Slips of the analyst.

Understanding the analyst's work and its vicissitudes has been a major focus of recent psychoanalytic writing. This study on slips of the analyst represents an attempt to advance our understanding of analytic work. The slips described support the view that slips reflect not simply contributions from instinctual life, but active work-related goals of the analyst in carrying out the analytic tasks. Countertransference is discussed as reflected in the disturbance of intentionality betrayed by the occurrence of a slip. The essential role of the analyst's understanding his or her own reactions is emphasized.     

Pure reason and contemporary philosophy of religion: the rational striving in and for truth

This essay urges contemporary philosophers of religion to rethink the role that Kant’s critical philosophy has played both in establishing the analytic nature of modern philosophy and in developing a critique of reason’s drive for the unconditioned. In particular, the essay demonstrates the contribution that Kant and other modern rationalists such as Spinoza can still make today to our rational striving in and for truth. This demonstration focuses on a recent group of analytic philosophers of religion who have labelled their own work ‘analytic theology’ and have generated new debates, including new arguments about Kant bridging philosophy and theology. Cultivation of a reflective critical openness is encouraged here; this is a practice for checking reason’s overly ambitious claims about God.     

“What Do These Analysts Want?” A Response to Levine and Wilson on Desire and Influence

The target paper had the purpose of drawing attention to something “beyond countertransference”—the impact of the therapist’s psychology on the treatment, not in reaction to the patient, but as desires and defenses that operate throughout. The illustrative issue was a speculation that my development and analytic engagement carried elements that led me to interact with women patients in a way that increased the likelihood of their conceiving. The respondents reacted differently to the provocative aspect of this idea, but have in common a recognition of the analyst’s desire as an important part of the relationship. A further case vignette is introduced in this reply to examine some of the points raised by the respondents, in particular how the analyst’s desire may be expressed in a form that is modulated by the analytic role and at the same time has an impact on the patient’s life decisions. In sum, we are players in the drama of analytic work, and the more we think about what and how we are ourselves in treatments, the more informed our inevitable impact will be.     

Reflections on the role of the analytic setting in the light of COVID-19

There have been many reflections, both individual and collective within our Institutes, on the effects on our work with patients caused by COVID-19 and the requirement to move suddenly from the setting of our own consulting rooms to working with patients online (see also, the previous issue of this Journal). This paper focuses on what we have learned from these experiences that can add to our knowledge about the role of the setting in analytic work. Drawing on Bleger’s (1967) seminal paper highlighting the usual setting as a mute projection carrier for primitive wishes and affects, the paper explores how different patients have reacted to the loss of the analyst as the guardian of the setting and in particular as an embodied presence. Some key questions and challenges for both patients and analysts during the pandemic, when ‘the setting begins to weep’, are explored.     

The Write of Passage From Candidate to Analyst: The Experience of Writing Analytic Process

This article describes my experience of learning to write analytic process. It illustrates how the depth of understanding I achieved from learning to write transparently about analytic work was instrumental in the consolidation of my analytic training and my development of an analytic identity. Practicing analysis requires letting our minds function at multiple levels—integrating, synthesizing, free-associating, attending, and maintaining our own reverie—simultaneously. This is a large task for any analyst, much less a beginning analyst. Writing about this process necessitates not only understanding what has transpired in our offices with our patients but also developing the ability to explain that intimate and unique interpersonal dyad to our peers. Learning to do analytic work is not the same as learning to write about it; and writing about psychoanalytic process is very different from participating in it (Reiser, 2000). The goal of writing analytic process is not primarily to tell the story of the patient but to demonstrate our thinking, experience, and understanding as analysts. To do this requires both a depth of understanding of what we do and a mastery of analytic process.

While there may be different ways to synthesize and integrate our analytic training and to accomplish the significant task of progressing from candidate to analyst, learning to write analytic process was pivotal for me. It was a “rite of passage,” culminating in the development of an increased sense of identity, maturity, and confidence as an analyst.     

The Ideal Patient and the Realities of Clinical Work

As candidates, and later as practicing analysts, we filter the idea of what patients, analysts, and the analytic process should look like through our own ego ideal. Literature that is often stilted toward a theoretical ideal further muds the picture. Finally, we are often confused by the quest for the perfect patient who meets the criteria for analyzability outlined by our training institute, our supervisors, our teachers, and our own demanding superegos. This paper examines several cases of clinical work that falls far short of any ideal. However, these realistic snapshots of day-to-day clinical work are too important to be ignored as simply failed cases with unanalyzable patients. Often, even the briefest of clinical encounters enrich the analyst's understanding of human functioning and occasionally benefits the patient as well. If the analyst uses the analytic stance with all of his patients, a useful analytic discourse may take place with some of them. These cases are not standard or complete analytic treatments, but the results are often valuable to the practitioner and potentially helpful to the patient.     

