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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Looking Lab: SF views the urban landscape of San Francisco following on our observation that gender has displaced sexuality as the battleground for queer life. We present six short essays from drag queens, queer theorists, activists, and psychoanalysts to frame a broader project for Looking and the City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]