Encounters with the Irrational: My Story by André E. Haynal,with an interview by Judit Mészáros,International Psychoanalytic Books,New York, 2017, 173pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

The Power of the Spoken Word in Life,Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis—A Contribution to Interpersonal Psychoanalysis

Starting with a 1890 essay by Freud, the author goes in search of an interpersonal psychology native to Freud's psychoanalytic method and to in psychoanalysis and the interpersonal method in psychiatry. This derives from the basic interpersonal nature of the human situation in the lives of individuals and social groups. Psychiatry, the healing of the soul, and psychotherapy, therapy of the soul, are examined from the perspective of the communication model, based on the essential interpersonal function of language and the spoken word: persons addressing speeches to themselves and to others in relations, between family members, others in society, and the professionals who serve them. The communicational model is also applied in examining psychiatric disorders and psychiatric diagnoses, as well as psychodynamic formulas, which leads to a reformulation of the psychoanalytic therapy as a process. A plea is entered to define psychoanalysis as an interpersonal discipline, in analogy to Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry.     

The Frame,Within and Without: Discussion of “The Therapeutics of the Fee in Psychoanalysis”

The author picks up and expands on themes of fusion and separation brought up in Pauley’s discussion of the therapeutic uses of the fee in the psychoanalytic encounter. She asserts that the elemental nature of the exchange of goods speaks to us in the language of corporeal experience, making it a powerful disruptive force that can reshuffle defenses at the level of our most primary experiencing selves. This affords the fee the potential to reach us in the registers of sensation and enactment that bypass conscious, verbal communication making our authentic and ongoing attempts to grapple with it vital to the analytic project.     

Europe’s “New Jews”: France,Islamophobia, and Antisemitism in the Era of Mass Migration

Are Muslims the “new Jews” of Europe? The spectacle of Middle Eastern and African refugees shuttled by train from camp to squalid camp has understandably drawn parallels to the darkest pages in twentieth-century continental history. Such a historical comparison between Islamophobia and antisemitism, however, risks missing their ongoing interrelation. This article examines that interrelation, arguing that Islamophobia and antisemitism now most resemble each other as complementary mechanisms for diverting the anxieties bred by the global economic order. Antisemitism has long scapegoated the Jews for capitalism’s tendency to produce outsized winners. But there has been no comparably global shorthand for the anxiety prompted by capitalism’s losers—until now. Muslim refugees help give a name, Islam, to the masses seemingly encroaching from the margins of the world system. The result, I argue, is the hardening of Islamophobia and antisemitism into the inextricable poles of a reactionary worldview. Taking France as a case study, the article reads the burkini bans prompted by the July 2016 terror attack in Nice as an expression of middle-class fear about downward mobility. Targeted at both internal Muslim leisure and external Muslim encroachment, the bans evoke how European unease about globalization increasingly takes Islamophobic form. Such intolerance threatens not only to lodge Islamophobia at the heart of a reconstituted Europe but also to erode the vigilance against antisemitism once characteristic of the postwar European project.     

For the Greater Good of Psychoanalysis: Response to Carla Fischer’s Paper “Psychoanalysis and Dictatorship in Chile: A Non-Existing Relationship”

My response to Carla Fischer’s paper enlarges upon one of the powerful subthemes she introduces. Beginning with the rise of the Third Reich, there is a long history in psychoanalysis in which questionable decisions furthering the interests of the institution itself have been made at the expense of individual psychoanalysts. These conscious and unconscious choices have established an unfortunate precedent; they have had a profound effect on the culture of psychoanalysis as a whole, with technical and theoretical consequences that continue to reverberate throughout the profession. The “submission and castration” of the institution of psychoanalysis, as Fischer puts it so succinctly, have led to a loss of integrity and the sacrifice of the founding principles of a discipline that had privileged understanding, an investigative discipline that sought the truth even if that truth was a threat to the social order.     

Attachment,Family Therapy,and Relational Psychoanalysis: Introduction to Virginia Goldner’s “Romantic Bonds,Binds, and Ruptures: Couples on the Brink”

Virginia Goldner’s paper reflects her exceptional role as a leader in both the family therapy and relational psychoanalytic worlds. Integrating those domains with theory and attachment and affect regulation, she presents a vivid and elegant theoretical perspective with an acutely empathic and self-reflective account of a torturous case. Commentaries by Leslie Greenberg and Paul Wachtel follow, along with a reply from Goldner.     

A Review of “Mind to Mind: Infant Research,Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis”

Abstract

This article examines current research pertaining to the relationship between a mother and her children, and how this relationship may affect sibling interactions. Issues such as temperament, gender, and the age gap between children are also explored to ascertain their impact on the sibling relationship.

The displacement of the first-born child and the ensuing sense of loss and anger he may experience as a result of this is explored. The mother's second pregnancy is also discussed in regard to the impact of unresolved issues relating to her own sibling relations. The mother's interactions with each child, her role as a model for identification, and marital relations are discussed in light of their impact on sibling relations.

The evolution of a positive attachment between siblings is explored. Rivalrous behavior between siblings is also discussed, particularly in association to the mother's treatment of her own children and the manner in which the mother deals with her own aggression.     

