More or Less Life: Commentary on Paper by Ken Corbett

This paper elaborates on Ken Corbett's sense of inclusive and paradoxical solutions to what are traditionally described as conflicts of gender.     

The Dialectics of Relational Psychoanalysis and Group Psychotherapy: Commentary on Paper by Robert Grossmark

In this commentary, I address the question of why so few psychoanalysts become group therapists as I respond to the thoughtful and impressive paper written by Robert Grossmark on his work with a psychotherapy group, now in its 10th year of meeting. Prior to discussing the clinical material, and to set the stage for a discussion of Grossmark's work, I comment on my sense of the prevailing attitudes on group affiliations and group therapy within our culture and field as they have progressed over time. I then discuss my reactions to Grossmark's handling of his group session. Many of his conceptualizations of group treatment are in accordance with my own beliefs. There are some differences, however, in how I view my role as a leader and some ideas I have about group treatment that Grossmark did not address.     

Commentary on Paper by Ken Corbett

A report on the third analysis of a 41-year-old man who had been a feminine boy is used as a vehicle to describe the idiographic aspects of this way of being as well as to specify the input of the environment—parents, analysts, community. The role of self with mother, self with father, and self with mother and father together representations is explored and Zadie Smith's concept of dual citizenship and multiple internal voices is featured as an integrating and explanatory concept. The ways in which each analysis highlights different aspects of the patient's conflicts and dilemmas and reflects successive intrapsychic organizations is also explored.     

Harsh Conditions/Loving Work: Relational Psychoanalysis Expands Its Reach: Commentary on Panel

In these three essays Lazar, Swartz, and Doñas deconstruct a clinical moment that was, in their view, braided with the sociopolitical, as well as with the relational and the intrapsychic. In these bruisingly original discussions, the authors demonstrate how they held the tension between the intimate and the global, and how relational psychoanalysis remains an arduous practice but is also a gift.     

More Metaphor: Commentary on Paper by Ken Corbett

Beyond the inevitability of countertransference feelings is the question of countertransference enactments. From a two‐person, participant‐observer or observing‐participant perspective, enactments are inevitable. The analyst becomes influenced by the patient (and influences the patient as well) and enmeshed in the patient's internalized interpersonal configurations. Analysis works not by avoiding such action but by analyzing from within the interactional system. Analysts who are different from one another become engaged in different ways, since the person of the analyst is a significant variable. This article, using case examples, explores two analyst‐related variables, age and family configuration, to expand the examination of countertransference enactments and some effects on the analytic process.     

The Relationality of Everyday Life: The Unfinished Journey of Relational Psychoanalysis

Building on the insights embodied in Stephen Mitchell’s critiques of the developmental tilt and the metaphor of the baby, this paper aims to further illuminate the limitations of theoretical models rooted in infantile prototypes and to point relational theory toward a more thoroughgoing understanding of the contextuality and relationality of every facet of our lives. In its examinations of both the mother–infant interaction and the intricacies of the analytic relationship, the relational turn has yielded deep insights into the reciprocal, two-person causal sequences that characterize the development and dynamics of personality. But in the massive zone of living that occurs outside the nursery or the consulting room—the countless interactions and experiences of everyday life—relational theory has made less of a contribution, implicitly relying on an older psychoanalytic model in which these events of daily life reflect or express inner dynamics, rather than highlighting how daily life experiences continue to shape the inner world even as the inner world gives meaning and shape to those ongoing experiences. Drawing on both parallels and differences between Mitchell’s seminal contributions and the theoretical perspective known as cyclical psychodynamics, the paper aims to extend relational advances in understanding the mother–infant matrix and the dynamic structure of the analytic relationship to the everyday events that constitute the vast majority of our waking hours. In doing so, it points to a consequentiality to everyday life that, when appreciated and taken seriously, opens new pathways for therapeutic advance and provides a more solid and comprehensive foundation for relational theory.     

Relational Psychoanalysis: A Review

Relational psychoanalysis, a relatively new and evolving school of psychoanalytic thought, is considered by its founders to represent a “paradigm shift” in psychoanalysis. The relational approach, initiated by the publication of Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell's book, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory in 1983, has developed into a movement with its own substantially separate literature. This paper reviews both the history and theoretical origins of the relational movement, as well as important theoretical premises and viewpoints now associated with the relational school.     

Humiliation and Transgender Regulation: Commentary on Paper by Ken Corbett

This commentary reads Ken Corbett's “Boyhood Femininity” alongside the Lawrence King case to examine shame as a means of regulating gender nonconforming boys. Corbett describes the dominant clinical discourse on feminine boys that understands them to be “nonconforming, extreme, and disordered” and notes that such discourse depends on the presupposition that boys must be masculine. This discourse is at once ontological and normative, asserting both that boys are naturally masculine and that they need to become masculine, a paradoxical imperative that may account for the ways in which the discourse is haunted by anxiety about the location, durability, and persistence of masculinity. In responding to the framing of boyhood femininity as a disorder, Corbett inverts the diagnosis; as a response to the reading of gender variant youth as inappropriately arrested in their psychosexual development, he diagnoses the profession itself as suffering from a “developmental lag” and suggests that the diagnosis that condemns a femme boy to psychic stagnation and unhappiness projects its own failure to see beyond normative gender presumptions onto the phenomenological life of the feminine boy. Corbett asks us to consider boyhood femininity as the scene of gender's emergence rather than as the site of its failure.     

