Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings

Differential Embodiment

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 13:16:00 +0000

With the growing inclusiveness of diverse gender, race, etc, three short, independent films - Limbo (Gokce Erenmemisoglu), Limit (Javard Daraei), and Ready for My Closeup (Jordan Werner) - at the presentation from Tampa’s Sigmund Freud Film Festival (the brainchild of Rodrick Colbert) viewed at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society on May 15, 2021 gave occasion to think about “differential embodiment” (Shildrick). All three films reminded me of the works of Margrit Shildrick. In The Broken Body (co-authored with Janet Price), Shildrick questions the assumption that the ‘disabled’ are disqualified from sexual subjectivity.

Limbo is a whimsical, surprising, somewhat disturbing, very short film in which two characters’ prosthetic limbs become separated at times from the rest of their bodies during their ‘hook up.’ What if Limbo is about metaphorical pieces and parts, like multiple selves, always striving toward wholeness?

Shidrick additionally questions whether polymorphousness - both in the literal body and in its desire - is perverse, a question that serves as a countervail to the Freudian idea that fetishism is an attempt at resolution of castration anxiety in the little boy where a lost limb and a penis can stand for and restore, respectively, the lost penis. [Contemporary thinkers might locate this anxiety in early attachment relationships and to self image rather than with the ‘horror’ of anatomical difference.] Shildrick notes “the impossibility of a fully developed, invulnerable self.”

Shildrick and Price write, “slippage between what is possible for them and what is required of them...women can never finally answer to the discursive requirement of femininity but remain caught in an endless cycle of body fetishization.” Even the TABs (temporarily abled bodied) “fail to contain or express their ideal standards.”

In Ready for My Close-up an aging actress and her son go to drastic measures to reclaim (surgically) her youth.

“All women are positioned in and measured against an inaccessible body ideal, in part determined by a universalized male body[*]” which “further marginalizes the already marginalized.”

[*in Ready for My Close-up, he is “my goofy manchild son”]

In Limit, a young man desperately seeks help from strangers but his grunts and the film’s ominous score cause suspenseful suspicion in the audience. Vulnerability is reconfigured not as a weakness but as the possibility of becoming.

Shildrick and Price remind us that “disabled and ill people - those whose bodies are deemed as broken are labeled as other - are forced to negotiate a set complementary to those of able bodiedness… [their] performative acts - corporeal signs, gestures, claims and desires elicited in embodied subjects - serve no less to produce effect of identity, coherence, control, and normativity.”

Interesting times in tele-sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 31 May 2021 16:21:00 +0000

I have been seeing patients by Zoom for over a year now. This past week two unusual things occurred in sessions with two different patients, both of whom I have been seeing for years prior to the pandemic. One could not have occurred in person. I did not say anything at the time to the patients and I thought about why these things occurred, why I remained silent about them, and what was their significance. This is what occurred to me.

One patient, a young, professional woman, had been given away by her mother (her parents) when she was eight months old and then taken back at about three years of age. Our work together had been processing these preverbal traumas and their manifestations throughout her life and presently. Metaphorically speaking, she had been developing her infant emotional life. In this session, she interrupted the session for a number of minutes to answer texts on her cell phone, something that had never occurred before. I sat quietly as she did this. It seemed to me that whatever other actions and meanings were afoot, this was a 'forward edge' [Tolpin] in that she had at last developed into a toddler who could be ‘alone in the presence of the other’ [Winnicott], not needing to pay attention to me nor have me attend to her, but could be perfectly content to ‘entertain’ herself while I was nearby.

The other patient, a retired, professional woman, will often (over the past fourteen months) see me while still in her nightgown, and sometimes has ‘tea and toast’ during the session. Because it has been inordinately difficult in her life to be close to others, I saw her willingness to ‘dine’ during sessions as an invitation to ‘break bread’ with me, a gesture of wanting to be closer. In this particular session, she decided she had to urinate and instead of excusing herself for a minute, took her computer into the bathroom and continued the session with me. While I could not actually see anything ‘unusual,’ with the exception of her reaching high for the toilet paper, I thought her behavior unusual until I remembered how close girlfriends and spouses might frequently and casually continue their conversations while using the facilities in front of one another. So once again I felt this was an indication of her growing closeness with me.

Electives: Students Present: Somatization and Group Therapy, Part IIIB

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 23 May 2021 10:17:00 +0000

What had happened in the group happened in parallel process to my personal life: I split my feelings of loneliness and shame from the group’s projective identification of me in an omnipotent position. Now we will see how we managed to reinterpret the enactment and how an intersubjective space for new experiences was created for the group as a whole.

Foteini’s Case Study:

What happens when something unbearable for the analyst interacts with something unbearable for the group members? It is a moment of encounter in which the group projects to the therapist a deficiency of coordination, a moment when the inner personal will be the womb that will engulf the intersubjective.

The cauterization (medical term: of the heart, to correct the unstable cardiac frequency) of the group arrhythmia seemed to be the therapeutic challenge where bad representations, of the analyst and of the members' selves, were in discourse without detachment and without fear of somatization and fragmentation. Examination of projective identifications, happening in
a parallel process, began. The first process concerned the feelings of agony, pain and
frustration which the mother has to keep in control and she also has the responsibility
of planning the intervention. These qualities my child projected on me, inviting me to occupy an omnipotent position and having to feel loneliness at the same time. On the other hand, the group members, my symbolic children, reflected elements representing a motherly figure devastated and disconnected, a motherly figure feeling ashamed and shrinking, fearing being attacked by her children because of her absence.

It seemed that the group needed to communicate the aspect of the not good enough mother. The mother who can be absent without guilt thus integrates the split and facilitates the transition into a depressive position. The group members sought an object of identification and explored, at a symbolic level, who was being abandoned, whose needs where forgotten. Ehrenberg (1995) supports that the challenge is not to surpass our own annoying feelings, but to recognize that they are part of the analytic procedure. If we see ourselves being defensive, or reluctant, this is an important analytic fact, indicative of what happens interactively, aspects that intervene between the need of the patients to mourn for idealized objects and the need of the analyst to mourn the limits of his/her therapeutic omnipotence.

Until that moment of the session in the group, in which I returned after the cauterization of my son’s arrhythmia, I was not fully aware of the degree of difficulties concerning the relationship with my child. I had been a false self of a mother who does not admit her exhaustion, whose body is tired and who may have been persecuted by her child's attacks and enactments. After the session, I discussed the session with my co-therapist, as we do after every session. We had the belief in common that we had cracked open and then closed a door; that is, we did not encourage the cauterization of the group’s arrhythmia, an arrhythmia we belatedly understood as members and therapists may be mutually traumatized, mutually vulnerable without the need to deny the toxicity of the one or the other in order to maintain the sense of psychic integrity.

It was at the beginning of my acknowledgement of the extent of my frustration and anger towards my son that I became more able to feel a greater sense of authenticity and aliveness. This, in turn, enabled the group to shift from seeking approval to a search for recognition of a true self. In the session that followed, the members’ interactions allowed the unfolding of material that shed more light on the emotionally suppressive mother-child condition. The confession of a member that admitted to how disorganized she feels by the presence

of the baby in the group, (as reminder there was a baby present at the group with the consent of the group members), created more space to talk about the possibility that a child may cause threatening feelings for its mother, might persecute her or even remind her of her inadequacy.

My own personal story met the stories of the group members, causing a resonance
(Foulkes,1990) with the experience in the moment - my willingness to perceive the members' material, to be susceptible to their impacts - revealing what happens if we go deeply and fight analytically. With continuous supervision, my co-therapist and I realized that we had gotten into regressive states of shame and guilt which could not be articulated. We realized the need to open a safe enough space where the mother-child dyad would be able to embrace all their aspects of vulnerability allowing for autonomously reclaimed ability to bear to be bad together without threatening persecution.

The personal story with my son incited me to connect more truthfully with the group members, discovering the boundaries of my resilience and realizing that something like this can happen without it being dangerous. The group projected the aspect of a mother who might be exhausted shattered and angry. My resonance with this psychic state, and my realizing, through the supervision, the usefulness of my weak point as a tool of analytic work, allowed the emergence of emotionally difficult experiences of the members concerning their own mother-child relationships. Their experiences of frustration and exhaustion and their denial of the omnipotent position led to exploration of more liberating ways of relationship for the group members, leading not to disorganization but able to include detached shameful aspects of self. It seemed the heart of the group is less threatened by arrhythmia and is steadily regulated allowing for the creation of new perspectives in the analytic work. On a personal level, my therapy, my supervision and the continuous education facilitate the relational coordination of my multiple roles. As Ehrenberg writes: each participant does own something not owned before. This is something we keep even after the experience is over and it becomes a kind of 'private property.' I am different both with my family and my group.

