Psychoanalytic Quarterly最新文献

I consider the place of termination in contemporary psychoanalytic practice. A more flexible approach to therapeutic endings represents one dimension of a broader paradigm shift away from rule-boundedness and toward clinical flexibility. In any event, final, less-than-final, and absent goodbyes have always been part of psychoanalytic reality despite the power of our termination ideal. I first describe the broader move toward flexibility within the field and then address its complex implications for psychoanalytic endings. In that context, I explore the varied ways in which we don't always end treatment relationships. The implications of not entirely ending a treatment are also addressed.

Vermeer's masterpiece, "The Allegory of Painting," which is the one work that he refused to sell, brings to mind the successful outcome of psychoanalytic treatment. In its incongruities, this painting presumably contains and reflects the conflicted inner world of the artist, but it also evokes a remarkable sense of coherence and harmony. To develop a credible explanation for Vermeer's achievement in analytic terms, I found it helpful to employ several major theoretical models; this finding suggests that for clinical analysis as well, a multi-theory approach would be optimal.

We explored the dynamics of treatment termination in a patient with borderline personality organization who underwent eight years of transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP). A previous paper examined the beginnings of this treatment (Bernardi and Eidlin 2024). In both papers, we aim to strengthen the clinical evidence through further contextualization and triangulation of perspectives. We analyze the relationship between the end of treatment, therapeutic gains in relation to self and other, and the likelihood that these gains will be maintained and extended once the patient is on his or her own. The contributions of complex systems models to the study of dynamic, open, and non-linear clinical interactions are explored.

Psychoanalysis focuses both on the patient's inner life history and on what happens in the actual analytic situation. Psychoanalysts differ in the extent they pay attention to memories and the past or to the actuality of the analytic session as such and in the extent they link both. The main goal of this paper is to give an overview of ideas in the history of psychoanalytic thought on the relationship between past and present. The paper examines five possible positions: historicization (the past colors the present), actualization (back and forth between past and present), dehistoricization (the here and now), posteriority (the present colors the past), and natality (present without link with the past). New positions are added to old ones rather than replacing them. Together, all the positions testify to a lively dynamic in psychoanalysis that both repeats and transforms itself in everyday analytic thinking and practice.

Black Studies and psychoanalysis both consider how socio-sexual dynamics contour the skin. Black Studies scholar Hortense Spillers (1987) alongside psychoanalytic theorist Didier Anzieu (1985) trace the skin as a porous enclosure, albeit in different discursive environments. Also a scholar of psychoanalysis, Spillers's work emphasizes the intersubjective nature of embodiment: history carries notions of race, which frames interactions between desiring subjects. As a case study, the journals of writer and English doctoral student Gary Fisher (1961-1994) provide a narrative surface to place both traditions in conversation. This article investigates the fraught relationship between the imagined and historical in the psyche's processing of racial trauma. Fisher's exploration of his racialized fantasies and sexuality unfurls across his writing at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an epidemic which continues today. Fisher's prose reveals that abject sexual practices, those which rely on racial tropes to efface and excite the desiring subject, can inspire meaningful self-actualization and broaden understandings of race and sexuality.

To understand fascistic group movements, it is necessary to understand the dynamics of fascistic states of mind within all of us. Following a note on the American polity, the author differentiates fascism from authoritarianism before reviewing the dynamics of fascistic states of mind, including the omnipotent longing for purity and its relationship to destructive narcissism. Considering the role of the death drive, the allure of the fascistic state is explored, based largely in the need to avoid primary terrors of annihilation. In addressing the movement of such states from the individual psyche to the larger group mind, the author examines the symbiotic fit between the leader and the group's unconscious fears and phantasies, as illustrated by perverse containment within the cult of Trumpism. Finally, in noting the inability of reason alone to contain destructive forces, he ponders how we might deal with fascistic states of mind most effectively in individuals, groups, and ourselves.

Starting with the English translations of Freud's 1937 nuanced concept of ending analysis, the author touches on the history of subsequent ego psychologists' more exact notions of termination. Merton Gill's radical shift in perspective away from that attempt, shows how more modern, post-1990 theoretical developments have evolved toward more subjective, intersubjective, and ranging judgments about what may be practical (Freud's own final 1937 word). Resuming ego development as a goal, for example, and the role of analyst as new object (Loewald 1960 for example), is linked to a creative process of a patient's increased subjective well-being-one feature of ending that cannot be precisely measured. There are two clinical examples of terminations: (1) The author's experience of hearing Hanna Segal tell impressively about a case and its ending, circa 1970; (2) a longitudinal account of a four-part analytic involvement, from a patient's teenage to middle years, that demonstrates different kinds of endings over a patient's life. The last analysis, with a new analyst, after the original analyst's death, was supervised by the author. Summed up, the termination phase is a deep study of the complexity of human existence for both analyst and analysand. This appreciation, including its limitations, helps many analysands fruitfully continue their life journey.

Analytic process is a poorly understood concept often thought to have an agreed upon meaning despite evidence to the contrary. So long as it remains ill-defined, its value as a metric of both candidate progression and whether a presented case demonstrates said process is dubious. To rectify the matter, the author proposes an expansion of what is thought to constitute analytic process in order to bring that concept in line with evolving trends in our collective thinking about clinical practice.

At the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis, this essay draws on Freud's discovery of the infantile sexual unconscious to explore moments in the late novels of Henry James, in which an adult protagonist both recognizes and disavows the visible evidence of a sexual relationship. The essay considers Hans Holbein's 1533 painting, The Ambassadors, as a possible source for Henry James' choice of title for his 1903 novel: the painting's visual play with point of view touches on the narrative disavowal of what is there to be seen. The essay explores some narrative dimensions of Freud's writing to highlight the dynamic disclosure of the infantile within the adult. The concept of Nachträglichkeit, recognizing the deferred or belated impact of disruptive recurrences in mental life, helps to understand such moments and gives insight, more broadly, into narrative experience. Drawing on Nachträglichkeit as a principle of mental life, the essay explores the resonances of infantile sexuality, fantasy, and trauma in narrative, and more generally, as a resource in creative expression.