Division Review Issue #18

DIVISION REVIEW DIVISION A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

NO.4 SUMMER 2012

NO.18 FALL 2018

SPIRAL WORK

LIVING WITH LACAN

ELLMAN | GOODMAN | Birksted-Breen

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BENVENUTO | Millot

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HYSTERIA AND DIFFERENCE

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TANK COMMANDER

HOOK | Grose; Gherovici

ROTHSCHILD | Bion

GHEROVICI & STEINKOLER | Bonnigal-Katz The Psychosis Therapy Project | BOTTICELLI | JUSTICE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

INTERVIEW CARTER | Talking about Palestine in Session and Beyond

PALESTINE, PSYCHOANALYSIS & POLITICAL DISCOURSE P A P ERS F ROM A 201 7 PA N EL

PORTUGES | WE ARE TALKING

SHEEHI | THE UNUTTERABLE

R E M I N I S C E N C E BERRY | VETERANS KORSON | FORMING A PSYCHOANALYST SEIDEN | HALL

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P H O T O G R A P H Y The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: For Henry Seiden Discovering that psychological symptoms represent meaning in the subject’s life, that they are not mere dysfunctions but convey unconscious intentions, psychoanalysis became a discipline concerned with the study of symbolic representation and not merely a clinical discipline concerned with mental health.

Representation includes the capacity for imagination, for speech and language, and indeed for the entire realm of cultural symbolization. For this reason, psychoanalysis can never be solely a behavioral science. Its scientific basis must always also be open to its cultural face, since culture is the world of representation in which we

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CORINNE JONES

David Lichtenstein

live. One realm where this has been most evident is that of poetics, understood most broadly as the act of making art (poiein, Gr.) from language. The capacity to make art is distinctly human and always addressed to the other. Any theory of representation that does not recognize and seek to account for this central capacity will be insufficient to

Official publication of Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association

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CONTENTS EDITOR

David Lichtenstein

BOOK REVIEWS 4

Paula L. Ellman & Nancy R. Goodman

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Sergio Benvenuto

Hysteria Today

by Anouchka Grose

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Derek Hook

Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference

by Patricia Gherovici

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Louis Rothschild

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Ricardo Ainslie, Christina Biedermann, Chris Bonovitz, Steven Botticelli, Ghislaine Boulanger, Muriel Dimen, Patricia Gherovici, Peter Goldberg, Adrienne Harris, Elliott Jurist, Jane Kupersmidt, Paola Mieli, Donald Moss, Ronald Naso, Donna Orange, Robert Prince, Allan Schore, Robert Stolorow, Nina Thomas, Usha Tummala, Jamieson Webster, Lynne Zeavin

La vie avec Lacan [Life With Lacan]

by Catherine Millot

Derek Hook

Steven David Axelrod, J. Todd Dean, William Fried, William MacGillivray, Marian Margulies, Bettina Mathes, Henry Seiden, Manya Steinkoler

The Work of Psychoanalysis: Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind

by Dana Birksted-Breen

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SENIOR EDITORS

WEB SITE EDITOR

Loren Dean BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

War Memoirs: 1917-1919

by Wilfred R. Bion

Brian Smith PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Corinne Jones

INTERVIEW 20

IMAGES EDITOR

Psychosis Therapy Project: Manya Steinkoler An Innovative Psychoanalytic Treatment Program interview Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz Patricia Gherovici &

PALESTINE, PSYCHOANALYSIS & POLITICAL DISCOURSE: PAPERS FROM A 2017 PANEL 24

Steven Botticelli

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Carter Carter

How Do We Talk about Justice in Psychoanalysis?

The Case of Palestine Talking about Palestine in Session and Beyond for Mental Illness

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Lara Sheehi

Palestine is a Four-Letter Word

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Stephen H. Portuges

The Times Must Be Changing, Because Psychoanalysts Are Talking About Palestine

REMINISCENCE 36

William Fried

Henry Seiden: Literalist of the Imagination

Andrew Berry

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Michael Korson

The Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Approach to Working with Veterans The Candidate’s Experience: Immersion into Disavowed and Hidden Aspects of Others, Culture, and Oneself ON POETRY

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Henry M. Seiden

Hannah Alderfer, HHA design, NYC DIVISION | REVIEW a quarterly psychoanalytic forum published by the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association, 2615 Amesbury Road, Winston-Salem, NC 27103.

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ISSN 2166-3653

On Dreams and Poems: A Poem by Donald Hall

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DESIGN BY

© Division Of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher.

COMMENTARY 40

Tim Maul

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The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: For Henry Seiden from page 1 an understanding of the human subject.

Thus, psychoanalysis finds itself directly concerned with the processes involved in making art. Neither an embellishment nor a decorative surplus, art, poetics, and human cultural creation are central to the focus and the object of psychoanalytic study.

These thoughts are dedicated to Henry Seiden, the cofounder of this publication, who passed away last year, and who regularly wrote a column On Poetry in these pages. The point of Henry’s columns, which were collected in his book entitled The Motive for Metaphor: Brief Essays

on Poetry and Psychoanalysis (see William Fried’s essay in this issue), was that there was a fundamental link between the two disciplines, not an incidental similarity.

Understanding the way experience is represented in poetry enables the psychoanalyst to understand better how it is represented in dreams, in symptoms, and indeed in the wandering speech of the psychoanalytic session. For the final time, we are publishing one of Henry’s essays, this one on a poem by Donald Hall that appears to be about a dream. It allowed Henry to reflect on imagination, representation, and the work of conveying it to another.

Poems may address universal themes, but their expression is always singular, and

it is that singularity that is essential to how a poem works. Likewise, with psychoanalytic treatment, the themes may be universal and the methods repeatable, but each treatment involves a singularity in the way those themes are experienced and expressed, and without an appreciation and recognition of that singularity, no treatment can succeed.

Thus, the replicable science of psychoanalytic method is met by the singularity of creative expression and in this seemingly impossible collision, a psychoanalysis may be possible.

Henry Seiden was both a scientist and a poet. In his work and in his writing, this seemingly impossible collision was allowed to have its effects for the benefit of us all. z

backpack). Collage often looks the way music sounds. Klaus Voormann’s cover of The Beatles “Revolver” (1966) correctly advertised the music within as did, a decade or so later, Jamie Reid’s mismatched lettering and ravaged appropriations that mimicked the destabilizing energy of the Sex Pistols, grabbing one’s attention with the urgency of a ransom note. Corinne Jones’s work in media includes sound recording, and since I believe that everything an artist does affects everything that artist makes, I cannot disconnect her recent collages from her deep engagement with music of a wide spectrum. Even on the page, her pictures lure and promptly abandon us on a hectic but legible field of multiple directives and textural expanse that could be read as geological. They are not “easy on the eye”; early criticism of Pixar’s Toy Story series mourned the gaze’s “lack of refuge” in all things computer animated, with the pixel-driven image offering little beyond exactitude and constant stimuli in our sustained looking.

Similarly unrelenting displacements agitate Jones’s “Knock On Effect” (2018) series initially resembling the upturned jumbled contents of a board game or early “scatter” piece by the sculptor Barry Le Va. Jones’s “September, October, November” (2018) group cross-references seasonal kitsch as we careen through disproportionate reconfiguring of commercial stock images of garish decor, four poster beds, and parquet floors aligned in funhouse perspective(s) suggesting the labyrinthian distortions of the perpetually uncool M. C. Escher.

Corinne Jones’s paintings and interventions firmly resist being synthesized into any form other than what they already are.

Other types of pleasures are to be derived from this new work where Jones reenlists and subverts the idealized depictions of one impossible dreamworld to fabricate another. It’s a good thing for art to do. z www.corinnejones.net

Tim Maul

On the Photography of Corinne Jones Modern two-dimensional collage first appeared in women's scrap books of the later 1800s during an era of affordable photography, increased leisure time, and the availability of disposable print culture—a fortuitous meeting of the burgeoning publishing industry with the stationary store.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modest but important 2010 exhibition Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage demonstrated that the recycling of mechanical reproductions began not with cubist experiments of gluing extractions of the real world onto paper, but in the mischievous and uncanny amusements of women with both time and scissors at hand. Since this use of craft originated outside the artist’s studio without the associated manual skills, collage/assemblage remains a less gendered medium taken up by reclusive occultists (as exemplified by Joseph Cornell), outsiders wanting in (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns) and furtive adolescents (any kid’s bedroom wall, locker interior, or

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A Voyage in Spiraling Motion In her opening chapter, Birksted-Breen writes of psychoanalytic treatment being a voyage. An essential ingredient of the voyage is the intimacy of two psyches being with The Work of Psychoanalysis: Sexuality, Time, and The Psychoanalytic Mind.

By Dana Birksted-Breen Routledge, 300pp., $55.80, 2016 each other. Another image of movement is presented in the form of a “spiral” honoring non-linearity. Birksted-Breen incorporates into her style of writing the original ways she has of visiting psychoanalytic concepts.

She writes of the spiraling, the back and forth, the reverberation time, to depict the mother-infant relationship contributing to psychic growth and the analyst-analysand engagement in the psychoanalytic process.

Her concepts suggesting movement, space, and time become her style of writing and invite the reader to join in the journey. Moving in a spiral reflects the importance of space and time.

Throughout her writing, Birksted-Breen enacts this sense of voyage and spiral that is alive in both psychoanalytic theory and in the hours of clinical work. Concepts are revisited in different theoretical contexts, with abundant clinical examples, and are articulated and revisited throughout the book.

Birksted-Breen is currently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP), and is embarking on the second five-year term of her editorship as she plans for the IJP centennial celebration. She references contributions from all regions and across time, from 1893-2016.

She brings in her thinking from papers written early in her psychoanalytic career, and a significant proportion of chapters are current, presenting new ideas and synthesis of her thinking. With recognition of her lifetime in psychoanalysis since the early 1970s, she begins with a review of her very first research contribution on first pregnancies—an instance of life’s moments requiring change if “lived through rather than gone through.”

Birksted-Breen informs us that her ordering of chapters is not based on publication date, but more on the evolution of the book. The course of the book moves from sexuality to symbolization to the psychic work of the analyst and phenomena of the analytic dyad, with themes of sexuality, temporality, and disturbances of identity. With the journey through Birksted-Breen’s chapters, one has a rich and deepening sense of psychoanalytic concepts, traditions, and a high regard for Birksted-Breen’s clinical astuteness. In our review, we take the voyage in a spiraling fashion, stopping along the way

to explore femininity, penis-as-link, trauma, reverberation time, and termination.

Spiraling 1: Femininity Birksted-Breen’s Chapter Three, “The feminine and unconscious representation of femininity, a duality at the heart of femininity,” was written in the same year (1996) as the publication of a complete volume of Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association devoted to femininity and female identity, and brings focus to a psychoanalytic understanding of femininity.

Birksted-Breen provides a full literature review of the topic, including the other side of the Atlantic, not typical in most of her chapters. She reviews the North American perspective on the concept of gender identity and primary femininity and emphasizes that both sides of the Atlantic want to understand what is feminine before language, that is, what is primary. Having written papers on the topic of primary femininity, we appreciate the integration of thinking from our side of the Atlantic (Basseches et al., 1996; Fritsch et al., 2001). She brings her emphasis to the duality at the heart of femininity, the contradiction of negative and positive femininity, what is lacking and what is present. This was an era of wrestling with what is beyond the bedrock of penis envy, the lack, and Birksted-Breen was very much present.

Her work reminds us of the study group we engaged in, seven women who trained together many years ago to study our work with women as women psychoanalysts. Out of our study came two associated papers on femininity and psychoanalysis. The first, “Hearing What Cannot Be Seen: A Psychoanalytic Research Group’s Inquiry into Female Sexuality” (Basseches et al., 1996), reports on our discovery of a lag between our then current theoretical ideas and our clinical practice. “The group identified our anachronistic emphasis on penis envy functioning as ‘bedrock’ and with our discussion of current writers of female development, our integration of theory and practice became more possible” (p.511).

Our clinical material confirmed the view that psychic derivatives of penis envy or female genital anxiety have multiple developmental determinants and stem from varying defensive solutions. We discovered that penis envy may relate to an effort to merge with the pre-Oedipal mother or, alternatively, to a wish to pleasure the Oedipal mother. The turn to a wish for a phallus often involves an effort to move away defensively from female genital anxieties involving Oedipal-level conflicts. It is 4

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better to long for what one does not have than to be under superego certainty that the female genital will be harmed, raped, or closed off. And/or it may serve as a protection against the terrors of merger with the pre-Oedipal mother. Our second paper, “The Riddle of Femininity: The Interplay of Primary Femininity and the Castration Complex in Analytic Listening” (Frisch et al., 2001), reports on the study group’s exploration of the relative heuristic use of these two important organizing concepts in analytic work with female analysands. Both papers emphasize the crucial importance of openness in analytic listening when the treatment involves the working through of conflicting feminine identifications and defenses and the layering of facets of unconscious fantasy (Ellman & Goodman, 2017).

Birksted-Breen, in a similar way, explores the anxieties arising from the positive and negative based in the early relationships to mother and father. She suggests that the rejection of femininity could be understood as the envious denigration of the mother and the desire to triumph over the omnipotent primal mother at the same time as being a way to deal with anxiety in relationship to the inside of the body and fear of attack, often leading to rejection of the receptive position.

She brings us the clinical material of Charlotte to demonstrate the dual aspects of femininity. Charlotte’s anorexia and compulsive exercise is an attempt to control her terror of death and disintegration. With regard to her severe anxiety about damage to internal organs, the treatment allows for a negotiation of the two dimensions: “namely the acceptance of lack (and difference) and the acceptance of the feminine body (with the complex anxieties rooted in the relationship with the mother and father) and their interplay traces a woman’s experience of her own body and sexual position” (p.81).

Chapter Two, the “Modalities of thought and sexual identity,” offers a broader perspective of the construction of identity and the place that gender has in organizing and being organized by identity. Birksted-Breen spirals back to her statement that there is no oneto-one relationship between actual body and psychic representation; as she said in 1996, “psychical events do not simply parallel biological determinants” (p.73). Returning to femininity, Birksted-Breen emphasizes the role of vision, the having and not having, and that feminine identity is closely connected with the capacity for symbolic thinking: “…the representation of the self in terms of masculinity and femininity will reflect levels of symbolization, which vary within the

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individual in relation to special issues linked with sexuality (in the widest sense of the word to refer to the drives and their objects)” (p.62). Birksted-Breen speaks to the impact of psychoanalysis as “disrupting a rigid coherence” and shifting fantasy positions.

Thinking of femininity brings BirkstedBreen to Chapter Four, “Sexuality in the consulting room,” and her continued focus on dualities. Here, the duality is between silent sexuality and noisy sexuality, emphasizing that sexuality underlies the analysis at all times, but manifests in different ways. Similar to the duality of life and death forces (Basseches et al., 2013), Birksted-Breen writes of silence belonging to Eros, the libidinal, motoring the transference and keeping treatment alive. In contrast, noisy sexuality “cannibalizes” and controls the object, which she attributes to the erotized phallic position often leading to fragmentation. Marie’s eating and talking are libidinized, and there is the genitalization of the oral and confusion of oral and vaginal.

Psychoanalytic understanding of femininity

has journeyed far over the last 20 years, and Birksted-Breen’s chapters demonstrate the span of its development. Birksted-Breen shows how femininity is now viewed within the larger context of identity, and how it spirals through the transference where sexuality and identity are expressed within the here and now of psychoanalysis.

Spiraling 2: Phallus, Penis, Mental Space, and Alterations In her chapter entitled “Phallus, penis, and mental space” (Chapter Six, pp.126138), Birksted-Breen offers a new concept compelling in its clinical and theoretical significance. We stop our voyage to take in the meanings about male and female and about thinking itself that are related to penis-aslink. It becomes clear that the phallus as fantasy is often related to a narcissistic position in which omnipotence and unreachability take precedence. Whether a male or a female patient expresses this phallic yearning through the bodily enactment of bulimic

vomiting or through an isolated search for the perfect other, phallic maneuvering tends to render contact impossible and meaningless. Penis-as-link, Birksted-Breen’s new concept, is triadic and Oedipal in object relations and in intercourse within one’s mind, taking place between analyst and analysand.

As opposed to the binary aspect of the phallic vision along the lines of presence and absence, the structuring and linking function of the penis of the tripartite world of the mother, linked with but different from the father, and child in relation to the parents, makes for a more complex world…. In this position, good and bad, powerful and powerless, masculine and feminine are encompassed rather than being mutually exclusive. (p.130) Penis-as-link is a function just as the Oedipal couple function to connect and create.

The use of the word “link” is crucial in recognizing the bond that becomes possible when the constellations of fantasies about the penis include relationships and love. While there may be fantasies about the phallus and about penis-as-link, their content in relation to sexual excitement and to the other are quite different in their aim.

While the phallus belongs to the mental configuration that allows only for the ‘all-or-nothing’ distinction, hence to the domain of omnipotence, and is an attempt away from triangulation, the penis-as-link, which links mother and father, underpins Oedipal and bisexual mental functioning and hence has a structuring role which underpins the process of thinking. (p.137) The penis-as-link brings about contact between analyst and analysand to bring observation and thought to the analytic session, as does knowledge of the Oedipal couple bring about the structure and containment of powerful effects including desire, envy, and acceptance of reality. “It is this structuring function of the penis that creates the necessary space leading to the possibility of separateness and link” (p.131). The phallus and penis-as-link have different relations to space—phallic narcissism closes space and penis-as-link opens space, while simultaneously allowing for observation, knowledge, and structure.

When the articulation of a new concept leads to listening in a different way to clinical material, one recognizes the value of that concept. With Birksted-Breen’s concept in mind, one of us (N. Goodman) heard her patient, Mr. C, in a new way. Mr. C was thinking of a tender feeling he had in a dream when he was reunited with a childhood female friend. “I felt tender, romantic.

I do not think it was erotic, maybe a little,

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but it made me nervous.” He then spoke of the familiar terrifying feeling of being seduced by his mother’s need for him and his search for his own phallic presence through pornography. Goodman realized the awakening of a new position in her ability to think and in connection with the patient. She was able to say to Mr. C., “You and your penis were linking with your childhood girl friend in a tender way, and something made you anxious about linking in that way.” She later brought it into the transference by saying, “Tender feelings toward me acknowledge our thinking together, a meeting that is somewhat romantic and not highly erotic.”

Mr. C. replied that hearing his analyst’s voice made him want to turn away and tell her how unworthy she was—that there would be no contact. The analyst understood how his erotic solitary turning to pornography was in the phallic domain, while the new/old feelings were in the penis-as-link domain.

As with male patients that BirkstedBreen mentions in this article, the patient’s father is conspicuously absent. We are wondering if hearing the new penis-as-link is like the infant hearing the existence of the primal scene in the mother’s mind bringing about space. Penis-as-link carries the knowledge of coupling. “What I call penis-as-link is part of the position or configuration in which the vagina is known” (p.128). We found this linking to the literature on female genital anxieties, such as the article by Arlene Kramer Richards, “The Influence of Sphincter Control and Genital Sensation on Body Image and Gender Identity in Women” (1992), in which knowledge of the internal genital is known by women and placed in compromise formation fantasies. It is good to recognize the knowing of the female genitals across psychoanalytic continents.

The penis-as-link creates space and depth and the possibility of meaning that resides in the multiple layers of the unconscious. “Mental space and the capacity to think are created by the structure that allows for separateness and linking between internal objects, and the self and other, instead of fusion and fragmentation” (p.136).

resonance in the work of Birksted-Breen in her thinking about Nachträglichkeit and her emphasis on how the reversal of time relates to thinking and symbolization. For Birksted-Breen, the discovery of traumatic recollections, unconscious fantasies, and affects becomes articulated in the landscapes of trauma that are located in the transference and countertransference.

sessions. She focuses often on the path from sexuality to the symbolic.

Spiraling 3: Trauma Birksted-Breen takes up psychic trauma in various ways throughout this volume. As the unknown of trauma becomes symbolized, time takes shape. In our way of thinking, articulated in Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide (2017), we emphasized the important recognition of the way the traumatic, and the unconscious fantasies gathered around it, are discovered and uncovered with temporality. That is, the “here and now” leads back to the trauma that requires symbolization. We find

Birksted-Breen revisits “fort/da” throughout her writing. Uncovering the traumatic mind appears to be a particular version of here/there—it is near; it is also at a distance.

