Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association最新文献

Grounded in clinical examples, the text focuses on the challenges posed by working at a historical moment that, if fully taken in, presents us all-patients and analysts/therapists-with "more than mind can endure." This "too muchness" makes it particularly difficult to maintain our consulting rooms as "safe" spaces. The basic question: how to preserve a sense of safety in our clinical work while we simultaneously remain open to the disruptive and often unrepresentable dangers that surround and infiltrate us.

In this essay the author describes some of the transformations that occur as one moves from preverbal functioning to verbally symbolic language. In preverbal experience, there is a direct connection between the sign and what is signified. An infant or child signifies displeasure by throwing his food or other objects to the floor. Much of the emotional tie between mother and infant and patient and analyst is communicated in this way. When a transformation occurs from preverbal to verbally symbolic language, as occurs in early development and as one interprets a dream, meaning is not merely translated, meaning is created. On acquiring verbally symbolic language, a "space" mediated by an interpreting subject opens between the symbol (for instance, the word guilt) and the symbolized (the experience of guilt) and a new subjectivity is created. On entry into verbally symbolic language, one becomes able to experience oneself in a qualitatively different way; one becomes both subject and object, I and me; one becomes able to experience a far broader range of feelings and types of thinking. Helen Keller's account of her experience of acquiring verbally symbolic language is drawn upon.

This paper presents a collaboration between a clinician (C.M.J.) and a research team (W.B., B.M., and S.M.) to address the question: At an operational level, what happens in the special form of conversation that is psychotherapy? How can we study, beyond a priori lenses of psychoanalytic models, what we are actually doing when we engage in this process? How can we capture from the linear flow of conversation, the simultaneous, complex, active, interwoven, dimensional emotion schemas that words can only point toward? To address the question, we first present the need for new approaches in the current climate within the clinical and research communities. Next, we address the challenges for clinicians and researchers by using multiple code theory and derived linguistic measures that offer an objective view of the processes of subjectivity. We then apply the research methods to the clinical data to illustrate the yield of the collaborative effort-a yield that captures the connection between the linear flow of words and the arousal, verbal expression, and reflection/integration of emotion schemas without the usual filters of psychoanalytic models of process and change. The project illustrates the critical value of clinicians' perspectives to guide researchers and encourages clinicians to participate in research to advance our field. For researchers, this project represents a "fourth generation" of process research that includes the criteria of video-recorded, transcribed data; the clinician's report of their experience; a theory of how emotion-laden meaning and motivations (emotion schemas) are expressed in the therapeutic conversation; and reliable, valid measures to capture and represent those processes; and that encourages researchers to access the rich contributions of clinicians' understanding. The implication for clinical practice is a new way to look beyond the lens of psychoanalytic models into what is actually unfolding in real time.

The Columbia Academy for Psychoanalytic Educators supports graduate analysts' professional development at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In 2018, a pilot program was launched for faculty interested in analyzing and supervising candidates, whose aim is to support and educate those interested in taking on these essential training functions. The focus is on educating the educators, which is a significant departure from the historical focus on evaluation, vetting, and faculty hierarchies. In the process of developing and piloting the program, complex and long debated issues in psychoanalytic education and development were considered that are relevant to many institutes, including training of supervisors and analysts of candidates, addressing problematic faculty hierarchies, creating safety for those presenting clinical work to colleagues, building professional peer relationships, and engagement of faculty in time consuming and nonremunerative activities. The authors report on their experience developing and evaluating this pilot program.

The direction of time is often defined by describing asymmetries between past and future events, referred to as "time-arrows." Two important time-arrows are the mutability time-arrow, which specifies that the past is unalterable, while the future is not; and the causal time-arrow, which stipulates that past events may cause future events, but not vice versa. The author argues that the unconscious conception of causation expressed in both the oedipal myth and certain oedipal wishes negates the mutability and causal time-arrows. The author suggests, therefore, distinguishing between oedipal phantasies that undermine the ordinary conceptions of causation and time (such as the wish of being one's own parent), and classical content that is in line with our time perception (such as sexual and aggressive wishes toward parents). Analyzing clinical examples suggests that some patients' oedipal phantasies are combined with unconscious sexual satisfaction from the asymmetric conception of time. When this sexual satisfaction is analyzed, they might expose the oedipal phantasies founded on the symmetric conception of time.