Losing a father all over again: the termination of an analysis of an adolescent boy suffering from father loss

Criteria for beginning and conducting the termination phase of psychoanalysis have provoked debate and confusion from the early days of psychoanalysis. Gabbard (2009) has recently pointed to the field's tendency to cling to idealized versions of these criteria as a way to deal with disagreements. The situation becomes more complicated for child and adolescent psychoanalysts because their patients are in the midst of a developmental process at the very time they are engaged in a psychoanalytic process. The termination phase of an adolescent male suffering from father loss is presented in depth in order to provide clinical data toward further consideration of the vexing questions surrounding termination in psychoanalysis. His termination is used to examine the relative importance of losing the analyst as a transference object as against a developmental object; the meaning of action during termination; the complicating role of trauma vis-à-vis termination; and the importance of the post-termination phase of analysis. It is suggested that his termination phase demonstrates that a "good enough" termination involves the development of a self-analyzing capacity that continues to evolve and develop after termination.     

The use of play to promote insightfulness in the analysis of children suffering from cumulative trauma

Psychoanalytic opinion continues to be dichotomized in regard to the role of trauma versus intrapsychic conflict as contributing to pathogenesis. This paper emphasizes the importance of conflict in both the experience and processing of trauma, so that problems in talking about it and processing it verbally are taken as evidence of conflict and defense. Cumulative trauma and its analysis in children are emphasized. While children in analysis find remembering and talking about their traumas difficult, they can know such experiences and modulate the anxiety of knowing when they do so in play. A clinical vignette is presented to demonstrate this way of using play to promote more advanced mentalization or insightfulness.     

Between the modern and the postmodern. The possibility of self and progressive understanding in psychology

Psychology assumes defensible notions of human subjectivity and understanding. Yet, some versions of postmodernism, including some of those currently influential within psychology, eschew the possibility of the kind of understanding-capable personhood on which modern psychology has depended. The authors argue for a skeptical, middle-ground position that might allow psychologists to resist a forced choice between modernism and postmodernism in their subject matter and understanding. The authors set up their argument with 2 stories of human development and change. These stories assume no fixed, essentialist foundations of the sort favored in classically modern psychologies, yet they maintain the possibility of both self and understanding within a real but contingent physical, biological, and sociocultural world. The authors then articulate a middle-ground position as one that avoids the fixed foundationalism, essentialism, and absolute certitude of modernity, without endorsing the radical arbitrariness, antisubjectivism, and anarchistic relativism of some versions of postmodernity.     

The relationship between drinking control strategies and college student alcohol use.

Interventions designed to reduce heavy drinking among college students often contain suggestions for drinking control strategies. However, little is known about the relationship between the use of these strategies and alcohol consumption. The authors developed a measure of drinking control strategies and investigated its psychometric properties in a sample of 250 college drinkers. Strategies clustered into three factors: selective avoidance of heavy drinking activities and situations, strategies used while drinking, and alternatives to drinking. These three types of strategies were independently associated with alcohol use; however, the first and last types were negatively associated with alcohol consumption, whereas the second type was positively associated with alcohol use. The findings from this study suggest that the type of strategy recommended may be important when the goal is alcohol reduction.     

Sex,Drugs, and Rock and Roll: Comment on Mark Freeman's “Beholding and Being Beheld”

Mark Freeman's reflective explorations into an “ethics of attention” prompt a number of issues and questions raised in this response. These include the historical, particular, situated, and contingent character of ethics and transcendence; Freeman's skepticism; moral criteria for judging varieties of transcendence; the demarcation of ethics; and the kinds of subjectivity compatible with an ethics of attention.