- Fotini Doumoura

Ehrenberg, D.B. (2005). Working at the “Intimate Edge” Intersubjective Considerations—Comments on “A Case Study of Power and the Eroticized Transference-Countertransference”. Psychoanal. Inq., 25(3):342-358.

Electives: Students Present: Somatization in Group Therapy. Part IIIA

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 May 2021 17:32:00 +0000

New relational patterns for the group as a whole

Alkinoi: Ι explain how I came to understand how my relational story influenced the group material and how I was able to communicate and find attunement with the members. I managed to become a new object for the members and eventually a better mother and therapist.

Ehrenberg, in her article Working at the Intimate Edge, writes that we must consider why particular qualities or sensitivities of either patient or analyst are activated at a given moment and not at others. Central to her position is the recognition that analyst and patient cannot avoid having an effect on each other. Sometimes disclosing our confusion or specific feelings of puzzlement can be useful. Asking questions - Why are we fighting now? How did we get into
an argument? - and tracking when either patient or analyst becomes more frightened or less, more open or less, etc, can help to engage in a collaborative exploration with patients about what is developing interactively and can become a medium to deconstruct toxic developments
in the effort to figure out what is going on. She describes this kind of process as an effort to work at the intimate edge. She looks not only at the interaction but also at how she might be
participating in it. Working this way does not involve mutual analysis or wild analysis, but it does require that the patient and the analyst deal with each other, and their strengths and
vulnerabilities, in real time and in real ways. Accepting responsibility for our contribution allows the opportunity to discover how deeply affected each can be by the other. This emotional involvement can be constructive. Such experiences are not there to be found but, instead, are intersubjective creations, and they are never static. Each participant then 'owns' something not owned before.

On The Analyst’s Emotional Availiability And Vulnerability

How do we understand what happened here, in the patient, in the therapist and in the interaction? It was a truly therapeutic moment; it was not understanding, it was not insight. It had to do with the experience of the moment. What was the experience of the moment? It was with the analyst's inner experience, the degree of emotional availability and vulnerability, the level of what we ourselves are willing to risk emotionally in relation to our patients. Sometimes we permit, and other times we preclude, emotional contact. We listen differently and are present differently. In our silences as well as in our words, our willingness to receive our patients'
thoughts and feelings - not being afraid, but being willing to be vulnerable to her/his impact and still survive, being sensitive to whatever we feel, no matter how bizarre it may seem - becomes the basis of the analytic work. Being closed and open as an authentic reaction, not because we think it is the correct thing to do or feel. Whether we find ourselves defensive, detached, angry, unemphatic, constitutes important analytic data about what is going on interactively if we are able to use them in an analytic way. Simply saying, 'I find myself feeling detached and I don't understand what is happening and I am concerned about this' is very different from being detached as an assumed role or merely enacting our countertransference detachment. To pretend to feel what we think we should feel - trying to be a good object - is different from
being a real object.

The challenge is to stay close to the most subtle aspects of our own experience however threatening they seem. For some patients, the opportunity to experience a toxic interaction can become a revelation instead of remaining locked into feeling 'weird' or 'defective' and may allow the patient to feel safe for the first time. Ehrenberg's supervisee shared her puzzlement with her patient without analyzing it, without blaming the patient for doing this to her. This enabled the patient to feel that she was not as alien as she had come to think. Ehrenberg suggests that this kind of emotional communication - to allow oneself to touch and be touched without the protection of "psychic gloves" - becomes the key to the most profound kind of analytic possibility.

Alkinoi’s Case study:

Looking back at the material [see post of May 19, 2021] I can recognize that my difficulty to connect with the foreign object that invaded my body, and at the same time my difficulty to contain group members whom I was experiencing as foreign objects, were crucial assumptions that I had to admit and accept if I was to own my badness, as Davies wrote.

My supervision and my personal therapy as parallel processes to the group therapy, came to side light my blind spots. They helped me identify with my own unconscious material and my own relational story, and interpret them for the benefit of the group. Through my own dreams, that were analyzed in my individual and group therapies, I managed to connect with the difficulties of having a baby. I comprehended not only the absolute happiness ,but also the unbearable feeling of narcissistic injuries: my fear about if I would be able to raise her properly, my envy that I would lose the uniqueness in my husband’s life and heart, my anxiety regarding my availability as a group therapist and my ability to become a group therapist. Finally, the shame that it was me that was able to get pregnant and not my patients (most of the members were women, some facing fertility issues, many had had abortions or wished to get pregnant).

Admitting my own difficulty, a new inner space was created for the group members. My pregnancy was evident now, present in the room, and the members were examining my experience. Mothers in the group found space to talk about their dreadful feelings during their own pregnancies. A domino of self-disclosure about abortions and miscarriages started as the group felt safe with the therapeutic process and with the two therapists who were bringing our own subjectivity into the sessions.

A subgroup, though, was very anxious about where I would be after giving birth, when I would come back and If there would be still space inside me for them. They fantasied that I would never come back, others, that when I left to give birth, they would take my chair out of the circle. The male member, who was very traumatized by his psychotic mother who had abandoned him when he was young, announced that he would stop therapy at the end of the season, but he couldn’t connect his decision with my pregnancy and the here and now of the group. This subgroup experienced anxiety in a persecutory way.

In the group many patients had grown up with psychotic parents. My somatization evoked the sense - described by Davies in her article - who is the insane, the psychotic? Is it also me? This subgroup could not explore this and for some patients it was traumatic. Something that we were only later able to understand came beautifully to a session and to our consciousness from a dream. (Inside the projective identification I could not understand it at that moment.) Two years after my pregnancy, and one year after the pregnancy of one of the members during sessions where she was now coming with her baby boy, there came into group a dream in which babies are monsters that are overly aggressive and fatal. It was a very crucial moment as were finally able to talk about who owns the badness. We had to admit our inability to connect with this part as a way to protect them from the presence of the baby and the traumatic persecutory memories that the baby boy's presence evoked for the group.

Using the theory of action (Ehrenberg) and being honest with my countertransference, first with myself, and then examining it with the members, enabled a new relational pattern about which we had been previously unaware. This experience of emotional communication left me able to touch and be touched in a way that shaped me not only as a therapist but especially as a mother.

-Alkinoi Lala

Ehrenberg, D.B. (2010). Working at the “Intimate Edge”. Contemp. Psychoanal., 46(1):120-141.

Electives: Students Present: Somatization in Group Therapy, Part IIB, Fotini's Story

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 20 May 2021 16:39:00 +0000

Foteini’s case study:

I am going to present how my personal story - the treatment of my son’s heart arrhythmia - brought ‘arrhythmia’ to the coordination of the group. Andrienne Harris noted that our wounds must serve as tools, but sometimes they are obstacles impeding our capacity to engage deeply in the analytic process. Bion believed that two minds are needed to think about the most unpleasant thoughts of the one. But access to the most secret areas demands courage.

What happened in the group happened in parallel process to my personal life: I split my feelings of loneliness and shame from the group’s projective identification of me in an omnipotent position.

It was at the end of the third year of a group therapy that Alkinoi and I became coordinators. The group included 11 members and 2 therapists; the sessions took place once a week for 1.5 hours. Before the session from which the present analytic material emerged, the members had empathetically discussed absent parents, somatizations, common traumatic experiences of abuses, fantasies of destruction and projections of aggression. I returned to the group after an absence during which my child had been hospitalized to have his cardiac arrhythmia cauterized. His first episode was at the age of 5; I still remember the strong pulse heard from his chest. I could not offer him any kind of help except to hold him tight in my arms until we took him to hospital. From that day, and for the years following, every time he asked me to go next to him, calling “mama”, my body froze until I was certain that he was all right. Feelings of fear, helplessness, agony, and shame invaded me. My son felt the same way, but back then I was not aware of his worry, which was enacted by bursts of anger and a pervasive fierceness. During that period, I was more concerned with dealing with his behavior than with his inner feelings. I was responding from the ‘outside’ and not from the ‘inside’ - as Levine wrote.

