Incognito or not? the patient's subjective experience of the analyst's private life

This paper examines the meaning for the patient of the analyst's personal life and personality which are ostensibly banished from the consulting room. The therapist has a not‐always‐so‐secret “secret life”; that the patient is supposed to “not know”; about. Yet, more or less unconscious perceptions, impressions, and fantasies about extratherapeutic aspects of the analyst are omnipresent and significantly color the psychoanalytic enterprise.

Moreover the analyst as a person generally plays a critical and underacknowledged role in the patient's experience of the endeavor. Constructing multiple overlapping images of the analyst and of the analytic relationship, the patient discovers himself or herself in the matrix of these relationships with various images of the analytic other. The analysand is motivated to make sense of the analyst as wholly as possible, the better to place into context the analyst's interventions. The patient's resulting view of the analyst's subjective experience acts as a lens that filters and subtly alters the meaning of the analyst's communications.

I illustrate these points by relating my work with a patient whose dreams uncannily picked up on a (consciously) unknown aspect of my private life—my having a handicapped son. The treatment thereafter centered on the patient's identification with my child (as someone “disabled") and on the meaning of her having dreamt something so personal about her therapist.     

Hume's Reflections on the Identity and Simplicity of Mind1

The article presents a new interpretation of Hume's treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the “Appendix” to the Treatise. Hume's project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. the belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the “vulgar” who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as to think of their perceptions. the author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the “Appendix.” He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the “Appendix” must meet.     

How Change Happens: Controlling Images,Mutuality, and Power

SUMMARY

Change is inevitable but it can go in a positive direction toward growth or in a negative direction. Extending Patricia Hill Collins' concept of controlling images (2000), we can see how these images interact with relational images and strategies of disconnection to obstruct growth on both the societal and the personal level. In therapy, change is defined as movement-in-relationship toward better connection; and increased connection leads to growth. Several aspects of therapy that lead to deeper and wider connection are explored, especially increasing the patient's power. Prior versions of parts of this article were presented at the Jean Baker Miller Summer Training Institutes in 2001 and 2002 and at the 2002 Learning from Women Conference sponsored by the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute and the Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

As therapists, we're “in the business” of change–change for the better. That's our goal. Another word for change for the better is growth. Change is the essence of life. It is most obvious in children but it is a necessity through all of life. Change will occur inevitably but it can go in a positive or a negative direction. Further, I believe change toward growth creates pleasure. We feel most alive and zestful when we are engaged in this expanding activity.     

The concept of unlivability: A reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952)

From a close reading of Frantz Fanon's “The North African Syndrome” (1952), this article draws out Fanon's understanding of “death in life” to suggest that a concept of unlivability in the present must account for the temporal duration of racialized and colonized experiences of pain and trauma. It is thus critical of Judith Butler's and Frédéric Worms's discussion of unlivability in The Livable and The Unlivable (2023) for not centering a phenomenological study of the testimonies of the oppressed. I argue for a greater engagement with Fanon on the longue durée of racial and colonial violence enacted on the bodies, psyches, and histories of racialized and colonized peoples. This article concludes by pointing to possibilities for a shared unlivability in a shared temporality, with potential to move beyond refusal and toward resistance to the colonial control over time.     

Longing for the Feminine: Reflections on Love,Sexual Orientation,Individuation, and the Soul

This article is a collaboration that represents several years of dialogue about our topic, alongside the individual depth work done by each of us to overcome the negativities that often poison collaborations and feeling connections: envy, enmeshment, and passivity. It is the unique expression of two women working together in a co-creative process pulsed by feminine principles. Diane is a Jungian analyst and has spent her life close to the unconscious. Fran is a writer, educator, and lifelong student of mystical paths. The article gives an account of Diane's longing for the divine feminine and the particular meaning it has for her as a lesbian in this time of global upheaval. In particular, her story highlights the psychic suffering that individuals go through when their same-sex attractions and love orientation are judged as psychologically “immature” or religiously “sinful.” Neither Christian-based “conversion therapy” nor Jungian analysis turned Diane into a heterosexual woman. Her story reveals the benefit of Jung's depth psychology even as it underscores the singularity of every person's individuation process. The article's unusual format is a tandem of Diane's first-person sharing of her soul's journey and Fran's witnessing of the journey's profound significance. We found that both voices were needed. Truth requires not only the one who lives a journey with courage but also the one who witnesses it with a loving heart. Ultimately, we see the personal journeys of gays and lesbians as significant to the larger context of the evolution of human consciousness.     

Socialized to Die Younger? Hypermasculinity and Men's Health

This article presents recent statistics concerning average life expectancies of men and women and leading causes of death among men; reviews a number of articles that propose “causes” and “cures” for higher male mortality; suggests that issues surrounding men's health are integrally related to traditional masculine socialization, hypermasculinity, and societal devaluation of feminine behaviors; and proposes an interactional model of male mortality based on Levi's (1974) diathesis-stress model of illness.     