Affective Honesty and Compassion Come in Many Forms: Discussion of “Love (and Hate) With the Proper Stranger: Affective Honesty and Enactment,” By Holly Levenkron,L.I.C.S.W.

Holly Levenkron's work with her patient, Ali, beautifully illustrates one way that a creative analyst makes superb use of her own experience to communicate and negotiate with great affective honesty. Holly's analytic style emphasizes the effective use of a particular kind of self-disclosure and a way of thinking about intersubjectivity and enactment associated with the contemporary Relational movement. Yet, it may be Holly's personal willingness to allow the analytic relationship to profoundly destabilize and influence her that most engages Ali in their work.

An imaginary analytic scenario is described with an analyst, Dr. X, who like Holly is destabilized by Ali but whose thinking about intersubjectivity and enactment emphasizes an empathic immersion in Ali's experience of the analytic relationship. In contrast to Holly, Dr. X focuses primarily on grasping and interpreting the adaptive strivings that animate Ali's differently organized subjective world.

The underlying capacity to acknowledge and use the analyst's own version of the patient's issues may also characterize analyses such as that of the hypothetical Dr. X—in style that are more explicitly “interpretive” (less confrontative) than Holly's work. These two contrasting approaches highlight the wide range of ways to think about intersubjectivity, enactment, and affective honesty in the analytic process.     

The patient's part in analytic process: the influence of the analyst's expectations.

The psychoanalyst's expectations of the patient are complex and crucial to the work of analysis. These expectations, operating at a level generally outside the consciousness of patient and analyst, are part of the "microstructure" of analysis, the interactional give-and-take that brings about change. The view taken here is that analytic process is necessarily interactive, as well as intrapsychic. In addition to transference-countertransference motivations, both parties to an analysis operate in a social context that prescribes a range of desired and undesired behavior. The analyst brings to the interaction professional analytic attitudes about how to listen and act, and a set of expectations of the patient. These attitudes and expectations modulate subjective reactions to the patient's transferentially driven actions, and influence the expression of countertransference. The mutative process of psychoanalysis involves the action of these attitudes and expectations on the patient, both in ways specific to individuals and in more general ways. Such expectations lie behind analytic tactics and, though not often written of, are part of the oral tradition of psychoanalysis. Here the expected patient role is described in terms of five bipolar continua: (1) reporting and editing; (2) transferring and containing; (3) thinking about oneself and thinking about the analyst; (4) regressing and listening/self-observing; (5) initiating trial action and mediating among inner states. The activity and thinking of the dyad move constantly along these continua. A clinical example from the beginning of an hour illustrates how these expectancies emerge in analytic work.     

Countertransference, empathy, and the analytic ideal: the impact of life stresses on analytic capability

Analysts' emotional attitudes toward countertransference issues are influenced by unduly perfectionistic ideals that are partly derived from the early period of psychoanalytic theory. Analysts' unconscious receptivity, whether of the beneficially empathic kind or the disadvantageous countertransference variety, is a reflection of a dynamic internal state. This fundamental relationship between empathy and countertransference is illustrated with examples. Important events that occur in the life of the analyst, by virtue of their impact on his own central compromise formations, cannot but affect his analytic functioning. Minor disturbances in analytic capability are commonplace and do not significantly handicap effective work.     

How wide is the widening scope of psychoanalysis and how solid is its structural model? Some concerns and observations

The author advances the thesis that in the past 35 years there has been a relatively silent but nonetheless significant movement within the mainstream of American psychoanalysis toward a more "modest" position. This movement has been stimulated from different sources, sometimes with diverse goals and different programs. One determinant was the reaction to the post-World War II euphoria in regard to psychoanalysis and its possible therapeutic powers. Another element has been the ongoing consolidation of our knowledge and understanding of the ego-psychological, structural-model approach to analytic theory and technique, an approach which emphasizes both intrapsychic conflict and compromise formations. A consequence of this more modest position has been a greater appreciation of the limitations of psychoanalysis as well as the significance of those limitations. This more realistic appraisal of psychoanalysis may not have encouraged the widening scope of the indications for analysis, but the enhanced understanding of its limitations offers the promise of more effective psychoanalytic work in areas that have not been considered ideal for the so-called "traditional" analysis. It is suggested that more sophisticated approaches in the analysis of resistance and character, of "conflict" (in distinction to "diagnoses"), together with a more applicable understanding of the psychoanalytic process, can all contribute to a deepening, if not necessarily widening, of our psychoanalytic endeavors.     

