Man on Wire: Walking the Therapeutically Transformative Tightrope of the Analyst’s Cancer

Almost nothing was clear to me when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I knew that I intended to inform all of my patients about my illness. But how could the focus remain on their needs when my mortality was so at risk? Unexpectedly, I discovered that I coped with my fears most effectively in my office. It was the one place where I could maintain a grasp on a holistic sense of myself and hold conflicting intense emotions. Additionally striking was the corresponding capacity of my patients to remain in treatment while addressing the unpredictable dyadic changes generated by my sickness. In this paper, I address this point of intersubjective transformation—the interactive contributions that generated each treatment’s unique rhythm. I also discuss the temporality of illness and how my continuing reconfigurations of self-experience impacted my ability to maintain authenticity and analytic balance both during and after treatment.     

CONFESSIONS OF A PRACTICING NATURALISTIC THEIST: A RESPONSE TO HARDWICK,PEDERSON, AND PETERSON

Abstract. In my response to the comments of Charley Hardwick, Ann Pederson, and Greg Peterson, I continue the narrative, confessional mode of my writing in Dancing with the Sacred. First, I sketch some methodological decisions underlying my naturalistic, evolutionary, practical theology. I then respond to the encouraging suggestions of my commentators by further developing my ideas about naturalism, mystery, creativity as God, the place of ecological responsibility in my thinking, sin, and eschatology. I offer suggestions as to how I might widen the practical applications of my theology beyond environmental and medical ethics to other areas of moral responsibility in relation to the creative process. I do all this with much appreciation for the care and careful critical reflection that my commentators have devoted to my thinking.     

Now and Then

I describe my development as a psychoanalyst from my dream of psychoanalysis as a revolutionary movement battling against ignorance and fixed beliefs to finding in Freud's theoretical framework a reliable, scientific base from which I could pursue my own thinking. I trace the evolution of my thinking through my experiences on the training and at my first post-training job in an antenatal department. I give an account of the culmination of my analytic development in my work at Brent Adolescent Centre where my husband, Moe Laufer, and I developed our theory of developmental breakdown in adolescence. Here we pioneered work and research with adolescents in analysis and at the walk-in center.     

MENTORING IN PARALLEL UNIVERSES

Mentoring plays a vital role in the academic context. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the mentoring relationships I established with my students and to determine how my experiences and the mentoring I received from my university professors influence my mentoring practices. The results confirm the dynamic nature of the mentoring process, and the scenarios illustrate how my mentors influenced my practices but also show how I changed my approach when necessary to meet the needs of the students.     

Blessed are the uncertain,for they will experience excess

In this paper I look at the possibility that uncertainty may not merely be a stage in the research process, but an outcome in itself. Exploring how university education and scholarship collided with my own personal experiences and identity I discuss how a combination of poststructural theory and my encounters with peace, conflict and religion enabled me to value uncertainty, and I make the case that uncertainty can open up the future to the gift of chance. By intertwining discussions of both lived experience and academic work, the organisation of the paper reflects how the two became inextricably linked, continuously folding into each other, so that my sense of self influenced my research, and conversely, my research influenced my sense of self. The outcome is a discussion of how I incorporated uncertainty into my research and personal life, which I explore using the example of religion, and how I lost and gained my faith, rejecting my previous Christianity while reconstructing a kind of faith found in uncertainty, a sense of place and ethical space to come.     

The Reversal of Lifelong Labeling: An Autoethnography

The periphery belongs to me. I was born and grew up in a poor neighborhood. In common imagery, it evoked the negatively stereotyped image of a place as a poverty and crime heap. Because of my neighborhood, I’ve suffered various forms of strain. A lifelong labeling process has plagued my life, while in many theories of deviance and crime I would be a criminal. Therefore, how did these theories function with me and with my behavior? How has my lifelong labeling influenced my identity? What suggestions does my life experience offer in terms of urban/social policies? Now I’m trying to answer these questions through my autoethnography.     