The knowing of the trauma consciously and unconsciously takes place in time, pulling it forward and pushing it away. Winnicott’s premise that the trauma of the past is anticipated in the future is useful here, as Birksted-Breen states, “…the trauma needs to be experienced in the here and now in order to become a past trauma” (p.144). Throughout her writing, the powerful and overwhelming effects of the past become known in the frame of the analytic

clinical situations in which awareness of emotions is not available and in which there is significant lack of connection between emotion or sensation and idea and in which necessary representation is unavailable. (p.5)

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My focus on the development of symbolic capacity and the connections with temporality ‘in the presence of the object’ (that is within the clinical situation) is the thread which runs throughout this book. I address in particular,

Trauma is not directly mentioned, but in essence, this is a definition of the traumatized, unconscious, overwhelmed mind. Ellman and Goodman (2017) describe a process in the treatment of trauma in which enactments puncture timelessness, the fusion defending against the

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helplessness of trauma and of Oedipal longing. Our observations in Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain (2017) identify how enactment processes in the here and now of sessions bring about narratives of the events themselves and of intermingled unconscious fantasies presenting in transference and countertransference:

Finding involves the creation of space in the mind of the patient and the analyst, and within the treatment dialogue. In cases where there is narrative and trauma we have the opportunity to recognize and listen to symbolized and unsymbolized material, and investigate the process of uncovering of networks of fantasy between analyst and patient.

(Ellman & Goodman, 2017, p.4) Birksted-Breen introduces the concept of “bi-ocularity” in the analyst’s mind and as the crucial element in establishing

representation where previously there has been none. The triangle, the space, is essential to the process of symbolization: “bi-ocular…two images are overlapping but distinct and (there is the) need to retain or regain coexistence in the mind of the psychoanalyst” (p.216). For trauma to become symbolized, there must be a gap, and transformation becomes possible in “reverberation time.”

In her conceptualization, temporality evolves in a mind that gains structure through the bi-directionality of now and then. Bi-directionality is active for discovering the unconscious mind in all its dimensions.

When the strong effects of now take place in treatment, Birksted-Breen considers it of the utmost importance that the analyst carries the knowledge that now is also then. “The greatest danger I believe is when the analyst has lost the temporal perspective in his or her own mind and is colluding with the patient in a malignantly denuded present” (p.142).

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not stand still, a fantasy that may be multidetermined, leading to a wished-for truth that symbiosis is possible and agreed upon in a folie-a-deux of analyst and patient.

Working with trauma is embedded in the ways Birksted-Breen develops her ideas on time: “…the same hatred of progressive time produces an attack on retroactive time” (p.151), emphasizing that for there to be progression, there has to be a “retrospective resignification.” This is the après-coup, the creation of meaning where trauma and nothingness existed, and where time progression results from linking. Movement forward is freed from attack, and the future becomes possible, as trauma experienced in the here and now can become past trauma.

Spiraling 4: Reverberation Time On a voyage, the experience of time changes. We spiraled into variations of time as we discovered Birksted-Breen’s profound understanding of time and space: “The ‘reverberation time’ created by the mother’s and the analyst’s capacity for reverie, includes both a chronological aspect and a back-and-forth aspect between mother and infant. We can represent this as spiraling in non-even ways (because the back and forth aspect takes varying lengths of time at different moments)” (p.147).

Birksted-Breen brings an important focus to reverberation time that “spirals” through most of her chapters, but especially in Chapter Seven, “Time and the après-coup,” Chapter Nine, “Reverberation time, dreaming and capacity to dream,” and Chapter Ten, “Taking time, the tempo of psychoanalysis.” BirkstedBreen addresses time as a crucial element in understanding analytic process. “One important curative factor of psychoanalysis is precisely that it is a process, that the time element is central to it” (p.155). Birksted-Breen associates her reverberation time with the many related psychoanalytic concepts that we are all so familiar with: the “containment,” “reverie,” “transitional space,” “time of sojourn,” “potential space” (Britton), “theory in practice,” “dreaming up” (Winnicott), “dreamlike flash” (Ferro), “analytic third” (Ogden), the back and forth, the spiraling, triangular space.

Birksted-Breen’s description of reverberation time has a way of capturing the capacity to think, to dream. “For the infant, therefore, the time which can be tolerated will be, at first, the time of transformation within the mother’s psyche, if the mother is able herself to tolerate the time factor and not have to block or immediately eject the projections. I call ‘reverberation time’ the time it takes for disturbing elements to be assimilated, digested, and transformed” (p.147). She writes of the way thinking detaches from immediate reality, allowing for the moving back and forth in time and thereby bringing the possibility of a symbolizing process. In symbolizing, we

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find the capacity to think, to represent, and to capture the yet known past in a new way in the present (Ellman & Goodman, 2017).

Enactments contain both past and present, and have the power to bring timelessness to an end by creating the event of the enactment, which produces links between present affects and fantasy, and past memory (Ellman & Goodman, 2012).

We appreciate Birksted-Breen’s emphasis on place in the dyad, where “echo reverberates back and forth with mother and infant recognizing themselves in the other” (p.183).

She tells us that the primitive subjective sense of time created by the reverberation between mother and infant is where something is internalized and then becomes the basis of the capacity to dream. The dream then becomes the container of the “back and forth,” of the unconscious dialogue. For there to be an analytic process, here and now is mediated by reverie and the analyst’s capacity to give meaning. The mediation by analyst’s psyche in the now and the then, and the reverberation of the patient’s experience, enables a change in temporality in the patient’s psychic functioning. Time becomes linked with the space in the dyad and the space across time.

One of us (Ellman) was reminded of an analysand, a young woman in the termination phase of her analysis, who had a narcissistically limited mother unable to imagine her child’s mind, and who longed for closeness with a feminine object who could digest her thoughts. Coming to the end of a session, the analyst slipped and rather than say, “It is time for us to stop,” she said, “It is time for us to shop,” recognizing the reverberation time of having the maternal longing to provide the mother-daughter joining that had been missing. In this slip, the “there and then” became present in the “here and now” as the patient’s longings and the years of analytic exploration were mediated in the slip, “It is time to shop.”

In the context of discussing reverberation time, Birksted-Breen spirals back to discussing her discrimination between the British and French models of psychoanalysis, the British here and now emphasis and the French non-linear form of temporality, their après-coup (deferred action), retrospective attribution of meaning. Birksted-Breen contends that the British “here and now” approach, while taking center stage, does not actually depart from a form of temporality, as even in the here and now, the past must remain present. With this important recognition, the present amends the past according to the principle of après-coup.

Free association depends on temporality. One thing leads to another; there is time and space that is between and connects thoughts. The French use of metaphorical language speaks in one moment of different times. The notion of reverberation time links

with free association as thoughts/feelings move back and forth, and echo with unconscious processes.

Birksted-Breen emphasizes that time is about tolerating frustration with positioning in the Oedipal and generational difference, the depressive position of mourning, and the capacity to think about and imagine the past and future. The work in reverberation time, the back and forth, the spiraling, rather than the straight line, makes for the central necessity of the other. The analytic dyad holds the promising potentiality for reverberation time.

Spiraling 5: Termination Birksted-Breen’s final chapter on termination is quite moving. Her depiction of the termination process brings to life the powerful impact that psychoanalysis has on the mind reaching closer to its potential.

Birksted-Breen describes the way self-awareness and the recognition of beginnings and endings brings about greater connection to objects, increases in symbolization, room in the mind for the reflection and recognition of time. All of these elements come together with greater human connection to others, to the future, and to one’s own deep experience. In her words: The aim of psychoanalysis is to enable the development of the capacity to reconfigure the threads in a symbolic form, enabling separation via the creation of memory of the process. (p.235) In reading this termination chapter, Ellman recognized her current immersion in a termination phase of an analysis of a 30-yearold man, having conquered potent demons of his psychic past and opened facets of his inner world that were previously inaccessible.

In the depth of psychic work, both patients and analysts increase awareness of time within life and death forces. Birksted-Breen writes how representation replaces repetition.

With self-awareness, the repetitions are no longer identical, and the struggle is not the same. She addresses two dimensions. There is better psychic functioning and the growth of the greater capacity to experience a loving connection to others. The second affects relationships to both external and internal objects. These two facets both … lead to an overall picture in which there is a greater ability to face psychic reality, a greater sense of responsibility without masochism, a better self-esteem and toleration of separateness and loss, a better toleration of the more disturbed parts of the self and capacity to contain these, a better protecting ‘shield/skin’ or a greater sense of an internal structure when these have been deficient. (pp.232-233) 8

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In this beautiful quote, Birksted-Breen captures the internal growth that congeals in the termination phase.

Ellman’s patient exemplifies the growth of awareness that takes place with the increase of temporality and the good-bye. He recalled a film he repeatedly watched as a child, which to this day he watches and which moves him to tears at the moment when the protagonist triumphs over an internal weakness. He remarked that lately he is reminiscing more about memories of himself as a child and said that perhaps this is the time for that, since he anticipates he will be reminiscing about the years of our work together in the near future.

He wants to speak during the upcoming last month of our work about his anger at what’s been lost that he will never get back, reckoning with how his gains, his engagement and upcoming wedding, his professional advancement, the beginning of his graduate studies, his place of comfortable autonomy from his parents, his ease with his aloneness and newly found comfort with travel, poignantly bring him the sense of what he missed out on and will never rediscover. He is working at digesting the limits of our relationship, and what I cannot be for him. The earlier pressure, anxiety, and panic has moved away, and what has moved in is a sense of sadness along with an energized hopefulness in his own found capacities without the paralyzing fears of destruction.

As our spiraling voyage with BirkstedBreen is at an end, we are intensely aware of the richness of our travel with her. Ideas of temporality, sexuality, and being with the unconscious are present for us in new and transforming ways, adding to our understanding of the psychoanalytic process. We have spanned the continents with Birksted-Breen as she has integrated psychoanalytic thinkers from across expanses of geography and time. z REFERENCES Basseches, H. I., Ellman, P. L., Elmendorf, S., Fritsch, E., Goodman, N. R., Helm, F., & Rockwell, S. (1996).

Hearing what cannot be seen: a psychoanalytic research group’s inquiry into female sexuality. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 44S, 511-528.

Basseches, H. I., Ellman, P. L., & Goodman, N. R. (Eds.). (2013). The battle of life and death forces in sadomasochism: Clinical perspectives. London, UK: Karnac.

Birksted-Breen, D. (2016). The work of psychoanalysis: Sexuality, time and the psychoanalytic mind. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge.

Ellman, P. L. & Goodman, N. R. (2012). Enactment: Opportunity for symbolising trauma. In A. Frosch (Ed.), Absolute truth and unbearable psychic pain: Psychoanalytic perspectives on concrete experience. Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytical Studies series on the boundaries of psychoanalysis. London, UK: Karnac.

Ellman, P. L. & Goodman, N. R. (2017). Finding unconscious fantasy. In P. L. Ellman and N. R. Goodman (Eds.), Finding unconscious fantasy in narrative, trauma, and body pain (pp.1-22). London, UK: Routledge.

Fritsch, E., Ellman, P. L., Basseches, H., Elmendorf, S., Goodman, N. R., Helm, F., & Rockwell, S. (2001). The riddle of femininity: The interplay of primary femininity and the castration complex in analytic listening. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 82(6), 1171-1182.

Richards, A. K. (1992). The influence of sphincter control and genital sensation on body image and gender identity in women. Psychoanalytical Quarterly, LXI, 331–351.

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Catherine Millot’s Life With Lacan The celebrated Orson Welles film Citizen Kane (1941) develops as a biographical reconstruction. A journalist has to reconstruct the life of media mogul and tycoon Life With Lacan

By Catherine Millot, Andrew Brown (Trans.)

Polity, 128pp., $19.95, 2018 Charles Foster Kane immediately after his death. He composes a sort of jigsaw puzzle consisting of interviews with various characters who had shared part of their lives with Kane. The several witness accounts make

up a multifaceted image of this figure, but what the journalist mainly wants to find out is why, before dying, Kane uttered the word “Rosebud.” Who or what was Rosebud? This signifier seems to indicate a missing piece of the jigsaw.

As well as the unopened flower of a rose, Rosebud is also used to indicate a rosy mouth, delicate and rose-tinted. As an orifice with mucosa, the term also evokes the large and small lips of the vagina. Rosebud would indeed seem to refer to a woman, but it is also a signifier of what in French is

known as béance: what remains open, like a slit vein or a half-open mouth. The journalist eventually discovers nothing in particular, with the final revelation—a MacGuffin, in cinema language—being reserved for the spectator; a revelation, however, which leaves open the question of the ultimate meaning of the signifier uttered on the verge of death.

The Welles film came to my mind after reading La vie avec Lacan1 (“Life with Lacan”) by Catherine Millot (2017). The author, a psychoanalyst and writer, was

Lacan biography by Elisabeth Roudinesco (1997). We have a wealth of anecdotes, some quite palatable, others more or less imaginary, on the character of Lacan. We have to set these accounts side by side, a little like the journalist in Citizen Kane, if we want to compose the Lacan jigsaw. But are we left with a Rosebud to find a solution to?

I think we are. In short, I believe a Lacan enigma does exist.

Various friends I respect have said that they don’t think this brief volume is worth much. I wonder what motivates this severe

Lacan’s pupil-lover and partner in the 1970s. He was 43 years older than she was, and she notes that she has finished writing the book being the same age Lacan was when she met him: he was 72 at the time.

Millot’s is a witness account of her personal experience with Lacan, one that adds to the various testimonies, all with different perspectives, published over the years by Lacan’s relatives, friends, pupils, and analysands; and to the list, we can add the bulky

judgment. A witness account owes its interest not to whether it results in a more or less well-written book, or whether it’s more or less profound, but to the mere fact that it records and informs us on aspects of a life that particularly interests us. Several Lacanians abhor biographical writings on Lacan in general; “it’s only gossip,” they say, but ultimately, all historiography is a form of gossip. Analysis itself may somehow appear as gossip on oneself, translating into words something intimate and unspeakable. Perhaps some would rather

1. Gallimard, Paris, 2016. The pages quoted are taken from the Italian edition, Vita con Lacan, Raffaello Cortina, Milano, 2017.

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see hagiographies about Lacan rather than biographies. Serious biographies always involve a halo of demystification, and I can see why those who are devoted to a form of personality cult to Lacan are unable to accept them.

In contrast, I am also interested in “gossip” on Lacan, because, as psychoanalysis teaches, psychoanalytical theories are not only the product of disembodied minds, but of specific subjects with their histories, their unconscious, and their life wounds. In addition, it is also true that every biography appeals to our voyeurism. In fact, we might have expected Millot to tell us about her sexual relations with Lacan, or her relations with Lacan’s wife Sylvia; why not? But the more we find out about eminent women and men, the more we are haunted by something similar to Rosebud: there’s always something that escapes us, a sort of gap. Basically, who was Lacan really?

One of Lacan’s behaviors those most intimate with him point out is quite striking: the way he drove. He would drive over the speed limit, failing to give way, slipping into the emergency lanes to avoid a traffic jam; in short, he would jeopardize his own life and those of his passengers.

Even if somebody else were driving, he would immediately lose his patience at a red light, sometimes even leaving the car.

This anarchism of Lacan as motorist particularly surprises me, because Lacan was the psychoanalyst who gave the most importance to the role played by the law in the unconscious and in individual destinies. For Lacan, as for Saint Paul2, the law is not an obstacle against our desire, but is, on the contrary, the condition for desire itself; it is what desire is made of and what unleashes it. Now, how to consider the fact that the theorist of the law failed to heed to the simplest of laws, the Highway Code? Do we capture here a dyscrasia between theory and life?

Transgression, indeed: I think it is quite significant that Lacan clashed with the International Psychoanalytic Association not because of the content of his teaching, but for what I would call “fiscal” reasons: the fact that his sessions were variable in length (and therefore didn’t respect the fixed time, usually 45 minutes, adopted by orthodox analysts) and were usually too short. There’s nothing wrong with creating a new analytical technique, in doing short sessions, but I think it is significant that the rift broke out because Lacan failed to follow the code of the analytic setting.

We come across this problematic relationship with “the rules” in several more of Lacan’s behaviors, in particular making 2. Paul, Letter to Romans, 7, 7-8.

Catherine Millot his lover while she was still his analysand and pupil.

Lacan himself describes his meeting with the famous Austrian psychoanalyst Ernst Kris at the 1936 International Psychoanalytical Congress in Marienbad (Lacan, 1966). The young Lacan expressed to his colleague his wish to go to the Berlin Olympics, which were being held at the time. The point was that these were set to be Hitler’s Olympics… And Kris, a Jew, said to him in French, “ça ne se fait pas!” [“You shouldn’t do that!”] Lacan went anyway.

Indeed, ça ne se fait pas. You shouldn’t go through a red light, you shouldn’t go to bed with patients, you shouldn’t do excessively short sessions, you should yield right-of-way to other vehicles… And I say this not to launch an anathema on Lacan, quite the opposite, but rather to say that Lacan was a dandy.

No biographer or witness of Lacan, as far as I know, has portrayed Lacan as a dandy. Perhaps because the great dandies—Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Raymond Roussel, etc.—don’t appear ethically correct to us. They excluded themselves from the values and tastes of the masses, boasting their freedom from the rules that applied to the common people, i.e., to the mediocre. Now, it would seem that the charming arrogance of the dandy cannot be reconciled with psychoanalysis, which is after all, whether you recognize it or not, a curative activity, a form of help, a service to the person. Can a dandy be a philanthropist or simply a doctor? Millot stresses how Lacan made common people feel comfortable, how well he could converse with psychotics; in other words, he knew how to help. Besides, if you have that mysterious charm that today we call charisma, it’s easier to help people than if you don’t have it.

The dandy, therefore, feels free. Now, it so happens that Lacan always scorned to preach freedom, something that distinguishes him sharply from Sartre, the philosopher of the human being’s boundless freedom. When a TV journalist asked him a question about freedom, Lacan burst out laughing and eventually said to her, “I never talk about freedom.” He never talked about it, but he put it into practice, even if it meant breaking his neck.

Millot mentions Lacan’s pupil Giacomo Contri, translator of the Écrits into Italian, and here she makes a mistake. She says Lacan was exasperated by the fact that Contri had named his Milan school “Comunione e Liberazione” [“Communion and Liberation”]. In fact, Contri had called his group “Scuola freudiana” (“Freudian School”, of which I 10

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was a member for several years), but he was also a member of the Comunione e Liberazione movement, which we Italians know very well: it is an organization of fundamentalist Catholics, which even in politics took quite a conservative stance.

Lacan actually blamed Contri for his subscription to Catholic fundamentalism. In a meeting in Milan with Contri’s pupils, he said that the two signifiers “communion” and “liberation” were deeply foreign to his teachings, which was certainly not Catholic or Communist. The analyst in particular is never free: “It cannot be said that my discourse promises you liberation from anything, because it concerns, on the contrary, fixing upon ourselves people’s suffering …” (Lacan, 1978).

Millot writes: “To a transsexual who proclaimed his female essence, he never ceased to remind him during their interview of the fact that he was a man, whether he liked it or not, and that not even an operation would ever turn him into a woman” (p.42). There’s a position that would be seen as retrograde today, one that the LGBT movement would censure decisively. What prevails today is the idea that our gender is something that is assigned to us, not something we objectively are. But this is the point; Lacan did not gratify the liberal ideology according to which we should be free to be what we want to be, even with the aid of surgery and technology. The rhetoric of liberation that was so fashionable at the time both with the left and the right—“it is forbidden to forbid” (one of the famous slogans of May 1968 in Paris), the theology of liberation, and so on—was totally alien to him.

In fact, several more theories countered Lacan at the time, laying claim to, in the wake of 1968, an unconditioned liberation. These included Wilhelm Reich’s apotheosis of orgasm, Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines, or Jean Baudrillard’s liberational criticism. Compared to these philosophies that glorified the freedom of desire, Lacan’s thought appears a sore callback to the determinism in which the human being is involved.

