Reply to “Expanding the Frame” by Anthony Bass and to Commentaries

In this reply I offer a short answer to the question about the theme “What do we learn from experience?” I can say that certainly the power of that particular experience with that patient made me more sensitive and careful toward similar moments with other patients. I then offer some comment on the contributions in this issue of the journal. I emphasize the interweaving of structure and process and the process of building meaning as an intersubjective achievement. I also intervene on the theme “how to transmit psychoanalytic wisdom.”     

“Was It Good for You?”: Reply to Commentaries

In many ways, psychoanalysis revolutionized attitudes about sexuality. Yet by undertheorizing female erotic passion and downplaying the role of the clitoris, psychoanalysis perpetuated a long historical tradition of denying essential aspects of women's sexual experience. Psychoanalysis has at times contributed to women perceiving their own bodily erotic excitement as frightening, dangerous, and out of control. In this reply to the commentaries, the authors continue to explore the ways in which women and women's experience, especially their embodied sexual experience, are so often rendered invisible.     

Found in Translation … Perhaps: Reply to Commentaries

The commentaries by Cornell and Markman are read here as attempts to convert or translate my text in terms they have found useful building on ideas by Winnicott, Bion, and others. I experience meaning in these commentaries in the sense that I can feel found at times in their words, but also, perhaps not. I try to convey the value and limits of our attempts to use a languaged representation of the polyrhythmic weave of embodied registrations, which I emphasize as a useful expansion for analytic attention. It is with these registrations that dissociated affect might be engaged in a way that helps the analyst to navigate, rather than react to, difficult to bear affects associated with dysregulation and shame.     

“Presence” and “Absence”: Kaleidoscopic Hide and Seek: Reply to Commentaries

In this reply I respond to Cambray’s introduction of the “self-organizing” and “emergent” qualities of telepathic communication, looking more closely at the relationship between dissociation and the emergence of telepathic phenomena. I highlight the creative aspect of such telepathic “intrusions,” viewing the clinician’s capacity for intuitive imagination as key to the emergence of telepathic material. In response to Eshel’s connection between the analyst’s “presence,” “absence,” and the patient’s unmet need for recognition, I examine the roles of co-construction and mutual dissociation in transference-countertransference enactments that generate uncanny phenomena. Verbal interpretation not always being the most viable mode of communication, “absence” can sometimes serve as a co-constructed, unconscious “solution” to the problem of multiple conflicting needs, holding a space for telepathic emergence to express the inexpressable.     

Good Grief—What Becomes of the Lost Relationship: Reply to Commentaries

In replying to the discussions of Gilbert Cole and Stefanie Solow Glennon, I focus on several issues raised, including the continuing intrapsychic relationship with a dead parent who may have been destructive to the patient; the analyst's facilitating role in enabling the patient to connect with, and construct the future of, the lost relationship; the potential meaning of an enactment with a bereaved patient; and some thoughts on the dyad's needs to work creatively postloss in multiple affective time zones.     

Reconsidering “Considering Gestational Life”: Reply to Commentaries by Levine and Williams

The two commentaries of “Considering Gestational Life” are both wonderful in their generative reflections and from such uniquely different perspectives. Each has generated an array of new questions about the nature and impact of gestation that are yet to be substantially explored. This discussion attempts to further their inquiries by focusing on how “gestational thinking” leads us into exploring Negative Capability; the improvisational nature of analytic process; objectivity versus subjectivity; reconsidering the impact of gestational trauma; the epistimophilic instinct; gender bias; clarifying “objectless intersubjectivity”; the role of silence, isolation, interiority, and privacy in analytic listening; what patients seek in treatment; and clarification of the meaning of “merger” and “unity.”     

“Keeping Up with the Joneses”: Subjective Social Status Predicts Proactive Coping

Journal of Adult Development - Proactive coping involves actions to prevent or alter the form of future stressors which can be important for successful aging processes, but it relies on resources....     

“Expanding the Frame”: Reply to Commentary

In responding to a discussion by Susi Federici-Nebbiosi of “When the Frame Doesn't Fit the Picture,” I further consider the ways in which analysts and analysands together create the best conditions for their work. I emphasize that analytic work best fulfills its potential when it grows out of a collaborative search for ways of constructing the psychoanalytic situation that are most fully and subtly responsive to the unique qualities and circumstances of each patient and analyst. Implications for psychoanalytic training of an intersubjective model of frame construction are briefly considered.     

Mechner’s Reply to the Commentaries on His Article, “A Behavioral and Biological Analysis of Aesthetics”

The Psychological Record - The commentaries prompted my realization that it is more useful to view the core of the aesthetic reaction as composed of a set of Pavlovian respondents than as a...     

“Like Walking Backwards” – The Challenge of Theater Improvisation Paradigm within the Psychotherapeutic Discourse – Reply to Commentaries

This article responds to two commentaries to the author’s original article; both commentaries relate to the issue of theater improvisation as a distinct paradigm in psychotherapy. The commentaries represent what can viewed metaphorically as the positions of “Yes, But” and “Yes, And.” The article describes these two positions, then addresses the issue of psychotherapy as art and/or science, and subsequently wrestles with how to train clinicians in improvisational skills. Considered as well, are the possible systematic changes the theater improvisation paradigm can have on the psychotherapeutic field.     

“It All Comes Down to Imagination”: Reply to Commentary

In her generous and full discussion of my paper, Doris Brothers writes about patient's efforts to restore themselves following trauma and how that runs into walls caused by their “systemically emergent certainties.” She beautifully writes, “Since our capacity to hope depends on being able to tolerate uncertainty we sometimes join our patients in their hopelessness” (p. 231). Brothers emphasizes how Murakami can help us tolerate uncertainty. My emphasis is on how writers like Murakami help us restore our imaginative and empathic capacities. Frozen landscapes, as evoked by Murakami in “UFO in Kushiro,” are depictions of shut-down psychic states. Animated imagery helps to melt the ice, creating living motion in thought and affect. Both Brothers and I are looking at the crucial movement from simplified to complex shared states of mind. We seem at first to differ in our understanding of the function of rage in treatment, though I believe we may be discussing different clinical situations.     

How to Use Your Mind When You Can’t Think: Reply to Commentaries by Davies and Cooper

There is much area of agreement between the author and the discussants. The author addresses areas of concern and questions raised in the commentaries. These topics include the use of reverie, how I have defined maternal desire, concerns about the avoidance of negative transference, the analyst’s own dissociation, and compassion.