Psychoanalytic Quarterly最新文献

For Imre Hermann, a central figure of Hungarian psychoanalysis, the aesthetic relation to music, entailing an objectless, affect-laden situation, offers a privileged point for understanding infantile sexuality and its reemergence in regressive states. Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a text permeated with music, drew Hermann's interest as a model for comprehending psychotic regression. Building upon Hermann's observations, it is argued that music becomes a contested means to give form to affect where language is compromised. Within the throes of psychotic regression where there is no third and representation is experienced as violent and perverse, the aesthetic relation becomes a means of survival.

This paper argues that a conceptual conflation between biology and ontology has had a pervasive influence on psychoanalytic thinking about gender, particularly transgender phenomena. This has made it difficult to think about gender's relationship to the body outside of essentializing fantasies. The origins of the modern term gender and Freud's biological emphasis are addressed, followed by a more extensive engagement with contemporary psychoanalytic scholarship on trans. Finally, the paper proposes a framework for attending to gender's relationship to the body with greater nuance, turning to Freud's late drive theory to help us think in this complex area.

The author discusses the analyst's neutrality as an activity: a constantly moving position and an always-evolving process characterized by the analyst's thinking and curiosity about how to help the patient better know and become himself. The author maintains that neutrality is a cluster concept (Wittgenstein 1953) that includes a number of functions. Recent theoretical shifts regarding neutrality are briefly reviewed, and an illustrative clinical vignette is presented.

A pattern of psychic fragmentation followed by consolidation occurs throughout life and can be seen in all developmental stages. Using Neil Gaiman's novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the authors focus on the experience of disorganization and re-organization in early middle childhood. The frequency with which young boys use fantasy to contain affects and impulses makes the literary genre of magic realism especially well-suited for the exploration of psychological states during early middle childhood.

The author focuses on the workings of the female analyst-male pair in the consulting room when sexual feelings emerge as part of the adolescent storm. The need for open-bodiedness in relation to the perception of the bodily states of both the analyst and analysand is described and discussed. The author shows how somatic countertransference, reverie, and projective identification are harnessed creatively in the service of transformation. The importance of the third to help provide an analytic space for thought and meaning, rather than enactment and impasse, is discussed. The trajectory from the analyst's wish to silence sexual transference and countertransference in the consulting room, followed by the analyst's initial reluctance to discuss the hot feelings with colleagues, and then the impact of publication anxiety when writing through the experiences and revising this paper is described.

The author proposes that the concept of framing activity provides a useful approach to neutrality by synthesizing relational approaches with an extension of José Bleger's (1967, 2012) conceptualization of the frame as containing primitive aspects of the analysand. She argues that the analytic frame also serves as a depository, or bulwark, for the analyst's ideological alignments. Identifying how ongoing framing activity is in tension with this bulwark affords a means of approaching, interrogating, and "doing" neutrality that elaborates the flexibility and self-reflection that contemporary psychoanalytic thinking seeks to bring to an earlier, more rigid idea of "the frame." Clinical vignettes focus on framing and its connection to neutrality in the context of remote treatments.

Amidst a pandemic and the events following George Floyd's murder in 2020, discussions of race have escalated in the psychoanalytic community. One theoretical formulation, Afropessimism, has served as a lightning rod across both psychoanalytic and academic circles. Another, Black Rage, offers a psychoanalytic theory of the psychic effect of racial oppression on traumatized subjects. Using both as catalysts, this essay explores the historicity of the questions raised by the racial unrest of the pandemic--the deep embedding of questions of race and Blackness in unconscious prehistories of modernity, the human, and our understanding of our social worlds.