Yet Lacan felt he was free from any rule. His pessimism regarding freedom was therefore only one side of the medal; the reverse was a liberation that I would call in extremis, born precisely out of a sort of inaugural submission. We can compare it to Antigone—on whom he held some fine seminars—the heroine that rebels against the law of the city to follow her own law, that of her desire.

Because Lacan’s transgressions went against the laws of Creon—from the International Psychoanalytical Association’s standard sessions to red lights—in order

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to affirm another law, the law of desire.

“We feel guilty,” he said, “when we give up on our desire.” He did not want to give up on his desire. “For him there were no small desires, the smallest longing was already enough for him,” Millot says (p.69), including the longings for the people he loved, longings that he had to satisfy immediately, without ever putting off to the next day what could be done right away.

Significantly, as a young man he was friends with some of the surrealists, including Dalí, even if Millot prefers to call Lacan a “Dadaist.” Perhaps this is why he married the former wife of Georges Bataille, whom we can consider the ultimate libertarian philosopher. It is precisely when we theoretically deny human freedom, as Luther did (De Servo Arbitrio), that you must practice it in the most candidly desperate way.

Lacan always wanted to enjoy everything: women, money, knowledge, thinking. In short, of Lacan we can by no means say he was wise—never mind the prejudice that says an analyst must be a champion of wisdom. Lacan expressed instead a remarkable vitality, an almost futurist passion for movement, sport, speed, travel. An almost childish vitality, which he himself acknowledged when he would say that he had the mental age of a five-year-old child.

Ultimately, what distinguishes someone merely intelligent, even extremely intelligent, from a genius is indeed vitality and energy. Lacan didn’t need amphetamines, unlike Sartre, who would take heaps of them, to always be somewhat in high spirits. And, in fact, like Erik Porge, we could interpret the title of Millot’s book as With Lacan: Life.

This vitality also expressed itself in the opposite of movement: Lacan spent long hours rapt, silent, motionless. This static void he created around himself at home, absorbed by his reflections, actually expresses the vitality of his thinking, which, whipped by the urgency of a perhaps impossible solution, would nail him down. A fast running for life, which, however, headed straight towards death, not towards the sense that each of us must die. After being diagnosed with bowel cancer, Lacan refused to follow a cure. And to his daughter who asked him why, he replied “No reason, just a whim.” The shadow of a quasi-suicide thus hovers over him, and the Stoics said that suicide is one of the few truly free actions a human being can allow himself.

When you’re extremely vital, you do not fear death, and Millot insists on Lacan’s fearlessness. Once, during a supervision session, a burglar broke in and pointed his gun straight at him, demanding money, but he absolutely refused to give him anything. When faced with death, he didn’t run away from it.

Like a dandy, he paid the price of a fundamental loneliness. “There was never an ‘us’, there was just him, Lacan, and me following him… After all, if the word ‘us’ was never congenial to me, to Lacan it was absolutely alien… His profound loneliness, his apartism [feeling ‘apart’ from others] made the ‘us’ something inappropriate” (p.19). The “us” is that dimension of communion that, as we’ve seen, Lacan found lamentable about the Communion and Liberation movement. This is why he didn’t believe in Communism, and why those who practice group analysis are quite allergic to him. Freud had dealt with the dimension of the “us” in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921/1955), in which he describes every Mass, every collective, every “us,” as something essentially fascist. Because the unity of the “us” always presumes a Führer, a leader, a sort of alienation of desire in him. How then could Lacan found an almost-mass school of which he was the undisputed leader?

The fact that he dissolved it shortly before his death tells us, however, that it had not been set up to exercise power on the masses. “With the exercise of power he had a relationship I would describe as minimalistic” (p.52).

What was then Lacan’s Rosebud? I would say the very fact he told us that each singular existence—even his own—rotates around the mystery of a half-closed mouth presenting itself as extremely sweet. He was at once Kane with his hole and the journalist looking for him. The enigma Lacan represents for us is his way of going round and round the enigma that every human being is, even to him or herself. Ultimately, he has always indicated a fundamental hole that breaks the coherence of the subject-organism. A béance, a cleft, a gap, in psychoanalytical theory, of course, and also in his own theory, which, however, in turn expresses a fundamental gap in the human being. As Millot reminds us, he called the human being “the singular,” separating it from the particular and the individual. He sought a singularity with no sense with which we all have to confront ourselves.

In physics, a singularity is every phenomenon by which the laws of normal physics cease to be valid, as in the case of black holes. Lacan believed that the bottom of every one of us is something “impossible” in which our laws are not valid and which he called the Real, a black hole that polarized him in his later years.

At the time Lacan was completely absorbed, I would say harried, by Borromean knots. These consist of an undefined number of rings—at least three—interlaced in such a way that removing any one ring results in the others being unlinked: 11

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Millot reminds us that the strings he used to create Borromean chains had at one point invaded both of Lacan’s houses.

In his later seminars, he would limit himself to drawing on a blackboard more and more complex rings and knots, in silence; he had almost stopped talking.

I shan’t discuss here the possible utility of Borromean knots in analytical theory and practice, but Lacan’s passion for them was certainly his jouissance and his symptom. Psychoanalytical theory needs to be psychoanalyzed too, along with the psychoanalyst who develops it. Lacan was apparently questioning himself: how to put together the fact that we manage to link aspects of our subjectivity, in such a way as to happily “close ourselves” to the cut, the breaking of the knot, which throws everything into the hubbub of freedom? In these knots, I can see an attempt to give an answer to a fundamental paradox, that of human existence, which psychoanalysis does nothing but retrace.

Around this paradox, the vortex of Lacan’s way of living and thinking. This vortex makes him stodgy for many, precisely because we can never rest upon a definitive consistency of the theory. He had most of human knowledge rotate as an ensemble in this vortex, in a bulimia similar to Hegel’s speculative one: psychoanalysis and works of literature, mathematics and philosophy, logic, art, and linguistics.

This cyclone rotated around an eye that he called the Real. This something missing from the jigsaw puzzle—and that which, in a way, dangerously frees us from any law— is something he confronted his entire life.

z REFERENCES Freud, S. (1955). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 18, pp.65-134). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1921) Lacan, J. (1966). The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power. Écrits (Vol. II, p.77). Paris, France: Seuil.

Lacan, J. (1978). Lacan in Italia/En Italie Lacan (pp.122127). Milan, Italy: La Salamandra.

Millot, C. (2017). Vita con Lacan (R. Prezzo, Trans.) [Life with Lacan]. Milan, Italy: Raffaello Cortina. (Original work published 2016).

Roudinesco, E. (1997). Jacques Lacan (B. Bray, Trans.).

New York NY: Columbia University Press.

Welles, O. (Producer and Director). (1941). Citizen Kane [Motion picture]. United States: RKO Radio Pictures.

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HYSTERIA AND DIFFERENCE Hysteria Today As Patricia Gherovici (2017) has recently noted, the histories of psychoanalysis and hysteria are intimately connected. Both demonstrate that there is no natHysteria Today edited by Anouchka Grose Karnac (2016) and Routledge (2018).

198 pp., $25.95 ural object for the drive; both are testimony to the fact that there is no pre-given “normal” model of sexuality. The imperative to reiterate these two fundamentally Freudian principles is particularly urgent today, in an era of trans-gender/sexuality, in a time when psychoanalysis is more than ever being called upon to demonstrate its relevance. Hence, the urgency of attending to what hysteria might be, and what diverse forms hysteria might take, in today’s world.

Anouchka Grose’s impressive collection of essays, published by Karnac under the imprint of London’s Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, provides an instructive means of comparing varying definitions and descriptions of hysteria in contemporary clinical work.

Grose’s opening chapter, which provides a wonderfully succinct overview of historical conceptualizations of hysteria, notes the opprobrium that has been targeted on the diagnostic notion of hysteria by feminism, before asserting that

Derek HOOK

forward in the form of accepted laws and norms. They use their dissatisfactions and discomforts as a means to interrogate the Other, to make it say something back…

In this sense the hysteric can be seen as a seeker after truth. (p.xxix) Hysteria, notes Grose, had disappeared from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by 1980, only to be replaced by the categories of “conversion disorder” and “histrionic personality disorder.” Leonardo Rodríguez takes up this argument, pointing to the hysterical phenomena that persist in the DSM under a diversity of headings: “Anxiety Disorders,” “Dissociate Disorders,” “Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders,” “Sexual Dysfunctions,” and so on.

Rodríguez warns against the tendency to simply equate conversion symptoms with hysteria. Almost anyone is capable of developing a conversion symptom, he notes, going on to specify that We diagnose a patient as a hysteric of the conversion type if the conversion symptom is the dominant symptom, that is, if the conversion symptom…is what holds the patient together, providing neurotic stability and an unconscious form of personal identity. (pp.10-11)

It is, by contrast, forms of anxiety hysteria that are more likely to present at today’s clinic. As Rodríguez rightly notes, a great number of patients today “suffer from social inhibitions, incipient or ill-defined phobias, and episodes of anxiety with detrimental physiological concomitants” (p.15). Rodríguez goes on to set conversion symptoms apart from more generalized psychosomatic symptoms. Conversion symptoms, he points out, are metaphoric in nature; metaphoric substitutions are not present in psychosomatic symptoms, which, furthermore, “correspond to a direct, sealed link between unconscious conflicts and the affected organs” (p.16).

A further distinction follows, between conversion symptoms and “pure” states of anxiety, which, as Rodríguez emphasizes, are still hysterical in the sense of being open to “becoming affected by the signifiers that the running of human life normally present[s] to the subject” (p.18). In each of these cases—hysteria manifesting in conversion symptoms, psychosomatic complaints, or varying forms of anxiety—the body remains the battlefield of subjective conflicts.

In her account of the apparent disappearance of hysteria into new diagnostic categories (such as those of anorexia and borderline personality), Anne Worthington reminds us of Freud’s concerns, which in his early work on hysteria lay with

in the Lacanian clinic, a diagnosis of hysteria is anything but an affront.

Dissatisfaction is the motor for desire, and desire drives existence. Hysterics specialise at using dissatisfaction to keep desire spinning, acting against atrophy and ossification. Far from trying to get them to stop fussing and get back in line, one might encourage them to take their questioning further, to use it in their lives and work, and even to attempt to enjoy it. (p.xxx) Hence, Lacan’s terminological choice in the 1970s, when he spoke about the need to “hystericize” neurotic analysands, stressing in this way the importance within clinical work of confronting incongruities and questioning what analysands claim to know about themselves and their history. So, Far from portraying hysterics as people who foolishly manufacture symptoms in a doomed attempt to buck the system, they are…seen [in Lacanian psychoanalysis] as people who refuse easy answers, resisting commonplace idiocies put 12

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the reconstruction of…patients’ histories, which gave access to a knowledge about desire, a desire so strongly prohibited by the patients’ own desires about what was acceptable, whether socially or according to their ideas about who they were, that it has been repressed only to emerge in bodily symptoms. (p.36) The existential question that distinguishes hysteria from other neuroses may today be less “Am I man or a woman?”

(Lacan’s favoured formulation) than “Am I straight or bisexual?” or even “Am I gay, or queer, or homosexual?” There are of course differing cultural contexts within which hysteria emerges. Worthington’s analysis of queer identity and politics as a site for “the articulation…of hysteria today” (p.49) provides a case in point; despite that, a series of crucial clinical continuities remains in place: Hysteria today, then, is perhaps not quite so different from the hysteria of yesterday: the somatic symptoms are messages, expressions of something repressed, questions addressed to the Other; it is associated with sex and sexuality, feminine sexuality; and the inherent bisexuality of the neurotic manifests itself in the hysteric’s speech, dreams, and identifications. (p.40) In a somewhat cryptic, yet nevertheless compelling, account, Vincent Dachy speaks of “the hysterical arrangement,” in which an effort is made “to keep and maintain the traumatic encounter with an enjoyment that poses the question of desiring within the realm of love” (p.57). The hysterical subject does not want to be desired as an object (for, as Dachy stresses, their body, their looks, their money, status, etc.), “but wants to be desired as and for ‘oneself ’…wants to be desired for the same reasons as those of being loved—but still wants to feel desired sexually” (p.57). The apparent structural impossibility of such a demand is nicely underlined by Dachy: “enjoyment, love and desire do not constitute a simple and automatic, ‘natural’ continuum!” (p.57).

It is the hysteric’s attempt to use love as a means of containing the traumatic encounter with enjoyment that particularly fascinates Dachy: As the traumatic disruptive enjoyment is too much to deal with, love…is called

to make it passable. Love attenuates the shock of the traumatism, gives it a limit.

By seeking the protection of the powers of love…desiring can be upheld as un-realised, and the re-encounter of the problematic enjoyment kept at bay. (p.57) Part of what is compelling about this account is that it foregrounds how a traditionally masculine dilemma—how to both love and enjoy the sexual object—is also fundamentally hysterical.

Darian Leader continues the study of careful diagnostic distinctions apparent in Rodríguez’s chapter by insisting not on the content of clinical symptoms, but on the place they occupy for their sufferers, and by drawing attention to what they give voice to. Any number of culturally available symptom types might be utilized as a means of articulating the hysteric’s discontent. Contrary to how the term is often invoked, there can be no cross-cultural or trans-historical definition of hysteria: Hysteria by definition is constantly updating its symptom pictures. Presenting symptoms will change with culture…A robust diagnosis will be predicated not on surface symptomology but on how the subject speaks about their symptom, the position it occupies, and what we can learn about its construction. (p.28) Leader’s chapter is concerned with three particular areas where diagnoses of hysteria and psychosis are sometimes confused, namely questions concerning Other minds, the Other woman, and the Other body. The psychotic subject, like the hysteric, may spend much of their life in the unbearable situation of not knowing who they are for the Other. This puzzle of Other minds can often be separated in its psychotic from its hysterical in the following terms: What seems on the surface to be a… stoking the desire of the Other, of creating…unsatisfied desires…turns out [for the psychotic] to be a way of creating… distance. …The Other must be kept at an artificial distance which the subject has created. …for the hysteric, such refusals serve to perpetuate the question of their value for the Other-…The relation to the Other here aims at a point of desire, of lack, which the subject identifies with. (pp.29-30) The hysteric’s identification with the lack, furthermore, is generally situated in the father. The role of paternity thus makes for a useful differential diagnostic feature in hysteria and psychosis. Whereas the Name-of-the-Father 13

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is famously foreclosed for Lacan in the structure of psychosis, something about the father does not work here; the trace of the father and the lacking father are typically operative in hysteria.

Leader’s conclusion makes for an important consideration in any differential diagnosis of hysteria: The hysteric is not the only subject allowed to pose a question about their sexual identity, just as the hysteric is not the only one with a sensitivity to the desire of the Other or a claim to use the body as a space for conversion. It is less the presence of these motifs that truly characterizes hysteria than the nature of the space in which they are elaborated. (p.33) If the medium of this space is lack, Leader continues—opting here for a topological formulation—and if this lack is one within which elements of identification are operating, “we are probably with hysteria” (p.33).

Hysteria Today has obviously been prepared as a text primarily for clinicians, and its focus on differential issues is certainly one of its strengths. It would have been useful, perhaps, if more on Lacan’s later theory of the four discourses might have been introduced, thus opening up a link to social and political theory. This being said, Colette Soler’s contribution to the volume does usefully foreground a series of Lacanian formulations regarding hysteria that connect his early to his later work: Clinically speaking, the key phenomenon of hysteria is…a systematic lack of satisfaction, that is, a lack that is cultivated. …This has given rise to a series of different interpretations: first it was the manifestation of a desire to desire, then it was necessary to keep jouissance unsatisfied so that desire can be sustained. But any desire is always linked to a modality of jouissance. (pp.91-92) Particularly helpful here is how Soler reformulates the idea of a hysterical desire for an unsatisfied desire in terms of the later Lacan’s attention to jouissance. There are a series of motifs—signatures of jouissance, as we might put it—that point us to how hysteria is most likely to manifest today: the jouissance of being deprived; the idea of “the body on strike,” and “identification with the jouissance of the castrated master” (Soler, pp.91-92). Bearing these clinical indications in mind gives one little doubt about the persistence of hysteria in today’s world. z REFERENCES Gherovici, P. (2017). Transgender psychoanalysis: A Lacanian perspective on sexual difference. Abingdon, UK and New York, NY: Routledge.

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Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference It is unfortunate that much of institutionalized clinical psychoanalysis, particularly perhaps in the more medicalized US context, has lent itself to a patholoTransgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference

By Patricia Gherovici.

Routledge, 198pp., $52.95, 2017 gization of “non-normative” or so-called “deviant” sexualities. Patricia Gherovici’s distinctive political and Lacanian engagement with what is perhaps the most urgent debate in psychoanalysis today—that of sex/gender change, as brought to the fore by the trans movement—does not shy away from this lamentable history.

It is something of an irony that a mode of clinical and theoretical practice developed on the basis of Freud’s texts (inclusive of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905/1953) should be either somewhat detached from, or worse yet, pathologizing of, “minority” sexualities. As Gherovici shows, Freud himself was far keener to collaborate with experts of sexology in the development of psychoanalysis than were many of his colleagues, and he certainly demurred from the homophobia that many later psychoanalytic institutions sadly came to exemplify.

The polymorphous perversity that Freud posits as underlying sexuality itself, along with his suggestion, echoed and amplified by Lacan, that drive is by definition skewed, deviant, “non-normative” (even, might we say: “queer”), should mean that the concept of sexual abnormality has no place in psychoanalysis.

We could take this argument further: in having gravitated towards the conservative, particularly with respect to current debates on trans identity, psychoanalysis has—in effect—ceased to be psychoanalysis at all, at least in the sense of being a discipline attuned to the non-normative and unconscious dimensions of sexuality.

It is for this reason that Gherovici argues that psychoanalysis needs a sex change, and that current developments in the trans movement best enable such a revision. Humorously, she asks: “Could it be that today’s psychoanalysts are no longer as afraid of Lacan as they were yesterday?

Are they not more afraid of sexual and gender non-conformity?” (p.2).

If Freud’s non-normalizing theory of sexuality is in any doubt, let us refer back to Freud’s thoughts on sex as related to the drive, as so articulately described by Gherovici:

Freud separates sexuality from the destiny of genitality, from the destiny of gender, and even from the destiny of reproduction. …Freud had further elaborated on the sexual drive as not determined by gender…in Freud’s thinking the drive has only one object—the aim of the drive is satisfaction, a satisfaction that even when obtained is never complete.

The drive, a tireless power, unlike other biological functions, knows no rhythm…

The drive carries along a non-representable sexuality in the unconscious. The drive is neither a biological force nor a purely cultural construction. (p.165) What this means then is that “sexuation”—how one identifies and, as importantly, how one desires as a sexual being—cannot be reduced to questions of either biological sex or sociological gender. For psychoanalysis, as Gherovici puts it in a succinct formulation, “sexual difference is neither sex nor gender because gender needs to be embodied and sex needs to be symbolized” (p.165). Moreover, “The problem that one finds in the clinical practice,” says Gherovici, “is always of the order of the Real…of the unassimilable aspect of sexuality” (p.165).

Sexuality, viewed from a Lacanian perspective, is invariably a failed or incomplete project, a function of modalities of jouissance that are never completely domesticated or harmonized with that of another subject.

Hence Lacan’s famous rhetorical insistence that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” Or, put in a more straightforward way, sexuality for Freud exceeds sexual practices and sexual identity and is hence inherently problematic. Why? Because it is disruptive of identity, or as Gherovici puts it, paraphrasing Leo Bersani: “sexual pleasure occurs when a certain threshold of intensity is traversed, when the organization of self is…disturbed by sensation” (p.38).

The notion of jouissance is crucial to grasping the radically de-natured form of human sexuality; jouissance connotes “a violent, climactic bliss closer to loss, death, fragmentation, and the disruptive rapture experienced when transgressing limits” (p.63).