INTUITING THE TRUTH OF WHAT'S HAPPENING: ON BION'S “NOTES ON MEMORY AND DESIRE”

Bion's “Notes on Memory and Desire” (1967a) is an impossible paper that this article's author has struggled with for decades. He views the paper, only two and a half pages in length, as a landmark contribution. Despite its title—and its infamous dictates to resist the impulse to remember past sessions and desire for “results”—the paper is not, most importantly, about memory and desire. It proposes a new analytic methodology that supplants awareness from its central role in the analytic process and, in its place, instates the analyst's (largely unconscious) work of intuiting the (unconscious) psychic reality of the present moment by becoming at one with it. This article's clinical examples, provided from the author's own work, illustrate something of his ways of talking with his patients.     

The Analyst's Secret Delinquencies

Despite a burgeoning literature on major analytic boundary violations, there has been little investigation of what might be called analytic delinquencies or misdemeanors—the small and virtually ubiquitous ways in which analysts deliberately withdraw from the therapeutic endeavor. I consider the impact of professional misdemeanors on patient and analyst and compare both with more serious analytic “crimes” and enactments. Professional delinquencies may reflect a therapeutic reenactment, an expression of the analyst's split-off or disavowed need, or an unconscious attempt to self-regulate or to negotiate space within the constraints of the treatment setting. Because the professional ideal leaves so little room for the analyst's humanity, it is often difficult for us to address and work with evidence of our own need when it clashes with what we regard as the analytic contract.     

Dreams and the holistic nature of interpersonal psychoanalytic experience

Patients’ dreams and analysts’ dreams about patients are assumed to reflect each analytic participant's attitude and psychic conduct toward the other, and an unconscious overlapping of psychic issues and struggles between them as well. This makes it possible to deal with dreams from one‐person and two‐person models of psychological functioning, as well as from an additional psychic dimension that is assumed to be a creation of the analysis itself. As a source of freely moving experience within both participants, one that is assumed to have a life and direction of its own, this latter dimension of analysis permits patient and analyst to undergo more freely the actual experience of the treatment as a modality that is separate from and prior to positivistically grounded determinations that can be made about either the patient or analyst individually, or about the two of them jointly.

This dimension of analysis is said also to reflect a holism that characterizes conscious and unconscious psychoanalytic experience. Dreams and unconsciously generated dreamlike clinical phenomena are presented to try to illustrate this holistic character of analytic work, and to show how either participant's psychic productions maybe used to evoke significant experiences and further clinical knowledge.     

Psychologism and Completeness in the Arts

When is an artwork complete? Most hold that the correct answer to this question is psychological in nature. A work is said to be complete just in case the artist regards it as complete or is appropriately disposed to act as if he or she did. Even though this view seems strongly supported by metaphysical, epistemological, and normative considerations, this article argues that such psychologism about completeness is mistaken, fundamentally, because it cannot make sense of the artist's own perspective on his or her work. For the artist, the question is not about his or her own psychology, but about the character of the work and the context in which he or she works. A nonpsychological account of completeness, on which completeness is a question of whether the work satisfies the conditions implicit in the artist's plan, avoids this problem and is equally or better able to explain the metaphysical, epistemic, and normative phenomena which appeared to support psychologism.     

试论宋儒人文性格的时代特征

受时代变迁和社会环境的影响,宋儒的人文性格呈现出鲜明的时代特质。他们所表现出来的“仕以行道”、以天下为己任的理想与豪情,严格的道德自律精神,深沉、浓重的忧患意识,参禅悟道、争相趋禅之风尚,从一定意义上讲,都与当时的社会文化环境密切相联。宋儒人文性格之形成与涵养,涵摄了个人自身和与之相应的社会文化现象的多重因素。     

