Nebbiosi’s Third: A Discussion of Gianni Nebbiosi’s “The Smell of Paper”

Gianni Nebbiosi’s clinical paper is discussed as music to the hammer of the commentator’s ear. Three overlapping points are presented. The first centers on Nebbiosi’s tone of voice with his analysand Teresa. The second point is about music and psychoanalysis. The final point is about Nebbiosi’s free association to Beethoven’s Third Symphony.     

Interweaving the Symbolic and Nonsymbolic in Therapeutic Action: Discussion of Gianni Nebbiosi’s “The Smell of Paper”

Gianni Nebbiosi’s paper speaks to therapeutic action in a new key in the challenges of finding communion with a hard-to-reach patient. He achieves this through the creative interweaving of the nonsymbolic, his mime and music, and the symbolic, which attains greater purchase through painful personal reckoning in concert with his increasing awareness of previously unformulated states within and between each member of this particular analytic dyad. Central to this paper is the move from an empathic stance to greater complexity for each of the dyad. Distinguishing between empathy and recognition is germane. Particularly as we witness the transformation through therapeutic action of empathic presence to recognizing presence that permits the emergence of a more complex empathy—an achieved empathy that incorporates feeling and knowing the multiple, more deeply held, and often paradoxical aspects of our patients and indeed of ourselves as these play out in intersubjective space.     

A Postscript to Panel Discussion of Gianni Nebbiosi’s “The Smell of Paper: On the Usefulness of Musical Thought in Psychoanalytic Practice”

Gianni Nebbiosi’s paper, “The Smell of Paper: On the Usefulness of Musical Thought in Psychoanalytic Practice,” explores many levels of the analyst’s clinical sensibility. These include the finding of a patient in the mind of the psychoanalyst, the discovery of new points of creative inflexion in developing metaphors with a patient who is frightened of symbolic meaning, the use of countertransference analysis to explore the analyst’s points of resistance to helping his or her patient, and the development of a creative shared frame of reference between patient and analyst that emerges from the patient’s unconscious life.     

Discussion of Lewis Aron’s Paper for Dialogues

Lewis Aron’s creative paper is a psychoanalytic version of a Picaresque tale. Lew, a newly born psychoanalyst, and Al, his analysand companion, go their way together from birthday to birthday. On the journey they meet up with gurus from diverse places and theories. Each meeting adds the birth of a new perspective. My discussion takes up the richness and depth of Lew’s passage through life as the analyst of Al and Al’s passage through analytic insight.     

The Music of Dan’s Life

ABSTRACT

In a persistent quest for understanding of what animates life and produces human experience, Daniel Stern was able to put the unspeakable into words. Impregnated with the world of childhood, he described the Forms of Vitality, rendering as never before the ubiquity of the music of life that animates and underlies the unfolding of movement and action. This concept opens new horizons for many disciplines.

Examples will describe advances in neuroscience or for the diagnosis of autism, as well as the essential function of human relationships in early development.     

The Politics of Language: A Discussion of Andrew Samuels’s “The ‘Activist Client’”

This commentary offers three suggestions or potential additions to Samuels’s fine and important article “The ‘Activist Client’” (this issue). First, it is suggested that hermeneutic theory would set a solid philosophical foundation for his political project, a foundation that could add to the article’s persuasiveness and assist the ability of others to apply his perspective to their own therapeutic practices. Two, certain linguistic terms Samuels uses are discussed as counterproductive to his goals, and alternative terms are suggested. Finally, Gadamer’s argument against the concept of empathy is offered as a supplement to Samuels’s intriguing use of Brecht’s approach.     

Discussion of Dominique Scarfone’s Paper, “On ‘That Is Not Psychoanalysis’: Ethics as the Main Tool for Psychoanalytic Knowledge and Discussion”: Terminable and Interminable Discussion

When we ask ourselves if psychoanalysis is a science and what type of science it is, we raise many questions related to the notion of faithfulness. For instance, we might ask what it means to be faithful to a text, to the essence of an author’s writings, or to his or her creative power. If being a psychoanalyst means, at the very least, being able to translate the other’s thoughts, one of the difficulties of this task lies in what we call the complexity of translation. Analysts translate, interpret, interfere with the thoughts of the other in order to open up new paths, to offer themselves as a projection screen, or to try to create a link between two subjects so as to make room for the present, which is sometimes erased by history. To elucidate some of these issues, Scarfone (this issue) focuses on a discussion on the ethics of the analyst and of psychoanalysis     