Given then the de-essentialized, “real,” and disruptive nature of sexuality as a type of constitutive incommensurability, how should we define trans? Gherovici provides a helpful and necessarily inclusive description: “Trans” is an umbrella term that applies to genderqueer people, to male-tofemale and female-to-male transsexuals, to gender non-conforming folk, to drag queens and drag kings, to cross-dressers, to a large range of people who do not identify with the sex assigned on their birth certificate. (p.3) 14

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The political importance of this movement, which Gherovici considers the new frontier of the Civil Rights Movement, comes to the fore here. Gender transition is not just a movement between categories, or a reiteration of existing dominant poles of gender (“male” and “female”). By contrast, the transgender experience “unsettles identity while it highlights the plasticity, contingency, and arbitrariness of categories like race or gender” (p.5).

Of the various myths that Gherovici dispels about gender transitioning, perhaps the most crucial is that such a choice is not a type of commodity decision, an instance of identity experimentation; it is “more about mortality, the limit between life and death, than about sexuality, the border between male and female” (p.106). As she stresses, transgender subjects want to be recognized in their being: “When they say ‘I am beautiful’ the stress is more on ‘I am’ than on ‘beautiful.’ Theirs is more an ethical than an aesthetic concern” (p.114). Transitioning, in short, is typically a life and death matter.

The pathologization of transgender persons in Lacanian psychoanalysis has often occurred through the presumption that such transgender desires are, by definition, psychotic. This, suffice to say, is something that Gherovici strongly contests. The automatic equation of transgender desire with psychotic structure is necessarily erroneous, for the simple reason that such transgender desire can manifest within any psychical structure. Indeed, ultimately it is hysterical structure that proves for her more informative that psychosis in exploring trans gender, and for a crucial reason: “Hysterical gender uncertainty exposes the psychic hesitations caused by living in a body that is sexed and mortal, expressing a universal foundation of sexual uncertainty for all speaking subjects, cis and trans” (p.7). The universality of sexual uncertainty—this surely is a rallying cry that psychoanalysis should fully endorse.

Gherovici has for some time been at the forefront of a critically explorative and politically progressive form of Lacanian psychoanalysis within the US (particularly so in The Puerto Rican Syndrome [2003], Please Select Your Gender [2010], and, with Manya Steinkoler, Lacan on Madness [2015]). She consolidates and extends that reputation in Transgender Psychoanalysis, largely via an inventive application of the Lacanian notion of the sinthome. It is via this concept—sinthome understood as a new kind of symptom that does not need to be removed or cured—that she maintains, “we can rethink sexual difference without the notion of the phallus” (p.8). The sinthome refers to the unique way a subject enjoys their unconscious. It is a non-pathological symptom, an invention—as one might say, an idiosyncrat-

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ic quirk or signature, an extemporization of jouissance—that makes life livable for them.

The standard Lacanian example is of James Joyce, who, through the activity of his highly distinctive writing, managed to bind together the three Lacanian registers of the real, imaginary, and symbolic (the domains of libidinal excitation, the body-image, and

[A] sinthome can be found in any structure (neurosis and psychosis)… [hence] with the help of this theory one can challenge the pathological approach too often adopted by psychoanalysis when confronted with non-normative expressions of sexuality and sexual identity. (p.146)

theory with the critical and political imperatives of the clinic of transgender issues is both sophisticated and, frankly, inspiring.

Significantly, she uses psychoanalysis as a means of critiquing psychoanalysis itself, and as a means of signaling a prospective future for the discipline. The last (hopeful) word belongs to Gherovici: “One might say

the operations of language and law) and thus stave off psychical fragmentation.

The clinical implications of the concept of the sinthome are immediate: the work of analysis is not to be focused on removing something from the subject (hindering forms of jouissance, for example) or upon conceptualizing the subject in a type of deficit model (in which there is something wrong, pathological, with or about them), but on constructing something new, a novel means of binding enjoyment, identity, and the symbolic. The theory of the sinthome moreover offers an original framework for thinking about sexual difference:

The work of an analysis is hence more akin to a type of construction than a hermeneutic of suspicion, more a means of finding that crucial fourth element within a subject’s life that might function as the knotting element that holds the various other facets of their subjective and symbolic existence together.

Gherovici deploys an impressive array of skills in Transgender Psychoanalysis: historian, critical thinker, Lacanian theorist, and—most impressive of all—open-minded clinician continually willing to explore the conceptual and political limitations of psychoanalysis. Her blending of Lacanian

that psychoanalysis is due to undergo its own castration, to experience a depletion of prejudice, ushering in new forms of desire.

If heeded, this might radically transform the fraught relationship between psychoanalysis and transgender people” (p.101). z

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REFERENCES Freud, S. (1953). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 7, pp.123-246). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Gherovici, P. (2003). The Puerto Rican syndrome. New York, NY: Other Press.

Gherovici, P. (2010). Please select your gender. Hove, UK and New York, NY: Routledge.

Gherovici, P. and Steinkoler, M. (Eds.). (2015). Lacan on madness: Madness, yes you can’t. Hove, UK and New York, NY: Routledge.

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War Memoirs: 1917-1919 While reading the newly published second edition of Wilfred Bion’s War Memoirs, I found myself in The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1924/1969). I was not surprised by War Memoirs: 1917-1919, Second Edition

By Wilfred R. Bion Routledge, 320pp., $42.95, 2015 this, as Mann’s work ends with his protagonist killed by a shell in World War I and contains jokes about psychoanalysis in the early pages. However, my focus was not so much on the story itself as on an essay, The Making of the Magic Mountain (Mann, 1924/1969). In that essay, Mann covers a lot of ground, and two points stood out in my memory. First, that the novel could not be judged alone and should be considered with his other works. Second, Mann suggests that as with a piece of music, if the volume is enjoyed, that it will be more so if read more than once. These two points are of course interrelated, and I mention them here because they are fitting and equally daunting in regard to approaching Bion’s work. Fortunately, there is no single way of reading.

In this age of classroom requests by students for trigger warnings, there exists at least one classroom where the first edition of this book has been read by undergraduates who evidently find comfort in reports of Bion’s own challenges to linking (Souter, 2009). Additionally, Meg Harris Williams (2010) writes on the pleasures of personal readings and the dangers of reading dogmatically. Williams (2010) has written her own haunting poetry in response to Bion’s writing, and I recommend it in addition to recommending the book under review. Associations to music and poetry are fitting, as Bion’s work possesses a literary quality, and to that end may be linked to a significant literature by British poets, who like Bion fought in World War I. Another Wilfred, Wilfred Owen, who met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon at a military hospital before returning to the front where he was killed in 1918, writes in the first stanza of his poem “Insensibility” (in Ward, 1997, p.20), “Happy are men who yet before they are killed/Can let their veins run cold.”

Containers crack, sometimes failing to hold in a good enough fashion. The breakdown of witnessing capacities is a loss of continuity that has been equated with death (cf. Gerson, 2009). Telling, speaking, and writing then become efforts to rekindle what has gone cold, and this in itself can lead to new challenges. Efforts to speak aim to reshape experience from unspoken anguish into a story (cf. Toll & Toll, 2016). Us-

ing a military metaphor to write about war poetry, Kate Falvey considers that “words provide supply routes for healing and understanding” (Falvey, 2015, p.190). Donald Moss (2010) writes of a pleasure in listening and hearing in a manner that may blow the mind apart due to an inability to distinguish

bances over time. In my reading, an image arises of Zen calligraphy. There I see a circle painted black, its broken gap that is no gap alerts me to a pulsating force and that this circle is turning red. Blood? A ring of fire? It turns black again, falling silent. Cold.

As I consider sharing this, I am reminded

pleasure from harm as spoken sniper bullets cut across generations. Such a process marks efforts to recreate the self again and again through a telling that fosters feelings and possibly recovery rhythms in the present (Williams, 2010).

Images of veins as broken containers are not easy to work with, and what is remarkable about Bion’s writing is his capacity to creatively work with such distur-

that to report blood in response to a Rorschach card is considered bad form. However, not to speak of blood when faced with war might well be worse. Experience can be challenging, and in the land of inkblots, I find that in regard to bad form, poor integration has been considered to be due to experiencing a passivity in being struck in a manner that thwarts integration (Schachtel, 2001). Color shock. Shell shock. Schachtel

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adds that an individual may not consciously experience this helpless attitude. Relatedly, John Rickman, a Quaker and conscientious objector who was Bion’s analyst in the 1930s, used the term “nameless horror” to convey the rekindling of an experience already lived in a stage in which the mind was still immature (Civitarese, 2011; Roper, 2012). Bion’s War Memoirs depicts an author experiencing helplessness and reworking it.

that Bion’s statement that he died in World War I is not to be treated as a metaphor.

This consideration of the literal quality of death is found again in the treatment given to Chief Plenty Coups’ comment that after the buffalo disappeared, nothing happened as a means to illuminate the challenges of moving forward into uncertainty without guideposts (Lear, 2006). Bion’s war diaries are not simply a report of trauma and

Cold veins, metal, and blood are the materials of this work, and as Michael Eigen (2004) writes, hemorrhage expresses injury to thinking and feeling processes.

With each war, the response to trauma is one in which it becomes apparent that history has been buried and disavowed (Davoine & Gaudilliere, 2004). In consideration of such history, Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere write

death, but show the development of capacities to work with having died so that something more might happen in actions occurring on and off the battlefield.

Dogmatic dangers may be found in the simple fact that the War Memoirs, first published in 1997, has been re-published a year following the publication of the sixteen-volume edition of Bion’s Complete Works edited by Francesca Bion and Chris 17

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Mawson (W. R. Bion, 2014). Amidst such voluminous danger is a challenge toward heterodox play with words that “became litanical on their way to becoming liturgical” (Grotstein, 1987, p.61). In the introduction also found in volume three of the Complete Works, Mawson writes that this volume is the final part of Bion’s autobiography. This comment is, I think, rather playful and pithy. The first part of the book is comprised of writing composed shortly after the war, and was written by Bion to his parents in lieu of letters never sent. Francesca Bion refers to this as “his first piece of descriptive writing” (p.2). This first section entitled “Diary” is followed by writings of Bion entitled “Commentary” and “Amiens”.

The “Commentary” and “Amiens” sections were written not simply after World War I but after World War II, as they bear the respective dates of 1972 and 1958. Francesca Bion notes that these sections are closer to the writing found in A Memoir of the Future (Bion, 1991a). This sort of re-telling and reworking affords something more than what Mann was referring to in regard to a rereading of The Magic Mountain. A return of first in last with difference and repetition as the text itself transforms over time. Bion’s book concludes with a section entitled “Aftermath” written by his daughter Parthenope Bion Talmo. Talmo illuminates much about Bion’s capacities of loving attunement to wars in and between internal and external groups, and she connects relating with war to Bion’s use of beta-elements and alpha-function. Alpha-function and beta-elements are terms that Bion considered not so much a part of psychoanalytic theory as much as working tools (Bion, 1991b). Regarding these tools and Bion’s autobiography, James Grotstein (2007) considers that both may be read as radio signals sent from an undead/dead self struggling to be heard.

Bion considers raw sense impressions that Eigen (2011, p.65) has referred to as “impact globs” that may overlap with feelings or other perceptions, and along Kantian lines are experienced as a thing, rather than phenomena, to be beta-elements. Beta-elements may be evaded or converted into alpha elements, and Bion (1991b) adds that this process may be either conscious or unconscious. Alpha-function, then, is a modification and storage (cf. Eigen, 2011) process that entails a searching for durable and familiar sense impressions (Bion, 1991b; 1994). To that end, alpha-function is required for creativity (Brown, 2012). Alpha is about how a capacity is being used, as one may have alpha intuition at sometimes and not others (Eigen, 2004). This has been considered a type of thinking that shapes the thinker (Williams, 2010), and Bion turns to celestial navigation as a means to mea-

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sure time in order to pursue questions as to whether a self holds ideas or ideas hold a self (Bion, 1991a). In War Memoirs, Bion writes of taking compass readings in an effort to soothe panic prior to the start of a battle. He considers that his action is simply an anxiolytic one and of no other use.

However, he later finds that due to fog, the compass readings are essential for the navigation of the tanks he commands. Here, mental processes are filled with moments of false certainty and uncertainty that may be greater than what may be apprehended.

In relation to the fog of war, experiences of bizarre objects are related to a reversal of the alpha-function that does violence to its structure. Experience becomes mediated through the changes brought by such violence, so the perception of a bizarre object is not the same as beta-elements (Bion, 1991b). Working with such thought, Eigen (2004) writes that trauma creates damage leading unconsciousness not to be trusted.

Through work with survivors of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Ghislaine Boulanger (2007) finds confirmation that alpha functioning is damaged in presenting symptoms, and adds that the containing capacities of an analyst may be helpful to successfully work with what Eigen highlights as a sense of catastrophe (Eigen, 2011, p.65, italics original) so that beta-elements may become thoughts as opposed to bizarre, stagnant objects. Bearing witness to such transformative capacities, Parthenope Bion Talmo writes in the “Aftermath” that Bion became an analyst in spite of the war.

After passing through fog and into battle, Bion is in a tank with a gasoline filter that is clogged. The danger of being an easy target is great, and extreme effort is required to complete the small task of making the filter work. Filters and thoughts may break down. Alpha backs up. Time stops.

Bion’s writing on being in tanks is significant, as physical warfare becomes a model from which to approach the war of the mind (Williams, 2010).

Prior to battle, Bion orders his men to tie gas cans full of water onto the exhaust pipes of their tanks so that later there would be hot water for tea. He also writes of an officer who simply ties a small container of water to another tank’s exhaust for his personal shaving kit. The implications of such differences in regard to an individual’s sense of relatedness in groups is underscored in the “Aftermath,” where Talmo considers that her father was gifted with a capacity to provide a sort of behavior therapy.

However, behavior therapy is delivered in a context in which Bion’s interest in his own life had died. He writes to his parents that he looked forward to being killed as a way

in which to escape while doing his job to the best of his abilities. Such a berserk state typically entails perpetuating abuses, and it is challenging to find a melancholic quality to Bion’s berserk state in which he wishes to die in service to his men (cf. Shay, 1994).

While reading, I began to have day– dreams of Snoopy as a flying ace rescuing Bion. A transitional object is a hero, and there I am reminded of Eigen (2010) writing that Winnicott is peace psychology.

Following a German retreat, Bion writes, “One didn’t quite like to think about peace” (p.150). Snoopy is not coming, and that is heart breaking. A few pages after savoring my wish for a messianic Snoopy, I find Bion writing of enemy airplanes.

He writes: “Amongst the others there was one painted bright red—the color usually believed to be affected by Richthofen [celebrated German pilot, nicknamed the Red Baron]” (p.147). I feel that the aim of my fantasy is spot on, and I “hang on” to my desire for Snoopy. Eigen (2010) adds that like Winnicott, Bion too has faith in nourishment. For Bion, faith is a radical openness or naked attitude existing without memory or desire, facilitating a move beyond a crisis in faith (cf. Eigen, 2011).

There is a marked difference between writing in the “Diary” and in the sections that follow in regard to how Bion describes the events occurring shortly before and after the fixing of the tank’s clogged fuel filter in the 1918 battle of Amiens, which was the start of the offensive that eventually ended the war. In the “Diary,” Bion writes of being outside the tank and that the gasoline filter was easily fixed. Following the “Diary,” he is inside the tank, wonders if the walls are made of jelly, time appears to bend, Bion fixes the filter, and drops out of the door of the tank. It was common for commanders to walk behind the tanks. Moments after he exits, the tank explodes, and all the men inside are killed. He describes an image that looks like both a flower and the guts of an animal (p.244). In a transcript of a tape recording from August 8, 1978, Bion says: “… the bodies were charred and blackened, and poured out of the door of the tank as if they were the entrails of some mysterious beast of a primitive kind” (Bion, 1994, p.368).

Like an inkblot, a tank can be a womb or a grave (cf. Williams, 2010).

Moments after the tank explosion and the death of his men, a similar variation is found in Bion’s writing regarding the death of his runner, to whom he gives the name Sweeting. Bion writes to his parents that a shell seemingly burst on top of the two of them, leaving Sweeting unable to cough as the left side of his chest had been ripped apart. Bion also writes to his parents that prior to Sweeting dying, Bion accepts 18

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Sweeting’s mother’s address and promises to write her on his behalf. Bion writes of this repeatedly in the sections that follow.

There, Bion writes of leaving the exploded tank while “gripping tightly onto Sweeting’s belt” (p.244). Then, Sweeting clutches Bion’s side as they attempt to find safety in a shell hole, where Bion decides that his compass bearings must be incorrect. Bion then tells Sweeting to shut up in response to his request that Bion write his mother.

Pages later, Bion writes in dialogue with another soldier that the war is simply mur-

der, and mentions Sweeting’s death. The other solider replies that it (the death of the runner Sweeting and organized murder in general) is not much to worry about. In the first section immediately following the “Diary,” Bion’s younger self tells his older self that most of his trouble started at this battle from which he never recovered. Bion of 1972 then speaks of still becoming. In A Memoir of the Future, Bion (1991a) writes of words as hanging across a mental wound like the lame field dressing that he applied to Sweeting, and that he wishes to believe in forgiveness. Sweeting has been considered Bion’s sweet heart or his feeling self with links to his mother that he was unable to tolerate (Williams, 2010). Wishing to avoid pain, Bion desires to be a “dummy stuffed with straw” (p.231). I find another link to The Magic Mountain, as in that novel, some characters with tuberculosis undergo procedures resulting in a condition in which one lung would expel air from the side of the chest. A fantasy results, in which Sweeting would be a fictional patient before the war, that is similar to my desire for Snoopy.

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Such thinking might well be considered defensive denial; that is not far from what Gary Winship (1999) has in mind when he suggests that analyzing this text may well be a defense against the horror of the narrative. There, a search for coherence reveals a difficulty in tolerating the unknown by working to create a knowingness that could well thwart creativity (cf. Phillips, 1998). Yet, there is a paradox, as knowledge may also facilitate creative processes.

Accordingly, knowledge may be good or bad in its capacities to manipulate experi-

ence (cf. Eigen, 2012). As knowledge can vary, working with alpha-functioning can be a pesky affair, and Eigen (2016) suggests considering the nuances and mixtures of a simultaneity of a positive-negative alpha that is more complex than a binary. Tolerating a suspension of certainty and staying with such a flux of uncertainties may allow transformations such as Sweeting’s request to write becoming Bion’s new capacity to write (Williams, 2010).

In his Poem “When I’m killed,” Robert Graves writes: You’ll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you’ve read.

(Ward, 1997, p.42) Cultivating compassion in regard to parts of the self that want to attack links or not be compassionate is a curious paradox (cf. Rothschild, 2015). Bion’s autobiographies reveal him as a master of this, and he writes that truth and compassion are relational qualities that may be associated with absence or presence (Bion,

1994). Relating to absence or uncertainty is challenging, and with an attitude of a Zen master commenting on Bion’s writing, Francesca Bion (1995/2014) suggests that answers will only be found through one’s own intuition and understanding.

She (F. Bion, 1981) also provides an introduction of her late husband’s that he had written for an unpublished collection of poetry. There, he writes that it is easy to lose the capacity for awe. If there is any recommendation regarding this work, it is to read with awe. One significant example of this is expressed by Lawrence Wetzler (2015), who writes of studying Bion for sixteen years in Michael Eigen’s seminar, where a single passage may be returned to repeatedly over several weeks. I also find this in the manner in which a simple book review needed to grow. If you have read this far, thank you, as an ethical sense pulls for either such lengthy treatment or the challenge to compose a stark haiku and to let it stand for the whole.

Eigen recommends Bion as helpful when “barbed wire surrounds the soul and cuts into it” (Eigen, 2010, p.40). Moments of birth and death can make for significant bleeding. In her memoir, Sister Chan Khong (2007) writes of smelling dead bodies while sleeping on boats next to Thich Nach Hanh during the Vietnam War, and how this led Thich Nach Hanh to write the poem “Experience” after cutting his finger as a prayer for the dead.

