A Rule of One's Own: Reply to Commentaries

I respond to two key issues raised by Bernstein and Frankel. One concerns the complex and potentially useful impact of misdemeanors on the treatment process. Without, however, minimizing this dimension of misdemeanors, I focus instead on how we deal with instances when we fail our patients by deliberately placing our own needs ahead of theirs. Bernstein raises the possibility that we are most likely to commit misdemeanors when we embrace an idealized Winnicottian model. I disagree, suggesting that all theoretical positions exclude some aspect of the analyst's personhood. Ultimately, we cannot escape the conflict between the analytic ideal and the reality of our nonideal humanity.     

Racial Insult and Repair

This discussion examines the theme of time as it is experienced by someone who has suffered a loss, in an attempt to understand and differentiate certain contrasts in these authors' approaches to theory and technique. The discussant argues that the frame is a vital tool in helping the analyst to gain access to the differential interplay between awareness of mortality and our flight from it. Finally, the discussant asks whether certain prevalent relational themes, such as mutuality, empathy, and the ubiquity of enactments, have contributed to an atmosphere in which attention to the frame can recede.     

Jonah: A Fantasy of Flight

This paper “Nostalgia” has two distinct parts: One, accounting for nostalgia, by pointing out a systematic distortion in cases of nostalgic memories—idealizing the past and presenting it as a sentimental realm of pure innocence. This distortion typifies kitsch morality, morality guided by sentimentality that can easily turn into brutality. For attacking the innocent seems to justify any brutality in return. Two, an account of what is an ethics of memory, claiming that memory as the case of nostalgia suggests is a fertile ground for ethical discourse, which is different from the politics of memory.     

The Paradoxical Place of Enactment in Psychoanalysis: Introduction

Ringstrom's “comparison of relational psychoanalysis and intersubjective systems theory” exhibits a category mistake that renders the core of his argument logically incoherent.     

Discussion: Toward a social‐constructivist view of the psychoanalytic situation

The three papers by Modell, Aron, and Greenberg are discussed in terms of their relationship to a new paradigm for understanding the psychoanalytic situation. The paradigm is called social‐construct‐ivist to capture both the idea of the analyst's participation and the idea of construction of meaning. It is argued that these theorists, as well as many of the authors they cite as part of a broad movement in the field, do not consistently meet the criteria for this paradigm, although they seem to be aiming for it. An important source of inconsistency and confusion derives from the confounding of the two axes: drive‐relational and positivist‐constructivist. Many relational theorists who hold fast to the idea that analysts can grasp the truth of both their own experience and that of the patient are no closer to the constructivist point of view than was Freud. The call by Aron and Greenberg for greater attention to the patient's resisted experience of the analyst's subjectivity is discussed in terms of its potential benefits and problems. The ritualized asymmetry of the psychoanalytic situation is said to have important functions, including prevention of excessive involvement and protection of the unobjectionable positive transference and of a degree of idealization. Modell's notion of paradox, which makes the therapeutic relationship seem “real”; and “unreal”; at the same time, is seen as a special instance of the always precarious social construction of reality. It is argued, moreover, that the social and individual aspects of experience are interdependent. Neither is reducible to the other, and both should be understood, like many other issues in the new paradigm, in terms of a dialectical interplay of figure and ground in experience.     

Toward a critical relational theory of gender

This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural category. Without succumbing to a nonpsychoanalytic notion of androgyny, the argument developed here challenges the assumption that an internally consistent gender identity is possible or even desirable. Beginning with the idea that, from an analytic perspective, the construct of “identity”; is problematic and implausible, because it denotes and privileges a unified psychic world, the author develops a deconstructionist critique of our dominant gender‐identity paradigm. It is argued that gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals that psychoanalysis has absorbed uncritically. These ideals, moreover, are said to create a universal pathogenic situation, insofar as the attempt to conform to their dictates requires the activation of a false‐self system.

An alternative, “decentered”; gender paradigm is then proposed, which conceives of gender as a “necessary fiction”; that is used for magical ends in the psyche, the family, and the culture. From this perspective, gender identity is seen as a problem as well as a solution, a defensive inhibition as well as an accomplishment. It is suggested that as a goal for analytic treatment, the ability to tolerate the ambiguity and instability of gender categories is more appropriate than the goal of “achieving”; a single, pure, sex‐appropriate view of oneself.     

Father and daughter: Identification with difference—a contribution to gender heterodoxy

This paper reinterprets the historical problem of penis envy, that is, the girl's wish to be masculine, in terms of a developmental need to identify with father. Many of the problems posed by earlier analyses of femininity can be clarified by recognizing that before the girl “turns”; to the oedipal father as love object, she looks to the rapprochement father for identification. Identification is not merely an internal structure, it is a relationship in which the subject recognizes herself or himself in the other. In rapprochement, love of the father, who symbolically represents the outside world, takes the place of the practicing toddler's “love affair with the world.”; This identificatory love of the father, initially noticed in boys by Freud and later authors, is often frustrated by the father's absence or inability to recognize the daughter. This frustrated longing takes the penis as its symbol of likeness. The pre‐oedipal over‐inclusive phase of identification with the other sex parent is not superceded by the oedipal constellation, but is integrated with it. Thus identification becomes an important basis of the love of the other: it is not so much the opposite of object love as an important precursor and ongoing constituent of it. Case material illustrates the multiple possibilities of identificatory love and use of phallic symbolism to represent them.     

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.”     

Waking Dreams

Although they have been infrequently reported in the literature, spontaneous visual images in therapy sessions have a long history in psychoanalysis. In this paper, I present three clinical examples in which patients experienced such visual images. These images were spontaneous in that they felt like they emerged “out of the blue,” from another self-state. The person experienced the images while knowing they were images; for this reason, they might be called “waking lucid-dreams.” These waking dreams provided a channel for the expression and communication of emotional states otherwise excluded from our relationship, from the “me–you” patterns that had prevailed at the time of the images. These images, and their potential role in personal growth, have something to “say” not only about relatedness, meaning-making, and referential activity, but also about affect regulation and mentalization.