A Farewell to Countertransference

The "discovery" of countertransference provided a much-needed corrective to the one-sided view of transference and a patient's pathology. Even if its usefulness in the development of psychoanalysis was indisputable, its days are numbered. When I present my clinical work at conferences, I am often asked questions about my countertransference. These questions contain numerous assumptions that are challenged in this paper. Treatment is discussed from a self psychological perspective to highlight the therapeutic value of enabling the patient to engage a selfobject transference. The concept of "projective identification" is also challenged. Systems theory, in which the therapeutic relationship is understood as a co-construction between therapist and patient, is proposed as a more effective model to deal with the issues formerly included under transference-countertransference.     

A RESPONSE TO STANLEY KLEIN: A DIALOGUE ON THE RELEVANCE OF QUANTUM THEORY TO RELIGION

Abstract. I respond to Stanley Klein's critique of my essay “Quantum Reality, the Emergence of Complex Order from Virtual States, and the Importance of Consciousness in the Universe,” arguing in support of the necessity to derive a quantum perspective of evolution rather than adhering to an essentially classical view. In response to Klein's criticism of my concept of a cosmic morality, the origins of that concept are traced back to Zeno of Citium. I wholeheartedly embrace Klein's suggestion that the new science inspires views of the human condition that can help us make the world a better place.     

The real and the unreal: A reply to Jensen and Vernon

Jensen and Vernon (1986) have written a detailed reply to my critique of Jensen's reaction-time research (Longstreth, 1984). Their reply seems little short of a complete annihilation of my article. My critique is said to be full of inaccuracies, half-truths, false reasoning, wrong conclusions, and statistical naivete. But it just isn't so. I now explicate my concerns, and show that, particularly with respect to the major theoretical questions, there is little reason for accepting Jensen's claims.     

Nina Farhi: Leaning on an Annealed Identification: Commentary on Paper by Nina Farhi

In my response to Nina Farhi's paper, I begin my discussion with the concept of a placental space that Farhi develops to represent the psychotic's internal experience of living in a fusion with the Other. Farhi's new concept of an annealed identification provides a useful addition to the psychoanalytic literature to describe the living conditions of a psychotic who is severely entrenched in an unyielding maternal bond. Basing her conceptualizations on Milner's psychotic patient Susan, Farhi also focuses on Milner's discovery that no repressed unconscious existed for her patient Susan. I suggest in my response that Freud's nearly forgotten idea of primal repression and Lacan's idea of maternal jouissance would shed additional light onto the psychotic experience and expand Farhi's notion of an annealed identification with the maternal figure. In addition, I argue for an inclusion of the Third whose presence is so powerfully lacking in the case discussion and in the patient's life.     

Enactment as Therapeutic Hand Grenade: How Bursts of Emotional Honesty Can Get a Stuck Treatment Moving Again: Discussion of Holly Levenkron's Paper

In my discussion of Levenkron's article, I consider ways of understanding the patient's therapeutic progress that were not highlighted by the author. Adding my own criteria to Levenkron's definition of enactment, I suggest that what the author labels as enactment might be seen as a last-ditch but successful effort to get patient and analyst out of a stuck and painful place. I explore the interplay of confrontational and nonconfrontational interventions in contributing to cure, and I suggest placing a greater emphasis than did the author, on the intersubjective contexts out of which the patient's troublesome behaviors emerged.     

Embodied female experience through the lens of imagination

Abstract: In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying ‘male’ gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman – and thus imprisons her – which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman's lived experience. I will approach this by exploring how remembering this film has become a personally transformative experience as I look back on it through the lens of postmodern and feminist discourses that have emerged since it was made. In addition, I will explore how this process of imaginatively looking back on an artistic creation to generate new discourses in the present is similar to the transformative process of analysis. Lastly, I will present a clinical example, where my embodied countertransference response to a patient's subjection to the objectifying male gaze opens space for a new discourse about her body to emerge.     