Part of that reads: On this big place by the Thu Bon River, I cut my finger And watch the blood drip (Khong, 2007, p.64) Bion (1994) considers that humans may be compared to embryonic mammals terrified in regard to developing capacities while moving into an unknown future, and worries that failure to develop may lead to extinction. It would indeed be a tragedy if terror was considered final, and here Bion is, I think, of much help. Qualities close to his psychoanalytic spirit are found in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry: Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

(1905/2005, p.119)

REFERENCES Bion, F. (1981). Memorial meeting for Dr. Wilfred Bion.

International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 8, 3-14.

Bion, F. (2014). The days of our lives (1994). In C. 19

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Mawson & F. Bion (Eds.), The complete works of W. R. Bion, Volume XV, Appendix A. London, UK: Karnac Books. (Original work published 1995: The days of our years. Journal of Melanie Klein Society & Object Relations, 13) Bion, W. R. (1991a). A memoir of the future. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Bion, W. R. (1991b). Learning from Experience. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Bion, W. R. (1994). In F. Bion (Ed.), Cogitations: New extended edition. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Bion, W. R. (2014). In C. Mawson & F. Bion (Eds.), The complete works of W. R. Bion. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Boulanger, G. (2007). Wounded by reality: Understanding and treating adult onset trauma. Mahwah, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Brown, L. J. (2012). Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield and in the consulting room. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 93, 1191-1214.

Civitarese, G. (2011). Towards an ethics of responsibility. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 20, 108-112.

Davoine, F. and Gaudilliere, J. M. (2004). S. Fairfield (Trans.), History beyond trauma: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent. New York, NY: Other Press.

Eigen, M. (2004). The sensitive self. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Eigen, M. (2010). Eigen in Seoul: Volume one, madness and murder. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Eigen, M. (2011). Contact with the depths. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Eigen, M. (2012). Kabbalah and psychoanalysis. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Eigen, M. (2016). Personal communication, March 20, 2016.

Falvey, K. (2015). Review of K. Powers: Letter composed during a lull in the fighting. Bellevue Literary Review, 15(2), pp.188-192.

Gerson, S. (2009). When the third is dead: memory, mourning, and witnessing in the aftermath of the Holocaust. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 90, 1341-1357.

Grotstein, J. S. (1987). Making the best of a bad deal: A discussion of Boris’s “Bion Revisited.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 23(1), 60–76.

Grotstein, J. S. (2007). A beam of intense darkness: Wilfred Bion’s legacy to psychoanalysis. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Khong, C. (2007). Learning true love: Practicing Buddhism in a time of war: A nun’s journey from Vietnam to France and the history of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist community.

Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.

Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mann, T. (1969). H. T. Lowe-Porter (Trans.), The Magic Mountain. New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1924) Moss, D. (2010). War stories. In A. Harris & S. Botticelli (Eds.), First do no harm: The paradoxical encounters of psychoanalysis, warmaking, and resistance (pp.243-250). New York, NY: Taylor and Francis.

Phillips, A. (1988). Winnicott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rilke, R. M. (2005). A. Barrows & J. Macy (Trans.), Rilke’s book of hours: Love poems to God. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. (Original work published 1905) Roper, M. (2012). The ‘spear head of an advance’: Bion’s wartime letters to Rickman. Psychoanalysis and History, 14, 95-109.

Rothschild, L. (2015). Sensing the mustard seed: Defense, awakening, and fragmentation. In S. Bloch & L. Daws (Eds.), Living moments: On the work of Michael Eigen (pp.307-322). London, UK: Karnac Books.

Schachtel, E. G. (2001). Experiential foundations of Rorschach’s test. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat trauma and the undoing of character. New York, NY: Scribner.

Souter, K. M. (2009). The war memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W. R. Bion. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 90, 795-808.

Toll, E. & Toll, S. I. (2016). Old soldier, is it like this?

Journal of the American Medical Association, 315(2), 135-136.

Ward, C. (Ed.). (1997). World war one British poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and others. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Wetzler, L. (2015). Studying Bion’s work in Mike Eigen’s ongoing weekly seminar. In S. Bloch & L. Daws (Eds.), Living moments: On the work of Michael Eigen (pp.243-250).

London, UK: Karnac Books.

Williams, M. H. (2010). Bion’s dream: A reading of the autobiographies. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Winship, G. (1999). W. R. Bion War Memoirs 19171919. Edited by Francesca Bion. Karnac. Pp. 312. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 13, 93-95.

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INTERVIEW

Psychosis Therapy Project: An Innovative Psychoanalytic Treatment Program

Patricia GHEROVICI & Manya STEINKOLER interview Dorothée BONNIGAL-KATZ

We met with the psychoanalyst Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz in March of 2017 in London on the occasion of a two-day conference, “Transgender, Gender and Psychoanalysis,” an event she organized with The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Freud Museum.

We were intrigued by the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP), an Anglophone psychoanalytic treatment center for psychotic patients she directs, and asked her if she would be willing to be interviewed for DIVISION/Review to tell us about her current work.

found much inspiration to be found in the astute observations they make regarding their clinical experience of psychosis, even though they are speaking from a different psychoanalytic tradition and within very distinct metapsychological models.

During my training at the Site, one of my clinical placements took place at an Islington Mind day center, in a wonderful and chaotic house in Crouch Hill (North London), working with people with acute and underserved needs.

MS & PG: What led you to open a treatment program for psychosis?

MS & PG: Was this the impetus to start the Psychosis Therapy Project?

DBK: I started working with psychotic patients in the context of my psychoanalytic training at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in London. The Site was founded by former members of the Philadelphia Association, many of whom had direct involvement in the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s (Kingsley Hall, etc.). Psychosis is therefore an important interest at the Site and there is a tradition of working with psychosis there. The Site in fact includes outstanding clinicians who worked with R. D. Laing closely for years, including Haya Oakley, whose guidance has been invaluable to me over the years.

Haya is one of the key teachers and supervisors at the Psychosis Therapy Project, the clinic for psychosis that I launched in North London over four years ago. This is the immediate context of my personal interest in psychosis, and the reference to Laing is an important one.

DBK: Islington Mind is a mental health charity in North London that vitally supports people who require substantial to critical levels of care and are subject to

the complexity of the transferential engagement with psychotic patients, and the richness of the clinical material that arose from it.

This is how the Psychosis Therapy Project came about. When I got to the end of my placement, I felt that instead of leaving this important work behind, I should formalize it, make it more widely available, and turn it into a proper specialist therapy service; there was an obvious need for it, as it simply did not exist. In the UK, people with a diagnosis of psychosis are generally not eligible for psychotherapy in statutory services. Beyond medication and time-limited psychological therapies (cognitive-behavioral therapy, predominantly), long-term talking therapy remains widely unavailable to those who cannot afford private treatment. This is what makes the

socio-economic exclusion. I was given a lot of freedom in this placement, which I was grateful for, as it gave me a chance to be as experimental as I wished. I made myself available as a therapist in the house and a few psychotic service users started visiting my consulting room on a weekly basis, seeking my “counsel,” as they put it.

This turned out to be a good taster of what working with psychosis psychoanalytically might be like. I found the work instantly compelling. I was struck by the intensity of the encounter with psychotic subjects,

Psychosis Therapy Project a unique service in the British context, serving the complex needs of highly vulnerable and underprivileged service users. Peter Nevins, the director of Islington Mind (a psychoanalyst and a member of the Site), welcomed the initiative enthusiastically. The project quickly drew passionate trainees and volunteers, and within a few months, I was able to put together a team. Referrals mainly came from within Islington Mind initially, especially from Islington Mind’s reputable Hearing Voices group.

MS & PG: Can you tell us about your own trajectory?

DBK: Having trained in France before moving to the UK about ten years ago, my work has also been influenced by Jacques Lacan’s groundbreaking contribution to the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis.

Lacan was one of the greatest clinicians of psychosis; he was able to draw key insights into the treatment of psychosis from the Freudian corpus itself, despite and beyond Freud’s claim that psychoanalysis might not be relevant to psychosis. The works of Serge Leclaire, Jean Laplanche, François Roustang, Gisela Pankow, and Evelyne Kestemberg, among others, make up important references in my approach as well. In the British context, I became acquainted with the work of Winnicott as well as with Bion’s theory of psychosis; in both cases, I

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MS & PG: How were you able to finance this project? Where did monetary support come from?

DBK: Apart from the generous hospitality of Islington Mind, the project started out with no funding. In fact, funding (or the lack thereof ) remains one of the greatest difficulties this project has encountered since its foundation. There are obvious reasons for this, and I might not have the space to get into them in detail in the present context, but let us say that the therapeutic success we encounter in this kind of work is not easily measured by evidence-based standards. The kinds of interventions we offer at the project are beneficial, as recently confirmed by a satisfaction survey run among our service users, but the dominant model of “recovery and rehabilitation” that presides over services’ eligibility for funding is ill-suited to the treatment of psychosis, if not persecutory.

MS & PG: This is a very important point that clinicians who work with psychotic patients would appreciate—the risks of imposing standardizing and normalizing models that do not reflect the complex clinical reality of psychosis, not just not undermining it, but worsening it. Some have argued that the saturated reality of psychosis requires a different therapeutic tempo. Is this your experience?

DBK: The work is very slow—it can take people years to dare take off their coat. Sometimes they never do. This is why we are committed to long-term, open-ended work, and it has proven extremely therapeutic and effective. The point of longterm therapy is to provide much needed dependability, allowing individuals to rely on a steadfast yet flexible therapeutic setting that operates over time as an anchoring point. But this generally does not sit well with funding requirements and criteria. At this stage, we rely on vital funding from Islington Mind for the day-to-day running of the service, but we still operate on a shoestring budget and substantial long-term funding is very hard to get. Since 2017, the project has expanded to South London under the auspices of Lambeth & Southwark Mind. A pilot is currently running in Brixton but there again, and however needed such a service is in this underserved area of London, funding is a true challenge. I think the project has been very resilient all the same, and we will find ways to keep it going, but it is a constant struggle. The conditions we encounter are terrible due to the dire lack of funding and support. Our service users are vulnerable; we strive to maintain a mental health safety net for them, at all costs. But we should not underestimate the magnitude of the mental health crisis underway.

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MS & PG: What is unique to the approach you propose? Have you been influenced by other psychoanalytic models of treatment for psychotics?

DBK: I did not really have a model in mind when I started the project. In a way, all the conditions were in place at Islington Mind and the project emerged quite organically. Psychoanalysis has a lot to gain from engaging with the community and tackling the devastating impact of social and economic exclusion. Its therapeutic approach has a lot to contribute to the community in turn, especially to the treatment of acute mental health problems, which are often inseparable—in the context of the work we do in London at least—from socio-economic discrimination. Once the project was launched, I discovered kindred projects in France and Canada, which became a source of inspiration for us; they are long-established and belong to a rich tradition of psychoanalytic work with psychosis. The Kestemberg Centre in Paris was founded in 1974 and specializes in the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis. Vassilis Kapsambelis, the director of the Kestemberg Centre, kindly invited me to attend one of their scientific meetings last spring, and I was impressed by the quality of the contributions and by their facilities. The PTP team is hoping to go visit the centre next year.

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The other dream project I came across is the “388” in Montreal, a psychoanalytic center devoted to the treatment of psychosis (young people, especially) and led by Willy Apollon and Danielle Bergeron. I am hoping to make contact with them.

MS & PG: We have been talking about the Psychosis Therapy Project; we are curious about how you define psychosis.

DBK: It is fair to say, from the outset, that psychosis is a challenge to psychoanalysis—psychoanalytic technique especially. The main reason, in my view, has to do with the impairment of the mechanisms of repression in psychosis. This is a distinct characteristic: I see psychosis as the site of the breakdown of repression, which logically leads to the failure of the metaphorical function. No repression, no return of the repressed, no remembering (at least, not in the conventional sense), no working-through: this leaves analysts rather bereft of their usual landmarks and tools. At the same time, working with psychosis yields privileged insights into primary process: there is a kind of literality that presides over the modalities of inscription and articulation of the unconscious. As such, it is a gold mine for theoreticians of psychoanalysis and a core term in metapsychology. This interestingly places psychosis at once on the margins and at the very heart of the psychoanalytic project.

MS & PG: While we agree with you about the centrality of psychosis to psychoanalysis, it has been our experience, in particular in the United States, that often psychoanalysts retreat when facing psychosis, assuming that psychoanalysis has little to offer. Do you ever encounter resistance treating psychotic patients analytically?

DBK: The marginality of psychosis in psychoanalytic practice is one that can be questioned rather easily, in my view. Granted, Freud posits repression as the “cornerstone” upon which the whole edifice of psychoanalysis rests. But while this is actually true of the human psyche that crashes into the desubjectivating literality of the unconscious when repression breaks down, the edifice of psychoanalysis does not collapse when repression is faulty. The focus simply shifts to the flip side of repression, to the other side of the mirror, where the whole ceases to be the sum of its parts and the clock freezes in obliterating timelessness. It is a very different landscape from the clinic of neurosis, a very impoverished one at times, desolate, a place where the Cartesian cogito is an unavailable luxury. Thinking and being are somewhat estranged, one no longer warrants the other. As for meaning, it is somehow trapped in the body, inscrutable scraps

in an inscrutable whole: the word is simply not stitched to the flesh.

Working with psychosis therefore mobilizes fundamental questions about existence and subjectivity. When psychotic subjects seek our help, what they bring to us is their ontological precariousness, what they claim is subjective delineation and substantiality. Generally speaking, the work is very demanding, requiring an enormous amount of discipline and rigor on the part of the analyst. In psychosis, there is no room for two: one plus one is in fact one, a reality paradoxically rooted in a murderous dyad that it is the analyst’s job to avoid at all costs. The analyst must therefore strive to embody “subjectivity degree zero,” as I like to look at it. These are very hard demands to meet, impossible ones. But is the impossible not the terrain of psychosis?

This paradoxically makes psychosis the paragon of psychoanalytic technique. Beyond the apparent irrelevance of Freud’s technical guidance, the clinical encounter with psychosis involves what Freud sees as the foundation of the talking cure: he calls it truthfulness—“psychoanalytic treatment is founded on truthfulness” (“Observations on Transference-Love,” 1915 [1914]/1958). In the Freudian sense, truthfulness is by no means an ideal: it is a technical requirement rooted in the fundamental rule of abstinence, of neutrality, and in the therapist’s consistent frustration of all forms of ego gratification. In the clinical setting, such a stance elicits the elaboration of a non-judgmental therapeutic space where the psychotic experience can be engaged with, safely and fruitfully. In this context, therapists are able to endow the psychotic experience with validity, which results in immediate therapeutic gains.

MS & PG: Can you tell us more about how such gains are accomplished?

DBK: The idea is to develop a therapeutic alliance predicated on the technical requirement of truthfulness. This is what the PTP seeks to implement and substantiate. This naturally applies to psychoanalytic practice in general, not only psychosis, but in the clinic of psychosis, it is a vital requisite.

Another related requisite consists in rejecting all forms of normalizing “reality,” which would censor the psychic reality of psychotic subjects, thereby depriving the individual of his/her most precious safeguards. This is aligned with Freud’s acknowledgment that “the delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction” (“Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” 1911/1958). It is therefore imperative to work with and within the psychotic experience with a view to advancing the individual’s “at22

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tempt at recovery” and contributing to the “process of reconstruction.”

MS & PG: Since, as you argue, psychotics do not have repression, one might conclude that they do not have an unconscious, and therefore would not be good candidates for psychoanalytic treatment. On the other hand, some psychoanalytic schools talk about psychotic phenomena or even psychotic experience, implying that psychosis is a potentially universal subjective state. What is your opinion about this?

DBK: My metapsychology is not Kleinian, so I do not see psychosis as a universal phenomenon. I do not think we all have a psychotic core; I think we all have an unconscious, a core of negativity that draws us to death.

Psychosis is, in my view, one of the defenses mobilized against this core or draw. It is a very deficient defense, granted, but a defense all the same, the only one available when repression has broken down. In neurosis, repression does not break down, it only fails, and the consequences are very different. Gisela Pankow usefully distinguishes between destruction (psychosis) and distortion (neurosis) in this context. I personally think more theorization is needed in the area of psychosis, more metapsychological engagement. The experience of working with psychotic subjects is a distinct one and much of it remains to be symbolized.

Evelyne Kestemberg talks about a duty to theorize. She has a point. I believe clinicians working with psychosis have a duty to do so just as psychoanalysis has the duty to address the underserved needs of the community. z Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst and a translator in the field of psychoanalytic theory. She is a member of the College of Psychoanalysts - UK and the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and one of the editors of Sitegeist: A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. She is the founder and Clinical Director of the Psychosis Therapy Project in London and also works in private practice. She has translated a number of psychoanalytic works, including Dominique Scarfone’s Laplanche: An Introduction (2015) and The Unpast: The Actual Unconscious (2016). She translates for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis on a regular basis. She has a special interest in promoting the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis in theory as well as in practice. Address for correspondence: dbonnigk@btinternet.com REFERENCES Freud, S. (1958). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 12, pp.1-82). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1911) Freud, S. (1958). Observations on transference-love.

In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 12, pp.157-171). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1915 [1914])

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PALESTINE, PSYCHOANALYSIS & POLITICAL DISCOURSE: PAPERS FROM A 2017 PANEL

How Do We Talk about Justice in Psychoanalysis?

The Case of Palestine Steven BOTTICELLI

Simply to mention the word “Palestine” in our very Jewish profession of psychoanalysis discomfits people who have strong emotional reactions to hearing criticisms of Israel. For those people, Jewish or not, it can be challenging to hold in mind the idea of Israel simultaneously as a sanctuary for the Jewish people and as the state responsible for the continued dispossession of another people. Perhaps one way psychoanalysis could be useful for politics would be in thinking about how to soften the defensive reactions that get set off when one is confronted with a viewpoint different from one’s own in such a manner that discussion is able to proceed.

I am not sure I will succeed in this today.

But then, psychoanalysis also has something to teach about the value, at times the necessity, of bearing discomfort, in this case in the service of thinking about what would be required to achieve justice for the Palestinian people.

Justice is a concept from philosophy and legal studies that refers to the distribution of fairness, but is there a way we could think of it in psychoanalytic terms? Which psychoanalytic ideas and values might give us a basis for formulating a fuller notion of social justice? Could psychoanalysis be a resource for thinking about what might help to advance the Palestinian struggle for self-determination?

Implicitly if not explicitly, psychoanalysis upholds an ethic of depressive position functioning. Even as we’re aware of our own and others’ inevitable oscillations between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, by virtue of both character and training we analysts tend to be good at acknowledging limitation and incompleteness, accepting responsibility, and grieving losses. To the extent that we embody this psychoanalytic ideal, we strive toward instating and reinstating functioning within the depressive position. The shift in the relation to the other, instantiated by the recognition of loss as it allows for the experience of grief, is crucial here. It’s both a developmental achievement and a moral stance, a way of being in relation to other people and the world that if universalized could operate in the service of justice.

Grief, by showing us the depth of our attachment to others, shows us how we are in fact constituted by them. Judith Butler, who has been developing the potential of grief as a resource for politics, offers this beautiful description of the experience of grieving:

…one is hit by waves…one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen.

One is exhausted but does not know why.

Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing. (2003, p.11) To be taken over, to be thrown off of our intentions in this way, to feel that we have been undone by our connection to someone now gone, is to be put in touch with our alterity, the otherness in the self.

Immersed in our experience of grief, we are made to know the way “we are implicated in lives not our own” (Butler, 2003, p.14), to feel our affinity with others who we might otherwise encounter as not-me. This is the theme of Lincoln in the Bardo, the recent novel by George Saunders (2017). In Saunders’ rich imagining, Lincoln’s sorrow over the loss of his son expanded the range of his empathy to the point he was impelled to emancipate the slaves, a striking example of grief operating in the service of justice.

To be “undone” by grief may be an alternative to being “undone” by violence.

This is certainly a founding ethic of the Parents’ Circle, a group of Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children to the violence between their peoples and have come together in shared mourning.

As analysts, we know that in individual lives, grieving loss has the potential to disrupt traumatic repetition. We might wonder, on the level of nations, how the failure or refusal of grief might have been responsible in part for the way in which the creation of a sanctuary for one group of refugees had the effect of creating another set of refugees.