It was especially painful and shameful for me to be able to help other families with similar issues while at the same time I could not find a way to connect with my child. It was not that we did not have moments of love or that I could not see his sweetness. It was extremely hard when speaking of Winnicott’s way to hold him in a continuous and stable way. Seeing motherhood so romantically in our civilization, causes a greater burden to the mothers of our occupation who have to fight with the role of being good enough mothers and the role of being good enough therapists.

Entering the room to start the group session, I noted that I was confused, as if I were in a dream. Some members looked at me furtively. I fantasized that they thought I was exhausted, that they were convinced that I was devastated, and I would not even be “present” at the session. I felt embarrassed and I did not know why. My body was weak. For a long time I remained silent. I couldn't connect, showing that something unbearable was happening. Even before words could explain it, my motionless body echoed that something was coming. A therapeutic impasse and at the same time a moment of deep engagement.

The group members had been informed about my absence at the previous session by Alkinoi, as my son’s hospitalization happened suddenly and I had no time to inform the group about my absence. A special condition that prevailed in the group for weeks, for which the members had consented, is that a mother attended the sessions with her baby. My child’s arrhythmia was synchronized with the ‘arrhythmia’ of the group and my own ‘psychic arrhythmia.’ While I was trying to find my position in the group, I realized that I was in a terrible split. What kind of mother am I? Am I a “good” mother, who gives priority to my real child, or am I a “bad” mother, who is absent for my symbolic children? If I remained in the group, would I be bad for my son and good for my group? In my real life, another child had been left aside, my younger son, and my huge agony was that he might also be exposed to danger or that his personal needs might be left behind.

Nevertheless, at that moment I managed to share with the group a small part of my vulnerability. Idealizing what a mother needs to do to pull through, I pretended to endure, without speaking of my vulnerability, without being perfectly honest or spontaneous. The limits became a blur. How can we invite in our inner selves which torture us from the inside, filling us with self-hatred and self-deception; which trigger repetitions of an unbearable therapeutic impasse, attempting inappropriate forms of heroic rescue? What are we willing to risk: allow ourselves to affect and to be affected instead of remaining closed, fighting with our fears of being strange and defective? Or remain near the subtle details of our own experience and use them in an analytically sensitive way? Up till the moment I returned to the session, after my son's problem of arrhythmia had been resolved, I was not fully aware of the degree of difficulties concerning the relationship with my child. Even in my own therapy, individual and group, I experienced feelings of shame in revealing how difficult it was to deal with this situation, how angry it made me feel, worrying if my therapist would judge me as a bad mother. Unconsciously, I was terrified of my own hostility and destructiveness. However, in this session, even though my intent was to connect with the group members, I was detached, without showing my weak mark.

-Fotini Dourmoura

Next time (Part III) we write about reinterpreting the enactment.

Electives: Students Present: Somatization in Group Therapy, Part IIA, Alkinoi's Story

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 May 2021 17:59:00 +0000

Electives: Somatization and Group, Part II: Therapists’ Relational Stories

In Levine's article we see how her own analysis around her difficulties with her relationship with her younger son opened an analytic space with her patient Susan. How did her relational story facilitate the analytic process? Adrienne Harris has suggested that the analyst opened “access to unbearable affects,” together providing a safe enough environment to reveal Levine’s shame about her relationship with her son. Also, her analyst was able to hold Levine in her mind with acceptance and faith in her and her son so that Levine could contain him - from the inside - and help him put his experience into words.

Levine’s patient Susan also had problems with her own son. Levine initially was not aware of these difficulties because of projective identification, that is, being identified with Susan as a good mother doing the best she could for her son. When Susan revealed that she intended to abandon her son with his abusive father, Levine, by examining her subjective countertransference, was trying to understand this enactment. There was an intergenerational repetition of abandonment, shifting back and forth between the positions of mother and child, trying to create a transitional space of thirdness.

In presenting our case studies of our personal stories, we have in mind what the Barangers’ wrote: two persons remain unavoidably connected and complementary - neither member of the couple can be understood without the other.

Alkinoi’s Case Study:

My somatization was my pregnancy and I explore my countertransference in the here and now of the group. In this particular week, an enactment emerges which enabled me to reflect on my countertransference and connect with my somatic changes. My relational story hindered, initially, my capacity to engage deeply in the analytic process.

The material comes from the birth of the group (my first ever group) which was around the second month of my pregnancy - something that was not announced to the group members. Only my co-therapist and my supervisor knew. The birth of the group preceded the birth of my daughter, thus I was simultaneously pushing to stretch myself beyond my limits for both of my babies. During this early stage in therapy, the group was made up of two female co-therapists, and one male and seven additional female members. There were many “abortions” due to therapists’ anxiety.

The group at these first meetings is occupied with the subject of the omnipotent mother, their mother. The image was clear and vivid: she can do everything but she self-neglected and, at the same time, deprived. There is a split inside the omnipotent mother, inside the group (symbolic children- symbolic mothers) and inside my body as I was sharing it with my baby and my clients. During sessions I was feeling weak with strong somatizations, and with sleepless nights after the sessions. These symptoms were not related to my pregnancy but had to do with the group dynamics and the unmetabolized material of sessions, particularly that we were two novice group therapists.

I had the need to hide this difficulty from the group, whereas with individual clients I was more open and I had self-disclosed about my pregnancy. In the group I had to survive changes, and through projective identification I was identified with the omnipotent mother. Symbolic children were angry with their mother and with me. There were members saying that my interventions were not helpful while others attributed my interventions to my co-therapist, saying how wonderful and empathic she was. They were finding me distant, private, and withdrawn. I was feeling neglected and lonely, tired and discredited, and excluded. The enactment that woke me up, just as Levine wrote about with her client Susan, was when the male member at the end of the session - one day after his name day - complained that no one remembered his name day and complained he was feeling neglected, especially by Foteini. I was really surprised. It nearly pushed me out of my chair. At the beginning of that session I was the only one who acknowledged with wishes his name day, and he had totally forgotten it by the end of the hour.

What was happening that we couldn’t connect? What experiences had members placed inside my womb? Was I the Fairbairnian bad object? Although I was talking about my experience, I was not able to communicate empathetically with the members, the children of the group. And the other subgroup of mothers was describing similar experiences in their lives with what I was feeling in the here and now of the group.

Was there a part of me that had dissociated in order to protect my body? Definitely. A subgroup experienced intense somatic symptoms and others in the group struggled with autoimmune diseases and cancer. Did I feel protective of my child? At that time I was not aware of my difficulty to connect fully with my pregnancy. Not the happy side of pregnancy, but the particular side that has to do with more difficult feelings like loss, loss of uniqueness, even envy, as something foreign invaded my body, my life and my relationship with my husband. These were some of the difficulties with this new role as mother and at the same time with becoming a group therapist. There were feelings of shame as I struggled to be a good enough mother for both my baby and for our group, and I was failing. Who needed more support: the group? my baby? or myself? And what would my pregnancy evoke in the group?

According to Fairbairn (Armstrong-Perlman,1991) I was a blur object: I couldn’t respond with cohesion and consistency to their needs. A part of me was unavailable. Was I acting as their mothers? How did my pregnancy affect the group as a whole? I could understand that there was a blind spot for me: my pregnancy and my relationship with my own mother had affected the way I was responding to the group. As Bass says: the way we respond to our clients reveals a lot about us and our values. Until the enactment I had been pretending that my pregnancy was hidden and so could not affect the group. Also I had not been aware of my shame - riddled, bad self-representations.

- Alkinoi Lala

Levine, L. (2009). Transformative Aspects of Our Own Analyses and Their Resonance in Our Work With Our Patients. Psychoanal. Dial., 19(4):454-462.

Electives: Students Present: Somatization in Group Therapy Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 May 2021 20:37:00 +0000

In Somatization in Group Therapy, we start with a brief introduction of the model which provides the theoretical base for the accomplishment of the therapeutic goals in our work with the group. These are the Interpersonal model by Irvin Yalom and Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. We present the most important points of a Davies' article, searching for answers to the question: why some therapies fall apart from the burden of repetitive self-destructive behaviors of both the patients and the therapists. How the emergence of envious, embarrassing selves at the beginning of treatment blocks the mutual acceptance of toxic introjections but finally allows the analytic work to proceed.

In Part II, we will present the case studies of the personal stories of the two therapists
which coincide with the stories of the group members. In such moments, the enigmatic feelings of the therapists and the group members became valuable analytical data. In Part III, we will explore how the space for new experiences is created.

