Coming out of the Hasidic closet: Jiří Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the fashioning of homosexual-Jewish identity

This essay inaugurates the historical study of the modern homosexual Jewish experience before Stonewall. I begin with a historiographic introduction to the emerging subfield of gay Jewish history. I then turn to reintroduce Jiri Langer, a homosexual and Hasidic writer affiliated with the interwar "Prague circle" (and friend of Franz Kafka and Max Brod) into the purview of modern Jewish Studies. I take up two questions: first, how Langer reconciled his homosexual and Orthodox religious identity; and second, why Langer"s homosexuality became exigent as a Jewish question at this particular historical moment. In his key text, Die Erotik der Kabbala, Langer engages with the dominant interwar debates on homosexuality, but most directly with the work of Hans Blüher, the major theoretician of the German Wandervogelbewegung. In the course of correcting Blüher's antisemitic claims about Jews and homosexuality, Langer managed to delineate a specifically homosexual Jewish identity by renegotiating the relationship between homosexuality and Judaism and by adumbrating a history of "gay" Jews. I contextualize this long-neglected text within Langer's fascinating biography; the debates in the early homosexual rights movement; the particular cultural features of the "Prague circle" in which Langer wrote; and the dislocation and devastation of Langer's beloved eastern-European Hasidic communities caused by World War I—communities that Langer experienced as deeply homoerotic.     

Mentally ill or mentally handicapped? A longitudinal study of severe learning disorder

SUMMARY

In the course of some eighteen months of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a young woman of twenty-seven once deemed braindamaged at the age of seven years, has shown herself capable of sustaining once weekly psychotherapy. Against all expectations she has taken responsibility for her own attendance, travelling by public transport alone to her sessions. She has also taken initiatives in relation to finding work for herself.

Psychotherapy has disclosed a significant component of autism in the personality which is resorted to regularly and which seems to drag the patient into a passive acceptance of half-life which she tries not to mind. In the course of her sessions the patient has come to take more notice of her predicament and to mind more about the dissatisfactions which she experiences.

The case presented here is considered to have the characteristics of a particular group of adolescents. These are often described as “just slow” and are brought for psychiatric or psychological attention by desperate parents urgently concerned about the working future of their children.

These are individuals of whom the original definition of mental handicap contained in the Mental Health Act 1913 “a state of arrested or incomplete development of mind” would seem to offer as honest, appropriate and meaningful an assessment as the formal I.Q. score introduced in 1959. Unlike the latter, it is an assessment based on a concept of mental development. Assessment by I.Q. score has led to emphasis on training to compensate for the supposed loss of functioning and also to notions like “training for development” and “education from birth”.

In the case described here it was the abandonment of training aims and approaches which produced a dramatic improvement in the well-being of the patient and her family. Treatment is now fostering the potential in this woman to bring her own mind into action and to support in her, her own wish for personal development.     

Allergic to People: Building Bridges in a Ripped Psychic-Soma

An exploration of the use mind/body metaphors in a woman whose physical, environmental and psychoneurotic trauma culminated in an irreversible colostomy. She lived in a world of concrete symbols, her primary process damaged such that she could not create generative symbols to process her trauma. She regressed to a state of infantile megalomania, recoiling from the external reality of subjective others. Her introjective disorder mirrored her digestive disorder as she could absorb neither good objects nor good nutrients. The analytic situation has been an auxiliary fecal container and we work to bridge her mind body split with mind/body metaphors. As she reclaims lost development mastery, she displays a symbolized sphincter. As her capacity to form symbols grows, she rages and mourns for the loss of her fantasized ideal parents and her ideal body.     

Subjectivity and symbolization

The aim of this paper has been to demonstrate that the emergence of subjectivity as a central concept in psychoanalysis is both consistent with and intertwined with the emergence of a new great generative idea (Langer, 1942), now in its nascent stage. Langer's (1942) thesis that symbolization and the power of symbols provide the basis for the fundamental assumptions of the new great generative idea was presented in condensed form. Langer's work was then integrated with that of contemporary psychoanalytic theoretical writers, which tends to support Langer's thesis. Freud's discoveries were revolutionary insofar as they resulted in the posing of new kinds of questions that have to do with symbols and their meanings. To that extent the birth of psychoanalysis itself appears as one manifestation of the emerging new generative idea. The issue of subjectivity was examined from the specific vantage point of recent conceptualizations of self and self-experience. Symbolization, it was shown, is a crucial factor in both self-experience and conceptualizations of self. Finally, it was suggested by the author that some of the existing baffling problems concerning subjectivity, the concept of self, and self-experience may disappear in the context of the new great generative idea, based on fundamental assumptions about the power of symbols.     