Discussion of Otto F. Kernberg's Paper: “The Nature of Interpretation: Intersubjectivity and the Third Position”

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Making Good Use of Combined Therapeutic Modalities: Discussion of “Somatic Experiencing”

A positive view is taken of integrative analytic and bio-psychological Somatic Experiencing (SE) therapy for trauma. Levit’s case report is viewed as reflecting an early stage of the analyst’s development as an integrative clinician. A risk of integrative treatments is splitting between modalities of analytic functions including affect regulation. The present case is read closely. Commentary focuses on enactment and missed opportunities for analytic reflection, including (transference) meanings of SE interventions. Increased analytic attention to therapeutic process aims to open reflective space to discuss a wide range of experiences in treatment, including disappointments and other (more negative) aspects of transference, deepening the therapeutic experience, and reaching more broadly into sequelae of the patient’s developmental trauma than SE intervention alone. Integrated bio-psychological interventions are compared and contrasted with use of psychotropic medications in analytic therapy. Bio-psychological interventions such as SE have the advantage of adding resources for the analyst’s self-regulation as well.     

Discussion of “Unraveling Whiteness”: Commentary on Paper by Melanie Suchet

In this discussion I consider several influences on the contemporary project of deconstructing racism and the concept of racialized subjectivity. This discussion applauds the turn in Suchet's work toward self-examination in a consideration of the experience of race and racism. Suchet's work moves the debates about racialized subjectivities into a deeper and more complex understanding of all the ways in which identifications and attachments cross race and class lines for many individuals. This discussion focuses on Suchet's treatment of the power of hybridic and biracial identifications, beginning with autobiographical material from Suchet's own childhood in South Africa. In this discussion of “Unraveling Whiteness” I integrate psychoanalytic concepts of enigmatic signification (the work of Laplanche) into a discussion of early attachment, and relational configurations with children and nonparental caretakers. The question of trauma or potential transformation in interracial experience is discussed, and some distinctions between American and South African experience are considered.     

Discussion of “Hysteria and Humiliation”: Commentary on Paper by Sam Gerson

This commentary describes certain differences in how Relational and Contemporary Freudian analysts approach both the conceptual dynamics of hysterical functioning and its clinical management. The discussion shows how, despite considerable agreement between these two groups concerning the critical importance of a receptive other for the successful buildup of virtually every aspect of mental life (not to be confused with the concept of co-creation), they also have quite substantial differences; differences that are rooted in contrasting basic assumptions about the ways in which fantasies, unconscious transference displacements, and self-regulating repetitive processes are set up in the mind. The discussion also illustrates how the clinical management of hysteria differs considerably depending on whether what is taking place in the consulting room is conceived of as an autonomous, repetitive process that the patient brings to the treatment and repeats (one way or another) over and over again, or whether it is conceived of as co-created, belonging to the minds of both persons in the room, even if not in equal measure or equal ways.     

Vulnerability,Resilience, and Surviving Destruction: Discussion of “The Analyst’s Experience of Trust and Mistrust”

In this response to Danielle Novack’s intellectually astute and clinically rich paper on the “analyst’s trust,” I reflect on the valuable ways in which Novack elucidates this undertheorized aspect of the analyst’s experience and reconfigures trust/mistrust as a meaningful intersubjective dimension of the therapeutic relationship. Novack shows how attending to shifts in trust/mistrust can provide valuable clues for deciphering the transference/countertransference. While I strongly agree with her construction of trust as a psychoanalytic achievement, I question the notion that the analyst’s trust is a necessary condition for her participation. Novack’s work on the analyst’s trust joins a broader contemporary conversation about potential overreaches in the relational paradigm, which I discuss. Finally, I consider the implications of Novack’s work for specifying the factors that underly resilience and engaging a conversation about surviving destruction in contemporary relational psychoanalysis.     

