I will describe how tuning into the unconsciously transmitted analytic soundtracks—by way of the narrative derivatives and raw emotional experiences of the patient and analyst, the analyst's more elaborated reveries, emotional states, bodily experiences and activities, and the patient's reverberating text—creates the possibility for “welcoming the absent” encounters in the field of unconscious emotional experience. Once these encounters are registered by the analyst, they can be relegated useable by giving them form through the language of interpretation. If these interpretations ring true to the patient, and the patient wishes to be heard, then a collaborative partnership can take shape, in which a pocket of resistance can emerge and allow the dreamwork of analysis to begin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am grateful for the rich commentaries of Ogden and Ferro and Civitarese, and wish we could continue this discussion, as it speaks to the importance of psychoanalysis looking outside itself to the arts and other disciplines to enrich and expand our ways of hearing. In my response I take up Ogden's discussion of the resistance of the medium of psychoanalysis and the necessity of “changing the terms.” I present a short sequel to the clinical material presented in my paper to illustrate what Ogden is discussing. I also agree with the importance of Ferro and Civitarese's focus on the primacy of incarnate emotional experience and the necessity of moving in and out of integration and nonintegration as we struggle to register what is going on in the analytic encounter and how we may all generate meaning out of these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses ideology. It puts a question whether it helps to bridge gap between the public narratives being offered and one's felt experiences to identify and understand the psychic mechanisms required to live here now. In two papers, now five years old, sociologist Neil Altman and the author set out to capture the underlying psychic dynamics that permit the current pace of life and the mood it generates. The author believed his combined psychoanalytic training, clinical, and personal experiences offered him a unique window into the interior domain of life in American society. The public narratives (ideology) he is offered relating to freedom, democracy, and opportunity create a complex veneer through which it is often difficult to locate oneself or see through to what is actually going on within and around oneself. As psychoanalysts, the author knows how difficult it is to penetrate beyond the wall of fantasy to reality--to challenge that creative world of illusion and dreaming that can become a barrier to embracing the real world in all of its splendor and disappointment. The world of public fantasy (ideology) is equally, if not more, difficult to penetrate to the realities of societal life.

In this paper the author explores the generational object of the American flag in three periods of American history: the post World War Two era, the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the period immediately following 9/11. In each of these periods the flag holds a difference resonance. In the first it symbolized the assurance of a measure of freedom and social security; in the second it represented the imposition of American dominance abroad; and in the third the flag was used to justify a new and unnecessary war. The author argues that a new flag is needed, one that signifies a revitalized 'progressive patriotism' dedicated to reclaiming and rebuilding the institutions that have been eroded in this period of American history. The paper then shifts from the symbol of the flag to the psychoanalytic consulting room. The author maintains that psychoanalytic development and clinical theories now stop short of the examining the psychic relationship to the social world outside of the family and that in order to truly help people live fully in the 'place that they live', psychoanalysis must extend its theories and clinical interventions beyond the Oedipal triad to communal groupings the larger society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]