The essence of being stuck: It takes one to think you know one or work on the therapist's own family

Abstract

I would like to tell you about certain strategies I used to change my relationship with my family of origin, particularly my mother and dad. I did this in order to become more me, more differentiated from them. In doing so, paradoxically, I established a closer, more rewarding relationship with each of them and with my own children, especially my second child, Mark, and a more effective relationship with families in treatment.     

The Immigrant Analyst: A Journey From Double Consciousness Toward Hybridity

In this paper I utilize the concept of “double consciousness” as a framework for theorizing the subjectivity of the immigrant analyst. I invite the reader to journey with me as I deconstruct my experiences as an immigrant analyst in North America in order to depict how “double consciousness” shapes subjectivity. I show that I developed a binary, bifurcated analyst self, despite my wish to become a multicultural analyst who could “stand in the spaces.” This subtly clouded my clinical judgment causing me to side with the immigrant boyfriend of an American patient and to ignore significant differences between myself and a French patient because he too was an immigrant. When I named and processed my “double consciousness” I experienced resignification, my subjectivity was reconfigured, I was able to experience a panoply of selves, a hybrid “me-ness,” and I could recognize and address “double consciousness” in my immigrant patients.     

Becoming (and Remaining) an Analyst in Latin America

The following overview of the development of psychoanalysis in Brazil and in Porto Alegre outlines the current situation and the challenges to psychoanalysis in my country. I will explain my own experiences on becoming an analyst, the main reasons for my choice, my main influences, and my evolution as a clinical psychoanalyst and as a member of psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions. I include my main contributions to psychoanalysis and consider two broad areas of interest: psychoanalytic technique and its teaching, and the relationship of psychoanalysis and culture. As for the former, my main interests are studies on countertransference and analytic neutrality, to which I will propose a comprehensive concept. As for the latter, I discuss a culture that contrasts vividly with the one in which Freud created the discipline, psychoanalytic views on violence and perversity, psychoanalytic institutions, and the application of analytic ideas for the understanding of some artists and their work.

I will also describe some general features of my country and the development of psychoanalysis in it; report my experiences as a candidate and an analyst; and offer some information about my evolution as an analyst through papers I have written over the past 30 years.     

The Vocation of Depth Psychotherapy

During the last years of my training as an analyst, from 1980 to 1985, I was in analysis with Dr. Edward Edinger. I remember well my first session; I had come to ask him if he would supervise one of my clinical cases. He told me that my father complex was in such an unconscious state, I would probably hear everything he said to me as critical. I asked if he would work with me analytically and he said that was a possibility.     

A personal odyssey

In this autobiography, I tried to capture important aspects of my personal and professional development from my childhood in the ethnic ghettos of South Philadelphia to Pennsylvania State University and the University of Chicago and eventually to over 45 years on faculty at Yale. It has been a journey that I could never have anticipated and that has given me a sense of the unpredictability of psychological development. We all evolve in an open system and a significant portion of the variance of the outcome is determined by fate. But much is also determined by the ability to recognize opportunities and the willingness to take chances and to work hard when opportunities arise. As I reflect on my career of over 50 years, I have been delighted that I opted for a career as a clinical psychologist because it has provided me with opportunity to develop clinical skills and to combine these skills with scholarship and research. While I take considerable satisfaction in the recognition that my contributions have received, the most important aspect of my career has been my relationship with students and colleagues. These collaborations have clearly enriched my work; but more important, they have enriched my life.     

Making Up Your Mind: How Language Enables Self‐Knowledge,Self‐Knowability and Personhood

If language is to serve the basic purpose of communicating our attitudes, we must be constructed so as to form beliefs in those propositions that we truthfully assert on the basis of careful assent. Thus, other things being equal, I can rely on believing those things to which I give my careful assent. And so my ability to assent or dissent amounts to an ability to make up my mind about what I believe. This capacity, in tandem with a similar capacity in respect of other attitudes, supports three important lessons. It means that I can know what I believe by seeing what commands my assent, that I can put aside the possibility of error in committing myself to holding such a belief, and that I can therefore perform as a person: I can organize my mind around commitments to which others are invited to hold me.     

