Sugar and Spice: Competitiveness,Envy and Shame in Women’s Relationships - Discussion of “With Friends Like These”

Barth’s (this issue) thoughtful article draws our attention to the ubiquity and dangers of competitiveness in women’s relationships. She highlights the tension between women’s desires to be nurturing and supportive of one another, and their discomfort with being competitive with and envious of one another. In responding to Barth, I address three aspects of her article. The first is the broader sociopolitical context in which women compete. The second is the need to delineate the complex and important differences between competition and envy, which are so often linked but are essentially quite different emotional states. I explore the role of shame as an underpinning of envy. Third, I take up Barth’s comment regarding traditional psychoanalytic technique being employed by the analyst as defensive maneuver.     

“Abyss Calls Out to Abyss”: Oedipal Shame,Invisibility, and Broken Identity

The article derives from the experience of a double self or double reality. The abysses are often those of contradictory values and ideals, and with that opposite contents of shame or guilt, or the conflict between the sense of a deep inner hell that often is unspeakable and unnamable and that of a hollow and empty appearance. Absoluteness of judgment and its correlate, soulblindness toward the other, are the opposite to the empathy into the inner reality of the other. Soulblindness by the others creates massive shame in us. These dynamics are presented in a detailed case study.     

Discussion of “Taking the Sting Out: Manifesting Aggression and Containing Difficult States in a Relational Group Psychotherapy”

Ravit Raufman’s paper contributes to the bridging gap between relational approaches and group therapy. It is also important in its recognizing the (group) therapist’s aggression and suggesting how to use it in the service of the group development. In this review I focus on the dynamics of a group of women led by a woman to explain some of the phenomena that Raufman describes in her article, and I add some social unconscious ideas to enrich our understanding of that group.     

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     

“Coming Out” to Parents in a Christian Context: A Consensual Qualitative Analysis of LGB Student Experiences

Disclosures of same-sex attraction are some of the most difficult experiences for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals. For LGB individuals of faith, disclosure to parents is often complicated by the intersection of religion/spirituality and sexuality. This study presents a grounded theory about a particular subgroup to address gaps in the literature concerning how LGB students on Christian college campuses describe and experience their parental disclosures. Consensual qualitative research analysis (Hill, Knox, Thompson, Williams, & Hess, 2005; Hill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997) revealed themes related to predisclosure influencing factors, the disclosure event experience, and longer term impacts of the disclosure. Implications for parents, counselors, and college faculty/staff are provided.     

On Love and Fortitude: A Relational Discussion of “Poison Cookies”

The author offers a relational perspective on Oram's “Poison Cookies.” The discussion focuses on two central questions. Why does analytic empathy feel like torment to this patient? How does the analysis transmute this experience into healing? In the course of this investigation, the author will also consider the role of envy, the role of the sibling, the analyst's predicament around termination, and our tendency to conflate isolation and solitude.     

Voices from the margins: Islam,queer identity,and female agency in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler

This article foregrounds the intersection between queer Islamic masculinity and Islamic female identity in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler, and shows how these two identity categories are subjugated in light of dominant expressions of Islamic masculinity. The novel’s action takes place within a traditional Cape Muslim community and employs, among other literary strategies, the main protagonist’s vice of gambling and her son’s sexuality as tools to illuminate the interstitial and perilous social space occupied by women and gay men in South African Muslim society. The research dissects the poignant picture that Jacobs paints of marginal identities as they exist at the intersection of religion, gender identity and sexual identity, and ultimately exhibits that homophobia and gender inequalities are not necessarily intrinsic to Islam. The article adopts a cultural studies style literary analysis. In light of this theoretical approach, this article evaluates Jacobs’s novel in a manner that goes beyond its literariness and shows how it also acts as a form of social commentary. This article also shows how the novel problematises hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality within Islam by giving voice to women and gay men: identity categories which remain largely voiceless in the dominant representations of Islam.     

Postnatal Depression: The Role of “Good Mother” Ideals and Maternal Shame in a Community Sample of Mothers in Australia

Sex Roles - Contemporary literature confirms that “good mother” ideology dominates cultural discourses of motherhood in Australia, USA, United Kingdom, and Korea. Within this context,...     

Discussion of Jorgelina Corbatta’s “Sexuality,Normality, and Social Terror: XXY by Lucía Puenzo”

Gender is confusing. Sexuality is confusing. Gender and sexuality are confusing and confounding for children, adolescents, and adults. Jorgelina Corbatta (this issue) gives us a glimpse as to how we might think about the complexity and confusion of gender and sexuality by sharing her analysis of the film XXY (Puenzo, 2007). We are grateful to her, both for her fine discussion of these issues and for sharing a poetic work of art that brings so many complicated topics to light.     

RAMP Findings and Making Sense of the ‘God Within Each Person,Rather than Out There’

This research note provides selected ‘belief’ data from the RAMP (Religious and Moral Pluralism) survey—data of an apparently arresting nature. The present discussion is primarily directed at offering several hypotheses to do with interpretations and explanations of the data. The overarching aim is to contribute to a research agenda which is of considerable significance for the sociological study of spirituality and religion, with profound implications for policy makers.     

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.     

Discussion of “time and timekeeping in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy”

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Difficult Days: The Continuing Evolution of Relational Group Analysis: Discussion of “Taking the Sting Out: Manifesting Aggression and Containing Difficult States in a Relational Group Psychotherapy”

Raufman’s paper is located in the ongoing integration of relational concepts into the world of group analysis. Raufman’s difficult days of therapeutic impasse in her group are regarded as emblematic of the theoretical bind that she and other group analysts find themselves in, caught between older, more classically based theory that inheres in much group therapy and theory and the recent embrace of relational concepts. An alternate reading of the group enactment is offered from the perspective of an unobtrusive relational group analyst with a focus on the conductor’s negative capability and capacity to companion the group’s organic psychological language and idiom in a process of enactive co-narration. It is suggested that when Raufman killed the wasp, the group finally found the vitalizing, enlivening, and companioning object in the leader, that it had been seeking all along.     

Discussion of “Bread and Roses: Empathy and Recognition”

Rachel Kabasakalian McKay’s (this issue) important contribution focuses on a comparison of “empathy” and “recognition.” In her paper, McKay compares the sensibility of responsive attunement that she associates with empathy to the sensibility of distinctiveness that she connects to recognition. This discussion takes up this comparison of empathy and recognition associated with their embeddedness in self-psychology in contrast to relational and intersubjectivity theories. In the author’s view, the essential tension between autonomy and at-one-ness is necessary to both empathy and recognition and should not be split between them. Because recognition is Benjamin’s fundamental idea, the foundation of intersubjective recognition theory, it is incumbent on us to develop and elaborate the precise technical meanings, denotations, and connotations of this term, along with its clinical and social implications. The author believes that the key to this project is to see that, for Benjamin, recognition occurs throughout life across developmental levels and thus actually refers to quite different, although deeply related, phenomena.