Christology and Anti‐Humanism

This article engages the current anti‐humanist or post‐human ethos from the point of view of Christology. Invoking Alain Badiou's claim that “the man of humanism has not survived the twentieth century”, it argues that the death of “the man of humanism” ushers in a situation in which the Christian proposal can be clarified in two crucial ways: (1) Christology is the core of Christian anthropology, and therefore must be the first and last word of the Church's formulation of her answer to the question that is every human life; (2) there is no neutral “human” ground in which the Church can carry on a discourse about “humanism” or “natural law”. The current situation thus forces a theological decision: either the death of man or the God‐Man.     

The Dwelling Places of Self-Experience

Instead of dichotomizing psychic life as either intrapsychic or interpersonal, I suggest we think in terms of a continuum of self-experience from the most private or interior to the most public or exterior. I articulate four “domains”—phenomenologic, intrapersonal, interpsychic, and interpersonal—that constitute this spectrum of self-experience. Each domain lends a specific quality to one's internal life, and together (but in varying proportions) they constitute the psychic dwelling place unique to a given individual. This article illustrates how the variability among our patients in their habitual dwelling places may explain their diverse responses to differing analytic stances, interpretive approaches, and indeed, different analysts. A clinician's awareness of his or her own personal proclivity toward a more interior or more exterior orientation helps promote optimal contact with the patient's psychic life.     

How the “Not Religious” Experience and Witness Suffering and Death: Case Studies

ABSTRACT

This article is based on a subset of a multi-site (8), multi-year (4) research study that explored the cultural construction of dying and death in long-term care facilities. In open-ended interviews with residents and staff members, we learned how four individuals who describe themselves as “not religious” respond to queries about the meaning of suffering and death while working and living in long-term care.

We present case studies of two residents and two staff members from one of the sites–a secular, for-profit nursing home–who described themselves as not religious. We offer a brief history of their lives and daily activities, and present their responses to our queries about dying and death.

A finding of this article is that the nonreligious residents and staff members discussed here found significance in personal meaning systems developed through past, positive life events and present uncertainty about suffering and death. The self-described “not religious” provide another perspective on facing the end of life.     

Death education in American medical schools: Tolstoy's challenge to Kübler-Ross

No one has done more to shape contemporary physicians' and nurses' understandings of dying and death than Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. A comparison of her views to those of another era, as delineated by Leo Tolstoy, raises questions concerning Kübler-Ross' five-stage theory and points out inadequacies in current medical education and in the values that shape American culture. According to Kübler-Ross, the dying person angrily asks “Why me?” Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych is more concerned about the implications for cosmic justice than for self-perpetuation, and angrily asks “Why death?” One's sadness is born of depression (sadness over the nearness of one's death), the other's is born of despair (sadness over the apparent meaninglessness of life or of life as one has lived it). Kübler-Ross and Tolstoy also differ in their views of what can be done to “sweeten the pill,” whether “acceptance” is the best way to face death, and whether death ought to be viewed as a barrier to self-fulfillment or a means of self-transcendence.     

Kierkegaard,MacIntyre and Narrative Unity—Reply to Lippitt

In a recent article in this journal, John Lippitt mounts a forceful argument against narrativist approaches to issues in personal identity and practical deliberation, with specific reference to the application of such approaches in the interpretation of Kierkegaard's writings. The present critical discussion piece addresses two points in Lippitt's argument. First, it seeks to meet Lippitt's challenge to clarify the notion of “a whole life” as this figures in narrativist positions. Second, it clarifies the sense in which narrative unity, and even selfhood, may be a matter of degree. It then uses this latter insight to sketch a defense of the claim that narrativity may indeed play a crucial role in Kierkegaard's distinction between ethical and aesthetic ways of life.     

Recoupling in Mid‐Life and Beyond: From Love at Last to Not So Fast

Divorce rates have dropped in the United States, except for couples over 50 where they are rising steeply, along with rates of late‐life recoupling. Both stepcouples and their young adult and adult children in new older stepfamilies are often surprised to find themselves facing many of the same challenges that younger stepfamilies do. Some challenges are even intensified by the decades‐long relationships and additional layers of extended family that come with recoupling after mid‐life. Stepfamilies formed in later life must also negotiate decisions about estate planning and elder care among stakeholders who often have sharply divergent agendas before there is time to establish trusting relationships. This article describes the “normal” challenges facing stepcouples who come together over age 50. It provides evidence‐informed guidance for therapists in meeting these challenges on three levels of clinical work: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational. As in younger stepfamilies, “family therapy” must usually begin in subsystems—often the adult stepcouple and parent–adult child. The article then describes a particularly fraught subgroup of recouplers: over‐50 fathers and their new partners, where the dad's young adult or adult daughter is very unhappy with his new relationship. In these latter stepfamilies, father–daughter repair must precede stepfamily bonding. Stepfamilies that are preceded by a partner's death and those that begin with affairs are also discussed. Finally, some “easy wrong turns” for therapists are described.     

