Ethics and Liberation: Commentary on Paper by Eyal Rozmarin

In this discussion of Eyal Rozmarin's “To Be Is to Betray,” I focus, along with Rozmarin, on the reconciliation of guilt and love, the embeddedness of our individual lives in the social world, and the significance of ethics in the creation of the kind of liberation that psychoanalysis can offer.     

Responses to Commentaries by Ferro and Civitarese,Carnochan, Peltz and Goldberg,and Levine

I offer responses to the discussions of my paper written by Ferro and Civitarese, Carnochan, Peltz and Goldberg, and Levine.     

Narrative Writing and Soulful Metaphors Commentary on Paper by Barbara Pizer

The author posits that Pizer's use of both narrative and lyrical style is not typical in psychoanalysis, whose scholarly tradition tends to favor a denser, more academic style of writing. The ways in which psychoanalysts read these two forms of writing are mirrors of one another. Both kinds of reading are forms of discipline; both forms of writing are necessary in psychoanalysis. The author also writes that Pizer's “nonanalytic third” does not have to be a “good” thing like a poem; it can be almost anything important to the analyst. The nonanalytic third is a soulful metaphor that can be used to create alternatives to rigid experience. Because rigidity in psychoanalytic relatedness is usually the result of problematic unconscious involvements between analyst and patient, the nonanalytic third can be significant in the negotiation of enactments.     

Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequelae of Identification with Parental Negation

In this paper I propose the phrase “living in an airless world” to characterize the intrapsychic situation when a child has grown up in circumstances of extreme parental negation (non-recognition). Of the two major dynamics Ferenczi identified as the sequelae of early trauma—“identification with the aggressor” and “splitting of the personality” (dissociation)—the latter has received far more attention in the relational literature than the former. I seek to correct that imbalance by examining in depth the phenomenon of identification with the other’s response to the self—especially its most toxic form, identification with parental negation. Airless world syndrome involves a kind of identificatory bondage to the internalized negating other which is disabling to the senses of self and personal agency and impairs the capacities to think, feel in an integrated way, separate and grieve. Consequently, for patients living in airless worlds, the central unconscious need and preoccupation is to convert their actual parents into true parents who will finally recognize their subjective experience and needs, thereby allowing them, for the first time, psychically to breathe. This understanding, in turn, has implications for how we think about the analytic field in relation to the patient’s developmental, parent-child field. The therapeutic implications of this model are described and illustrated with three clinical examples.     

Whither Philosophy?

This article considers possible future directions of philosophy, based around the experience of the author as editor of the European Journal of Philosophy for about a decade. After some discussion of the original impetus for the journal, and of how the philosophy scene has changed since it was founded in 1993, the article focuses particularly on the themes of transcendentalism and naturalism as likely to shape the philosophical debates of the future, as they have done in the past.     

Therapist memory and reverie: implications for the clinical setting

In this work, the author considers reveries to be ‘dream-like-memories’. In the course of a session they appear as proto-memory – the therapist’s early traumatic object relations that are recorded in the unconscious at an almost bodily level (a type of unthought known) and which are resurrected between therapist and patient when a similar traumatic subject arises between them. The therapist’s reveries are recollections in the form of dream-like allusions to his past experience. A clinical vignette from the psychotherapy of a child whose father suffered from PTSD (following a wartime experience in Afghanistan and Iraq) is discussed. Dissociative dynamics were repeated in the therapeutic relationship, in the form of an obsessive game intending to preserve the state in which there was no need to remember what had been unconsciously transmitted to the child: his father’s wartime experience. The projection of the primary elements which had been silenced evoked in the therapist allusions to his unconscious identification with his ancestor’s post-traumatic experiences. These allusions helped in overcoming the dissociated state. The role of memory in child psychotherapists’ receptivity of trauma is revisited.     

Teaching by Examples: Implications for the Process of Category Acquisition

A new paradigm, the 'teaching-by-examples' paradigm, was used to shed new light on the process of category acquisition. In four experiments ( n = 90, 90, 115, 117), manipulating the variables of category structure, status of non-target category, learning mode, and teaching mode, participants first learned a category and then taught it to someone else. High agreement between participants on the teaching sequences was found across conditions, and a typical sequence was identified for each category structure. The typical participant-produced sequences startedwith several ideal positive cases, followed by anideal negative case and then borderline cases. The efficiency of such sequences for teaching was tested in another experiment ( n = 60), in which they were compared with sequences emphasizing category borders and sequences emphasizing each dimension separately. The typical participant-produced sequences induced the most efficient learning. It is proposed that the pattern of performance may provide a rich source of data for testing and fine-tuning models of category acquisition.