Der Stellvertreter

Based on the analytic work on colleagues the author investigates a writer’s block of German psychoanalysts when writing about their patients. In the process of their own therapeutic analysis, an inhibition of association in these psychoanalysts comes to the fore by them falling into the professional role and talking about their patients. The accounts of these colleagues on their own patients function as a doubled imago revealing the unconscious conflicts of the patients as well as acting as a proxy of the psychoanalysts’ impulses, affects and foreclosed memories in their own analysis. The inhibition of thinking, leading to a writer’s block, is the result of the correspondence of the trauma of the patient with the trauma of the analyst when the transference-countertransference relationship evokes annihilation anxieties in the psychoanalyst. Therefore the writer’s block of these psychoanalysts is rooted in their professional work and is the result of the internalization of precarious emotional contents of their patients. The author examines the role of institutionalized psychoanalysis in developing a professional writer’s block, and the results of the paper highlight the need of an emotionally supporting professional environment for the psychoanalyst during his training and his practice work.     

James Astor in conversation with Warren Colman

In this interview with Warren Colman, James Astor speaks about his development as a Jungian analyst from his own experience of personal analysis in the 1960s to his recent retirement from clinical practice. The discussion covers his long association with Michael Fordham, the child analytic training at the SAP, the infant observation seminars with Fordham and Gianna Henry through which Fordham was able to make new discoveries about infant development, his experience of supervision with Donald Meltzer and the development of his own thinking through a series of papers on the analytic process, supervision and the relation between language and truth. The interview concludes with reflections about the legacy of Michael Fordham and the future of analytic work.     

The clinical concept of analytic process: A conceptual investigation1

The authors discuss the term ‘analytic process’, confi rming the variability of the meanings ascribed to it. Although all the psychoanalysts of this and previous times acknowledge the existence of something called analytic process, as well as its importance, it has not been possible up to now to establish a consensual defi nition of it. The defi nitions are not only numberless, they also contradict one another. The possible advantages to analytic theory and practice proceeding from a uniform concept are incontrovertible. A review of the subject in the psychoanalytic literature has been performed. A conceptual study concerning the term, carried out among members of a psychoanalytic society affi liated to the IPA is presented, no consensual conceptualization for the term analytic process having been found. The subjects referred to the term as deriving from a variety of elements, some in common, but there was no agreement regarding the elements themselves. There was consensus regarding the role of the analytical relationship in the process, considered fundamental, as well as that of the extent to which the individual life experiences in that relationship defi ne the unique character acquired by the process within it.     

The analytic present in psychoanalytic reconstructions of the historical past.

The psychoanalytic reconstruction of specific influential past events has been a regular feature of psychoanalytic practice from its inception. More recently, as reconstructions of incestuous sexual abuse have become more frequent, the reconstructive process has attracted attention, and doubts have been expressed about the validity of the analytic evidence used to substantiate their inference. Over the years, psychoanalytic discourse about the adequacy of this evidence has moved from Freud's uneasy confidence to a rather sharply divided debate between advocates and skeptics. From beyond psychoanalysis, memory research raises questions about the validity of this evidence, and research on influence raises questions about the procedures by which it has been collected. A reexamination of several cases in which reconstructions emerged from unstable therapeutic circumstances leads to the conjecture that dynamics located in the analytic present may have been displaced to the historical past. Although logically "truth in the past" need not foreclose on "truth in the present," in practice, once a reconstruction surfaces, the latter seems to disappear behind the former.     

亲子间教育期望差异对小学生情感幸福感的影响:学业成绩和学业自我效能感的中介作用

以891名河北省衡水市某小学4~6年级学生为研究对象，采用问卷调查的方式，考察了亲子间教育期望差异对小学生情感幸福感的影响，以及学业成绩和学业自我效能感的多重中介作用。结果发现：（1）亲子间教育期望差异影响小学生情感幸福感，与感知到的父母教育期望和自我教育期望一致相比，当感知到的父母教育期望高于自我教育期望时，小学生的积极情感水平更低而消极情感水平更高；（2）学业成绩和学业自我效能感在“感知到的父母教育期望 > 自我教育期望”这一差异方向与积极情感间起部分中介作用，在“感知到的父母教育期望 > 自我教育期望”与消极情感间起完全中介作用。具体而言，“感知到的父母教育期望 > 自我教育期望”可直接影响积极情感，还可通过学业成绩和学业自我效能感的链式中介作用以及学业自我效能感的独立中介作用间接影响积极情感；同时，“感知到的父母教育期望 > 自我教育期望”可通过学业成绩和学业自我效能感的链式中介作用、学业自我效能感的独立中介作用以及学业成绩的独立中介作用影响消极情感。