The Ethical Challenge of Touraine's ‘Living Together’

In Can We Live Together? Alain Touraine combines a consummate analysis of crucial social tensions in contemporary societies with a strong normative appeal for a new emancipatory ‘Subject’ capable of overcoming the twin threats of atomisation or authoritarianism. He calls for a move from ‘politics to ethics’ and then from ethics back to politics to enable the new Subject to make a reality out of the goals of democracy and solidarity. However, he has little to say about the nature of such an ethics. This article argues that this lacuna could usefully be filled by adopting a form of radical humanism found in the work of Erich Fromm. It defies convention in the social sciences by operating from an explicit view of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of common human nature, specifying reason, love and productive work as the qualities to be realised if we are to move closer to human solidarity. Although there remain significant philosophical and political differences between the two positions, particularly on the role to be played by ‘the nation’, their juxtaposition opens new lines of inquiry in the field of cosmopolitan ethics.     

The limits of definition: Gadamer’s critique of Aristotle’s ethics

ABSTRACT

There is a recent scholarly trend drawing similarities between Aristotle’s conceptions of ethics and demonstrative science. One such similarity has become widely and rightly recognized: for Aristotle both ethics and demonstrative science seek essential definitions of phenomena. The task of the paper is to show that German philosopher and classicist Hans-Georg Gadamer not only prefigured this interpretative trend, he also identified a problematic feature of Aristotle’s method so construed. The problematic feature is semantic. For Aristotle essential definitions must consist of univocal terms, but such univocity cannot be maintained if the definienda and definientes are concepts to be usefully employed in everyday ethical judgements. Gadamer therefore points out a problematic tension in Aristotle’s ethics. On the one hand, ethical inquiry should have practical application, but, on the other hand, the semantic assumptions underlying inquiry imply that it cannot.     

Peirce on Education: Discussion of Peirce’s Definition of a University

I write this short essay in response to Peirce, as a feminist, pragmatist, and cultural studies scholar, in the hope that it will help to bring feminism and pragmatism together. I suggest that Peirce offers marginalized and colonized people a way to argue for the importance of their input, with his theory of fallibilism, even if he still claims a position of privilege. He also offers assistance through his concept of “a community of inquirers.” It is curious that Peirce’s definition of a university argues for a split between theory and practice that his earlier work sought to heal. Peirce opened a door to help diverse scholars be able to enter the university, and find a way to address issues of power, with his youthful connecting of theory to practice, that his more senior position draws our attention away from and seeks to hold off. Fortunately, it is too late. Peirce’s youthful pragmatism has been developed in important ways by other scholars and now serves as an example of a way to do philosophy that does connect theory to practice and does seek to address real problems in diverse peoples lives, and help to find solutions that effect change.     

The Protective Skin of the Analyst’s Case Formulation: Commentary on Paper by Tom Wooldridge

The contours of every psychoanalytic process are shaped by its case formulation. This discussion of Tom Wooldridge’s paper (this issue) of the long-term, psychodynamic treatment of a patient with severe anorexia provides opportunity to demonstrate that formulation derives from aspects of the clinician’s clinical education and personal growth. Wooldridge’s metaphor of the containing functions of the entropic body is extended to include particular paternal functions that an analyst provides his patient and that are suggested in the dialogue of this clinical material. Psychoanalytic case formulation distinguishes it from other aspects of an integrated treatment plan for eating disorder patients; in particular, clinician and patient discover important metaphors and elaborations of personal history that assist in recovery. Thinking through a case from different lenses provides real gratification for the psychoanalyst and a bulwark to assist in potentially life-saving work because of its protective and enriching functions. Drawing upon the metaphors Wooldridge expands upon such as secondary skin formations and the entropic body, I suggest that clinicians who work in the field of eating disorders could draw great benefit from learning more about what psychoanalytic case formulation offers patients. Detailed, evocative case examples such as the one Tom Wooldridge puts forward may be one way to reach this important audience because they bring to life many of the unique features of contemporary psychoanalysis.     

Birth—From Metaphor to Reality in Jewish Literature and Psychoanalysis: Discussion of Lewis Aron’s Paper “With you I’m Born Again”

In his innovative paper, Lewis Aron discusses narratives of his own “metaphorical birth” as a psychoanalyst, through the years of working with his first analysand and by way of his encounters with four different supervisors. Aron suggests varied psychoanalytic perspectives and dialogical readings of the essence of birth in mutual relations and of its presence in the analytic dyad.