In the Pursuit of Absence: Reimagining Early Loss within the Psychotherapy Relationship

In this paper I examine absence—absence as an internal relationship, absence as an enactment, absences characteristic of psychotherapy, absence as a theory, and absence as something people do to each other, including patients, therapists, families, and societies. To illustrate these ideas, I discuss my work with Gemma. When absence enters our relationship in a very present way, the powerful emotions that absence eludes come alive for us. Forced to confront my own absences, I begin doing a better job of holding her in mind, which ultimately helps her to hold me in mind and make better use of me.     

Identifications Annealed,Adhesive and Political: Commentary on Paper by Nina Farhi

Farhi's fascinating paper pays tribute to and extends those segments of Milner's clinical work that Milner hesitated to theorize explicitly herself. Seeking to understand the latter, I trace psychoanalytic politics in general and the history of Milner's relationships with Winnicott, Klein, and Riviere in particular to explore how her dutiful compliance to the rigid taxonomy of psychoanalytic power of her time bore on the trajectory of her becoming an analyst with a mind of her own. It is in accounting for how she struggled to disentangle herself from that web, that we discover how Milner was able to creatively refashion her work with her patient Susan, a process by which Susan was greatly impacted.

Following the trail of Farhi's ideas around this process and considering her thoughts around their psychic meanings for both analyst and patient, I explore their clinical implications. I focus on the transferential iterations of these dynamics to consider Farhi's suggestion that an annealed bond needs to be established in the treatment of patients who have, early in life, failed to develop annealed identifications. This opens up questions around how such bonds can malignantly colonize the analyst's mind and psychic reality, raises questions of self-care in the analyst and contributes to prognostically anticipating certain sets of enactments in the course of long-term psychoanalyses.     

Modifications to the Technique of Analysis of BPD Adolescents

In this article I discuss certain modifications in technique that I applied working with borderline adolescents that enabled me to preserve the therapeutic bond and which, in my opinion, allowed me to obtain successful results. The differences with classical analysis are clear cut and concern, for example, the setting, the frequency of sessions, the nature of the transference, and modes of interpretation. It is important to keep our dialogue with the adolescent alive and avoid long silences that can be destructive. Part of the analyst’s work, in fact, consists in loaning his/her “images” (the product of his/her mind or imagination) to the concreteness of the patient. In the session these images seize something that is already present in the adolescent’s narrative as a creative hint to be developed that the analyst sees in the dialogue and deposits as a seed in his/her mind and which gives rise to a fruit produced by the analytical couple.     

How a Kleinian Analysis Also Tells a Relational and Intersubjective Story Commentary on Paper by Meira Likierman

Dr. Likierman narrates her case in ways that differ dramatically from the usual discourse of relational analysts, and she frames her work with constructs that derive primarily from contemporary Kleinian theory. Yet I believe that if we listen closely to her clinical material, we can see how she and her patient live out a deeply relational/intersubjective process—intersubjective in both Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood's (1987) broad sense and Benjamin's (1995) more developmental point of view.

I suggest is that there is real mutuality in their relationship, a reciprocal, unconscious, taking in of the mind and role of the other—a mutual change in which, paradoxically, both parties seem more real and, more deeply than ever, to express themselves. Ultimately, I think we can see that analyst and patient have “enacted” a slightly subversive, yet vital, mutual dance into and through precisely the paradoxes that Likierman recognizes as “forbidden” territory in the therapeutic relationship.     

Agnes Arber: form in the mind and the eye

Agnes Arber (1879–1960) was a British botanist who was a leading plant morphologist during the first half of the 20th century. She also wrote on the history and philosophy of botany. I argue in this article that her philosophical work on form and on how the work of the mind and the eye relate to each other in morphological research are relevant to the science of today. Arber's unusual blend of interests—in botany, history, philosophy, and art—put her in a unique position to examine issues of form. Even her unorthodox ideas on evolution can now be seen as fitting in well with discussions of natural selection as the predominant engine of evolutionary change. Arber's views also throw light on present work dealing with developmental plant genetics and with the study of protein form. I will further argue that her marginal position relative to institutional science, while it may have left her vulnerable to criticism, also made possible her deep philosophical reflections on morphology.     