Of course Israel is not a historically unique example of one group’s self-determination coming at the expense of another’s, yet we might still wonder at the extent to which aborted grief over the Holocaust has functioned as an additional factor perpetuating a paranoid relation to the Palestinian other, operating as a justification for domination.

In his exhaustive survey of the relationship of Israelis to the Holocaust, Tom Segev described “the great silence [in Israel] that surrounded the Holocaust through the 1950s…almost to the point of denial” (1993, p.513). In his view, this attitude followed from the “regret and shame” (p.513) felt by the existing Jewish community living in Palestine toward Holocaust refugees, whose experiences could not be easily assimilated to the triumphalist narrative of Zionism that had animated their own im24

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migration to the land that would become Israel. Not until the trial of Eichmann in 1961 did this attitude begin to shift, allowing a “process of identification with the suffering of the victims and survivors” (p.361) to take place. By the 1980s, the Holocaust had become “a constant and intense preoccupation” (p.513) in Israel, and was pressed into service by some as a kind of retroactive justification for Israel’s existence. Segev suggests that neither of these attitudes—silence and denial, followed by “preoccupation” harnessed to an ideological program—has been conducive to grieving. While the Holocaust has been memorialized through institutions (Yad Vashem) and observances (Holocaust Remembrance Day), it’s not clear how much private or collective grieving such public memorials facilitate.

We might wonder how the existential fears some Israelis harbor for their state may be a projection into the future of the European genocide, dread as memory in the future tense (Harris, 2010). Alternatively, such fears may represent a return of the repressed of Israel’s own history of having forcibly displaced another people. This is a repression that began to be lifted through the work of the Israeli “new historians” in the 1980s and 1990s, in part to undergo repression again as writers such as Benny Morris revised some of their earlier work.

It’s worth reflecting here that there was nothing inevitable about the national form (if it was even to be a nation) that the refuge for survivors of the Holocaust would take.

Butler has lamented the “narrative lockdown” (2012, p.25) by which the creation of a state of Israel based on a principle of Jewish sovereignty is conventionally understood to have been the only logical response to the need for a sanctuary for refugees of the Holocaust. In fact, not all Jewish refugees wanted to emigrate to Palestine; some were induced to through economic or other coercive means. Among Jews who did end up in Palestine, there were debates about what form the nascent state should take. Among the alternatives considered were some kind of federal authority that would include the native Arab population, a form of binationalism; a commonwealth run by international authorities; or a state that would guarantee majority rule of its Jewish population. We are left to behold the tremendous amount of injustice that has flowed from that fateful decision, about which the indigenous inhabitants were never consulted.

The wisdom that follows on grief, then, includes a felt awareness of the otherness

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that constitutes the self. If it is true that (as Levinas has put it) we are bound to those who we do not know, then our fate is inextricably linked to the fate of others. The absence or refusal of this knowledge can only lead to more death and suffering. One can discern just this lack in those who currently govern the state of Israel, for instance in their criminalizing of nonviolent resistance to the

The existential logic inherent in grief, by which my fate is linked to yours, is consistently forgotten or denied by political elites and much of the public. It nevertheless creates a force that reverberates through history. Thus, a man whose family hails from a country that has suffered years of military bombardment from the United States kills 50 Americans in a night-

occupation. In 2011, the Knesset passed a law that imposes civil penalties for anyone advocating a boycott of the state. For years, the Israeli military has violently put down the weekly nonviolent protests against land confiscations and settlement expansions in West Bank towns like Bil’in and Nil’in by Palestinians and their Israeli and international supporters. The fact is, the Palestinians refuse to be a disappeared people. If people are prevented from resisting nonviolently, they will do so violently—with deadly consequences all around.

club in Orlando. As Americans, we grieve the losses of the patrons of the nightclub, whose names and stories were publicized in the media in the aftermath of the massacre, but do we know anything of the lives of the Afghans killed by American military violence over the last 15 years? Although the killer’s identity as an Afghan-American was nowhere in public speculations about his motives, we might yet wonder how loss that goes unmourned, unrecognized really, returns to us as violence. Less spectacular than mass murder but just as consequential 25

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to our experience of daily living in a militaristic First World power, Butler has speculated that the unmourned deaths of the military violence perpetrated by our country “form the melancholic background for [our] social world” (2003, p.33).

The position I’ve been developing here of the pursuit of justice through a practice of grieving is limited, first of all because no one can compel anyone else to grieve, but also because it underplays the agency of Palestinians themselves in advancing their self-determination. Surely Palestinians, as both victims and perpetrators of violence, have their own losses to grieve, but within this perspective, the fulcrum of transformation rests largely on Jewish Israelis, as members of the dominant and dominating group. Nevertheless, this perspective does provide us with a question we need to keep asking in our efforts to achieve justice: What would it take for all lives to be equally grievable?

Jessica Benjamin’s work on the third (2011) provides perhaps the richest psychoanalytic language for describing the psychic and social underpinnings of what might be necessary for the achievement of “justice.”

A “third” comes into existence when two individuals recognize each other as equivalent centers of subjectivity. This third has an ontological status separate from the two individuals that constitute it, and links them. As it has been developed by Benjamin and others, the third has come to take on many aspects. The one that concerns me here is the “lawful” or “moral” third. By coming into being, the third instantiates a belief in a lawful world, one in which regard for the personhood of each subject is affirmed. When violations of this regard for the other occur, as they inevitably do, the acknowledgment of the violation and the rupture it has caused reinstates the principle, in its breach. It is one of the principles of the third that the suffering of humans matters, and that as Benjamin puts it “the recognition of suffering connects or reconnects us to the magnetic chain of humanity in which suffering is our common denominator” (2011, p.208). When one recognizes that he has injured someone else, both parties are renewed in their belief in the basic rightness of the other and of the order of things within which they exist.

How is the third actually created? For Benjamin, “the dialogue of mutual recognition…marks the move out of the master-slave relation in which one must submit and the other dominate” (1998, p.592). The question arises of the quality of thirdness that can be achieved when the parties involved do not possess formal legal equality. Such is the case in any encounter between an Israeli Jew and Israeli Arab, living

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as they do in a country where many rights are conferred not on the basis of citizenship but on the basis of religion and ethnicity.

Such conditions are even less present in an encounter between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza under actual or de facto military occupation. Such is the conundrum created by the idealized logic of Zionism, whereby Jews can only feel safe by arrogating differential rights to themselves: Given the power difference that exists between Israelis and Palestinians, the basis for “dialogue” in any meaningful sense is lacking.

Indeed, it is on this basis that people-to-people projects that bring Palestinians and Israelis together to begin to know each other and promote mutual understanding have been criticized as counterproductive—when these projects do not place as their goal opposition to the occupation and the systemic inequalities that exist in Israel/Palestine. It’s not difficult for people of good will on opposite sides of the occupation to “get along,” to find things to like about and identify with in each other.

But the good feelings that issue from such contacts obscure the structural basis of the conflict by treating it as if it were the result of some personal misunderstanding rather than an unjust operation of power, and thus may have the effect of “normalizing” the intolerable conditions of the occupation.

My own view is that while person-to-person encounters can be personally transformative, in order to be more than feel-good exercises for their participants, such projects need to progress to making specific demands on power (e.g., for equal rights for Palestinian subjects in Israel proper; an end to the blockade of Gaza; an end to the military occupation of the West Bank).

If not from dialogue, then, from where might the third emerge? The international community has intermittently tried to take up this role. In 2002, the Middle East Quartet, comprising the United Nations, United States, European Union, and Russia, was established to mediate a peace process in Israel/Palestine. As official envoy of the Quartet, Tony Blair convened scores of meetings among relevant parties, but in 2012, the Center for Middle East Policy said that “the Quartet has little to show for its decade-long involvement in the peace process.” Its last meeting was held in 2015.

Independent of its participation in the Quartet, the United States has made efforts over the years to mediate a peace process. Most recently, John Kerry presided over such an initiative in 2013-14. Despite Kerry’s vigorous efforts and dozens of meetings held among various representatives of the parties, the talks collapsed in April 2014 with no agreement in sight.

However, according to Peace Now, during the nine months of peace talks, Israel set a new record for settlement expansion, with nearly 14,000 new settler homes approved.

This result represented the latest success of what Yitzhak Shamir described at the beginning of such negotiations in 1991 as Israel’s “teaspoon policy”: “endless negotiating sessions at which countless teaspoons amounting to mountains of sugar would be stirred into oceans of tea and coffee, but no agreement would ever be reached” (Ofir, 2017).

The question is why Kerry would devote so much energy to this doomed-fromthe-start effort when the United States has the power to end the occupation at one stroke by withholding the 3.1 billion—now 3.8 billion—dollars it provides in military aid every year to Israel, without which the occupation would collapse. In putting itself forward as an “honest broker,” the United States is a false third, its ability to function as such blatantly compromised not only by the enormous amount of military aid it provides to Israel annually, but also by the many other forms of diplomatic, financial, and ideological support it offers. The United States regularly shields Israel from censure and accountability for its violations of the rights of Palestinians at the United Nations. The United States grants tax-exempt status to Jewish-American and messianic Christian “charities” that fund settlement-related activities in the West Bank.

Midway through Israel’s summertime assault on Gaza in 2014, the United States resupplied Israel with war materiel, even as credible reports of war crimes committed with US-supplied weapons were circulating. Under these circumstances, we might say the United States plays the role of an annihilating third, actively destroying the possibility for peace it claims to be trying to advance.

Furthermore, the United States and its mainstream media are, in Benjamin’s terms, a failed witness to Palestinian suffering. Every day on anti-occupation websites like Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada, one can read about the home demolitions, land confiscations, administrative detentions (arrests without charge), and settler violence that the New York Times and most of the rest of the prominent media fail to report, in accordance with the ideological imperatives of American policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Typical coverage of news from the region features robust representation of Israeli perspectives but few, if any, Palestinian voices.

In response to these baleful circumstances, in 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations initiated the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement as a 26

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nonviolent movement to use economic and cultural forms of power to compel Israel to abide by international law. It demands equal rights of citizenship for all of the country’s inhabitants, an end to the occupation, and a right of return for unlawfully displaced inhabitants and restitution for their losses. An inclusive movement supported by people around the world including Israelis engaged in “boycott from within,” BDS has given rise to a solidarity that prefigures what peaceful, truly democratic coexistence might look like. In so doing, BDS has begun to create the conditions under which “dialogue” for the first time could become a meaningful possibility; in this way, BDS functions as a “living third.” Words could become the basis for understanding and negotiation rather than instruments in a cynical and oppressive exercise of power.

Psychoanalysis is a discipline that honors the power of words, as conduits for meaning, affect, transformation, and also as placeholders for things only imagined, yet to be. “Palestine” is a name for a place that as yet formally exists nowhere in this world, but lives in the mind of many people as a metonym for the universal aspiration for human freedom. To speak about a not yet realized possibility may be a condition of its becoming. To talk to you today about justice for Palestine, to evoke whatever that causes us to imagine in our minds, could be a step toward bringing it into being. Judith Butler said something similar and also something more in a remark that alludes to the theories of performativity that have been so influential on her work: “Perhaps the word ‘justice’ will assume new meanings as we speak it, such that we can venture that what will be just for the Jews will also be just for the Palestinians, and for all the other people living there, since justice, when just, fails to discriminate, and we savor that failure” (2013). z REFERENCES Benjamin, J. (1998). Finding the way out: Commentary on papers by Malcolm Owen Slavin and Daniel Kriegman and by Philip A. Ringstrom. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8, 589598.

Benjamin, J. (2011). Acknowledgment of collective trauma in light of dissociation and dehumanization. Psychoanalytical Perspectives, 8, 207-214.

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, mourning, politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

Butler, J. (2012). Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Butler, J. (2013, February 27). Judith Butler’s remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/judith-butlers-remarks-brooklyn-college-bds/ Harris, A. (2010). Dread is just memory in the future tense. In A. Harris and S. Botticelli (Eds.), First do no harm: The paradoxical encounters of psychoanalysis, warmaking and resistance (pp.349-358). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ofir, J. (2017). A Palestinian state has always been a fiction for Zionists. Mondoweiss, retrieved from http://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/palestinian-fiction-zionists/ Saunders, G. (2017). Lincoln in the Bardo. New York, NY: Random House.

Segev, T. (1993). The seventh million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

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Talking about Palestine in Session and Beyond What Edward Said called “The Question of Palestine” (1979) and its relationship to the state of Israel has complex, unconscious object relational significance for many people; I would further suggest that this makes constructive discussion and debate very difficult, because the latent content so readily overwhelms the manifest.

That is, we often say one thing and mean another; one can imagine Freud saying, “Tell me about your Intifada…”

It is important to recognize that these unconscious dynamics are suffused with issues of race and trauma to a very significant extent. In this paper, my focus is on Jewish American people. For many Jewish American people, the identities of Jewishness and whiteness are related in ways that produce conflicts that are often unconscious and imbricated with issues of race and oppression. Israel and Palestine are symbolic fields on which these conflicts are enacted discursively. The stress of the conflict—in both the psychological and political senses of the word—leads to a reversion to the paranoid-schizoid position even in people who would otherwise hold firmly in the depressive position. This stress seeks resolution through early defenses like denial, splitting, and projection. In my experience, this is evident both in session and in discourse, including the discourse of psychoanalysis.

By way of illustration, consider my work with my patient James. James grew up in a Jewish family in a largely Irish neighborhood; the home environment was traumatic, a more or less textbook incubator for a narcissistic personality, which is the primary issue for which I treated James for five years. Bad as the home was, life was equally so in the community. James was frequently beaten up by gangs of Irish boys from the neighborhood; indeed, he came to provoke these attacks, knowing they would likely happen anyway.

Some months before the episode I’m about to relate, James said, of his experiences of narcissistic rage, “When I get like this, I do just picture myself as one of the settlers on the West Bank, on a hill shooting down.”

I was aware that, in James’s object relational world, his experience of Jewishness was strongly associated with an experience of trauma and persecution in the world, and that trauma and persecution were also powerful themes in his family life; the net effect was that experiences of threat, real or imagined, led to a cascading sense of being retraumatized and persecuted. In his daily life, these would come to the fore over something as minor as someone stealing

his parking space. What this statement about settlers “shooting down” taught me was that issues of Israel and Palestine were imbricated with these issues of Jewishness, trauma, and persecution.

The following exchange occurred towards the end of a session immediately preceding my departure for a summer-long leave of absence from the clinic. Just before this point, James had been giving advice to his younger self, encouraging himself to be less fearful about his mother’s mortality, a fear that is related to her abusive enmeshment with him.

C: I’m still kind of chewing on this thing that you said, about— J: About?

C: —About, y’know, “your mother can take care of herself, you don’t need the pressure of this” and it just made me think of a thing that you said to me a few weeks ago, where you said that you would never look me up online, or try to find out about me, because you didn’t want to find out that someone that I love had died, or that something bad had happened— J: Yup! C: Do you think that those things are kind of…I can’t put my finger on it…

J: Why do I think that?

C: Do— J: Why don’t I wanna know that?

C: Do you think they’re kind of of a piece, I guess? Of a piece in some way?

J: Well … I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I found out for some reason that you are a supporter of the Palestinian cause, and you attend rallies and you write letters and you do all this stuff.

C: Yeah?

J: That would bother me! And it would change the dynamic.

C: Mhmm?

J: Well, I would know something about you, and it’d be something in your life that you are for, that I wouldn’t support, I’m trying to say, I’m not trying to say I don’t like Arabs or Palestinians, or something like that, I just don’t like terrorists. Unfortunately, now any Muslim is a terrorist, when we see Muslim we think terrorist [Ed.—he says this ruefully, as if it is regrettable] so, so something like that would would bother me, and that would get in the way of the sessions.

C: So, so what would it mean if you found out…?

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Carter CARTER

Palestinians, you hate Jews. I’m a Jew, you hate me. Right in the…I mean, that just puts a HUGE red sign, “Stop!”

C: It’s like what you said before about, about feeling like maybe I was secretly staying here [Ed.—At the clinic] and seeing everybody other than you?

J: Yes! Well, well see it would ruin, it would ruin the relationship that we have.

C: Is there some part of you, some kind of part that isn’t maybe in the rational part, but some part of you that really thinks I hate you?

J: No, I think everybody hates me.

C: [quietly] Everybody?

J: I have that thought about just about everybody, probably other than Angela, and my children, well, other than Christopher. Yeah.

C: That everybody— J: That, they don’t hate me all the time. But that there’s very few people I can trust in this world. You’re one, Angela’s another.

C: But what if you found out that I really hated you?

J: I couldn’t stay here? It would bother me. I’ve told you all these very personal things, you hate me, y’know you have all this ammunition, what’re you gonna do with it?

This exchange crystallizes many dynamics that were at play in my work with James at the time, most of which cannot be attended to here. What I want to focus on is the intersection of object relational issues with issues of race, identity, and oppression.

It is important to know that James is aware that I am mixed race, and that I have both Jewish and Afghan roots (among others).

Not knowing that Afghans, Arabs, and Muslims are different and not synonymous, when he is talking about how “Muslims” are seen, he is implicitly talking about me, and erasing our common Jewish heritage— an important connection—in the process.

The “unfortunately” is a nod to the fact that this discrimination is regrettable, even as he goes on to engage in it himself, feeling helpless not to do so.

In James’s invocation of the Palestinian Other, in the service of Othering me, he brought to light a configuration of experiences, both external and object relational, that I suggest is common for Jewish American people. For James, and for many Jewish American people, the experience of being Jewish is intimately linked with historical trauma and experiences of persecution and marginalization, and these associations are suffused with powerful affect.

At the same time, Jewish American people

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have generally been folded into the broader category of American whiteness, much in the way that people of Irish and Italian origin were, and with all of the power, privilege, and history that whiteness entails.

The possibility of occupying the social roles of persecuted and persecutor simultaneously produces cognitive dissonance and internal conflicts that are difficult to resolve, as recent discussions of “white feminism” illustrate. Because whiteness is an invisible construct that occludes itself from view by design, and to which most people do not have an emotional cathexis,1 it is generally the persecuted aspect that is affectively charged and experience-near. Thus, when a white woman, or a Jewish American person, is introduced to the fact that they have acted in an oppressive way, or endorse an oppressive position, the conflict becomes unbearable. Unable to hold the depressive tension, they revert to the paranoid-schizoid, denying the reality of their power to oppress and defensively occupying the position of having been oppressed. Indeed, they often employ the defensive maneuver of asserting that the act of bringing the fact of their privilege into awareness is itself an act of oppression. DiAngelo (2018) refers to this as a form of “white fragility.”

In James’s case, the fact of being both abused and abuser was a consistent theme in the treatment; having been abused and neglected, he became an abusive and negligent husband and father. It took extensive therapeutic work for James to even 1. NB, roughly a year has passed since I wrote this paper, and upon reflection I am no longer sure that I agree with myself on this particular point; I leave it unaltered here to reflect the argument I delivered at the 2017 spring meeting. Indeed, I think further theorizing and study of the nature of white people’s emotional engagements with their whiteness is acutely necessary at this historic moment.

acknowledge his own abusiveness and negligence, and the profound shame associated with this; this work was just beginning at the time of this vignette and ultimately unfolded in transformative ways over the course of the treatment. My sense is that, in the transference, I represented the exact sort of internal contradiction with which James most struggled. By being both Afghan and Jewish, in his eyes Muslim and Jewish, I was repudiating a certain kind of paranoid-schizoid binarism merely by existing, and in particular by caring for him.

Implicit in his fears about my “supporting the Palestinian cause” is the assumption that this is antithetical to being Jewish or to challenging anti-Semitism. This is, it should be noted, a view that is widely endorsed, and has been roundly discredited by, among others, Judith Butler (2003). It is also a view that reflects the precise kind of paranoid-schizoid thinking I am attempting to describe. In the Trump era, leftist activism has endeavored to challenge anti-Semitism pari passu with other bigoted ideologies, albeit imperfectly.