The group is the place for the repetition of internal conflicts and unbearable feelings of therapists and patients alike. The participants cannot avoid the impact they have on each other every minute. We are interested not only in what is said but also in what is not said. Our bodies, sometimes restrained, other times weak and tired, inform us that something is coming. Based on Davies' article, we will try to show how aspects of our subjectivity - regarding the therapy of the heart problem of one of the therapist's children and the pregnancy of the other therapist, carrying her first child, that is, somatization in our relational stories - helped the group and the therapists realized the difficulties of mother-child relationships. Then comes the realization, how certain interactions with our patients helped us, the therapists, to understand how we can be vulnerable together and how we can stay connected and collaborate in a joined effort to understand what is happening.

Theorists have moved from one-person analysis to more interpersonal models. The interpersonal theory developed by Irvin Yalom was strongly influenced by Sullivan’s view of the development of the human personality. Even before Sullivan, Winnicott [there is no such thing as a baby] talked about the importance of the relationship: the infant is nothing [would not come into being, or, would not survive] outside the mother-infant relationship. Sullivan also believed that the way we perceive ourselves is the consequence of others' views which have become internalized. We see ourselves through the eyes of significant others, especially the ones in our early lives, and then we interact accordingly. He suggested that the modifications of the beliefs and habitual patterns of interpersonal behavior should be a primary focus of treatment. The group can function as a mirror, so we expect that these internal representations and beliefs will emerge in the group, and that the members can understand their patterns and how they co-create their relationships. This is a model that focuses not only on interpretation and soothing but also on providing new relational patterns.

The main techniques of the model are that we work in the here and now of the group and we concentrate on the process and not on the theory or content. At the heart of the model is the emphasis on the feedback, (how the person connects with others and their impact on others). and the interpersonal learning. Lastly, in this model the group leader(s) is not only an observer but also a participant and so needs to be aware not only of transference but of her/his counter transference as well. The development of therapy cannot happen outside of the relationship, it is a co-creation. The interpretations are at three different levels, the individual, the intersubjective, and the group as a whole, the latter being the main level of interpretation.

Reading Davie's article, we will see that in modern psychotherapy the psyche is composed of the interaction of the self in relation to others. All these that we are going to see today are also going to discuss on the second week of our presentation.

Though in the beginning the communication is nonverbal, from the first lines of the Davies article the impact of the therapist on her patient and vis versa is evident. Davies is aware through somatic stimulus that something difficult is coming based on the expressions on Karen's face and via the tension in her own body. Here we observe the first aspect of unconscious communication between the analyst and the analysand which continue through the interaction. Karen seems to discern sides of the therapist before the therapist's realization. Davies allow herself to surrender to the experience of the here and now, and to an internal dialogue about what is happening during their interaction. She is receptive in the influence of the unconscious of the patient on her (and the other way around).

We see the focus on the here and now where priority falls on the instant events of the session and on the procedure of transference-countertransference. Davies has in mind the concept of negative transference and its use as a bad object, but she is not concerned with the understanding or the solving of this projective identification which evacuates the badness to the other, and, instead Davies examines her subjective countertransference at the moment of her interaction with Karen. She moves from the psychology of the one (which is the patient pathology) to the psychology of the two, emphasizing the mutual impact and shared responsibility of their relationship. She does this by examining the procedure [process]. Davies wonders what her statement reveals and the numerous factors which emerged due to their interaction. She sustains the capacity to reflect on the experience by being both in the moment and out of it at the same time. In the intersubjective moment they are both constructors of toxic self-states and vulnerable simultaneously, while managing to survive and feel sane and feel loved by the other. These elements are also found in group therapy ensuring cohesion and change for the group as a whole. 'My milk will heal you', Karen says. We can see how the experiential content is as important as the verbal one in an interpersonal meeting thus the patient feels able to heal the therapist. This experience can be the most healing experience of all.

-Alkinoi Lala and Fotini Doumoura

Davies, J.M. (2004). Whose Bad Objects Are We Anyway? Repetition and Our Elusive Love Affair with Evil. Psychoanal. Dial., 14(6):711-732.

Remembering Dr. Horacio Arias

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 16:23:00 +0000

On January 23, 2021 the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies lost after a brief illness one of its emerita faculty, and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society one of its long time members and former presidents. Horacio Arias, MD was 96 years old and had, up until a few weeks before, been practicing part time his craft as psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. At a Memorial Service (by zoom) on February 6, 2021 what stood out to most was his enduring kindness and wisdom.

I knew Horacio for more than twenty years and became accustomed to his thick accent (born in Colombia and trained in Kleinian psychoanalysis), so much so that those on first encountering him would ask me to repeat what he had said. One thing he said loudly and repeatedly to me, by his actions, was 'I'm always in your corner.' He had my back, in part, because of his Kleinian insistence to see whole objects and not just part object. A much needed skill, I think, in these times.

How the Therapist Can Journey Toward Being an Anti-Racist

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 10:12:00 +0000

In order to challenge oppressive cultural norms and their implicit assumptions, we need to recognize that components of identity, such as race, are not essential and biological, but, instead, are socially constructed through history, language, culture and custom. Often the designating of differences is to make those in power more comfortable.

When we ‘other’ what is different as unworthy or dangerous on the basis of race - often without even being aware that we are being racist - we are engaging in racism. We too are diminished alongside the harm we cause the othered for we limit our omni-potentiated multiple selves and truncate our capacity for varied identifications, empathy and creativity.

I wrote in a post on February 28, 2020 about Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist (2019). I thought it might be interesting to consider how we might strive in our clinical practices to be ‘on the journey’ to anti-racist behavior. Our profession usually emphasizes internal factors such as defensive othering to bulwark our fragile selves; fear and its consequent hatred of difference to calm our anxieties about difference; operating in the Kleinian paranoid schizoid position instead of the depressive position; failure to reflect, in Bionian terms, to think; failure to maintain the tension required by Benjamin’s intersubjectivity. But no matter to which theoretical explanation we subscribe, we, as therapists, in order to behave as anti-racists, can, to name a few:

- refuse to deny class differences with patients, and consider the impact of ethnicity and culture in the clinical setting;

- be “aware of both gender and racial difference and of the need to negotiate such differences rather than [to treat them] as fixed identities” (Kaplan,1993);

-“acknowledge that our assumptions and beliefs … towards those who are culturally and racially different may well be over simplistic, judgemental and discriminatory” (Hawkes,1997)

We can

-when working with any patient, keep in mind the damage to identity that racism engenders;

-think about the intergenerational transmission of trauma--from slavery; -think about how Adverse Childhood Experiences affect physical and mental health;

-not treat “race as a “content” whose symbolic meaning is already established (Leary, 1995);

-recognize that pathology is not only located within a mind but also has external origins in Society;

-provide a thinking space, a transitional space, a third in which to deconstruct assumptions about so-called race;

- be aware of the capacity for destruction and racist beliefs in each of us;

- understand how binaries are used by us and by others;

- not let ‘neutrality’ mean turning a blind eye to difference;

- reserve a % of our work hours to treat those of a different class, and at a reduced fee;

- and serve as witness.(1)

_________________________________________________________

(1) Donnell Stern writes that witnessing--an important function of therapists-- provides “metaphors for the organization of meaning.. We need a witness if we are to grasp, know, and feel what we have experienced, especially trauma. Someone else must know what we have gone through, must be able to feel it with us.” Evans writes “Sometimes the witness's function is to break the dissociative spell and free up unformulated experience. ...we give voice in the private domain that which one day will be discourse in the public space whereas issues previously out of awareness or in denial can be confronted by the body politic as a whole and serve to inform and enlighten legislatures.”

Hawkes, B. (1997). Race, Culture and Counselling by Colin Lago in collaboration with Joyce Thompson. Published by Open

University Press, Buckingham, Philadelphia 1996 British Journal of Psychotherapy, 13 (3):433-435

Kaplan, E.A. (1993). The Couch Affair: Gender and Race in Hollywood Transference. Am. Imago, 50(4):481-514.

Leary, K. (1995). “Interpreting in the Dark” Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Psychoanal. Psychol.,

12(1):127-140.

Colonization and Racialization

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:52:00 +0000

Psychology has made much of racism as a defensive mechanism --a projection--of, for example, asserting superiority to manage anxiety about Difference. Kleinians would say that we see the other as only part object when operating from this paranoid schizoid position. So called race is not simply about difference; historically it is also about power (Foster 2014) and about “the colonial attitude of assumed Western superiority.” [I recommend Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste , and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, to learn more about “the effects of colonization on the behavior, social systems, and subjectivity of both colonialists and colonized.”]