“It's A Long Way …” to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Training Experience in Self Psychology,Intersubjectivity, and Relational Psychoanalysis

The successful experience with a Jungian analyst, research work on international economic interdependence, and the failure of a classical analysis were the preliminary steps toward the discovery of Kohut's self psychology. The comparison of epistemological principles in Jung and in Kohut and the discovery of the relational nature of experience formed the background of my professional attitude as an analyst. After an unsatisfactory, but “orthodox” supervision, training in self psychology, intersubjectivity, and relational psychoanalysis at Isipsé made it possible to integrate all previous experiences in a complex and, at the same time, clinically coherent framework.     

From Persecution to Depression: A Case of Chronic Depression—Associating the Rorschach,the TAT,and Winnicott

In this article, I discuss a case study of a patient with depression, paranoid ideation, and other psychiatric difficulties who presented in a state of acute crisis. I review the Swiss Lausanne model of Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) interpretation, focusing on a psychoanalytic understanding of special contents and verbalizations. I then present a review of Comprehensive System (Exner, 2003) Structural Summary variables based on a modified Rorschach administration, while qualifying the meanings of these variables in light of the modified procedure. I conclude with a review of Winnicott's (1969) ideas on the paranoid potential, tie it to the main points of the case, and offer a 5-year follow-up of the patient's treatment. The case offers an approach to personality assessment that is informed by an international theory built on psychology and philosophy, and offers support for the use of an alternative theory-based, psychoanalytic method of data analysis.     

The background scenery: “Official” Hungarian philosophy and the Lukács Circle at the turn of the century

This paper is a background study. It gives an overview of the institutions, decisive trends and major achievements of Hungarian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus light is shed on the philosophical scenery which forms the background to the Lukács Circle. The paper discusses the relation of the Lukács Circle at the turn of the century to “official” Hungarian philosophy. First, the introduction portrays the various phases of the evolution of Hungarian institutions of philosophy. Then it sketches the institutional scene at the turn of the century. Thirdly, it attempts to determine the relation of the Lukács Circle to the official academic philosophy, and also sketches some of its aspects after 1919–1920.     

On “That Is Not Psychoanalysis”: Ethics as the Main Tool for Psychoanalytic Knowledge and Discussion

“That is not (or that is) psychoanalysis” is a statement that, more often than not, can only remind us that psychoanalysis is divided into many schools and that discussion among them is difficult if not impossible. This will always be the case as long as analysts hold to their respective ontological definitions as if these were impervious to the laws and, most important, to the Ethics of translation. In psychoanalysis our Ethics and our Epistemology are two sides of the same coin, inseparable from our know-how. Our ethical stance is what allows (or impedes) central psychoanalytic facts to be brought into daylight. This principle applies both in the analytic room and in the room where analysts from different schools try to hold a productive discussion. In both instances “translation” is necessarily incomplete; it is therefore recommended to start by looking for the missing part.     

“Ghosts in the Psychoanalytic Nursery”: Response to Lieberman & Harris

In this discussion, I elaborate on the question of why fear, per se, has been relatively absent from psychoanalytic dialogues, and of how to think about the relative primacy of fear, aggression, and infantile sexuality. In response to Harris, I consider some of the ways that contemporary neuroscience and evolutionary theory deepen this discussion. And, following Lieberman, I reflect on why it can be so difficult to hold and process our patients’ fear and trauma.     

The “Activist Client”: Social Responsibility,the Political Self,and Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

The idea of the “activist client” is intended to be taken both literally and metaphorically—applying to some extent to a wider range of clients than actual activists. The paper develops a set of ideas about a “political turn” in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, using the tag “the inner politician.” There is a focus on working directly with political material in the session, and the pros and cos of this practice are reviewed. Wider issues such as social responsibility and social spirituality are discussed, as well as an exploration of the limits of individual responsibility. Some specific topics covered in the paper include the political roots of depression, difficulties with the concept of the therapeutic alliance from the point of view of democratic perspectives on clinical work, and a challenge to the unquestioned valuing of empathy (based on a reading of therapy though a Brechtian lens). There are numerous clinical examples.     

On Ideas of “the Good” and “the Ideal” in George Eliot's Novels and Post-Kleinian Psychoanalytic Thought

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

“Man Is a Wolf to Man”: Disorders of Dehumanization in Psychoanalysis

A key component of dehumanization is the loss of personal credibility experienced by victims whose trauma and abuse have gone unwitnessed or unconfirmed. The scant or doubtful attention to victimization in orthodox psychoanalytic theory, where the late introduction of the destructive instinct favored analysis of the predator, has only underscored the victim's anonymity—a conspicuous shortcoming in our time of genocide and crimes against humanity. Yet victimization, as illustrated in this paper's case material, reveals relational conflict as compelling as classical intrapsychic conflict: between urges to keep silent or to speak and between concealment and habituation to human abandonment or reparative search for witness. What therapeutic neutrality is to psychic reality, therapeutic witness is to the recovery of social reality and one's right to live in it.