The dream between “here‐and‐now” and “there‐and‐then”

The analysand recounts his/her dream now, and here, in the setting. Though a dream may be recounted repeatedly, the human situation in which the recounting takes place is unrepeatable. Each moment of the analytic relationship is unique, and the recounting is essentially relational. Even if the dreamer were to read from a written text, his/her voice and non‐verbal aspects would render the communication unique. Not only the recounting but also the content recounted may present relational aspects, manifest or latent, but of a relational nature different from that of the session “here‐ and‐now”. The dream dreamt belongs to the “there‐and‐then”, and its analysis, like every analysis, implies an objectification. The analyst reacts to the recounted dream, trying to objectify it in its “there‐and‐then” and also inviting the dreamer to a common task. Working on the manifest content, free associations and interpretations of symbols, they voyage through the time and space of the analysand's life. The recounted dream involves the “here‐and‐now” of the session and asks to be meaningful as a cue in the analytic dialogue (what is the meaning of recounting this dream at this moment). At the same time it refers back to the dream dreamt, to a “there‐and‐then” which, if it is not to remain “an unopened letter”, must be received as an enigmatic challenge and a window on the unconscious, open and ready to close. Thinking of an opening of the dreamer's unconscious the analyst may find himself/herself faced with an opening of his/her own unconscious.     

“Ablation of the Parental Images”: A Secret Core in Charles Rycroft’s Psychoanalytic Thought

This article arises from the need to “present” (that is, to read again in a “present and actual” light) the paper, “Why Analysts Need Their Patients' Transferences” by Charles Rycroft (which first appeared in 1993 and is re-published in this Special Issue), and is therefore strictly connected to the ideas the latter contains. The authors, on the one hand, outline the stages of the journey that took Rycroft to elaborate the concept of “ablation of the parental images”, and on the other, retrace his personal “analytic genealogy” and discover a “missing forefather”, Sándor Ferenczi, who has represented for a long time a direct “missing link” in the history of psychoanalysis.     

Montague Ullman's Dream Appreciation

American psychiatrist Montague Ullman viewed dreams as spontaneous creative expressions of one's current life situation and developed a method of working with them the outcome of which he felt to be superior to interpretation. He called this outcome dream appreciation. It (a) was arrived at by the dreamer, not some professional; (b) didn't attempt to understand the dream in terms of any established body of theory, but tried to make sense of it in terms of the dreamer's life; and (c) reunited the dreamer with what was felt to be deepest and most true in herself and brought this out into her life. Examples exist in the literature of the first two aspects. Although the third aspect characterizes every well-run Ullman group, the literature contains not a single convincing example of it. This article provides one.     

The Orphan Archetype

This article explores the archetype of the orphan and traces it through myth, story, fairy tale, literature, and perhaps most importantly, through the author's personal experience. This is a treatment of the theme of abandonment that details the “inner orphan's” predicament. Rothenberg, a Jungian analyst, speaks from the depths when she says: “It is only when one is truly alone that the creative potential that is carried deep inside has the space and room to emerge into the light of day.”     

THE BIBLICAL ROOTS OF LOCKE'S THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

Locke's consciousness‐based theory of personal identity resulted not only from his agnosticism on substance, but also from his biblical theology. This theory was intended to complement and sustain Locke's moral and theological commitments to a system of otherworldly rewards and sanctions as revealed in Scripture. Moreover, he inferred mortalist ideas from the Bible, rejecting the resurrection of the same body and maintaining that the soul dies at physical death and will be resurrected by divine miracle. Accordingly, personal identity is neither in the soul, nor in the body, nor in a union of soul and body. To Locke, personal identity is in consciousness, which, extending “backwards to any past Action or Thought,” enables the self, both in this life and upon resurrection for the Last Judgment, to recognize that “it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done” (Essay II.xxvii.9).     

Beloved of the Beloved: When the Male Muse Appears

Serious illness puts us in touch with an acute sense of our own vulnerability and mortality. Loss of ego identity creates an urgent longing to find meaning within the experience of illness or impending death. Inspired by his own near-death experiences in later life, Jung wrote about the goal of the second half of life: “to be ready to die with life.” This article reflects upon three individuals’ stories illustrating how palliative care embraces the needs of the whole person and prepares individuals to participate consciously in their final journey in life. This interprofessional model of care can help individuals and their loved ones experience the highest quality of life possible and bring completion to life's relationships. These stories demonstrate a synergy between Jung's beliefs regarding the goal of the second half of life and the soul work necessary for healing, wholeness, and individuation.     

REX

This article is based on personal experience, an experience of grief and now, years later, an understanding of its transformative power in one's life. It is a true story and began some 25 years ago. As those who have gone through grief themselves know, it never ceases, it only changes, moves through its own cycles and permeates one's life. It almost has a life of its own within one's daily tasks. Eventually, grief can become a subtle and profound force in the act of living that is no longer felt as loss but as gain. In this story, I wish to present the idea that the relationship between the grieved and the person who has died continues to evolve and grow after the death process.