Psychoanalytic Review最新文献

The digital divide is defined as the distance between those individuals and communities that have access to digital resources such as high-speed internet and user-friendly, sophisticated computing interfaces and those that lack such resources. If empathy is understood as being fully present with another person without judgment, evaluation, or anything else added, then being present in the same physical space (such as a therapist's office) is arguably the optimum approach. Yet the genie is out of the bottle. This article engages with new forms of countertransference, parapraxes (slips), and breakdowns in empathy occasioned by taking psychodynamic therapy online including the advantages and disadvantages, the trade-offs, of each approach. It is just as misguided to require therapists exclusively to perform in-person therapy as it would be for everyone exclusively to perform online therapy. There is no turning back the clock.

Psychoanalysis is an explanatory science, and if our aim is to develop accurate theories of the mind, psychoanalysis would benefit from integrating explanations developed by psychology and neuroscience. The main part of the essay shows how psychoanalysis can be integrated with neuroscience and psychology. The concept of integration is defined in terms of six criteria, and the author argues that no matter how tight the integration is, it does not entail that neuropsychological explanations can replace psychoanalytic theory.

Despite the historical importance of free-association to psychoanalysis, there are theoretical tensions within the discipline as to how we think about what is expressed in free association and why it might be important to listen and become aware of ourselves free associatively. This method has usually been conceived of as a mode of speaking with the purpose of listening in order to hear and to arrive at the formulations of interpretation and insight. Rather than solely having this epistemological purpose, it can also be considered as an ontological freeing of subtle energies leading to greater aliveness. Pivotal to this way of approaching psychoanalytic processes are the "helpful notions" of psychic energy and of repression, with the latter being understood not as an eviction of representational forms from the domain of consciousness, but rather as the deformation of representations into traces of psychic energy that remain actively disruptive within us. The author suggests that, through free-associative processes, the patient and the psychoanalyst can become aware of movements of psychic energy that cannot be formulated in the representationality of self-consciousness. This unorthodox reading of Freud's discoveries leads to an interesting "ontoethical" appreciation of psychoanalytic processes as somatically grounded and erotically poetic.

This paper contemplates two notions that I have been exploring in relation to the frontier between subjects and collectives. The first is what I call homo-nationalis, the subject formed by and along the organizing principles of nationalism. This subject, I argue, reflects the ideology and reality of the nation-state. It is animated by its imaginaries and unsettled by its fragilities in the deepest psychological sense. The second is what I call the trans-subject. I use this notion inspired by, and wishing to extend the sense of, transing as it pertains to trans-gendering to other categories of subjecthood, aiming to capture the subject's potential to re-form the precepts of subjectivity as it is prescribed for them. I engage these two notions as I reflect on my (countertransference) experience while working with an individual moving across various collective-social frontiers in the process of a religious conversion.

In a scholarly yet playful conversation, the authors explore why analytic thought about trans remains so intransigently difficult. They propose that countertansferential responses to trans patients manifest not just in clinical work but also as blockages to psychoanalytic theorizing. They draw on extensive experience treating trans and non-binary patients, on teaching and supervisory work, and on analytic scholarship to think about why and how theorizing on trans stalls. Whereas in the social realm trans bodies are often hyper-sexualized, in metapsychology and the consulting room trans is notably desexualized. What is the cost of that and why does it occur? The authors locate the problem in the disaggregation of gender from the sexual, arguing that not only has this separation outlived its (once exigent) metapsychological utility, but that it is itself a defense against the anxiety of polymorphous perversity and psychic bisexuality that trans bodies can awaken in analysts of all genders, and especially in cisgender analysts.

Using Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of "becoming" and the "rhizome," as well as Bion's discussion of the interaction between the "establishment" and the "messianic idea," the author analyzes Boys Don't Cry (1999), a film that presents the story of a young transgender man who was raped and murdered. The author focuses on how the radical unsaturation of gender dichotomy may turn into an unbearable threat as it turns the linear, hierarchical "tree-like" relations of body and mind into a process of deterritorialization.

The author focuses on trans-identities within the broader field of trans-subjectivities while arguing that subjectivity should be considered within the conceptual framework of a heterogeneous and plural subject. The analyst's eagerness to classify gender and sex or typify pathology in a Manichean manner is an inevitable consequence of binary thought. This provokes undesired countertransference effects and creates obstacles to listening in the analytic session. The following contribution reexamines several notions to offer a renewed perspective on the concept of the subject, the Oedipus complex, the desire for a child, the categories of difference and diversity, and the blind spots of binary logic, among others. This reconsideration may in turn elucidate our comprehension of gender and sexual diversities. In this context, the author stresses the need to approach trans-identities and trans-subjectivities with a nonbinary logic based on a rhizomatous way of thinking.

This essay attempts to expand the traditional model of negative countertransference by giving it a Lacanian twist. The author uses theories and concepts from Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan in order to explore the affective dimension of countertransference in two cases of trans-identified patients. In the first case, the author shows that wanting to do good was counterproductive, while in the second vignette maintaining a position of neutrality allowed the author to go beyond fear and pity, which led to a dynamic resolution.