Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141610
Lynn D Preston, Ellen Shumsky
“The Ever-Emerging New Us” refers to an ever-changing, complexly layered vision of an evolving therapeutic partnership. We explore the developmental process of such an analytic system through the lens of complexity theory, and reflect on how this perspective illuminates our understanding of the therapeutic system and its processes of change and growth.
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Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141611
R. Stolorow, G. Atwood
Kohut’s lasting and most important contribution to psychoanalytic clinical theory was his recognition that the experiencing of selfhood is always constituted, both developmentally and in psychoanalytic treatment, in a context of emotional interrelatedness. The experiencing of selfhood, he realized, or of its collapse, is context-embedded through and through. The theoretical language of self psychology with its noun, “the self,” reifies the experiencing of selfhood and transforms it into a metaphysical entity with thing-like properties, in effect undoing Kohut’s hard-won clinical contextualizations. The language of such decontextualizing objectifications bewitches intelligence in order to evade the tragic dimension of finite human existing.
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Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141609
Bruce Herzog
What if the enduring desire of the psychoanalytic discipline to be seen as scientific provoked the suppression of certain therapeutic practices? It would explain why Kohut defined empathy only as a mode of clinical observation when he began discussing it, because even that proposal risked being seen as unscientific and controversial. Today, there exists a more favorable professional atmosphere, which should allow for empathic phenomena to now be included in a theory of cure. Clinical examples in this article demonstrate how “affect sharing” can be used in this way. Affect sharing occurs when the therapist believes he or she is reverberating with the affect the patient feels, resulting from a “sharing” selfobject transference, the aim of which is to elicit a shared emotional state with the therapist. In “descriptive affect sharing,” therapists are encouraged to feel what their patients are feeling when listening to their patients’ evocative descriptions. In “active affect sharing,” an activity introduced by the patient can lead to a shared emotional experience within the analytic dyad. These patient-initiated empathic events are experienced as having been shared when the therapist communicates—verbally or non-verbally, directly or indirectly—that affect sharing has occurred. Incrementally escalating affective communications are defined as “reciprocal intensifications” of affect sharing, where both patient and therapist use emotional phraseology and tone to intensify and solidify the shared empathic connection. Affect sharing is a form of empathy that constitutes its own selfobject experience, with mutative properties that firmly establish empathy as an integral component of therapeutic change.
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Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141603
Joye Weisel-Barth
The article examines some of the difficulties and vulnerabilities inherent in conducting a relational psychoanalysis. It suggests that co-created relational space has its own particular contexts and boundaries, violations of which may render the analyst as vulnerable and confused as the patient. Hence, when life contexts outside the analysis intrude on the dyad in surprising, distracting, and hurtful ways, it sometimes seems impossible for an analyst simultaneously to engage in the dyad in affectively open and authentic ways while also maintaining professional clarity and containing and protecting the analysis.
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Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141612
M. Steinberg
M arquis de Sade stand down! There’s a new dom in town. His name is Terrence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), and his brutal savagery finds expression in the role of jazz conductor at the legendary Shaffer Academy, the fictional premier music conservatory in the country. His submissive mark and obedient player is first-year student, Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller). Their complementary and complex relationship cracks, snaps, and jerks its way throughout the turbulent action of Whiplash, a film that’s a riveting tale of multiple implicit and explicit narratives. On the surface the manifest story is a mentor/mentee drama depicting the murky line between instruction and abuse that all too often is evidenced in teaching practices rampant in the performing arts. As such, the film is a lightening rod galvanizing wide debate on this arresting topic. Yet beneath the obvious, this film exists provocatively and juicily as so much more, for ultimately this is not a film about controversial teaching methodologies, or about jazz for that matter. Rather, in its deepest recesses, it’s an exploration of two men engaged in a sadomasochistic, master/ slave, doer and done to search for developmental growth and enlivening selfhood. As the film opens in a long-shot, we encounter Andrew in isolation, down a dark, narrow corridor urgently drumming to no one in particular. The fierce, maniacal energy has captured Fletcher’s attention as he slithers out of the shadows, head to toe garbed in black, suggesting a man who has already had all the joy drained out of him. “Do you know who I am?” he intones. “Do you know I’m looking for players?” It’s not really a question, but a command, a compulsory invitation to lock and load this duo into their mutually consigned destinies.
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Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141601
T. Philips
We live in a “selfie” culture. We are now able, by the merest touch, to put ourselves into a picture. Kohut understood that in order to be mirrored or empathically responded to in any way we needed to be seen. I reflect on how Kohut’s work of selfobject longings is strangely true in today’s world, even though he could not have anticipated to what degree technology would bear it out. His theory is a nuanced, multi-layered exegesis on this theme. This article is about Kohut viewed through the lens of current times. As it is a subjective view, along the way you will hear how Kohut’s theories impacted my own analysis and hear how and why Russell Meares was instrumental in bringing Kohut’s ideas to Australia. My South African racial past was not discussed in my 14-year analysis. I note and speculate on the absence of race in Kohut’s theorizing and show how the Internet influenced my need to examine my racial past after apartheid ended and how valuable Kohut’s theories were in that regard. I conclude by reflecting on Kohut’s contribution by relating it to the significance of social media, then and now.