‘It’s silly these doors don’t open’: a six-year-old girl emerges from a chronic state of emotional withdrawal

This clinical paper explores the way in which the first two years of a long-term psychotherapy helped six-year-old Anna to lessen her retreat into a chronic withdrawn emotional state. Over the course of the first year she would occasionally pick up the fridge from the doll’s house and try to open the doors, but because the fridge was actually a block of wood the doors could not open. In treatment, this inquiry came to represent the difficulties of engaging and making contact with a baby who found it very hard to feed. The author describes how, as Anna entered into a therapeutic relationship, it slowly became clear that there was an inner world jam-packed with persecutory anxieties and a family history of unmourned loss and trauma. Through fear Anna slammed the doors to her mind – to knowing herself – and by not feeding, Anna starved herself of opportunities for mental growth. It took some time for her to state, “it’s silly these doors don’t open, they should”. In the discussion of this clinical material the author draws on the work of Francis Tustin, Alessandra Piontelli and Marguerite Reid to consider the link between intergenerational and prenatal trauma and subsequent emotional disturbance in the child.     

The final challenge: ageing, dying, individuation

This paper is about the psychotherapy of a woman who passed from what Waddell (1998) would term 'older age' to 'later life', by which latter I mean the inevitable decline into dying and death. However unwelcome these developments may be to the individual, they are none the less activities of the soma, and therefore activities of the self-deintegrates. Much of the work of the psychotherapy centred around the task of enabling the patient to relate to and accept the bodily and emotional correlates of this process, which she tended to want to disown and deny by means of a split between mind and body along the lines of a long-standing internal depressive relationship. Permitting her contact with herself allowed her a much greater sense of internal company and peace, and arguably facilitated an easier process of dying, involving a self reconciled with itself rather than one at odds. Technically, the approach involved a greater concentration on the intrapsychic relationship rather than on the relationship between patient and analyst, and this is briefly discussed in terms of the work of Armando Ferrari who had himself died, shortly before the paper was first presented, and to whom therefore it is in part a homage.     

Therapeutic Action in the Work of a Playful Clinician: A Reflection on Dr. Silber’s Reimagining of Humpty Dumpty

ABSTRACT

In my discussion of Dr. Silber’s paper, Reimagining Humpty Dumpty: The Therapeutic Action of Play, I mirror Dr. Silber’s playful posture in her use of the Humpty Dumpty fable to talk about children and their care by society. My reflections on Dr. Silber’s therapeutic work with her two young patients focus on her co-creating meaning with each child’s parents as well as with the child. I discuss that by holding in her mind both the subjectivities of the child and his parents, Dr. Silber is able to practice a fundamentally relational therapy. I would have liked to have heard more about her emotional reactions in her work with both cases as another important dimension of her work. Finally, I emphasize through my play with Humpty Dumpty several ways that society can support children and families that are essential for their development: parental leave, developmentally approptiate expectations for children in school, and the facilitation and protection children’s open ended time and ability to play.     

Restoring Dyadic Connection in the Face of Multiple Disruptions: Accounting for Vicissitudes in the Therapist’s Capacity for Reflective Functioning

This article describes the working method of our study group comprised of former Chestnut Lodge Hospital therapists and focusing on understanding therapeutic work with severely disturbed adolescents. Using process material from one therapy session, the therapist’s commentary on her feelings and reactions in the session, and the group’s discussion of the work, we explore factors disrupting the therapist’s moment-to-moment capacity to maintain a theory of her own and the patient’s minds. We then discuss what allows her to refind her theory of mind in the face of the patient’s aggressive nihilism and her own sense of loss. Salutary factors included the therapist’s empathy for the patient’s shared sense of grief, the patient’s offering the therapist cues to his inner state, and the dyad’s capacity to tolerate the therapist’s vulnerability in the patient’s presence.     

The Importance of a Comprehensive Clinical Diagnosis for Group Psychotherapy of Borderline and Narcissistic Patients

This article presents a psychoanalytically oriented model of group treatment for female adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Two key treatment, issues—the survivor's struggle to trust her own mind and her tenacious allegiance to an omnipotent, all-bad self-representation—are used to illustrate ways in which the transference/countertransference matrix of the group permits members to enact, identify, and work through central internalized relational configurations. The group therapist's role is to maintain transitionality, a focus on process, and the capacity for play.     

