Women's Opposition to Race-Targeted Interventions

Work on the correlates of opposition to race targeted interventions (ORTI) has neglected gender specific analysis. Given that women themselves have been subject to collective discrimination, this experience could conceivably offset or reduce the effect of standard predictors of ORTI in the case of women. The present study employs multiple regression analysis on national data from the General Social Survey. The results indicate that indicators of all three standard theoretical perspectives (self interest, stratification ideology, and prejudice) tend to be more predictive of female ORTI than male ORTI. The hypothesis that the collective experience of discrimination would offset standard predictors of ORTI is not supported. The model explains 36% of the variance of womens' ORTI and 21% of the variance in ORTI among men.     

Introduction to Panel: When Relatedness is Damaged or Undeveloped: A New Consideration of the Link between Relational Psychoanalysis and the Object Relations Tradition

In this panel, we introduce two new conceptualizations of the analyst’s role and function designed for work with patients outside the reach of customary modes of engagement. Our approaches to the challenges of such patients draw on the insights of object relations theorists but rely on the relational school’s emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity and differing forms of engagement. We believe that together our approaches contribute to a broadened bandwidth of relational practice.     

When Relatedness is Damaged or Undeveloped: A New Consideration of the Link between Relational Psychoanalysis and Object Relations Theory

The author discusses Lisa Director’s concept of being a catalyst, an enlivening presence, and Robert Grossmark’s concept of companioning, in their work with patients whom I think of as being in the autistic contiguous position. Director and Grossmark each provide a moving example of a long-term, successful treatment with patients who are often seen as unanalyzable and dismissed. These patients are very challenging, having great difficulty entering relationships; either floating through space in a dull, disconnected manner or violently crashing into others in order to make contact and maintain a minimal sense of cohesiveness and connection. I discuss these two exceptional clinical papers using object relations theory, which can provide a more generalizable approach to the treatment of such difficult patients.     

Why Language Matters to Psychoanalysis

Much psychoanalytic vocabulary is embedded in discourses, or languagegames, that involve philosophical assumptions that most post-Freudian, relational, and intersubjective systems analysts no longer accept. Terms like transference, projective identification, and representation, however carefully redefined for contemporary purposes, cannot escape their connotative history and loading. It is suggested that psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners remain open to questioning and being questioned about our use of words, their impact on our attitudes toward our patients, and about our responsibility for disavowed assumptions about human nature and reality.     

From Psychoanalysis to a Post-Foulkesian Group Analysis

This paper explores the relationship between individual psychoanalytic theory and that of Foulkesian group analytic theory. It traces some of the philosophical and metaphysical assumptions behind orthodox psychoanalytic theory, and discusses its implications for group analytic theory. The paper then describes some aspects of a post-Foulkesian group analytic theory which challenge these assumptions and argues for the socio-political to be given a constitutive role in the construction of the psyche.     

Psychoanalysis in later life

After decades of heeding Freud's admonition against taking patients older than fifty years of age into psychoanalytic treatment, psychoanalysts began to treat them and to report encouraging experiences. This essay is another in a series of case reports that confirms and extends the nature of changes possible in the analytic treatment of elderly patients. In order to demonstrate both specific changes and the possibility of satisfactory terminations with patients of advanced age, the author describes his analytic work with a woman who first consulted him when she was sixty-eight years old.