Contextualizing is not nullifying: Reply to Mills (2005).

In omitting crucial words and sentencees, neglecting relevant citations, and overlooking important distinctions, Jon Mills' (see record 2005-04819-001) critique of relational psychoanalysis significantly misrepresents the authors' viewpoint. This viewpoint seeks to contextualize, but not to nullify, individual worlds of experience and their limiting horizons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Two interviews with Reik.

This article describes two interviews with Theodor Reik. Explored topics include Reik's relationship with Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic literature, and the history of the psychoanalytic movement. The author concludes with an analysis of his impressions of Reik. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trauma, dissociation, and conflict: The space where neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis overlap.

The authors describe their scientific and clinical interests in developing the panel Trauma, Dissociation, and Conflict: The Space Where Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Psychoanalysis Overlap, given at the 22nd Annual Spring Meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. They cite the influence of the panelists, Philip M. Bromberg, Wilma Bucci, and Joseph LeDoux, on their own work. Specializing in the treatment of chronic pain, Anderson has developed a relational intersubjective technique informed by this interdisciplinary approach. Gold's work has focused on the distinction between dissociative processes and repression in traumatic memory. The relevance of trauma, dissociation, and conflict, heightened since September 11, 2001, could not have been anticipated in the planning of the panel. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Special issue on women, psychoanalysis, and gender: Editors' introduction.

Introduces this special issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology. This special issue on Women, Psychoanalysis, and Gender is a commemoration of the capability, influence, acceptance, and authority of women in the community of psychoanalysis. In this issue, we turn to both new and more established voices in an expanded arena of gender, culture, and psychoanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The concept of structure in psychoanalysis.

Reviews the book, The concept of structure in psychoanalysis by Theodore Shapiro (see record 1991-97355-000). The present volume is a hardcover edition of a previous supplement to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association based on a series of panels presented at meetings of the American on the role of the concept of structure in current psychoanalytic theory and practice. The result can be taken as a more or less authoritative expression of current thinking about structure in orthodox analytic circles. As such, the volume is informative and in many regards thought provoking. But if readers are looking for a coherent, consistent, and consensually endorsed presentation of the idea of structure, or for a uniform conceptualization of the nature of psychic structure and its role in psychoanalytic praxis, they will have to look elsewhere. The volume is more remarkable for its diversity and often contradictory views on the nature of structure and the relevance of structure to clinical work in the analytic setting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time.

Review of book: Stephen Mitchell. Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. New York: Norton, 2002, 223 pp. Reviewed by Timothy J. Zeddies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Did Freud Say About Persons and Relations?

History is bunk, declared Henry Ford; he wanted to sell new cars every year. For psychoanalysis history is not bunk; it is its very heart and guts. Like an individual or a nation, psychoanalysis lives its history and rediscovers it in every generation. Psychoanalytic pioneers, authors of new rallying cries and new theories, seem to think otherwise: History of psychoanalysis begins with them. The author suggests a different approach: to see the new as a historical continuity of the old. The advocates of the relational approach in psychoanalysis will be surprised to hear that Freud was a Sullivanian, even though--like the proverbial M. Jourdain who never heard the word prose--he never heard of the word interpersonal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Critique of Relational Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis today is largely a psychology of consciousness: Post- and neo-Freudians form a marginalized community within North America in comparison to contemporary relational and intersubjective theorists, who emphasize the phenomenology of lived conscious experience, dyadic attachments, affective attunement, social construction, and mutual recognition over the role of insight and interpretation. Despite the rich historical terrain of theoretical variation and advance, many contemporary approaches have displaced the primacy of the unconscious. Notwithstanding the theoretical hairsplitting that historically occurs across the psychoanalytic domain, one is beginning to see with increasing force and clarity what S. Mitchell and L. Aron (1999) referred to as the emergence of a new tradition, namely, relational psychoanalysis. Having its edifice in early object relations theory, the British middle school and American interpersonal traditions, and self psychology, relationality is billed as "a distinctly new tradition" (Mitchell & Aron, 1999, p. x). What is being labeled as the American middle group of psychoanalysis (C. Spezzano, 1997), relational and intersubjective theory have taken center stage. It may be argued, however, that contemporary relational and intersubjective perspectives have failed to be properly critiqued from within their own school of discourse. The scope of this article is largely preoccupied with tracing (a) the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary relational theory, (b) its theoretical relation to traditional psychoanalytic thought, (c) clinical implications for therapeutic practice, and (d) its intersection with points of consilience that emerge from these traditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Photography in the Szondi Test: ‘The Analysis of Fate’

Léopold Szondi invented a projective test using photographs of people with mental pathologies to determine the unconscious, ancestral illnesses (or aptitudes) of his subjects. Szondi’s images were garnered from psychiatric textbooks published around 1900. Such photographs presumably revealed unconscious thoughts, desires, and destinies in the course of a test session. If a patient responded positively to a photo-portrait of a diagnosed ‘hysteric’, for instance, this indicated that the subject herself had unconscious, inherited hysterical traits. Szondi’s reasoning was predicated upon two commonly held fallacies: first that an individual’s physical appearance is the external marker of mental life, and second that photography is a transparent means of revealing true facts. In spite of (or maybe even because of) such problematic assumptions, Szondi’s use of photographs can be located historically in a tradition of reading human character from portraiture. The test was widespread, and was even administered to Adolf Eichmann at the time of his trial in Jerusalem – an ironic cultural development as Szondi himself would have been among the thousands of Jews deported from Hungary directly to Auschwitz by Eichmann had the Szondi family not been rescued by the Kastner train of 1944.     

Teaching on diversity: The mutual influence of students and instructors.

A wide range of emotional experiences, including anxiety, relief, guilt, and anger, are often expressed either implicitly or explicitly by instructors and students in graduate courses focused on diversity and psychotherapy. This article addresses the ways in which teaching on race and ethnicity can lay the groundwork for critical learning, impasses, and enactments. Contributions of psychodynamic perspectives to multicultural education are thought to be particularly relevant to psychologists, because they involve a study of individual and group dynamics as reflective of larger social structures and sociocultural histories. Findings from multicultural research and psychodynamic perspectives related to affective processes involved in multicultural learning will be explored. The author discusses specific experiences of teaching diversity courses to graduate students in psychology with the purpose of illustrating resistance to talking openly about one’s feelings about diversity within a group setting, and the difficulty experienced by students and instructors to tolerate undiscovered and/or unprocessed material related to diversity. These vignettes involve an examination of subjectivity of race and ethnicity and its influence on the interactions between fellow students and instructors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)