As therapists, we readily accept the premise that hurt people hurt people, that many of us are compelled to repeat our worst experiences, and that many of us (including minorities) identify with the aggressor as a defensive tactic. We also accept the premise that such behavior is at once understandable and unacceptable, that interrupting cycles of violence and trauma is imperative, and that accepting responsibility and working towards healing individually and communally can be a profound transformative experience for abused and abuser alike. This was, fortunately, the case for James in his treatment.

Palestine is a Four-Letter Word Something curious appears to happen with the mere whisper of Palestine within psychoanalysis. An unspeakable “p” word within a “p” word that transforms the symbolic into the real with one utterance.

Within our ranks, on our listservs, in our psychoanalytic conferences, the presence of Palestine renders a parallel process, the burden of which appears to be uncontainable; the affective response of which appears to be anxiety-ridden; the experiential space of which appears to be perpetually conflict-inducing. The curiousness comes because the word “Palestine” appears to

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REFERENCES Butler, J. (2003). Violence, mourning, politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Said, E. (1979). The question of Palestine. New York, NY: Times Books.

Lara SHEEHI

hold a unique power within psychoanalysis, one that swiftly conjures the most unbending ideological splits despite the emphasis of contemporary psychoanalysis on fluidity in theory, technique, and practice.

As a psychoanalytic clinician, scholar, and activist, I believe psychoanalysis has a critical role in speaking to and about injustices, liberation struggles, and the unconscious processes that may work to replicate systems of oppression. Of course, I am not the first to note this. From Freud to Fenichel, Fromm to Fanon, and more contemporarily, Annie Lee Jones (2015), Kirk28

It should not, in principle, be such a leap to translate this perspective from psychoanalysis to geopolitics, if we accept the feminist proviso that the personal is political. And yet, for us, it proves so hard. It is hard to accept that, having been banished from their homes, settlers banished others from their homes; having been corralled in ghettos, settlers corralled others in ghettos; having been made refugees, they made refugees of others. It feels hard to recognize that the Biblical rationale that underwrote the foundation of the state of Israel is not dissimilar to the ideas like manifest destiny that led to enslavement and genocide. It is hard to accept that, because we do not feel safe in the world, we want this to continue to happen. Attaining the depressive position involves an acceptance of the tragic aspects of human life, accepting that we are not as pure as we would wish, that the fact of wanting something does not mean that it is good to get it.

How, then, can we help the Jameses of the world if we cannot tolerate this tension and tragedy ourselves? If we must distort our view of history to comport with our emotional needs? If we put our privilege before our principles? My hope is that with respect to our own psychoanalytic discourse, and as psychoanalytic thinkers participating in the political discourse, we could use our own best ideas to make things better. Victory begins at home, or so I would hope. z

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land Vaughans (2016), Nancy Hollander (2010), Lynne Layton (2017), Stephen Portuges (2009), and countless others, many have made the decided link between psychoanalysis and our sociopolitical world.

Moreover, they have called on us as a field to embody the ethics of clinical work, to veer away from disavowing our responsibility in unpacking the distressing and demoralizing material stemming from the systemic inequities beyond our clinics.

I am heartened that in psychoanalysis, we are earnestly grappling with this call; this is reflected in big and small ways in our

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membership, in the panels we showcase, as well as in the visibility of a gender-neutral bathroom at our spring conference (2018).

Yet, in the case of Palestine, the call turns to ether.

The discussion of Palestine is circumscribed by entrenched ideological formations, particularly Zionism, that saturate, even unconsciously, our theory and practice as a psychoanalytic collective. While the Division has begun to challenge and analyze

how other hegemonic ideological formations (such as heteronormativity, patriarchy, whiteness, etc.) enframe our field, practice, and theory, the slightest utterance of Palestine appears to collapse psychoanalytic process, technique, and practice. In other words, the mention of Palestine appears to shut down psychoanalytic thinking.

Perhaps these dynamics are detectable to me as an Arab woman and clinician, born and raised in the Arab world and trained in the United States. Perhaps the tension has

been apparent to me, personally, as an activist-scholar clinician, who has worked to make visible ways that racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, unconsciously and consciously, structure our thought not only as clinicians, but also as individuals and citizens.1 My observation, then, is that the utterance of Palestine provokes a resistance against our natural reflex of psychoanalytic thinking, which is not coincidental. In turn, the utterance itself is seen as the aggressor.

The way I have witnessed this process to unfold—or perhaps better, collapse—is through a primarily unconscious internalization of an ideological formation, which is itself supported by material, social, cultural, and historical conditions (i.e., the conditions that perpetuate the social relations in which we are reared and come to find identifications) (Leary, 1997; Layton, 2006).

1. See my forthcoming chapter, “The Islamophobic Normative Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Considerations” in Islamophobia and Psychiatry: Recognition, Prevention, and Treatment (2018).

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Franz Fanon himself was aware of the double-edged nature of psychoanalysis. Armed with its tools and promises, he also alerts us to the dangers of dominant ideological formations within psychoanalysis itself and how they work to reconstitute themselves in the same breath in which they are being torn down (1952, 1963). If Fanon is speaking of the power and force of racism and settler-colonialism, I here am speaking of Zionism as an ideological formation based on the negation of the Palestinian people. The presence of this internalized dominant ideological formation in our psychoanalytic collective precipitates a splitting off of conflicting identifications in order to retain and maintain its structural coherence. I have come to see this as the foundation from which normative unconscious processes (Layton, 2006) emerge. That is, the unbending identification instigates an expression of normative unconscious processes that necessitates the disavowal of other potential self-states, or identifications, that may contradict or threaten the integrity of the ideological formation. The anxiety of deviation, therefore, is so pronounced, though perhaps not conscious, that all attempts to hold true to the position are made. Due to its unconscious “common sense” quality (Hollander, 2009), this ideological formation is at once all-encompassing and can go on unchallenged if not acknowledged and unpacked by our community as a whole.

I will offer two examples that illustrate this process further. I invite us to think about the ways in which we, psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians (perhaps even activists), may unknowingly or knowingly be complicit in perpetuating ways of thinking that deny and denigrate the humanity of the Palestinian people. While considering these following vignettes, I call on us to ponder the ways we contribute to the collapse of analyzable spaces with the mention of Palestine in service of a dominant ideological position in which we find ourselves secure and privileged.

Vignette One: Can Palestine Produce Psychoanalytic Knowledge?

I was invited in the fall of 2015 to present at the conference “Psychology and the Other” on a panel called “Manifesto Fest”—an extension of the very same panel that had presented in spring 2015 at the Division 39 annual conference in San Francisco. The guidelines for being on the panel were quite simple: write a manifesto about psychoanalysis that will showcase your passion for the field and theory— whatever that may be.

The number of participants on the panel was seven or eight. Even though I

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felt like the interloper because the majority had already presented together, everyone was gregarious and welcoming. In the weeks leading up to the conference, each panelist circulated their manifestos through e-mail to the group. The contributions were engaging; some funny, some clever, and some sobering. All were explicitly political, confronting issues of gender, race, police brutality, poverty, big Pharma, and capitalism. Every manifesto was met with resounding compliments and reflections on the piece’s vibrancy.

My manifesto was entitled “The Road to Psychoanalysis Runs Through Jerusalem” (Sheehi, 2016). It began with a call to arms: “Let’s liberate Palestine with psychoanalysis!” Despite the task of crafting a manifesto, the art of which is grounded in political declarations, I intuited that my contribution might not receive the same enthusiasm. As an Arab woman in the United States and an outspoken advocate of Palestinians’ right to self-determination, one may imagine the anxieties that accompanied my intervention.

Within an hour after I had pressed send, the organizer responded publicly with a compendium of concerns regarding my topic.

Despite its predictability, I felt the familiar sting of one being silenced. The crush of ideology is strong. Among its working tenets is the tendency, if not privilege, to present itself as rational and normative despite the weight of undeniable political realities. At this moment, I recognized the imperative to think.

The pause for thought was an opportunity to allow myself space before responding.

Yet, within two hours, I received another e-mail from the organizer. This time, the e-mail was addressed solely to me: I am trying to figure out how to address your manifesto. I have gotten back-channeled emails from others in the group who are concerned and questioned how your manifesto is psychoanalytic, how it adds to a discussion that emerges from psychoanalytic knowledge…I hope you will consider editing your piece in a way that keeps the discussion to the panel’s topic which is how psychoanalysis can add to a public conversation or explain its own relevance to the public. I hope we can avoid sidetracking the discussion to the particulars of this polarizing conflict.

The irony of this e-mail was not lost on me. My manifesto, indeed, had specifically spelled out how people would respond to my entreaty to liberate Palestine with psychoanalysis. It explicitly called on psychoanalytic theory and principles to outline how it could be useful in this sociopolitical context. The manifesto also anticipated that connecting psychoanalysis to Palestine would be dismissed with the accusation that “this is not psychoanalysis!”

This space was familiar: all it took was a whisper of Palestine. Out of the affirming electronic tenor suddenly emerged an anxious and anonymous clamor to censor “the particulars of this polarizing conflict.”

I understood this not as a shutting down of only “my voice” but also an unconscious admission, a slip, of the belief of the impossibility of how Palestine could “add” to the production of “psychoanalytic knowledge.”

I respectfully declined to alter the manifesto. I explained why the topic of Palestine did belong in psychoanalysis and how its discussion illuminates conditions within it.

Likewise, psychoanalysis itself lends us the language, the tools, the breadth, and the precedent to inquire into, and surely, to talk about Palestine. The normativity of ideology and its operative tenets (common sense, entreaties for dialogue, appeals to self-policing), left unexamined and unchallenged, may have left us believing that we indeed could not.

Vignette Two: Palestine is a Four-Letter Word I presented a significantly abridged version of this text at the 2017 Division 39 spring meeting in New York City as a part of a panel that we simply called, “Talking About Palestine in Psychoanalysis.” We were happy to see that many Division members also wanted to talk about Palestine in psychoanalysis, with the space quickly becoming standing-room only. Our intention was to use psychoanalytic theory, practice, and technique to highlight how the Palestinian narrative had been missing from psychoanalysis; some of us spoke to how that was not coincidental, particularly given the ways in which, historically, settler-colonialism operated: the colonized does not have the luxury of a narrative. In fact, the colonized, as Fanon reminds us, is always presumed guilty. Our panel was one of many that sought to alter the psychoanalytic terrain such that, in this case, the silenced and presumed-guilty Palestinian narrative could find space, and so that we could provide witness.

Yet again, as my talk titled “Palestine is a Four-Letter Word” alluded, the mere mention of Palestine instigated an ideological break. Approximately halfway through our panel, a middle-aged man wearing a white shirt adorned with the Israeli flag made his flagrant entrance into our room.

He carried a large paper bag and exuded aggressive energy by locking eyes with me (the only woman, and only Arab, on the panel) and repeatedly flexed his biceps and cracked his knuckles, as if preparing for a fight. The irony was not lost on me that he also appeared to “warrior up” by wrapping his neck with what is traditionally a kuffiyeh (a black and white scarf that has become a 30

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symbol of Palestinian resistance). His version of the scarf, however, was adorned with Israeli flags. This man, a fellow Division member and psychoanalyst from New York, blocked the doorway and only entrance to the room for the duration of the panel; he disrupted the panel continually, admonishing the panelists and audience with declarations such as, “There is no such thing as Palestinians!” and “Palestine has no place in psychoanalysis!” Despite several interventions from more senior clinicians, he continued his disruptive behavior. When people exited at the conclusion of the panel, he forced pamphlets onto them that were entitled “101 Lies that Palestinians Tell.”

The experience was a first for virtually everyone in the room. A video I took of the disruption is deeply troubling—a room full of clinicians, many of whom are “frozen,” heads hanging, unsure of how to intervene.

Many confided in me following the panel that they had been concerned the man was carrying a weapon; many women further commented to me about their sense of danger and feelings of being intimidated as well as their concern about confronting an aggressive, hypermasculinist male in a closed space with no escape.

The attempts from senior clinicians were admirable and appreciated given the onslaught, yet largely relied on traditional psychoanalytic theory to offer readings of what may have been happening in the group process. What was largely missing from the interventions, however, was analysis regarding the ways in which normative ideology is weaponized—an example of which had unfolded before our eyes. Indeed, hegemonic ideology is most threatened by changes that challenge its primacy. I understood what appeared to be this man’s imperative as not only an attempt to silence dissenting voices, but also to purposefully deflect and derail a reality-testing exercise that sought to bring Palestine to the forefront against the crushing weight of a dominantly entrenched Zionist ideology. If we are to call this an enactment, it is one that stems from the fear inherent in a changing of the tides. Indeed, the enactment appeared to be one that exposed a real-time disruption of what Layton (2006) calls a normative unconscious process. That is, the mere mention of talking about Palestine was so threatening as to cause a cavalcade of aggression, the primary intention of which was suppressing expression, thought, and witnessing. Further, in the context of psychoanalysis, it was a vigilante attempt to name what constitutes appropriate or pure psychoanalytic content—a practice that itself is deeply troubling and perpetuated by ideology. So it comes to be that when we speak of Palestine, the ideological weight of Zionism as its counterpart, as its reaction formation,

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as the salve perhaps for annihilation anxiety, collapses our ability to remain in the symbolic, to retain and maintain analytic space.

Conclusions When it comes to Palestine—and by extension, perhaps all other “unseeable,” unanalyzable spaces and issues (classism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia), we first must acknowledge and examine our own collective complicity and resistance. We cannot kowtow to or avoid “polarizing” ideological structures that perpetuate collective intransigence and the foundations of structural and systemic oppression.

Oppression works when the victim, here the Palestinian, becomes responsible for all suffering—theirs and that of their oppressor; while the oppressor, through collective complicity and hegemonic power, is consistently exonerated. The success of a dominant ideological formation, as distinguished from other

types of ideologies, is predicated on the normalization of its presence, the literal “taking in whole,” such that it is undetectable and results in a “common sense” acceptance. Within our ranks, our own unwillingness to include the Palestinian narrative within our oeuvre as well as the foreclosed analytic spaces such as those described above normalize and, indeed, prioritize Zionism, while in the same breath demanding “dialogue” (Sheehi, 2018) from those who express dissent. z REFERENCES Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press.

Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth. New York, NY: Grove Press.

Hollander, N. C. (2009). Anti-Muslim prejudice and the psychic use of the ethnic other. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 7, 73-84.

Hollander, N. C. (2014). Uprooted minds: Surviving the politics of terror in the Americas. New York, NY: Routledge.

Jones, A. L.(2015). A psychoanalytic reader’s commentary: On erasure and negation as a barrier to the future. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 25, 719-724.

Layton, L. (2006). Attacks on linking: The unconscious pull to dissociate individuals from their social con-

text. In L. Layton, N. C. Hollander, and S. Gutwill (Eds.), Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (pp.107-117). London, UK: Routledge.

Layton, L. (2017). Toward a social psychoanalysis: A conversation with Lynne Layton. In H. Macdonald, D. Goodman, and B. Becker (Eds.), Dialogues at the Edge of American Psychological Discourse. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Leary, K. (1997). Race in psychoanalytic space. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 2, 157-172.

Portuges, S. (2009). The politics of psychoanalytic neutrality. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 6, 61-73.

Sheehi, L. (2018). The Islamophobic normative unconscious: Psychoanalytic considerations. In S. Moffic, J. Peteet, A. Hankir, and R. Awaad (Eds.), Islamophobia and psychiatry: Recognition, prevention, and treatment. New York, NY: Springer.

Sheehi, L. (2016, April 2). The road to psychoanalysis runs through Jerusalem. Retrieved from: https://psychoanalyticactivist.com/2016/04/02/the-road-to-psychoanalysis-runs-through-jerusalem/ Sheehi, S. (2018). Psychoanalysis under occupation: Non-violence and dialogue initiatives as a psychic extension of the closure system. Psychoanalysis and History, forthcoming.

Vaughans, K. and Harris, L. (2016). The police, Black and Hispanic boys: A dangerous inability to mentalize.

Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 15, 171-178.

The Times Must Be Changing, Because Psychoanalysts Are Talking About Palestine Stephen H PORTUGES

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

—Universal Declaration of Human Rights The title of my discussion of these three fine papers, each of which explicitly attempts to articulate Palestinian historical, political, and psychological perspectives to American psychoanalysts, suggests that something has occurred that now lets us speak somewhat more openly about a topic whose absence is one of its most notable features. As Lara Sheehi’s presentation (2016) makes clear, whatever psychoanalytic scholars may think about Palestine, that intellectual labor is typically not part of the ordinary discourse at psychoanalytic professional meetings. In her case, even her wish to conjoin the words psychoanalysis and Palestine was discouraged.

So even though something may have changed, it is the more prevalent resistance to change that warrants our social psychoanalytic attention. What to me is one of the most obvious signs of that resistance, which shows up in all of this panel’s presentations,

is the difficulty many of us have in processing the unpleasant facts about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians since the birth of the ethnic state of Israel. According to many Arab scholars (See, among others, Abunimah, 2014; Aruri, 1989, 2003; Khalidi, 1997; Makdisi, 2008; Said, 1969/2000; Samara, 1988; Zureik, 1979), and to an important group of Israeli Jewish historians and sociologists as well (Kimmerling, 1983a, 1983b; Morris, 2001, 2004; Piterberg, 2001; Ram, 1999; Rodinson, 1973; Segev, 2007; Shafir, 1999), the creation of the Jewish nation entailed the forcible expulsion of at least 750,000 Arabs whose families had lived in Palestine for centuries (Glazer, 1979; Vidal, 1997).

Not only were their lands confiscated by the Israeli military, but also, once they were made refugees, the exiled Palestinians were forbidden from returning to their homeland.

At least another 250,000 Arabs were forced to leave Israel during the 1967 war (Masalha, 1992; McDowall, 1989). When the war ended, the newly dispossessed Palestinians were, once again, not allowed to return to their homes.

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This massive expulsion, which has been called “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” (Pappe, 2006), has been repeatedly denied by the Israeli state. The right of the refugees to return, assured by the United Nations General Assembly, continues to be rejected, because the refugees’ return would threaten a Jewish majority in Israel. Some have argued that this is a clear expression of Israel’s version of the eliminationist logic of settler colonialism: take over the land, get rid of or minimize the number of its prior inhabitants, settle the confiscated territory with loyal members of your own tribe, and deprive the remaining indigenes of equality under the law (Lloyd & Pulido, 2012; Pappe, 2006; Veracini, 2006; Wolf, 1999).

Lara Sheehi’s (2016) communication of her wish to work toward the liberation of Palestine by endorsing the decolonization of its society, culture, and geography caused a ruckus. Oddly enough, she was reproached last year for complying with the demand of a psychoanalytic panel’s organizer to say what was on her mind. Ironically, she notes,

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she had expressly foreseen and stated that her Palestine manifesto might be rejected for not appearing to be psychoanalytic. I was puzzled by the trouble Sheehi ran into, especially because a second irony apparently went unnoticed by the panel’s organizer.

The title of Sheehi’s disturbing manifesto, “The Road to Psychoanalysis Runs through Jerusalem,” was not only aspirational; it was also historically correct. When Max Eitingon, a Jewish Zionist who was one of Freud’s most trusted students, fled Berlin in 1933 as National Socialism was on the rise, he went to Palestine, where he soon established the first psychoanalytic society in the Middle East. The Palestine Psychoanalytic Society, which ultimately became the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society (Moreau Ricaud, 2005), was started on one of Jerusalem’s roads. Among other things, Sheehi’s title reflected the historical reality of Jerusalem as the birth-home of psychoanalysis in Palestine. The panel’s organizer may not have known or may not have wanted to know about this historical fact.

Sheehi (2016) theorized the reaction of her colleagues to her proposal by suggesting that the organizer’s misconception of psychoanalytic demarcation criteria was not just an oversight, but rather a simulacrum for an unspecified and perhaps unrecognized political ideology, one whose hegemony was nevertheless threatened by Sheehi’s desire to have the Palestinian other’s narrative represented on the panel. She proposed a social psychoanalytic thesis to account for her colleague’s error, one that recognizes the potentially traumatizing effects of threats to internalized political ideology in public discussions of claims to the land and the minds of the people of Palestine, no matter how psychoanalytically informed the participants might be. In the core of her condensed explication, Sheehi went on to argue against the dominant cultural tendency among the Western powers that encourages the internalization of a political ideology like Zionism. It is worth noting here that Israel’s settler-colonial paradigm is the consolidation and protection of all that is Zionist and the elimination and expulsion of much of whatever isn’t.

