History Dislocated in a Nightmare: Responses to Commentaries

It is not a simple matter for analysts across nations, oceans, generations, and schools to be discussing Germans and Jews post WWII. I found the discussions of my paper moving and troubling; they offer powerful teachings on listening to the kind of dislocated traumatic tales that patients carry into analysis, however left me still wishing to return to the power of nationalism and ideology as major forces that shape psychic reality and argue against reducing this realm into the language of family drama and object relations. In reviewing my work with Nyx following these discussions, I suggest that by being “former enemies” to some degree we functioned transferentially as ambassadors of our collective, and of history. Our field teetered between falling under the spell of a tribunal to a reconciliation committee, while we were negotiating the possibility of historical redemption. My way of working with Nyx manifests an underlying assumption that ideology, as expressed through history, is one of the key factors that constitutes one’s psychic reality and is very important to engage with psychoanalytically. With that in mind I discuss some thoughts on why it is so difficult to signify the horrors of mass trauma and suggest some ethical considerations that can help us think about the difference between Wolff Bernstein’s invitations for us to hover on the rim of the Real, Bohleber’s commitment to historical precision, and Faimberg’s way of listening to the transference.     

Predictors of Parental Communication and Cooperation Among Divorcing Spouses

The present study seeks to identify parental communication and cooperation as predictors of successful co-parenting in Israel during the divorce process. Self-report questionnaires assessing three types of predictors (parent personality characteristics, social and contextual factors and child characteristics) were completed by 123 divorcing mothers and 94 divorcing fathers. Two stepwise hierarchical regressions, one for parental communication and one for cooperation, showed that gender (female) and use of negotiation to resolve conflicts were the major predictors of both. These variables affected co-parenting both independently and in interaction with the personality characteristics of defense mechanism use and optimism. The differential contributions support the hypothesis of communication and cooperation as separate components of successful co-parenting, and the value of studying both. Clinically, these findings may be used to help improve co-parenting during divorce.     

#Me Too,I Was Interpellated

The #MeToo movement aims to dislodge events that occur on the sex/gender/power line from the “obviousness” of malignant supremacist patriarchy. Perhaps “what happened?” is not so obvious after all. Yet how does one FIX the meaning of a sexual event, inherently pregnant with enigma? The author borrows from textual analysis – translation, afterlife, sur-vival - to better understand the unstable nature of meaning, as it slides between different ideological structures. A few short cases, each undoing its former, demonstrate the problematic nature of attempting to FIX “What Happened?”.