It is important to remember that race and ethnicity represent amalgams of real social consequences as well as fantasy (Leary, 1995). Racism appears as internal - hatred of difference - but actually reflects internalization of external racialization rationalized and justified on biological, religious and psychological grounds (Davis 2007). Racism is a socially sanctioned form of hatred; death by cop a permissible persecution; projection not only exploits Difference, but creates it. (Evans,2004).

Dorothy Holmes (2006) contends that “our culture's attitudes and practices regarding race and social class inevitably cause significant and lasting damage to the self for all who live in this culture.” Recall that Sullivan noted that self esteem does not come from the self but from accretion of myriad interactions with others. Society, with its socially sanctioned beliefs about race, with its policing -- whether by law enforcement, segregation, Jim Crow Laws, red-lining, voter suppression or multiple, daily microaggressions -- ‘colonizes’ the mind through the learning from a myriad of cultural cues that demonstrate that one is excluded and that one’s self is experienced as inferior, dangerous, etc.

These negative attributions take their toll. Colonized in this way by Society’s projections, one begins to believe that one is inferior, and may, of course, lead to self loathing and dysphoria. The mind has been colonized not only by the projections from those who believe themselves to be white-- who see this injustice as normal and even natural-- but from experiences of being treated as inferior or dangerously other by institutions. This is one thing that is meant by the colonized, rather than a mentalized, mind.

Evans, P. (2004). Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and

Sociology Farhad Dalal Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge 2002 251 pp. £17.99. J. Child Psychother., 30(3):376-378.

Foster, A. (2014). Thinking Space: Promoting Thinking about Race, Culture and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Beyond edited

by Frank Lowe. The Tavistock Clinic Series; series editor: Margot Waddell. Published by Karnac, London, 2014; 266 pp;

£26.99 paperback. Brit. J. Psychother., 30(4):547-550.

Frosh, S. (2004). Aboriginal Populations in The Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis. By Celia Brickman. New York:

Columbia University PressPsychoanalytic Review, 91 (3):457-460

Holmes, D.E. (2006). The Wrecking Effects of Race and Social Class on Self and Success. Psychoanal Q., 75(1):215-235.

Leary, K. (1995). “Interpreting in the Dark” Race and Ethnicity in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Psychoanal. Psychol., 12(1):

127-140.

Race, Constructed and perspectival

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 11:07:00 +0000

It has been generally accepted in psychoanalytic circles that Race, like gender, is a socially constructed concept. It has been used politically to justify exclusion, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and worst: slavery. Race is used to legitimize the existing hierarchy of wealth, power and domination. (Evans, 2004) Race is an ideology. Evans writes “It is easier to exploit, torture and even exterminate people … [when] they are ‘othered’ [and] rendered less than fully human.”

Race has no genetic basis, and yet we live in a racialized society that is considered in terms of white and non-white, whereas, in the consulting room, remember these terms and meanings are to be negotiated between therapist and patient. Those who think of themselves as white also possess these categories. But race and ethnicity are not the sole domain of people of color. It is perspectival: It is not only the other who is other.

The assumed dominant culture, ‘whiteness’ , is the assumed universalized subject (Kaplan, 1993), the default position; Whiteness goes without saying, and you may have noticed that therapists, when presenting cases, often only state race when it is other than the Euro-normative white subject. Whiteness assumes a homogeneity within race, marks clear delineations between races, and obscures and oppresses any contradictory subjects’ positions. (Layton, 1998). The Euro-American culture is assumed normative, and stature and standard by which all others are contrasted. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks, among other things, recognition, and seeks redress of this black/white binary.

Evans, P. (2004). Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and Sociology Farhad Dalal Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge 2002 251 pp. £17.99. J. Child Psychother., 30(3):376-378.

Kaplan, E.A. (1993). The Couch Affair: Gender and Race in Hollywood Transference. Am. Imago, 50(4):481-514.

Layton, L. (1998). Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse: S. S. Friedman. Signs. XXI, 1995. Pp. 1-49Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 67 (2):348

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 19:25:00 +0000

The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society on November 7, 2020 offered a panel on race where four panelists reviewed contemporary books. The panel: Decolonize Your Mind: Antiracist Literature, featured Aisha Abbasi, MD; Lycia Alexander-Guerra, MD; Linda Berkowitz, LMHC; and Carolyn Smith, LMHC. Aisha Abbasi reviewed Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.

PBS Newshour, on Aug 5, 2020, spoke with Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times, and author of Caste, the Origins of our Discontents. Wilkerson sees us [U.S.] on the “cusp of an awakening, an awakening to a part of, much of, American history that many people may not have known. The goal of this work [Black Lives Matter] is to allow us to see again the structure that we have inherited, to be able to push forward,” -[doesn’t that also sound like the work of psychoanalysis?] - Wilkerson continues: “but most importantly, to recognize that we all have a stake in it and to recognize that it will take each and every one of us to make it the strongest house possible.”

Caste, a hierarchy, is an infrastructure. Hidden like bones, it is larger than race, the foundation, the framework for how people interact with one another. Wilkerson: “I think of caste as the bones and race as the skin...Race has been used as the cue, as the signal, as the indicator of where an individual sits in a pre-existing hierarchy ...”

“God Said to Abraham, Kill Me A Son.” - Bob Dylan, Highway 61

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 17:52:00 +0000

Hosted by the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society (TBPS) on Saturday, October 17, 2020, John Auerbach elaborated, in a most delightful presentation, the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac, and linked it with Bob Dylan’s [Dylan ne Zimmerman received Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, despite being a known assaulter of women] relationship to his own father [Abraham Zimmerman], as well as with the relationship in general of parents and children. [Thanks to Covid-19, all TBPS Speaker Program meetings are now virtual and so now almost anyone with wifi can attend presentations.]

One very interesting part of the discussion was introduced by Peter Rudnytsky’s noting of the existentialist Kierkegaard’s ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ [never acceptable, not even in 'the ends justify the means'] had the group examining Abraham’s dilemma-- unconditional obedience to God’s request to kill Isaac or ethical attention to God’s ‘Thou shalt not kill’ commandment. Recalling [Erich] Fromm, Rudnytsky found “profoundly troubling” any religion that teaches the acceptance of an ideology of authoritarianism and that values obedience to authority above all else. [I was reminded of the evangelical support of an unethical Donald Trump to the ends of a more conservative Supreme Court.]

Auerbach recounted that, after Isaac is spared, there exist no further Bible passages to indicate that Abraham and Isaac ever spoke again. Imagine, said Jessica Rausch, the trauma to Isaac [ironically, ‘laughter’ in Hebrew] knowing his own father might have killed him. And what if ‘raise him up’ was not raise Isaac up as a sacrificial offering, but rather to raise him up as 'to honor 'him? Abraham’s failure (of character) to protect his son is compared to God’s character in asking Abraham to make such a sacrifice.

While infanticide/filicide is much more prevalent than parricide, Freud chose the Greek myth of Oedipus to explain the mainstay of sexual development [recall that it is Oedipus’ father Laius who wanted to kill him first]. Auerbach mentions that Freud, in another indication of Freud’s ambivalence about Judaism -- an ambivalence shared by Dylan-- did not choose a Hebraic myth, but a Hellenic one. Anti-semitism in fin de sicle Austria put Freud, despite his success, in a marginalized group; Such groups struggle with self-love over self loathing.

Lastly, in thinking of an authoritarian and powerful God or a loving and just God, Auerbach contrasted the Freudian tripod anonymity, abstinence, and neutrality with the Rogerian triad of empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard. Joseph Assouline wondered if God were not giving Abraham the opportunity to think for himself, or perhaps God had planned to stop Abraham all along, only checking to see how obedient Abraham might be? Is God seeking faith or asking Abraham to ‘wake up?’ The Judaic tradition, Linda Berkowitz reminded us, is continued discussion, a plethora of opinions [think Aron and Henik, Answering a Question with a Question].

TBPS’ next program: November 7, 2020 on Decolonizing the Mind and Anti-Racism literature.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: Immigration, Trauma, Recognition: "Happy Birthday, Ocean!"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:32:00 +0000

Ocean Vuong, an emigrant at age two from war, is a Vietnamese American poet and novelist who debuted his first novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019, Penguin Press). Voung discusses his book and his experience on Amanpour and Company (aired 10-31-19). Amanpour found it “compelling” and “a poignant ode to marginalized immigrants.” Voung’s novel is written in the form of a letter to his illiterate mother.

