Articles:
Borgogno, F. (2016). A Special Learning Experience about Transference and Countertransference Dynamics at the Beginning of My Psychoanalytic Training. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.99–110.
Abstract: Drawing upon his description of the early phases of the analysis of the second case of official supervision, the author illustrates in his work why this experience became a foundational moment in his formative trajectory as a psychoanalyst. Three important aspects are discussed: (1) the significant role his supervisor played in helping to manage and to confront the difficult dynamics of transference and countertransference that characterized the author’s early years of analytic work with patients; (2) the transformative factors that opened up new avenues in the repetition and the original traumatic pathology put forward at great length by the patient; and (3) the making contact for the first time with that area of inter/intrapsychic phenomena that the author has since then explored widely and theorized about, under the name of relational dynamics governed by role-reversal.
Frosch, A. (2016). Warmed by the Fires of the Unconscious or Burned to a Crisp. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.111–121.
Abstract: In this paper I talk about the relationship or link between unconscious and conscious material. When the link is optimal we are warmed by the fires of the unconscious so that what we say and do has meaning—it is alive. When the link between conscious and unconscious is too close we are in danger of being burned to a crisp. The present is the past and the world of consensual reality pales in comparison to the emotionally charged unconscious fantasy pressing for discharge. An extended case vignette is used to illustrate the links between past and present as they unfold in a patient’s life and between analyst and patient.
Mann, M. (2016). The Role of an Immigrant Mother in Her Adolescent’s Identity Formation: “Who Am I?” American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.122–139.
Abstract: Immigration is a complex bio-psycho-social process and the immigrant mother has a truly complex task in lending her ego strength to her adolescent offspring. The normal adolescence’s decathexis of the love object and the consequent search for a new object may not happen smoothly for those adolescents whose mothers are immigrants. The immigration experience may cause the immigrant mother, who lost her motherland, deeper disturbance in self-identity as well as disequilibrium in her psychic structure, which in turn impacts adversely her adolescent’s development. The adolescent’s inadequate early experience with an immigrant mother may result in a deeper disturbance in his separation-individuation process as well as his identification process. An immigrant mother who has not mourned adequately, with a different sociocultural background has to go through a far more complex development of motherhood. The case of an adolescent boy, Jason, demonstrates the impact of immigrant motherhood on his ego development.
Charles, M. (2016). Race and Recognition: The Time of Our Singing. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.140–160.
Abstract: Literature affords the opportunity to consider the racial fear, hatred and hostility that can flare in moments when the otherness in the human face occludes the common bonds that join us together. Richard Powers’ (2003) compelling novel, The Time of Our Singing, highlights ways in which racial tensions continue to haunt us, impeding the efforts of successive generations to heal the wounds and move forward. In the novel, the parents’ efforts to move “beyond race” leave their children utterly unprepared for the ways in which race informs and obstruct their experience, as what has been denied returns to haunt them.
Poster, M. F., Hristeva, G., Giefer, M. (2016). Georg Groddeck: “The Pinch of Pepper” of Psychoanalysis. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.161–182.
Abstract: The life and works of Georg Groddeck are reviewed and placed in historical context as a physician and a pioneer of psychoanalysis, psychosomatic medicine, and an epistolary style of writing. His Das Es concept stimulated Freud to construct his tripartite model of the mind. Groddeck, however, used Das Es to facilitate receptivity to unconscious communication with his patients. His “maternal turn” transformed his treatment approach from an authoritarian position to a dialectical process. Groddeck was a generative influence on the development of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney. He was also the mid-wife of the late-life burst of creativity of his friend and patient Sándor Ferenczi. Together, Groddeck and Ferenczi provided the impetus for a paradigm shift in psychoanalysis that emphasized the maternal transference, child-like creativity, and a dialogue of the unconscious that foreshadowed contemporary interest in intersubjectivity and field theory. They were progenitors of the relational turn and tradition in psychoanalysis. Growing interest in interpsychic communication and field theory is bringing about a convergence of theorizing among pluralistic psychoanalytic schools that date back to 1923 when Freud appropriated Groddeck’s Das Es and radically altered its meaning and use.
Pizarro Obaid, F. (2016). The Dead-Living Mother: Marie Bonaparte’s Interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.183–203.
