Accentuated,Revealed, and Quotidian Personalities

The psychology underlying individuals’ attempts to pursue a path of growth as a result of death contemplation is the focus of this article. More directly, I attempt to reconcile diverging paths in the study of death awareness and its impact on human experience; specifically, I present empirical and theoretical support for dual-existential systems that are capable of explaining mortality-induced defensiveness predicted by terror management theory (TMT), and mortality-induced growth observed among individuals who contemplate their mortality as a result of illness or trauma. I suggest that individuals process their existence either via a specific and personalized existential system, or via an abstract and categorical existential system. I also suggest that these dual-existential systems begin with differential information-processing styles and end with growth-oriented or defense-oriented motivational states and self-regulatory processes. The psychological and the societal outcomes of processing existential matters via these dual-systems are also discussed.     

The Analytic Moment Doesn't Fit Analytic “Technique”: Commentary on Tony Bass's “When the Frame Doesn't Fit the Picture”

Tony Bass in his groundbreaking contribution to the analytic literature argues cogently that the frame remains an essential reference point throughout any psychoanalysis, a statement about which he and I are in agreement. He also argues that for a frame to be therapeutically useful it must be flexible enough to allow negotiation of enactments and their working through in an intersubjective field, another point about which we are in complete accord. He and I each hold a self-state perspective that informs and enriches our clinical work. Where we diverge slightly is in how this perspective shapes the way we think about the nature of the “frame” as it applies to the dissociated self-states of patient and analyst that emerge and engage each other subsymbolically as an ongoing aspect of the work, often in quite bewildering and sometimes confounding ways. This paper speaks to a number of issues that I hope will bring into relief some of the points of contrast that do exist, while underlining the core commonality in our thinking and clinical sensibility that unites us.     

One Need Not Be a House to Be Haunted: On Enactment,Dissociation, and the Dread of “Not-Me”—A Case Study

This paper examines psychic trauma as experience so shockingly strange that it exceeds the threshold for cognitive processing and begins to flood the mind with unintegratable affect that threatens to disorganize the internal template on which one's experience of self-coherence, self-cohesiveness, and self-continuity depends. A detailed clinical vignette illustrates how the unprocessed “not-me” experience held by a dissociated self-state as an affective memory without an autobiographical memory of its traumatic origin “haunts” the self. It remains a ghostly horror even in an otherwise successful psychoanalysis unless a new perceptual reality is created between patient and analyst that alters the narrative structure maintaining the dissociation as though the past were still a present danger. The analyst's making optimal use of dissociative processes in an intersubjective and interpersonal context enables the patient more readily to self-regulate affect in those areas of implicit memory where trauma has left its mark; the dissociated ghosts of “not-me” are thus persuaded, little-by-little, to cease their haunting and participate more and more actively and openly as self-reflective, self-expressive parts of “me.”     

Commentary on Carola M. Kaplan's “Navigating Trauma in Joseph Conrad's Victory: A Voyage From Sigmund Freud to Philip M. Bromberg”

This commentary adds a few additional sparks to Carola M. Kaplan's incandescent essay at the boundary of literary fiction and psychoanalysis, and attempts to place her already generous treatment of my work into a perspective that enriches her synthesis. Conceptually, I try to further develop our shared understanding of why the legacy of developmental trauma too relationally barren to allow cognitive symbolization and self-reflection, leads to an adult life shaped by a dissociated mental structure that channels the “best of intentions” toward tragically predestined defeat. But beyond our conceptually explicit link, and perhaps even more central, is that the history of my own attempt to “navigate trauma” at the interface of psychoanalysis and literature has become part of a deeper connection between Kaplan and me. I discuss this implicit link between us as representing the fuller meaning of intersubjectivity and the wonders of selfhood, otherness, and human relatedness. My overarching emphasis is that Professor Kaplan, meticulously respecting the boundary of what defines fiction in literature, has simultaneously demonstrated the permeability of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction in human relationships —showing that what is most human in human beings is in one way always nonfiction if it is experientially authentic.     

The Gill/Bromberg Correspondence

This correspondence between Merton Gill, M.D., and Philip M. Bromberg, Ph.D., includes five letters written between December 7, 1979, and January 8, 1984. The first letter, from Gill to Bromberg, shared reflections on Bromberg's paper “Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and Regression,” published in the October 1979 issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. The exchange of letters that follows takes up a number of issues relevant to the evolution of analytic theory and technique, of historical as well as contemporary interest. Their discussion moves from a consideration of the nature and role of regression in psychoanalytic work to a consideration of mental structure and mental states, to free association and the analysis of transference, and finally to their reflections on the analytic frame and analytic technique itself.     

“Afterword” to the Gill/Bromberg Correspondence

In trying to convey what it is like 30 years later to reflect on my correspondence with Merton Gill I write about a memory that has stayed the same while changing. As I looked with fresh eyes at the ideas that excited us individually/together, I relived and here try to convey my experience of this extraordinary man while reentering my own self-experience during it. This is indeed an afterword but also such an experiential continuation that I felt his “real time” absence in this discussion as a palpable loss.