Vuong’s mother cautioned him as an immigrant “to be invisible,””to go out and disappear,” “to hide yourself in order to protect yourself,” but Vuong “wanted to be known.” He hoped “to honor [his] journey.” On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is semi autobiographical and a coming of age story about a gay man whose family is working its way out of poverty, Vuong was inspired and empowered by Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Vuong recalls being put in timeout by his elementary school teacher and being so invisible that she forgot about him. The other students had gone to lunch when she discovers him still seated in the corner. “It is so easy for a small yellow child to vanish. The hard work, the real work that requires innovation, is to be known,” says Vuong. He found that being an artist is a powerful way to be known.

A lonely boy in Hartford, CT, Vuong wrote his own poems. His teacher thought Vuong had plagiarized them. “It was terrifying to be in trouble for your imagination.” But he also had never felt so respected and feared [for] being “unfathomable.” He notes the two stereotypes of Asian Americans: the math whiz (genetic) and the musical prodigy (from “the unjust (and inhumane) parenting of tiger moms” as if not the musician’s own agency), [see Eng and Han's 2000 paper A Dialogue on Racial Melancholy on the 'model minority'] “and always in service of … European music” To be an Asian American artist creating original works is “inconceivable” to other.

His mother and grandmother suffered with PTSD and Vuong grew up surrounded by the pervasive violence found in his mostly black and brown neighborhood, with its police brutality, and violence in his home, even toward him. He saw “that anger was the death of creativity and innovation...Anger is a force that extinguishers the wielder as well as the world....As a writer, as a thinker I am most useful to myself and my world when I ask ‘Now, what?...How do we change what happened to us into how we live better?’“

The Power of Voices

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 15:37:00 +0000

I wanted to mark the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

On August 28th, 1963, African Americans, and others, voted with their feet when 250,000 strong participated in the March. Civil rights leaders protested racial discrimination and demonstarted support for the civil rights legislation in Congress at the time. [The Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.] Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech was given on this date from the Lincoln Memorial.

This week, in support of protestors marching for Black Lives Matter following the shooting (seven times in the back) of 29 year old Jacob Blake by a police officer in Wisconsin and the subsequent death of two and the wounding of another protestor (allegedly by a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ seventeen year old), professional athletes in soccer, football, baseball, and hockey used their voices in massive protest, unlike any heretofore, by refusing to play or by postponing games and cancelling practices. Ray Allen, former NBA player for the Milwaukee Bucks and Basketball Hall of Famer, told PBS Newshour’s John Yang yesterday August 27, “[N]ow we understand the power we possess.”

I might add from Corinthians 13:1 (Good News translation) I may be able to speak the languages of human beings and even of angels, but if I have not love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell.

About the Voice

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 13:33:00 +0000

On August 18, 2020 I posted, on the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, about women having fought to obtain the voice of the vote. This led me to thinking about the voice in a more concrete way, in particular, when a patient’s voice is very loud, or productive, or seemingly pressured, patients who seem not to expect a dialogue with us or to let up ‘get a word in edgewise.’ A colleague complained to me about his patient’s very loud voice, shouting in the session such that she gave him a headache. He and I talked about the possibility that she had a great longing to be heard, having had a mother who would never listen to her. My colleague chose to ‘lean into’ her need to be heard, and even sometimes to muse aloud about this need of hers.

Another colleague of mine became annoyed with her patient with whom she had to struggle to get a word in, and to struggle to go from the patient’s complaints about external events to the patient’s internal longings. My colleague was tempted to interpret the patient’s seeming incapacity to be in dialogue with another and to let the patient know how left out from a dialogue she, the therapist, felt. Instead, my colleague decided to speak to the possible longings this behavior of the patient’s might be communicating. Perhaps the patient, like a loud patient, might have a great longing to get her story out, that is, to be heard, and had, in addition, the fear and expectation (learned from childhood experience) that a listener’s attention could not really be held for long and so the speaker better get in as much as possible before the listener 'disappeared.’

Childhood may teach us (and become a relational paradigm) that listeners disappear: A mother who is starting to give us attention, but then is distracted away by her other children, her own worries, or by her dissociated unresolved trauma. Caregivers may tell us to go away, that they don’t have time for us. They may teach us we are not really deserving of being listened to, or that we are boring, by pretending to listen while not really giving their full attention (e.g. while on the phone). Perhaps worse is to have had our parents dismiss our feelings and points of view such that we feel misrecognized and misunderstood, never heard.

An analytic attitude listens with heartfelt attention, allowing the patient the experience of being ‘a child of the universe [with] ... a right to be here.’ Another colleague told me how a particular patient would not stop talking at the end of a session, as if to “grab” the therapist, sometimes running over twenty minutes! I was reminded of children I have seen in play therapy who, when the parent calls for them at the end of a session, throw their arms around my legs and not want to leave. I notice aloud their attachment, let them know I will hold them in my mind, and that I will be here next time. Sometimes, because of our experience together, they know that to be true.

100 year anniversary of 19th Amendment’s ratification

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 10:10:00 +0000

There is no democracy without enfranchisement of all its citizens, and without the vote, there is no voice. [The voiceless are made helpless, vulnerable to depression and dissociation, and/or resentment and revenge.] The 19th Amendment enfranchised women, the right to vote giving voice to the speechless. [Psychotherapy strives to give voice, to enfranchise the speechless, empower the voiceless, to bring to fruition an individual’s potential.] This 100th anniversary is bittersweet; joy for the hard fought victory, anger that disenfranchisement lasted so long. [Our patients, too, may lament that it took so long to arrive at our offices where they work together with us to arrive at a stronger sense of themselves.]

Woodrow Wilson had declared, “Liberty is the fundamental demand of the human spirit.” The suffragists he initially opposed replied-- with their daily picketing outside the White House,

led by Alice Paul--, “How long must women wait for liberty?” These women, demonstrating in nonviolent civil disobedience through the winter and into the fall of 1917, were jeered, called Bolsheviks by journalists, physically assaulted, attacked, arrested, jailed and beaten, [much like Black Lives Matter demonstrators are today]. When it became politically expedient, and after years of persuasion (the carrot) from the then president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Carrie Chapman Catt, along with many months of embarrassment (the stick) by Paul and her sister demonstrators about his hypocrisy of America’s so called democracy with half its citizens unable vote, Wilson supported in November 1917 New York’s amendment to its state constitution for women’s full suffrage.

The Resolution for Amendment 19 came before the U.S. House of Representatives, gaining the required two thirds majority, and passing on May 21, 1919. One Representative left his wife’s death bed to, at her behest, vote ‘aye’ and then returned home to her funeral. The U.S. Senate passed it on June 4, 1919 by one vote over the needed two-thirds majority. Three-quarters of the states were needed to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution (in 1920, that was 36 out of the then 48 states). All the southern states failed to pass, some would not even consider, the 19th amendment--black women voting would lessen their hold on white supremacy-- making ratification impossible, all except for Tennessee (its governor was a friend of Wilson’s). Tennessee was the necessary 36th state to approve, by one vote over the needed two-thirds majority, the 19th Amendment. After over 70 years* of activism, twenty million women finally won the vote, thanks, in part, to a mother who told her Tennessee State Representative son he’d better vote for women’s suffrage. The ratification of the 19th Amendment was a huge step toward realizing the United States’ potential.

*First Convention for Woman’s Rights held in 1848, in Seneca Falls, NY -- with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglas in attendance. Black women’s suffrage groups had the motto “Lifting as we climb.”

The 19th amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Psychoanalysis as Education -Adam Phillips

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 15:46:00 +0000

In his 2004 essay Psychoanalysis As Education Adam Phillips draws fascinating parallels between Lenin and Freud. He writes that Lenin, through education of the proletariat about Marxism, hoped to make conscious their exploitation by the bourgeoisie, while Freud hoped to make conscious unconscious desire. Both the working masses and the psychoanalytic patient were apparently leading lives dictated by things outside their conscious awareness. Both needed to be educated by an omniscient, if somewhat inflexible, other to pay attention to their particular blindspots. Phillips writes, “Education, like psychoanalysis and politics, is the art of attention seeking.”

Lenin believed in education and pedagogy as a force of change -- for revolution -- despite the irony that education was also considered bourgeois. To benefit, people would then need to be malleable. While it is true that we can have a powerful effect on one another, Lenin did not seem to consider the idiosyncrasies of human desire. Freud, however, was very interested in desire. Freud’s understanding of the peculiar desires of individuals may have been the outcome from and the development of free association. Unlike traditional Leninist education (inform and get outcome), psychoanalysis’ “Free association is at once a new kind of information about the self, and a new way of learning about the self…[with] no preformed content [and] no predictable outcome.”

