State of the Hope: The New Bad Object in the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis

Until recently, most psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the analyst as a new object have tended to equate newness with good experience and safety. Recent papers in the relational literature have explored not only the therapeutic value, but also the inevitability of the patient's experience of the analyst as bad, as well as the analyst's participation in this experience. This author examines the multifarious nature of hope, goodness, and badness in the clinical situation. The patient gets to know not only elements of his or her own self that are held by the analyst, but also ways in which the patient holds elements related to the particulars of the analyst's person in the analytic situation. Shifts in American psychoanalysis regarding conceptualizations of the analyst as a new object are examined. Limitations of a bifurcated approach to goodness and badness in clinical conceptualizations are also explored.     

The Analyst's Anticipatory Fantasies: Aid and Obstacle to the Patient's Self-Integration

In this paper I explore instances of enactment related to the analyst's feelings and fantasies about how analysis will proceed. As I discuss a patient who was developing a new capacity to experience conflict, I explore how the analyst's fantasies about the impact of his interpretations may be utilized in helping him to elaborate and understand the patient's unconscious fantasies and identifications and unintegrated feeling states. In so doing, we sometimes discover how we are unwittingly influencing or avoiding understanding our patient's own version of their psychic catastrophe. As we develop language where there was previously no integrative language for the patient's internalized and interactive version of catastrophe, we always project particular kinds of expectations into the therapeutic situation.     

You Say Oedipal,I Say Postoedipal A Consideration of Desire and Hostility in the Analytic Relationship

Using a case example, the author explores the complex and shifting boundary between aspects of oedipal regression and postoedipal phenomena. Particularly, during termination phases, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish among the hostility, frustration, and anger related to oedipal longings and scorn that is connected to realistic appraisals of the limits of erotic longings in the analytic situation. Scorn sometimes involves a kind of righteous indignation that results from the patient's awareness that analytic immersion in erotic longings toward unavailable others has aspects of erotic masochism. To some extent, the analytic situation itself contains aspects of erotic masochism that are important to try to reorganize during ending phases of analysis. The author argues that distinctions between oedipal and postoedipal are ever-shifting and difficult to make because the Oedipus complex is a lifelong process that is never resolved. Instead, we are always seeking new adaptations and new ways to organize our relationships against the background of a fluid boundary between oedipal and postoedipal phenomena.     

The Evasion of Propaganda: How Prejudiced People Respond to Anti-Prejudice Propaganda

This experiment tested the hypothesis that there would be a significant increase in powerlessness scores over a 10 year period. The sample was drawn from a population of college students originally tested in 1964. At the 10 year follow-up, all Ss had graduated from college and were either professionally employed (mostly as teachers) or engaged in child-rearing/home activities. The average age of the 1974 sample was 29 years and consisted of 70 females and 30 males. The test instrument was the adult version of Rotter's Internal-External (I-E) Locus of Control Scale which consists of 23 forced-choice items. There were no significant differences on total I-E scores over the 10 year period. However, with use of the Mirels two-factor scoring system, significant increases in social-political control were found. No significant differences in personal control were found. It was concluded that care should be taken in utilizing cross-sectional findings and that utilizing multidimensional scores suggests different results for previously published reports.     

The Representation of an Action: Tragedy between Kant and Hegel

Hegel's theory of tragedy has polarized critics. In the past, many philosophers have claimed that Hegel's theory of tragedy removes Kant's critical insights and returns to pre‐critical metaphysics. More recently, several have argued that Hegel does not break faith with tragic experience but allows philosophy to be transformed by tragedy. In this paper I examine the strength of this revised position. First I show that it identifies Hegel's insightful critique of Kant's theoretical assumptions. Yet I then argue that it fails to note the practical importance of Kant's separation of knowledge and aesthetics. I propose an alternative approach to tragedy that builds from the revised view and yet maintains the autonomy of aesthetics. Tragedy represents an action, a set of events that are internally unified and yet cannot be reduced to theory. This is to say that tragedy confronts us with an aesthetic sphere of making and doing that, while constrained, is incessantly open and free.     

On Visitations: The Appearance of Sustaining Thoughts When Processing the Therapist’s Illness with Patients

This paper describes clinical and personal challenges when the therapist had to disclose his illness to long-established patients as a clinical and ethical imperative. Uncertainty about duration of treatment was processed in ways unique to each dyad. Mutual efforts at affect regulation became potent avenues of repair in some cases, although unexpected conundrums arose at the interface of privacy and disclosure, recognizing the intrusiveness of illness and its highly personal meanings. Vivid clinical vignettes and key pieces of clinical reading appeared to the therapist like visitations, spanning his career, corresponding to sustaining thoughts, admonitions, and former self-states. In kinship with authors of fiction, the therapist looks for a way through, to rebuild a holding environment capable of containing and utilizing the unwelcome news, responding very differently to each patient’s expression of compassion and caretaking, with particular sensitivity to those he feared were reenacting their own suppression of need. These became pivotal elements to explore relationally in trying to broaden the field in which topics of illness and mortality could rise above pathos, guilt, pity, despair, and other forms of isolation. In each relationship, a different wilderness was navigated.