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doi: 10.1177/0003065110370352pmid: 20538576
The current intellectual scene in psychoanalysis is marked by vigorous theoretical controversies about gender. The ideas being debated have important implications for clinical work, which have not been thoroughly explicated or integrated into common practice. These implications include the following: gender can accrue idiosyncratic meanings; gender identity is considered fluid and rigidity of gender identity deemed problematic; gender-related conflicts are typically described as divergent; analysis of superego conflicts related to gender becomes particularly important; and, finally, gender-related biases are seen as inevitable and must be taken into account in the clinical situation. A detailed clinical example illustrates the application of these ideas. While the more dramatic cases related to gender have been more frequent subjects of study, conflicts about gender are everyday occurrences for our patients and deserve further attention.
doi: 10.1177/0003065110369349pmid: 20538577
The current emphasis on understanding in psychoanalysis—on the analysand’s part as well as on the analyst’s—is excessive if we assume that the most essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment is change. Situated within the Lacanian register or dimension of the imaginary, the process of understanding can be seen to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar, to transform the radically other into the same, and to render the analyst hard of hearing. Our ability as analysts to detect the unconscious via slips of the tongue, slurred words, mixed metaphors, and the like is compromised by our emphasis on understanding and can be rectified only by taking as our fundamental premise that we do not understand what our analysands are saying. The emphasis on understanding can also do a disservice to analysands, who learn to observe themselves and to explain their feelings and behaviors to themselves and others in sophisticated terms without necessarily changing. But change can perfectly well occur in the absence of understanding, which in fact often impedes change.
doi: 10.1177/0003065110368858pmid: 20538578
The question of the training analysis demands a complicated set of answers that engage the issue at different levels of human organization. Historically, the training analysis has been the central feature of the tripartite model of psychoanalytic education. Internal and external pressures have burdened the training analysis and called its legitimacy into question. This problem of legitimacy amounts to a lack of coherence in the training analyst (TA) system. This lack engenders idealized fantasies of the role of the TA, in which the TA embodies special talents and attributes, and of the system that sanctions that role. This idealization is haunted by its opposite: a melancholic devaluation of psychoanalysis and a fear that it will collapse. Recent literature on the analyst’s position in the psychoanalytic process emphasizes the analyst’s position as decentered and conflicted. The analyst’s decentered, conflicted status goes against this idealizing impulse. An attempt is made to wed analytic values, and what we know about the analyst’s role in the analytic process, into a more coherent, consistent position regarding the analysis of candidates.
doi: 10.1177/0003065110368859pmid: 20538581
The work of Arnold Modell over the past forty years constitutes a major contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Of particular note are his efforts to sustain a paradoxical conception of the self as both an evolving, contingent product and an enduring core. Moving back and forth between celebration of the private self and articulation of the impossibility of a one-person psychoanalysis, Modell’s quest to define the nature of the self has taken him from classical analytic theory, through Winnicott and object relations, to the philosophy of intersubjectivity and, in later years, to the work of infant researchers and neuroscientists. In doing so, he has placed the continuity of the self and the making of personal meaning at the center of psychoanalytic practice. The evolution of his thinking reflects a turn toward a protean and transitional conception of the self, away from the notion of an enduring or superordinate core self.
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