Phillips sees psychoanalysis as a contribution to the debate on education (more than to medicine) for it is “an opportunity to explore the ways in which people inform each other.” Why, for example, do patients not make use of the new knowledge presented to them? Phillips says it is because annoying interpretations may be experienced as impositions or ‘impingements’ (Winnicott) or, worse, as trauma. He also notes, as Freud did, that the object of desire, along with suffering and stasis, is the past and its forbidden objects of desire. [I prefer to think that people do not seek suffering but connection, and they have learned through experience that suffering is the price paid for connection. I also think of Bromberg’s ‘staying the same while changing,’ that is, that patients, while expanding and acquiring new parts of themselves, do not wish to lose the former parts of themselves, even the sad and dysfunctional parts. Thus, we need the old and the new in conversation with one another, held in tension.]

Phillips [questions] whether psychoanalysis is free from persuasion and suggestion, yet sees the analyst as a new, different kind of teacher, “A teacher who does something that lets the patient let himself know about himself.” Phillips also questions Freud’s analogy of the psychoanalyst as teacher, superior, a lover of truth, and, thus, exempt from sham and deceit. Freud saw psychoanalysis as an education meant to overcome resistance. Freud said psychoanalysis was an “after-education,” unlearning (resistances) and relearning (satisfactions). Respectively, life is risks evaded and risks courted, says Phillips.

Phillips remains loyal to traditional psychoanalysis when he writes, “If there is a subject of psychoanalysis it is whatever obstructs speaking and listening.” [Traditionally, the obstructions were ‘resistances’ and the purview of defense analysis by ego psychologists. But perhaps Phillips intends a broader array of obstructions: the dissociation of the analyst? the lack of developing a ‘secure base’ from which to explore the inner world?] Contemporary and elegant, he adds, “Listening to speak and listen...experiments with wanting and being wanted, because wanting and being wanted are always an experiment. But unlike scientific experiments they can never be replicated.”

Phillips does note, as he says Freud noted, that “love is the greatest educator” -- even forbidden incestuous love has something to teach -- and this love as teacher is in keeping with parenting, and with research in education which shows that students learn better when they like their teachers and when their teachers like and believe them to be educable.

FLOWERS FOR THE SICK

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 10:41:00 +0000

Artist Tucker Nichols of San Raphael, California appeared on the PBSNewshour Arts and Culture series CANVAS on 5-8-20. He spoke of how the experience of being sick is isolating so he sends flowers, paintings of flowers, that is, from loved ones of sick people. In this time of Corona, he has had so many requests, he now has to post pictures of his paintings of flowers on line:

He writes:

Flowers for the ventilator operators

Flowers for the hospital janitors

Flowers for the bare handed mail carrier

Flowers for the neighbor who sits in her window on patrol

Flowers for elastic waistbands

Flowers for the dishwasher

Flowers for for you if you are the dishwasher

Flowers for someone who left in an ambulance but still no update

Flowers for the kids who are realizing none of the grown ups know how this is going to play out

Flowers for the frazzled woman at the post office directing the other customers to maintain their six foot perimeters while trying to keep her place in line

Flowers for New York City

Flowers for anyone in any hospital for any reason

Flowers for your mother

Flowers for anyone stuck at home without flowers today

Letter to Colleagues on recent events

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 19:59:00 +0000

Dear members of TBPS,

Writing this, I notice it is difficult to find the right words, a sound interpretation for the events that have recently taken place. Perhaps it is not about having the right words or interpretation but listening and bearing witness that is of importance. As psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, we seek to understand. We seek to hold, contain, and transmute what is brought to the therapy session so that others may grow. It is our duty to bear witness to the pain, suffering, feelings of betrayal and rage following the recent killings of members of the black community and the intergenerational trauma the black community has faced. It is our duty to look within ourselves, at our privilege, our preconceived notions, our biases, at our countertransference and transference, in the face of such tragedy. Lastly, it is our duty to bring what is in darkness into the light (“where id was there ego shall be”), despite the difficult conversations it may create. Through these difficult conversations we can affect our community. If ever there was a time, this is the time to do what we do best: listen, empathize, and support to create change.

Below you will find a link to the American Psychoanalytic Association’s statement regarding racism and recent events:

https://apsa.org/content/racism-needs-be-heard-and-addressed

Warm regards,

Joseph Assouline, Psy.D.

Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, President-Elect

Identification with father is not 'penis envy'

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 08 May 2020 15:47:00 +0000

Benjamin brings feminist and gender theories to traditional psychoanalytic theory by tackling the problematic concept of penis envy. She reinterprets the Freudian concept of "penis envy” by noting that a little girl bulwarks her striving for agency and subjectivity by identifying with the father -- classically thought of as the ‘wish to be masculine.’ She posits that the female (and male) child identifies with the preoedipal father as the idealized subject who possesses agency and desire separate from the mother’s. Identification with the father and the otherness he represents is a normal developmental step for children of both sexes. [Freud’s idea that penis envy is the sine qua non of female sexual development is a gross error in his attempts to understand female development. Note that terms such as penis envy or phallus are androcentric.]

Possession of otherness by the father has been conflated with the possession of the penis, phallic power. The penis becomes a symbol for the girl’s wish to be like the father in subjectivity and the wish that the father recognize the child as a like subject. It is the failure of the preoedipal father to recognize and welcome the girl’s (and boy’s) normatively developmental need to identify with the father --and not the little girl's realization of anatomical difference--that leads to penis envy. This failure by father risks later impairment of the girl’s subjectivity and agency and may lead to later masochistic submission to an idealized male. This disallowal of identification is also a disallowal of cross sex identifications and, as such, limits the richness available from multiply gendered identifications and expressions.

In the TBIPS Gender course there is much coming to terms with gender fluidity and being comfortable with the unfamiliar. Euripides Gravas noted that identification denied leads to envy. Jennifer Schafer mused about the possible multiple configurations of genders available as parental figures. Stamatina Kaidantzi explained that it is not the sex or gender identification of the non-caregiver parent but it is the otherness, the separateness from the caregiver, with all the comings and goings from home, that propels the preoedipal child’s wish --akin to the ‘love affair with the world' -- to identify with that other parent. Even in the absence of a second parent, that otherness exists. In addition to the caregiver/mother’s ability to ‘survive’ -- which, according to Winnicott, places her outside the fantasized omnipotent control of the infant and makes her external and a subject in her own right, and thus worthy also of identification -- the father may well be a solidifying identification for the child’s agency and desire, that is, for her subjectivity. Little girls do not feel inferior and certainly not because they are different from father; they just want to be different from mother while still retaining likeness.

Benjamin, J. (1991). Father and Daughter: Identification with Difference — A Contribution to Gender Heterodoxy. Psychoanal. Dial., 1(3):277-299.

Quarantimes and the After Times

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 May 2020 21:18:00 +0000

In these ‘Quarantimes’ we long for the ‘Before Times’ and anxiously wonder what the ‘After Times’ hold for us. One author, Kelly Corrigan, on the PBSNewsHour April 29, 2020 in the feature “IMHO,” said about our future:

Sometimes, when I feel outmatched by the thing in front of me, … I tell myself the story of what happened as if it’ s over and I nailed it. … I told myself the story of the pandemic of 2020...: At first it was awful, nothing but bad news on top of bad news. But, then, we rose up. We made soups and stews for old people, and dropped them off so they felt included and secure and nourished. We read books to children over the internet. We stepped outside at the end of the day and played music and clapped so that each of us knew we were not alone. We sent pizzas and Chinese food to E.R.s to sustain both our hospitals and our restaurants. We called old friends and told them things we’d forgotten to say. ‘I miss you;’ ‘ I still think of you;’ ‘ Remember that time?’

We turned up, allof us, on our screens to keep businesses afloat and, in so doing, were exposed to the more tender elements of our colleagues’ lives. Pets and children were now, to our mutual benefit, in the frame. People figured out they didn’t need fancy equipment to exercise. We stopped flying around and jumping in cars for no reason. Everyone planted things they could eat. We played cards with our families. We had long conversations. We identified what kind of learning can be delivered on line. We discovered that teaching is the most complex, high impact profession known to man, and we started compensating our teachers fairly for their irreplaceable work.* Everyone voted after Corona virus. Kids who lived through the virus valued science above all. They became researchers and doctors, kicking off the greatest period of world positive discovery and innovation the planet has ever seen. We came, finally and forever, to appreciate the profound fact of our shared humanity and relish the full force of our love for one another.