Further Notes on Feminist Ethics and Pluralism: A Reply to Lindgren

In a comment on my paper, “Moral Understandings: Alternative Epistemology for a Feminist Ethics” (1989) Ralph Lindgren questions the wisdom of confronta' tional rhetoric in my paper and much feminist moral philosophy, and the consistency of this stance with pluralism about ethics. I defend both the rebellious rhetoric and the inclusivity of my own approach, but suggest that pluralism in moral philosophy is harder to define than Lindgren's comments suggest.     

The paternal function in Winnicott: The psychoanalytical frame

My first aim has been to identify the implicit assumptions underlying Winnicott's detailed notes on a fragment of an analysis dating from 1955 and published after his death. The importance given by Winnicott to the father figure as early as 1955 is one of my discoveries; another is the deep Freudian roots of his thinking. In this essay I propose a new way of linking together the concepts of ‘paternal function’ and the ‘psychoanalytical frame’. Developing my hypothesis, I compare my reading of Winnicott and my way of reading José Bleger's study on the frame. Like Winnicott, I explore in detail a process of discovery, focusing on what the analyst and the patient are nor fully aware of …'as yet'. I am not proposing to unify Winnicott's and Bleger's thinking. My aim is to avoid the pitfall of eclecticism and, in so doing, to recognize both the related depths they sound in their thinking and their otherness. I want to share with the readers their ‘meeting’ in my mind.     

Saint Thomas Aquinas's Pagan Virtues?

Today's conversations in virtue ethics are enflamed with questions of “pagan virtues,” which often designate non‐Christian virtue from a Christian perspective. “Pagan virtues,” “pagan vices,” and their historied interpretations are the subject of Jennifer Herdt's book Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (2008). I argue that the questions and language animating Herdt's book are problematic. I offer an alternative strategy to Herdt's for reading Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. My results are twofold: (1) a different set of conclusions and questions regarding the moral life that lend a fresh perspective to “pagan virtues” and (2) corresponding methodological suggestions for improving Herdt's project that would, to my mind, reaffirm her normative conclusions regarding the most viable ways forward for contemporary discussions of virtue.     

Clinical Commentary

Abstract

This paper is the narrative of a first-time father with a son born seven weeks early by Caesarean section. Against the anxiety and trauma of his infant's birth and his wife's illness, another inner darker drama is being relived. Michael shows all the wounds of a battered child. He asks two awesome questions - Will I be to my son as my father was to me? Will my son be to me as I was to my father? Fearful and at first unvoiced questions, the developing interviews gave them a voice. We respected Michael's sharing of the early and fearful days and nights when his infant first came home. We sometimes found it hard to empathize with his running away to hide in work, until we understood what he was hiding from. Most poignant was his struggle with his anger and hurt with his father and his desire to understand, ‘Why?’, so that he would not be like this to his son. We saw a sensitive revelation of life being born inside him anew, as he made contact with his real infant and his psychic infant within. Of particular interest was the therapeutic use of the research interview space and the interviewer.     

Climbing for My Life

As a woman in my 50th year, as a psychotherapist, a mother, a lesbian, I look back over my years as a technical rock climber. Returning to rock climbing after a 15 year break, I climb now in a new way and only with other women. Here I describe the experience of climbing, and the fulfillment and joy it can bring. I discuss the challenge of being an older woman beginning a sport that is associated with youth and can be risky. I discuss the importance of passionate play within women's lives and its therapeutic value.     

The Analyst's Uses of Theory and the Theory the Analyst Uses: Reply to Commentary

Where Slochower focuses her discussion on the analyst's multiform uses of theory, I focus my response on how the theory we each use informs a quite different way of understanding what is at issue for my patient in the apparent disengagement that marks her quest for help. More broadly, I consider how the theoretical perspective Slochower brings to her rendering of my clinical understanding and position makes for a reading that diverges significantly from my own view of what transpired in the treatment process I present.     

