Transformative Aspects of Our Own Analyses and Their Resonance in Our Work With Our Patients

As psychoanalysts, our own relational stories, our “wounds that must serve as tools” (Harris, 2009 Harris, A. April 2009. “Keynote address at the meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association, Toronto, Canada.”. In You must remember this April,  [Google Scholar]), represent both our greatest liabilities and potential for change, at times facilitating and at times impeding our capacity to engage deeply in the analytic process. Transformative aspects of our personal analysis dwell, often unconsciously or preconsciously, in the analyst, generating unanticipated opportunities in our work with our patients. In this paper, the author describes how a profound piece of work in her own analysis around healing in her relationship with her young son resonated in her work with a long-term patient, enlivening and deepening the treatment. The author explores how she drew on the interpenetrating experiences of analyst, patient, mother, and child, helping her to deconstruct a complex enactment with her patient, and opening up potential space. In the process, her patient discovered new places within herself, which enabled her to reach out to her vulnerable teenage son in new and reparative ways.     

Our epistemic goal

David Lewis's modal realism claims that nothing can exist in more than one world or time, and that statements about how something would have been are to be analysed in terms of its counterpart. I first explain why the counterpart relation depends on de re modal statements in an intensional language, so that intuitive properties of similarity relations cannot be used to show that the counterpart relation is not an equivalence relation. I then look at test sentences in (the intensional) natural language, and show that none of them provide compelling evidence that a counterpart semantics is needed.     

Our Journey Ahead

This text is an edited version of a keynote address given in Paris on 12 March 2019 to a colloquium on “Justice and Justification” organized by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Ecumenism (ISEO, according to its acronym in French) to mark the 20th anniversary of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) between Catholics and Lutherans in 1999. The article explores the origins and the reception of the JDDJ, as well as the opportunities it offers for Christians of all denominations today. It goes on to remember the Joint Commemoration of the Reformation by Lutherans and Catholics in 2016 in Lund and Malmö, Sweden, and how this was influenced by the insights gained from the Lutheran–Mennonite dialogue. The address notes how since the signing of the Joint Declaration in 1999, three other Christian World Communions have joined the declaration and highlights various upcoming anniversaries, including the 500th anniversaries of the Diet of Worms in 2021, and of the Augsburg Confession in 2030.     

Our Cosmic Insignificance

The universe that surrounds us is vast, and we are so very small. When we reflect on the vastness of the universe, our humdrum cosmic location, and the inevitable future demise of humanity, our lives can seem utterly insignificant. Many philosophers assume that such worries about our significance reflect a banal metaethical confusion. They dismiss the very idea of cosmic significance. This, I argue, is a mistake. Worries about cosmic insignificance do not express metaethical worries about objectivity or nihilism, and we can make good sense of the idea of cosmic significance and its absence. It is also possible to explain why the vastness of the universe can make us feel insignificant. This impression does turn out to be mistaken, but not for the reasons typically assumed. In fact, we might be of immense cosmic significance—though we cannot, at this point, tell whether this is the case.