*[I would add that not only teachers, but other essential workers, such as food workers and suppliers, first responders and frontliners, sanitation workers and many more--most who are among the lowest paid-- will also be compensated fairly at the level they really deserve.]

Masculinity is about organizing identifications, not about disidentifying

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 14:07:00 +0000

There has been an important revision to the traditional idea that the development of masculinity requires a little boy to disidentify (Greenson, Stoller) with his preoedipal mother. This revision is a relational and intersubjective one. Diamond brings to the discussion of the development of the boy’s masculinity the emphasis on the importance of the quality of attachment relationships and the capacity of the mother “to recognize and support both her son’s maleness and his father’s presence” and the capacity of the father to allow “a reciprocal identification” with his son.

The confrontation of the mother’s subjectivity in the separation-individuation phase is a narcissistic blow to a child who now realizes s/he does not possess omnipotent control over mother. If we recall that identifications come about to preserve what has been lost, then the loss of omnipotence vis a vis the mother is for the little boy more traumatic than for the little girl because he has been pressured by the culture since birth to give up his feminine identifications; as Diamond writes, “the pressure to renounce gender-inconsistent traits is greater for boys.” A boy must adapt to this “pre-oedipal disruption;” how he adapts is dependent on the quality of attachments and on pre-oedipal identifications. If these are insufficient, the boy may do so by disavowing his need for his mother and by disavowing femininity itself.

Disidentifying with mother, then, becomes a pathological resolution to loss of the preoedipal dyadic connection with mother, and loss of omnipotence, and to being forced to denounce feminine traits. It can lead to a fragile phallic centricity meant to hide the need for and loss of mother and of omnipotence. This rigid masculinity constrains the boy’s experience of himself and others, and truncates the multiple possibilities of the self.

Corbett (2009b) advocates for fluidy, ambiguity, and multiplicity of gender identifications and expressions. He questions diagnostic authority when it adheres to the binary classification of gender. Corbett (2009a) also provides a clinical example of the relational influence of the development of masculinity when he reenvisions the dynamics in Freud’s case of ‘Little Hans’ by bringing to light possible domestic violence as well as Hans’ mother’s reluctance to have children in the first place.

Corbett, K. (2009a). Little Hans: Masculinity Foretold. Psychoanal Q., 78:733-764.

Corbett, K. (2009b). Boyhood femininity, gender identity disorder, masculine presuppositions, and the anxiety of regulation. Psa Dial 19(4):453-470.

Diamond, M. (2004). The shaping of masculinity: Revisioning boys turning away from their mothers to construct male gender identity. IJP 85: 359-380.

More on Gender Identifications

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:56:00 +0000

Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia (1917; SE:14), posited that ungrieved loss along with ambivalent identification lead to melancholia. Butler uses this Freudian idea in her Melancholy Gender (1995) [see post of 4-14-20] and made the very important contribution to gender studies and to psychoanalysis that unmourned homoerotic longing (unmourned because its loss must go unrecognized in a heterosexual culture) constructs melancholic gender identifications with this lost, same sex love object. [Benjamin reminds us that not all identifications come about through exclusion (repudiation, disavowal) or by abandoned love, but come also through inclusion (recognition).]

Jay adds some interesting modifications to Butler’s ground breaking theory. Jay (2007a) refines gender identifications by noting that not all gender identifications are melancholic and she demonstrates that ambivalence is an important component for melancholy gender to develop. Jay also writes (2007b) that Butler does not take into account the ways homoerotic love plays out differently for boys and girls: “Butler does not make a distinction between unavowed loss [in girls] and preemptive foreclosure [in boys].”

Heteronormatively gendered girls have, then lose, their homoeroctic longing for the same sex parent; Boys, on the other hand, from birth, are prohibited by heteronormative culture from homoerotic longings and so never have this loss to unmourn. [Benjamin, however, also reminds us that the unconscious, having no capacity to hold ‘no,’ does not deal in exclusions, so even what is excluded is represented somewhere in the unconscious mind.] A girl’s identification (to recapture what is lost or to disavow the loss) with mother -- because the loss of homoerotic love is unmourned -- becomes melancholic, whereas boys, having had these homoerotic longings foreclosed, develop anxiety, obsessive-compulsively performing masculinity lest they appear feminine or homosexual in a heterosexual society.

The ambivalence for a little girl in coming to identify with the ‘second’ sex “... suggest[s] that femininity becomes melancholic, at least in part, because the internalization of the feminine places the little girl not just in a disagreeable, one-down position but in an ambivalent, double bind: on the one hand, she internalizes the mother as her only route to preserving same-sex love yet, on the other hand, this feminine identification may reduce her to passive object status.”

She notes a different, less circuitous, path for boys: [Because] “boys tend to take mother, not father, as their first love” … “For males, then, heterosexual object-choice is often experientially continuous from the pre-Oedipal through the Oedipal stages.”

Benjamin, H. (1998). Shadow of the Other. Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. Routledge, New York and London

Jay, M. (2007a). Individual Differences in Melancholy Gender Among Women: Does Ambivalence Matter?. J. Amer.

Psychoanal. Assn., 55(4):1279-1320.

Jay, M. (2007b) Melancholy femininity and obsessive-compulsive masculinity: Sex differences in melancholy

gender, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 8 (2): 115-135.

Gender Performance, Gender Melancholy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:42:00 +0000

Judith Butler, like Foucault (social construction of gender in The History of Sexuality, 1976) before her, stresses the performativity of gender. Gender identities are not constitutive but rather are constructed from repeated performances of gender norms. Butler critiques compulsory heterosexuality and its binary dictates, and sees no need to pathologize performances that do not conform to norms. She critiques as well core gender identity: There is no core identity, only attributes of identity constructed from citation of cultural norms. Normative gender performativity requires the splitting of stereotypical feminine and masculine traits (such as dependency/agency; passivity/activity) which must be repudiated to attain normative gender identity. These binary heterosexual constructs are performed, while the unmourned, lost homosexual components are barred from performance, and the more entrenchedly their loss is disavowed, the more intolerant of them in others one becomes. Viewed this way, it is normative femininity and masculinity which are pathological for they are sustained by splitting and projection. Performance of them is both symptomatic as well as bulwarking of cultural norms.

Butler emphasizes a second contribution to the construction of gender identities: Gender identity is constructed from lost and ungrieved homosexual love (e.g. the boy for his father, the girl for her mother) which results in melancholy gender. Melancholy gender results both from repudiation of that of the opposite sex split off as the ‘other,’ as well as from repudiation of same-sex love objects whose loss remain unmourned. Relying heavily on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917; SE:14), Butler accepts Freud's theory that the ego is constructed from internalization of lost (because forbidden) love objects. This forbidding of love objects in the oedipal period is preceded by the taboo on homosexual love. In repudiating this same sex love, normative femininity and masculinity are embued with melancholy. (Freud, of course, denying the importance of relationships, reduced this to the intrapsychic, cementing the one-person psychology.)

Lynn Layton updates Butler to a two person psychology by reminding us that norms are conveyed in a relational matrix and come in a multiplicity of competing norms. Layton critiques Butler stating that dominant norms are not always repressive, and also that internalized relationships are varied and “do not necessarily conform to dominant norms.” Instead of melancholia as described by Freud, Layton sees a resemblance closer to Lacan’s ‘narcissistic’ development of identity: “the Lacanian ego is a structure built on the refusal to mourn losses.”

Layton connects dysthymia to the pain from disappointing relational patterns [insecure attachments?]. This, she says, is what creates melancholy, not -- as Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930, SE: 21) noted -- a trade off to be part of civilization. Instead, “dysthymia is produced by narcissistic intergenerational relationships that do not tolerate difference…” She further states, in a beautiful tribute to intersubjectivity, “Difference that does not reduce to sameness (Irigaray, 1985) is only produced in relationships where self and other are both subjects, in relationships of mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988). In this mode of relating, identifications are not solely forged from a refusal to mourn, the ego is not a substrate of such identifications, and performances of gender or anything else need not violate self or other.”

Butler, J. (1995). Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification. Psychoanal. Dial., 5(2):165-180.
Layton, Lynn. (1997). The Doer behind the Deed. Gender and Psychoanal., 2(2):131-155