Morality and a Scaffolding of Facts

In reply to Michael Campbell, I reformulate my questions of Raimond Gaita, avoiding the expression “form of life”. I examine what might remove the need for my questions, before taking up Campbell's line of thought about what he calls the “inwardness” of moral concepts. Campbell helps to clarify the picture of moral concepts advanced by Wittgensteinian moral philosophers. But at a general level, the picture remains unclear where a grammar meets its scaffolding of facts. Some may find this unproblematic, and indeed unavoidable. But I remain unsure of this, and hope to provide at least a useful caution.     

The use of the analyst as an autistic shape

In this paper I describe through detailed clinical material the challenges posed by patients who employ entangled autistic defenses. I discuss the complicated nature of treating a patient who employed entangled autistic defenses and utilized my voice in an effort to preserve an undifferentiated state of dual unity. My patient's pursuit of dual unity took a very concrete form in her attempt to mitigate the terror of separateness. This concreteness was expressed via the patient's urgent request that I read letters she wrote to me between sessions. This type of autistic defense placed great strain on my ability to think analytically and I also became increasingly concrete in my response to the patient. Crucial to the analyst's regaining a space in which to think and a sense of separateness is the ability to contact the ground floor of her separate bodily experience. This is just the beginning step in the analyst separating herself from the powerful press to join the patient in a state of dual unity. Interpretation in action (Ogden, 1994) was an effective way to convey the importance of creating and tolerating internal space in myself and begin to create internal space in the patient. Previously such space had been closed down in order to manage primitive fears of annihilation. When a patient is absorbed in an entangling autistic retreat words do not reach the patient on a symbolic level but rather are experienced primarily as an assault on the need for dual unity with the analyst. The patient's need to be wrapped in a sensation based world of dual unity is preferable to a world of spoken words that carry the danger of delineating psychic separateness. In essence there is no self to speak words, only a whirl of an amorphous sensation self lacking definition. I believe with certain kinds of patients it may be necessary to first lose and then work to regain one's analytic mind, as I have powerfully described in the case of Linda. Linda's profound loss of connection to the ground floor of her experience could only begin to be addressed when I worked to extricate myself from ‘our magic carpet ride’ of dual unity, contacting the reality of my bodily experience, and begin to tolerate the terror I felt regarding my separateness from Linda. I also describe the confusing vacillation between entangled and encapsulated defenses in patients like Linda as previously identified by Cohen and Jay (1996). Ultimately, this kind of slow difficult analytic work began to help Linda develop a capacity to think and provided an alternative to the deadened world of her autistic protections.     

A Reply to My Critics

My text is written to answer the questions asked at the APA Meeting's presentation of the book Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere by professors María Lugones and Eduardo Mendieta. The answer seeks to clarify that Lugones's infrapolitics position is not so distant from mine. I also address Mendieta's question directed more to the aesthetic domain. There, I seek to show how my position could be taken as a creative effort to extend some of Habermas's early work on the public sphere, and to develop the thesis of the important relations between the aesthetic and the moral realms.     

Equality as Comparative Fairness

The goal of this article is modest. It is simply to help illuminate the nature of egalitarianism. More particularly, I aim to show what certain egalitarians are committed to, and to suggest that equality, as these egalitarians understand it, is an important normative ideal that cannot simply be ignored in moral deliberations. In doing this, I distinguish between equality as universality, equality as impartiality, and equality as comparability, and also between instrumental and non‐instrumental egalitarianism. I then characterise the version of egalitarianism with which I am concerned, which I call equality as comparative fairness. I discuss the relations between equality, fairness, luck, and responsibility, and defend egalitarianism against rival views that focus on subsistence, sufficiency, or compassion. I also defend egalitarianism against the Levelling Down and Raising Up Objections, and present several key examples to illustrate egalitarianism's distinct appeal, in contrast to prioritarianism's. I conclude by considering two common questions about my view: first, whether my ultimate concern is really with comparative fairness, rather than equality, so that my view is not, in fact, a substantive, non‐instrumental version of egalitarianism, and second, whether my view ultimately reduces to a theory about desert.     