Organism,normativity, plasticity: Canguilhem,Kant, Malabou

Some of Catherine Malabou’s recent work has developed her conception of plasticity (originally deployed in a reading of Hegelian Aufhebung) in relation to neuroscience. This development clarifies and advances her attempt to bring contemporary theory into dialogue with the natural sciences, while indirectly indicating her engagement with the French tradition in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, especially the work of Georges Canguilhem. I argue that we can see her development of plasticity as an answer to some specific shortcomings in Canguilhem’s conception of organic or biological normativity as advanced in The Normal and the Pathological. Such a view of plasticity shows its potential to provide the basis for a powerful critical engagement with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, self-transformation, subjectivation, and the general theory of norms.     

Feeling one's way in the world: Making a life

This paper argues for the psychoanalytic relevance of the works of James Gibson and Susanne Langer in explicating the early development of the human child and makes use of this combined formulation of development to think about psychoanalytic theory and practice. From the insights of James Gibson's ecological psychology we can appreciate the embodiment and embeddedness of the child's growing mind within both her physical and social environments. Making use of Susanne Langer's concept of feeling to redefine ecological psychology's perceptual counterpart to action allows us to understand the child's seamless transition into active participation in her culture, as she learns to project her animalian capacity to feel into intersubjectively defined forms of behavior and experience with others. The paper presents a lengthy exposition of Gibson's ecological psychology, before explaining Langer's thinking and launching into the combined insights of these scholars to explicate the nature of the child's mind as she feels her way in the world and makes a life for herself within it. This is the life she will be able to remake in the embeddedness of a psychoanalytic therapeutic relationship where she can learn to feel her way in the world in a new light.     

The loss of the transitional object - Some thoughts about transitional and ‘pre-transitional’ phenomena

This paper examines the use made of the transitional object in order to construct a coherent sense of self. Examples are cited from both Freud's and Winnicott's work about the use of an object to manage separations and extend a sense of self. Then some current case material is presented to make sense of the meaning of a patient's strong attachment to a negative transitional object in childhood. Its influence on her current state of mind and relationships is explored. A theoretical term, ‘the existential object’, is introduced to make sense of her use of objects. Contemporary thinking about the loss of the mother in early childhood and its influence on the sense of self is explored with reference to Andre Green's work, which is then related to Freud's and Winnicott's earlier thinking on the subject.     

Reclaiming a Mind: Commentary on Paper by Yvette Esprey

In exploring the problem of thinking in black and white we encounter the difficulty of maintaining our subjectivity as good racialized whites. This commentary follows the journey that Yvette Esprey takes us on to reclaim her thinking mind and reconstruct an authentic racialized self. In addition, this work expands on the concept of racism as a form of abjection in which the hated parts of self that are extruded paradoxically come to construct the self.     

Positive Psychology and Indian Psychology In Need of Mutual Reinforcement

The current practices of positive psychology are woven into the behavioural fabric in the form of numerous strategies/practices without much theoretical foundation. Positive psychology moved from repair to reconstruction, from the negative side of human nature to its positive aspect. Indian psychology is relevant as it has the necessary meta-theoretical framework to sustain the goals of positive psychology. It proposes that mind may be controlled by deconstructing the ego and cultivating altruism by practicing selfless work, total absorption of the mind by devotion or meditation. When the ego is deconstructed, ignorance is removed and the person regains her inherent freedom and moves towards perfection. This position allows going beyond hedonistic pleasures to define happiness and combining material prosperity with moral sensitivity. To this end this paper brings out the points of contact between positive psychology and Indian psychology and argues for new initiatives.     

Naughty Girls Commentary on Paper by Jackie L. Cohen

In response to Cohen's rich and evocative presentation of her case of Lisa, I offer some additional perspectives on the material. Labeling Lisa a “naughty girl,” I explore the relevance of Winnicott's notions of the antisocial tendency and of the pathology of self-sufficiency, something Corrigan and I have called the mind object. I have looked at the treatment in terms of the facilitation of regression to dependence and a child's reconnection to her body. Herzog's concept of father hunger leads me to an exploration of Lisa's finding the father in her therapist, which helps her separate from omnipotent internal objects and accept the individuality of the other. Finally, inspired by Cohen's characterization of her treatment of Lisa as “relational and action oriented,” I attempt to review what I believe is essential to child treatment and what is beautifully illustrated in Cohen's work.