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Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141604
S. Stern
In this courageous and conceptually rich article, Joye Weisel-Barth shares her experience with her patient, Lara, in which a spontaneous, well-intended decision at a moment of heightened emotional connection led, unpredictably, to later events which caused the treatment to collapse. Weisel-Barth’s article invites reflection regarding both the complexity and risks involved in the analytic therapist’s greater participatory freedom—a core element in contemporary relational thinking, broadly defined. I consider what happened between Weisel-Barth and Lara from four points-of-view. The first has to do with the mutuality-asymmetry dialectic first named by Lew Aron (1991), developed more fully by Wally Burke (1992), and later canoninzed by Irwin Hoffman (1998). The second concerns what Madeleine and Willy Baranger (1961–1962) first recognized as the necessary ambiguity of the analytic situation. Related to that is the necessary complexity of the analyst’s subjectivity-as-analyst. And the fourth set of considerations, informed by Rachel Peltz’s (2012) article, “Ways of Hearing: Getting Inside Psychoanalysis,” concerns what it means to “go in close” in an analytic relationship, with particular reference to contemporary relational and Bionian approaches.
在这篇充满勇气和丰富概念的文章中，乔伊·韦塞尔-巴特与她的病人劳拉分享了她的经历。在这篇文章中，一个自发的、善意的决定，在高度情感联系的时刻，不可预测地导致了后来的事件，导致了治疗的失败。Weisel-Barth的文章引发了对分析治疗师更大的参与性自由的复杂性和风险的反思，这是当代关系思维的核心要素，广义上来说。我从四个角度考虑Weisel-Barth和Lara之间发生的事情。第一个是相互-不对称辩证法，最初由卢·阿隆(1991)提出，后来由沃利·伯克(1992)进一步发展，后来被欧文·霍夫曼(1998)认定为经典。第二个问题涉及玛德琳和威利·巴朗格(1961-1962)首先认识到的分析情境中必要的模糊性。与此相关的是分析师作为分析师的主体性的必要复杂性。Rachel Peltz(2012)的文章《倾听的方式:进入精神分析》(Ways of Hearing: Getting Inside Psychoanalysis)提出了第四组考虑，它关注的是在分析关系中“接近”意味着什么，特别提到了当代关系和Bionian方法。
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Pub Date : 2016-02-25DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1141608
R. Muchnick, P. Buirski
Much sociological and psychological research has been done on excessive or “addictive” Internet use, with increased attention paid to the use of social media sites in particular. This article attempts to understand the addictive engagement with social media from the perspective of self psychology and intersubjective systems theory. This article proposes that social media shares various characteristics with selfobject experience, thus making its use attractive to those longing for missing selfobject experience or the correction of painful self-experience from the past. We will discuss how selfobject experience transforms; outline the way in which social media mimics selfobject experience; examine how such characteristics are alluring to those craving selfobject experience; and explore how the unique interaction between the user and the site affects whether the site contributes to transforming, growth-promoting selfobject experience or becomes a form of self-experience that organizes but fails to transform.
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Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1107418
Janna Sandmeyer
Responding to patients in the midst of intense disjunctions and impending shame states is challenging and worthy of struggle. When we are confronted with dramatically discrepant perspectives about relatedness and emotional meaning, our desire to understand our patients can seem at odds with our desire to express our own subjectivity. We strive to be empathic and authentic. The concepts of empathy and authenticity have been well-covered in the psychoanalytic literature, to the extent that theoretically they are no longer considered dichotomous. And yet, in the consulting room, it often feels that there remains a tension between these two responses. What has not been addressed sufficiently in the literature, and what remains an essential and ubiquitous clinical struggle, is how to understand these concepts in the context of clinical disjunction. This article examines what emerges when seemingly facile theory is challenged by the exigencies and immediacy of clinical practice. This is addressed by providing an in-depth exploration of a disjunction in which the therapist is caught by surprise, there is little time for reflection, and both an empathic and authentic response is indicated and hoped for.
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Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2016.1107402
H. Maddux
When there is territory to be explored for which there is no map, many psychoanalysts, including Bion (1981, 2014), Loewald (2000), Milner (1950, 1987), Ogden (1997), Winnicott (2008), and Freud (2010) himself, refer/defer to the poets or to poetry of their own creation. In this article, Adrienne Rich’s foundational poem, “Transcendental Etude” (1977), is used as the point of departure to explore the territory of self-transformation. The article demonstrates how the trajectory of Rich’s evocative—and provocative—poem parallels in almost uncanny ways our earliest experiences of “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 78), as well as the therapeutic action and ultimate (we hope) transformation of the self that accompanies a “good enough” analysis. The article also suggests that clinicians incorporate an aesthetic sensibility into our work with patients to allow us to reach more deeply into the within and the between of the unspoken—sometimes unspeakable—experiences of our patients and ourselves. Clinical vignettes of the author’s work with a young man illuminate this process of self-transformation through the discovery of the patient’s personal lyric—a lyric found by him in poetry, song, and foreign film.
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