Bearing Witness in Israel/Palestine: Finding My Voice

This article traces my evolution as a political activist in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict over the past decade, and describes the ways my activism has become integrated into my professional life. I discuss my journeys in Israel/Palestine with delegations of the Compassionate Listening Project, highlighting disturbing stories of injustice and abuse and inspiring stories of interfaith cooperation and nonviolent peace work. My focus is on the emotional impact of becoming the bearer of stories of unbearable human experience that I felt compelled to bring back and share. I reveal my struggles with continuing to speak and write publically about the injustice that I witnessed. In the course of standing up to both internal and external attacks on bearing witness, I have discovered a stronger therapeutic voice with my patients as well.     

TAKING IN MORE OF LIFE

This is a story not only about my father's death but also about how it has affected me and life as I see it. I believe that the circumstances in my life following my father's death are connected to each other and have become my greatest lessons that I have learned in life.     

Memoirs of a Mentor: Using Creativity for Counselors in Coping With the Loss of a Mentor

This article was inspired by my (S.S.) own personal loss. My mentor passed away during spring break of my 2nd year postgraduate school after a short battle with systemic lupus. I remember the deep sadness that I felt when it became apparent that she was coming home from the hospital for the last time. No words can describe the emotions; she had helped me through the toughest times in my academic life. How would I ever get the type of mentorship she provided again? She was there when I almost quit as a young student, back when my anger still got the best of me. She talked me down from the edge so many times; I never expected to be on this journey without her.

I dedicate this article to her and mentors like her. Equally, I dedicate this article to mentees who have lost their mentors. I offer my story (in italicized font) in the hopes that it will help others who are dealing with a similar loss. In this article, we attempt to illuminate the true power of mentorship, honor the significance of the relationship between mentor and mentee, and provide a tool useful to anyone who has lost their guide. I share my story in gratitude for my own mentor; I am so thankful that she was a part of my journey and that I can pass on to others the patience she had with me.     

“That's Not Analytic”: Theory Pressure and “Chaotic Possibilities” in Analytic Training

Hoping to create my own analytic voice, I experienced complex pressure to conform to the venerated rules of American ego psychology. I could find myself looking over my shoulder, and my training could become saturated with received ideas. Using complex systems theory as a ground, I contrast the constricting pressure to conform that I experienced with three supervisors with the openness that I found with my fourth. I propose that analytic training is a nonlinear, complex developmental process that occurs in a space of “chaotic possibilities” (Glatzer-Levy, 2004)     

Reflexive encounters with embodied resistance to relational forgiveness

Troubling relationships with our parents may raise unanswered questions and anxieties. Over time, our bodies harbor these sensations in ways that often may go unrecognized. In this autoethnographic account, I examine memories of my childhood and recent past to understand emotionally disturbing episodes tainting my relationship with my father. Interrogating my reflective habits, I probe meanings left undetected by my preconceived sense-making routines. At the same time, I notice and voice the embodied resistance I encounter when opening up and deconstructing intimate layers of deeply rooted pains associated with my father. In doing so, I demonstrate how reflective practices summon a dialogue between embodied emotions and re-engagements with past understandings. Such dialogue generates potential for reimagining relational meanings and apprehending possibilities for forgiveness.     

The Protean Therapist

SUMMARY

The subject of the following article is the protean journey therapists make as they adapt to changing situations and challenges in their own lives and the ultimate impact it has on their clinical work with patients. I have used the example of my own life, in which certain critical events have transformed me from a person with a rather ordinary perspective to someone who has come to appreciate the fragile nature of life with its rich tapestry of complicated ties and patterns. I have tried to demonstrate that significant events in my life and my personal development over the past thirty years have furthered my appreciation and treatment of my patients. I have also come to recognize that my patients' particular journeys, on which I have accompanied them, have similarly contributed to and enriched my life in myriad ways.     

A psychologist grows in Brooklyn: reflections from the past

In this autobiography, I begin by describing how I made many important decisions in my life without much conscious or verbalized thought. I cover information about my parents, grandparents, early school experiences, and both college and graduate school. The autobiography also includes a detailed discussion of my 41 years of teaching at the University of Tennessee. I discuss important experiences that helped me to become a clinical psychologist and a teacher. I conclude the article with a personal experience concerning the death of my mother and an early memory.