Working in the Metaphor Commentary on Paper by Stephen Seligman

This paper expands on Seligman's ideas about mentalization and the challenges of working with patients who cannot mentalize. Seligman's clinical presentation demonstrates that much valuable analytic work takes place without explicit reference to the transference. Drawing on Britton's notion of the triangular internal space that allows for reflective thought, we propose that analytic interest in an external object, discovered through the relationship and meaningful to both patient and analyst, helps create the same kind of space. The difference-within-sameness of shared contemplation can increase receptivity to divergent perspectives. Likewise, the “third object” can become a therapeutic metaphor, open to various meanings without being limited to any one interpretation. We trace how Seligman and his patient use a series of third objects in their work together. In this process, the patient moves from a transitional relationship of minimal differentiation to an increasingly secure sense of her own separateness, beginning to accept, and even enjoy, having a motivated mind of her own. Finally, we discuss how Ferro's concept of the analytic field offers a theoretical rationale for the effectiveness of this process.     

Commentary on Paper by Steven Cooper

In this discussion of Steven Cooper's paper, it is argued that, although Cooper's desire to hold himself “accountable” in his work with patients is laudable, the “pluralistic third” approach that he employs gives rise in his doing so to several difficulties in the way that it is described in the paper. The vivid clinical material that Cooper provides to illustrate his approach is used as a starting point to offer an understanding of what transpired between analyst and patient, which although convergent with Cooper's formulations in some respects nevertheless follows a very different line of thinking in other areas. Broadly speaking, it is suggested that although these divergences arise from many sources—a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this contribution—one particular issue involved is a rather different understanding of the role of early internalized object relations in the patient's psychic life and the way these get lived out at many levels in the treatment situation. It is further argued that Cooper's conceptualization of the approaches of schools different from his own appears somewhat circumscribed and this detracts from his desire to make an authentic comparison between his way of working and those of other schools, something that is called for by his proposed pluralistic third method of keeping himself accountable. This is not considered surprising given the difficulties inherent in our becoming adequately familiar, in more than just an intellectual way, with the approaches of schools different from our own, especially when wide divergences are involved between schools.     

Shakespeare,Psychoanalysis and Creativity: Commentary on Paper by Lauren Levine

This discussion speaks to the creative dimension in the clinical encounter described by Levine in her paper. In particular, it addresses the creativity necessary to move beyond impasses in the treatment. The positive and negative associations to enactments are discussed as well as the creative possibilities offered in dreamwork and the analytic relationship.     

Total Exertion: Zen,Psychoanalysis, Life

This paper integrates Zen and psychoanalytic concepts; introduces the Zen concept of total exertion; elaborates the profound implications that the notion of total exertion has for the psychoanalytic encounter and the psychotherapist’s capacity for maintaining an optimal attentional stance; addresses anxiety-driven interferences to both the psychoanalytic process and deepened Zen practice. Clinical vignettes, personal experiences, poetry and psychoanalytic theory serve to demonstrate the abstract aspects of the discussion.     

Dance,Don't Interpret!: Commentary on Paper by Steven Cooper

With difficult patients who seek to engage the analyst through struggle rather than through warm connection, analysts struggle whether to interpret or contain. I use Cooper's case example to consider these two initial treatment approaches. I argue for the approach that is most difficult for all analysts—to let the patient be himself guiding us toward what he does and does not need.     

Field Theory in Psychoanalysis,Part 2: Bionian Field Theory and Contemporary Interpersonal/Relational Psychoanalysis

This article is the second part of an examination of field theory in psychoanalysis. In this article, contemporary Bionian field theory, primarily the work of Antonino Ferro, is compared with contemporary interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis.     

Attachment and Relational Psychoanalysis: Bowlby According to Mitchell

In our contribution we would like to highlight that the model formulated by Mitchell in his last book entitled Relationality seems to suggest that he had come to realize that he could not exclude attachment theory entirely from his theoretical framework. Some of the most interesting interpretations of it—post-Bowlbian interpretations—regarded the dynamics of early attachment as a fundamental model of emotional regulation. We think that in Italy there has always been a significantly widespread sensitivity toward developmental and attachment themes also in more strictly psychoanalytic contexts, hence the specific slant of our reading of the most recent developments in relational psychoanalysis.     

How to Help a Thin-Skinned Person: Commentary on Paper by Stephen Seligman

Stephen Seligman's treatment of Harriet illustrates the typical challenges and basic technical principles in working with narcissistically sensitive people. Often, with such patients there are struggles around the frame, especially issues of payment and cancellation policies. Sometimes the therapist must be flexible in negotiations with the patient. In the early phases of therapy interpretations of defense, especially the interpretation of projected aggression, are not helpful. Interventions that recognize the patient's response to something the therapist has done or failed to do are more effective and set the stage for later work focused on the patient's recognition of her self-states. A willingness to respect Harriet's identification with Joan of Arc, and to work in displacement, rather than pathologizing her preoccupation was also essential. Finally, Seligman utilized the concept of mentalization in actively discussing with Harriet the mental processes of other people in her life. All these techniques enabled Harriet to move from being dominated by a sense of grievance to becoming capable of experiencing grief.     

Sociorelational Psychoanalysis and Agency: Reply to Commentary

The author notes that, overall, he and White seem to agree on many important issues that she writes about in her commentary, such as the necessity of recognizing both our shared humanity and the agency of separate, subjective selves. He argues, however, that White mischaracterizes what it means to think of the self as socially constructed, and he clarifies his views of how the concept of a socially constructed self may be related to individual differences in the same culture, and to personal agency. He responds to White's imputation that his paper implicitly prescribes a type of intervention or mandates some particular view of the Truth as a new theology, substituting a concrete environmental or social determinism for the abstract (intrapsychic) determinism that he criticizes. Finally, he responds to some interesting and insightful questions White raises about the case vignette of Mr. J that was presented in his essay.