Abstract: Princess Marie Bonaparte is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis, remembered for her crucial role in arranging Freud’s escape to safety in London from Nazi Vienna, in 1938. This paper connects us to Bonaparte’s work on Poe’s short stories. Founded on concepts of Freudian theory and an exhaustive review of the biographical facts, Marie Bonaparte concluded that the works of Edgar Allan Poe drew their most powerful inspirational force from the psychological consequences of the early death of the poet’s mother. In Bonaparte’s approach, which was powerfully influenced by her recognition of the impact of the death of her own mother when she was born—an understanding she gained in her analysis with Freud—the thesis of the dead-living–mother achieved the status of a paradigmatic key to analyze and understand Poe’s literary legacy. This paper explores the background and support of this hypothesis and reviews Bonaparte’s interpretation of Poe’s most notable short stories, in which extraordinary female figures feature in the narrative.
Book Reviews:
Covitz, H. (2016). Book Review. The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, by Lawrence J. Friedman (with Anke Schreiber). Columbia University, New York, 2014, 410 pp.American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.204–206.
If aborigines have been presented in literature/film as fearing that their Souls might be captured and destroyed by photographers, one might wonder how the dead would respond to biographers with their sharp pens. Lives are lived in, perhaps, a two hour moving frame—the unfolding present—without regard for how these frames may later be cut and combined on some film editor’s floor. Many who visit our offices, indeed, seek us out because they cannot remain in that frame due to their dread of the future or their ruing of the past; perhaps, it is that film editor whom they fear…
Durkin, K. (2016). Book Review. The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, by Lawrence J. Friedman (with Anke Schreiber). Columbia University, New York, 2014, 410 pp. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.206|–209.
Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a psychoanalyst, social psychologist and activist who played a crucial, but largely unrecognized role in the mid-20th century development of psychoanalysis and sociology, and in the dissemination of psychoanalytical ideas to the wider public. His ideas, expressed in books such as Escape from Freedom, The Forgotten Language, The Sane Society, and The Art of Loving, were central contributions to American and international intellectual life, garnering him the reputation of cherished “public intellectual.” In this landmark, first full-length English-language biography of Erich Fromm, Lawrence Friedman—amply aided by Anke Schreiber, whom Friedman refers to as “almost a coauthor” (x)—meticulously excavates the details and back-stories to the main events in Fromm’s life (or “lives,” as Friedman prefers to characterize it)…
Akhtar, S. (2016). Book Review. The Shadow of the Second Mother: Nurses and Nannies in Theories of Infant Development, by Prophecy Coles, Routledge, London, 2015, 136 pp. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.209–212.
Having just put together an edited volume on the contemporary patterns of mothering in North America (Akhtar, 2016), I found it refreshing to pick up Prophecy Coles’ The Shadow of the Second Mother, for it is a book replete with historical information regarding nannies and wet nurses going back to early Roman times. The first two chapters of her book focus upon the deployment of wet nurses, either for the offspring of the highly-privileged or for babies abandoned by unwed mothers, many of whom were prostitutes. With painstaking detail, Coles traces the changing societal attitudes about abandoned infants, about wet nurses, about the fate of their own babies, about mothers who relegated the care of their babies to wet nurses, and about the psychological impact of wet nurses upon the children under their care…
Friedman, H. J. (2016). Book Review. The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process, by Frank Summers, Routledge, London and New York, 2013, 224 pp. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.212–214.
Psychoanalysis has from its beginning been concerned with how the mind works both in healthy and disturbed individuals. Throughout the course of its development psychoanalysts have stayed true to the therapeutic goal of relieving their patients of unnecessary suffering while adhering to a variety of theories that differ radically in their view of what goes wrong with patients and how to address our understanding of what constitutes therapeutic action in the analytic dyad. While differing theories have those who follow them with strict and consistent adherence there is also a growing, perhaps preponderant, tendency among psychoanalysts to use, either in combination or serially, many if not all theories with the insistence that such combinations or alternating of theories is either more effective therapeutically or enhancing of their analytic functioning…
Molofsky, M. (2016). Book Review. Winnicott’s Babies and Winnicott’s Patients: Psychoanalysis as Transitional Space, by Margaret Boyle Spelman, Karnac Books, London, 2013, 168 pp. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76(2), pp.215–217.
Dr. Spelman, who has published previously on the contributions of D.W. Winnicott, offers in this volume a vibrant, alive appreciation of the application of Winnicott’s theories, with a rich section devoted to “baby observation.” The fact alone that Spelman uses the term “baby observation” rather than “infant observation” conveys the naturalness and humanism of her devotion to Winnicott’s work, her recognition of the naturalness and humanism of his approach to understanding development relationally…