Problems with paccekabuddhas—decoding early Buddhism

Steven Collins's review (Religion 2:3 (July 1992), pp. 271–8) of my publication Ascetic Figures before and in Early Buddhism: the Emergence of Gautama as the Buddha, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter 1990) warrants an extended response for a variety of reasons. In a circumstance where a four‐thousand word review has not one positive thing to say about a book, then the principle of natural justice particularly cries out for the author's right of reply. If Collins's review should have the effect of putting off prospective readers of my book then my reply is designed to recuperate their interest. Notwithstanding, it does not take an adept in the art of hermeneutic suspicion to realize the review actually tells us much more about the reviewer than the book. I cannot think that frenzied expressions like ‘academic hooligan’, ‘hearer‐bashing’, ‘fantasy’, ‘biting the hand that feeds you, with a vengeance’ could so easily have poured forth from the pen of normally so gracious a reviewer, had this particular book not hit an emotive nerve—if nothing else!—and sent Collins into an unparalleled fit of moral panic. Indeed, I shall be so bold as to suggest that Collins's reaction to the book has less to do with questions of its scholarly credibility (though his academic posturing would have us believe otherwise): ‘the thesis is presented as historical scholarship, and so it must be judged on academic grounds’ (p. 274) than with Collins's own narrow, pedantic conception, or preconception, of Buddhist Studies. This means my rejoinder to Collins's review inevitably draws me into a discussion of broader methodological questions of general interest to the wider academic community as well as particular issues pertaining to Buddhist scholarship.     

Incognito or not? the patient's subjective experience of the analyst's private life

This paper examines the meaning for the patient of the analyst's personal life and personality which are ostensibly banished from the consulting room. The therapist has a not‐always‐so‐secret “secret life”; that the patient is supposed to “not know”; about. Yet, more or less unconscious perceptions, impressions, and fantasies about extratherapeutic aspects of the analyst are omnipresent and significantly color the psychoanalytic enterprise.

Moreover the analyst as a person generally plays a critical and underacknowledged role in the patient's experience of the endeavor. Constructing multiple overlapping images of the analyst and of the analytic relationship, the patient discovers himself or herself in the matrix of these relationships with various images of the analytic other. The analysand is motivated to make sense of the analyst as wholly as possible, the better to place into context the analyst's interventions. The patient's resulting view of the analyst's subjective experience acts as a lens that filters and subtly alters the meaning of the analyst's communications.

I illustrate these points by relating my work with a patient whose dreams uncannily picked up on a (consciously) unknown aspect of my private life—my having a handicapped son. The treatment thereafter centered on the patient's identification with my child (as someone “disabled") and on the meaning of her having dreamt something so personal about her therapist.     

Reply to Commentaries by Dodi Goldman and Avgi Saketopoulou

In this newly fashioned dialogue that allows us three respondents to continue our first-round discussions, I treasure the opportunity of learning more about Farhi's and Milner's works through the lenses of Dodi Goldman and Avgi Saketopoulou. Both respondents bring additional important historical information to this virtual roundtable, giving me another chance of re-reading Farhi's text through these new perspectives. I think that Goldman's information about Milner's interest in the natural science contributes a great deal to my understanding of her amazing capacity to tolerate her patient's changing psychotic states. I also learn a lot from Saketopoulou's sensitive discussion of the patient's last phone call to Milner shortly before her death in which the patient informs Milner that she had failed her in similar ways as Winnicott had failed Milner. I suggest a slightly different reading of the word failure and propose that the patient's utterance was a sign of a renewed strength rather than a statement of utter disappointment. A discussion of the place of phantasy in the intra-uterine life of a baby is also included in my response.