Israel colonized Palestine by expropriating Palestinian land and by disarticulating the Palestinian economy in ways that made the remaining Palestinians dependent on Israel’s economy (Farsakh, 2008). Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has shown that unlike European colonialism, which exploits the indigenous labor of the native population it rules and encourages its reproduction, settler colonialism, the historical colonialist paradigm in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel, entailed the purging, exclusion, or marginalization of

the indigenes (Wolfe, 20161, 1999). He calls settler colonialism “a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is replacement, not exploitation” (Wolfe, 1999, p.163). Notably, he goes on to say that there is a “sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the indigenous population” and that tendency “informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct.”

The invasion and colonization of a domain, he concludes, “is a structure, not an event” (Wolfe, 1999, p.2).

Like Sheehi, Carter J. Carter shows us how being associated with Palestine can imbue psychoanalytic clinical conversations with intrapsychic, interpersonal, and social conflict. Talking about things Palestinian sometimes appears to stimulate signal anxiety, especially, he reminds us, among Jewish Americans like me, that can become distressful or even traumatizing. So, if a Jewish patient makes disparaging remarks about a Palestinian, or if a Palestinian patient bad-mouths a Jew, we might find ourselves in a quandary about how to proceed, especially if we are either Palestinian, Jewish, or both. One possible therapeutic road to take in a case like this would be to think of and respond to ethnic slurs only as transference manifestations stripped of their social or political content, and to lean on our respective theoretical orientations and our psychological acumen for clinical guidance. However, that would ignore Carter’s expressed focus in his paper on identity, race, oppression, and trauma.

I think this is Sheehi’s point as well: she wants to make sure the cultural dimension is not left out of the psychoanalytic picture.

In other words, keeping the social content, the Jewish nation’s Palestinian policies, out of the psychoanalytic conversation may be the enactment of a self-deceptive conception of neutrality, one that is aligned with the prevailing “pro-Israel” perspective in our culture and in our profession. Interestingly enough, it mirrors the Israeli state’s current normalization strategy for dealing with their Palestinian “problem” by either pretending to talk about peace negotiations to create the illusion of authenticity or not talking about it at all (Lustick, 2014; Makdisi, 2008). Not talking about Israel’s ongoing oppression of its Palestinian citizens, as well as those it has eliminated and replaced, supports the disappearance of the Palestinian narrative in psychoanalysis.

But even though Palestine is thereby sequestered, the return of the repressed has a way of insinuating itself into our professional conversations. For example, viewed though his object relational lens, Carter en1. For an excellent theoretical appreciation of settler colonialism, see Veracini (2010), and for a British journalistic perspective that makes no reference to settler colonialism when asserting, “the goal of Israeli policy is to make Palestine and the Palestinians disappear for good,” see Cook (2008).

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visages what I take to be a conflicted Freud saying to his Palestinian patient Edward Said, “Tell me about your Intifada.” To those of us familiar enough with Freud’s papers on technique, Carter’s playful modification of Freud’s opening remarks to his patient could also be understood as a parapraxis in which the word ‘Intifada’ displaces Freud’s customary instructional phrase “…whatever comes to mind.”

Carter’s mention of Edward Said’s book, The Question of Palestine (1979), permits us to think at once about the psychoanalytic concept of resistance as the reluctance to know and social resistance as the expression of political agency. I would go a bit further with what I understand to be Carter’s humorous illustration of the problematic nature of talking about Palestine by having Said’s reply to Freud sound something like this: “Professor Freud: I see you’ve adapted your clinical technique to accommodate our Palestinian anti-colonization struggle and that you appreciate, as a psychoanalyst, the importance of the Palestinian social resistance to Zionism’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of our people which, I am pleased to hear, you wish to understand and explore by calling it ‘my Intifada...’” Had Said lived until July of 2005 and continued as Freud’s fantastical patient, we’d want to nudge Carter to update Freud’s imaginary slip of the tongue by having him say something like, “Let’s talk about your Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign.”

During his introduction to the treatment vignette of his tormented Jewish American patient James, Carter introduces many important psychoanalytic ideas, including the Kleinian concept of developmental positions, the interpersonal/ relational appreciation of enactments, the experiential basis of the repetition compulsion (hurt begets hurt), and the related Anna Freudian idea of identification with the aggressor, to indicate how psychoanalytic concepts can alert us to the manifestations of psychological conflict stimulated during transferential associations. For example, with James’s rage-filled episodes in mind, during which he repeated his ethnic cleansing fantasy about joining a West Bank settler colony and shooting Palestinians, Carter explored James’s resistance to knowing about his fears of passively losing his declining abusive mother and, in his momentary maternal transference, struggling to neutralize his paranoid anguish about discovering his Afghan Jewish therapist to be an anti-Semite who would also forsake him. Even though he did not directly take up James’s Islamophobia in the clinical vignette, race, identity, and oppression are all imbedded in this image of a man terrified of what he doesn’t yet recognize:

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his own projected aggression when threatened with abandonment by his troubling old and new love/hate objects—his mother and his therapist. Carter’s clinical example illuminates how the culturally-hated Palestinian becomes a “scapegoat-able” object upon which James’s aggression towards his

here, however, that there are times when not dealing with a patient’s Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, or otherwise racialized discourse can be experienced by the patient as being supportive of that discourse. I think it fair to say that there is always the danger of collusion between analyst and patient in

mother and his therapist can be displaced.

But even for the socially informed therapist like Carter, tact and timing remain clinical psychoanalytic priorities. At this point in the treatment, Carter’s concerns about the severity of his patient’s illness may have led him to make an important clinical decision to protect the integrity of James’s mind instead of dealing directly with James’s obviously ethnicized discourse. I want to add

the reproduction of cultural prejudice in the psychoanalytic setting.

Although I’ve focused most of my remarks on Carter’s clinical presentation, one of his social psychoanalytic observations is worth highlighting here. Without referring explicitly to settler colonial eliminationism, Carter succinctly recognized its ideological propagation using the chosen religious myths of two settler colonial societies. In Is33

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rael’s biblical origin legend and in the United States’ opprobrious concept of manifest destiny, Carter clearly understands that God’s will was invoked to naturalize and justify colonial conquest.

Steve Botticelli’s presentation is a good example of how to integrate and apply psychoanalytic ideas to philosophy, law, and politics for the explicit purpose of establishing a progressive social psychoanalytic perspective about justice for Palestine. All the while thinking about this synthesis, Botticelli develops a conception of psychoanalytic ethics based on some of the optimal depressive position capacities of well-educated, good-enough psychoanalysts who have learned to resist the binary logic of the paranoid schizoid position and realize that self-aggrandizement is, above all, a failure to minimize splitting operations entailed in the idealization of the self and the demonization of the other.

A good illustration of Botticelli’s identification of Zionism’s ongoing triumphalist narrative is revealed most recently in the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war’s appeal to Jewish Israeli narcissism as it celebrates its colonial expansion, which has necessarily encroached on the rights of its minority Arab population. Israel refuses to recognize that this anniversary symbolizes the expulsion of the Palestinians, and the ongoing destruction of their homes, villages, and towns, as it continues to eliminate and replace Palestinian culture with its own.

Moreover, by creating an anti-Nakbah law, which authorizes the state to revoke funding from institutions that mark Israel’s Independence Day as a day of Palestinian grief (Strickland, 2015), the self-proclaimed Zionist state seeks to negate Palestinian mourning. It refuses to acknowledge its seminal role in the production of Palestinian misery and instead criminalizes Palestinians’ right to commemorate their losses.

I also think Botticelli’s Triumphalism reference highlights Sheehi’s interesting theoretical point that once internalized, Zionism becomes psychologically hegemonic, obliges the fragmentation of other identifications “to maintain its structural coherence,” and is then reinforced by normative unconscious processes.

Botticelli’s paper also illuminates an interesting roadblock on the journey to justice for Palestine through the psychoanalytic concept of defense. He wonders about the possibility of assuaging the agitation that some of his Jewish psychoanalytic colleagues feel when even the mention of Palestine might involve them in conversations that threatens their ideologically infused attachment to the Jewish nation.

I think his doubt about the feasibility of coming up with a psychoanalytic salve to

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minimize potentially disruptive negative feelings when culture-threatening antagonisms are aroused is warranted: the Israeli state’s crusade to silence criticism of its domestic and foreign Palestinian policies is also hard on Diaspora Jews. The Jewish analysts that Botticelli wants to address are vulnerable to being seduced by the guilt and shame-inducing impact of the spurious equation of Zionism and Israel with Jewish ethnicity, identity, and/or religion. It is still all too easy not to appreciate that the political function of that false equivalence is to silence objections to Israeli rule by condemning them as Jewish self-hatred.

Instead of working to develop ways to help ward off the anxiety many Jews feel when introjected ideology about the land of milk and honey is challenged, Botticelli applies an important psychoanalytic standard

keeps Israeli and Diaspora Jews off-balance and frightened with its repetitious claims about anti-Semitic Palestinians pushing the Israeli Jews into the sea (Hollander, 2015). It would also oblige us to suspend our identifications with the Israeli state’s annihilation discourse, which distracts international attention from its ongoing colonization project. When unchallenged, one effect of this component of the Zionist narrative is to condition Jews worldwide to support colonization or to become acquiescent bystanders to it. However, in so doing, Zionism also condemns Jews worldwide to assume responsibility for the Israeli state’s atrocities and subjects them not only to irrational anti-Semitism, but also to hatred of the Jews.

At the end of his exploration of the idea of a moral third in Botticelli’s development of a psychoanalytic conception of jus-

and Sanction (BDS) movement (Barghouti, 2011; Lim, 2012; Shalev, 2015). Botticelli’s appreciation of the BDS integrates psychoanalysis and politics, creating a social psychoanalytic perspective that highlights the importance of talking about Palestine in psychoanalysis.

Steve Botticelli’s support for the BDS encourages peaceful civil resistance to reclaim Palestinian human and civil rights. I also think that supporting the BDS could eventually lead to a secure and just peace, not only for Palestinians and Israeli Jews, but also for Jews worldwide as well. I stress “Jews worldwide” because I believe that ending Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies will contribute to the reduction of anti-Semitism throughout the world.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, whatever can be done to promote the empathic appreciation of human similarities, to permit us to

that encourages forbearance whenever tolerating strong negative feelings supports the reality principle. Having reality-oriented conversations about the Israeli government’s Palestinian policies would require us to first identify the ways in which our often-idealized beliefs about Israel have been inspired by Zionism’s official story, one that

tice, and after criticizing the impoverished efforts of the United Nations and United States to broker a peace process, Botticelli comes to a logical and compelling conclusion about supporting the goals and demands of what he calls a living, vital third in the struggle for Palestinian justice: the Palestinian Civil Society’s Boycott, Divestment

see ourselves in the other, should also reduce discriminatory practices and prejudicial attitudes. Furthermore, for Jews to oppose Israel’s Palestinian policies by endorsing the BDS program not only demonstrates their solidarity with the Palestinians, but also challenges Israel’s hegemonic ideological equation of Jewish identity, Zionism, and Israel. The intended

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effect of this equation is to solidify uncritical emotional support for Israel and to suppress dissent against its Palestinian policies. For Jews who internalize this equation, supporting BDS becomes quite troublesome, because it is misunderstood to signify opposition to Israel’s right to exist; endorsing the BDS is similarly misconstrued as an act of self-hating anti-Semitism (Portuges, 2009).

Psychoanalysis began as a radical critique of the illness-producing effects of the social suppression and consequent psychological repression of human sexuality. Many of the psy-

choanalytic pioneers were also social change agents, whose politically progressive values obliged them to participate in movements for all aspects of social justice and equality. These three courageous papers are part of that legacy of psychoanalytic advocacy, one that promotes a peaceful way to make the Promised Land a land of promise for all of its Semitic peoples. Talking about Palestine in psychoanalysis is one important step in that direction.

z REFERENCES Abunimah, A. (2014). The battle for justice in Palestine.

Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Aruri, N. (1989). Occupation: Israel over Palestine. Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates.

Aruri, N. (2003). Dishonest broker: The US role in Israel and Palestine. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Barghouti, O. (2011). Boycott, divestment, sanctions: The global struggle for Palestinian rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Cook, J. (2008). Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s experi-

ments in human despair. London, UK: Zed Books.

Farsakh, L. (2008). The political economy of Israeli occupation: What is Colonial about it? The Electronic Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 8, 41-58.

Glazer, S. (1979). The Palestinian exodus in 1948. Journal of Palestinian Studies, 9, 96-118.

Hollander, N. (2015). Trauma as ideology: Accountability in “The Intractable Struggle.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Special Issue on Israel, 21(1), 59-80.

Khalidi, R. (1997). Palestinian identity. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Kimmerling, B. (1983a). Zionism and territory: The socio-territorial dimensions of Zionist politics. Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies.

Kimmerling, B. (1983b). Zionism and economy. Cambridge, MA: Schenkmen.

Lim, A. (2012). The case for sanctions against Israel. London, UK: Verso Books.

Lloyd, D. & Pulido, L. (2012). In the long shadow of the

analytic Thinking to Social Problems.” American Psychoanalytic Association, Winter Meetings.

Ram, U. (1999). The colonisation perspective in Israeli sociology. In Pappe, I. (Ed.), The Israel/Palestine Question.

London, UK: Routledge.

Rodinson, R. (1973). Israel: A colonial-settler state? New York, NY: Monrad Press.

Said, E. (1979). The question of Palestine. New York, NY: Times Books.

Said, E. (2000). The Palestinian experience. In Bayoumi, M., and Rubin, A. (Eds.), The Edward Said reader. New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1969) Samara, A. (1988). The political economy of the West Bank 1967-1987. London, UK: Khamsin.

Segev, T. (2007). 1967: Israel, the war and the year that transformed the Middle East. New York, NY: Little, Brown.

Shafir, G. (1999). Zionism and colonialism: A comparative approach. In Pappe, I. (Ed), The Israel/Palestine question.

settler: On Israeli and US colonialisms. In Lim, A. (Ed.), The case for sanctions against Israel. London, UK: Verso Books.

Lustick, I. (2014, April 2). The Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’: Trapped in a Nash equilibrium. Middle East Monitor, retrieved from https://www.middleeastmonitor. com/20140402-the-israeli-palestinian-peace-processtrapped-in-a-nash-equilibrium/ Makdisi, S. (2008). Palestine inside out: An everyday occupation. New York, NY: Norton.

Masalha, N. (1992). Expulsion of the Palestinians: The concept of “transfer” in Zionist political thought, 1882-1948.

Beirut, Lebanon: Institute for Palestine Studies.

McDowall, D. (1989). Palestine and Israel: The uprising and beyond. London, UK: I.B. Tauris.

Moreau Ricaud, M. (2005). Max Eitingon and a question of politics. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 65, 353-366.

Morris, B. (2001). Righteous victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-2001. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Morris, B. (2004). The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Pappe, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: One World.

Piterberg, G. (2001). Erasures. New Left Review, 10, 31-46.

Portuges, S. (2009). Psychoanalytic reflections on the misdiagnosis of anti-Semitism: The case of the “S.H.I.T.” list. Paper presented at the Discussion Group “Application of Psycho-

London, UK: Routledge.

Shalev, C. (2015, June 2). Netanyahu’s declaration of war on BDS is its first major victory. Haaretz, retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.659269 Sheehi, L. (2016, January 21). The road to psychoanalysis runs through Jerusalem. Medium, retrieved from https://www.medium.com/@LSheehi/the-road-to-psychoanalysis-runs-through-jerusalem-a1df45e9dd25 Strickland, P. (2015, May 14). Israel continues to criminalise marking Nakba Day. Al Jazeera, retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/israel-nakba-palestine-150514080431980.html Veracini, L. (2006). Israel and settler colonialism. London, UK: Pluto Press.

Veracini, L. (2010). Settler colonialism: A theoretical overview. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vidal, D. (1997, December). The expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined. Le Monde Diplomatique, retrieved from https://mondediplo.com/1997/12/palestine Wolfe, P. (1999). Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: The politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. London, UK: Cassell.

Wolfe, P. (2016). Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. London, UK: Verso.

Zureik, E. (1979). The Palestinians in Israel: A study in internal colonialism. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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REMINISCENCE

Henry Seiden: Literalist of the Imagination

1

If not for Henry Seiden, this journal would not exist, and I would not be writing or editing “Reminiscence.” When Henry took the chair of the publications committee of the Division, there was no DIVISION/ Review. After it was founded, under Henry’s vision and initiative, after he recruited David Lichtenstein as its editor, and after David decided to include “Reminiscence” as one of its features, Henry asked me whether I’d be interested in editing it. We were having lunch at Sapphire, an Indian restaurant on Broadway, a few blocks from my office. Almost at its front door is a subway exit from which Henry emerged innumerable times, at the precise moment that we’d scheduled lunch. He used to say, “It’s always a pleasure having lunch with a shrink: they show up exactly on time.” The remark certainly applied to him.

“So,” Henry says to me, “would you like to edit the ‘Reminiscence’ feature?” I ask him for some time to think about it. The next time we meet, he says he assumed I was not interested, because I didn’t get back to him. I say, “But I am.” He, looking pleased, says he will recommend me to David for that position. When we speak again, he says, “Okay, you’re responsible for ‘Reminiscence’.”

That’s how Henry worked. He got an idea, decided on the people to implement it, and, before they could change their minds, had the thing rolling. As it gained momentum, everyone involved got the feeling that its existence was ineluctable, and that it was absolutely going to work. And, dammit, it did!

Henry was a “Yes!” person. He had very little tolerance for “can’t” or “won’t.”

This was not grandiosity, mania, splitting, or denial; it was a very practical form of inspiration, native to Henry. It was a pillar of his character. You can see it in his poetry, the tropes consisting of palpable, familiar experiences that attain transcendence under the scrutiny of Henry’s inner eye.

I first met Henry in the fall of 1961, when we were both members of a small group of graduate students beginning the clinical psychology program at Teachers College (TC), Columbia University. It was a poor fit for both of us, only Henry knew it and I didn’t.

He’d been a psych major as an undergraduate at City College of New York, where the faculty included a panoply of deep and original thinkers, among them Kenneth Clark, Joseph Barmack, Marguerite Hertz, Gertrude Schmeidler, and Max Hertzman. The eclectic and speculative spirit of Gardner Murphy, founder of the department, remained 1. The title is a quotation from Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” from Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg. This poem is in the public domain.

influential even years after his departure. In other words, Henry had been schooled in an intellectual climate that encouraged imaginative and divergent thinking.

The ambience at TC was far from congenial to anyone who’d had the benefit of a liberal psychological education. It was informed by a rigid application of empirical method that was called “molar behaviorism” by its proponents, Lawrence Shaffer and E. J. Shoben, Jr., and was set forth in the book they intended as the Bible of the TC clinical psychology program, The Psychology of Adjustment (1956). It was one of the four or five urtexts on which all students would be tested in their comprehensive doctoral examinations. The thrust was to render psychodynamic thought respectable by fitting it to the Procrustean bed of academic behaviorism. The other text that epitomized this approach was Dollard and Miller’s Personality and Psychotherapy (1950). It was also heavily promoted in a widely read paper by Shoben titled, “Psychotherapy as a Problem in Learning Theory” (1949).

As you may well assume, Henry was unhappy at TC but, being Henry, could not and would not suffer in silence. In colloquia and seminars, his was often the challenging and dissenting voice, an inclination that fomented disapproval among the faculty.

It was thus predictable that a particular professor whose tolerance for ambiguity was notoriously low, and who also had a talent for ascribing ordinary failings to moral delinquency, became the instrument of Henry’s dismissal from the program. It happened quickly, without warning or recourse. One day Henry was with us; the next, he was gone.

I neither saw nor had any contact with Henry until 45 years later, when I became the treasurer of Section I, Division 39, and began to attend the Division’s annual meetings. By then, he was a very active member of the Section V Board and was making rich contributions to the vitality of the Division.

I later learned that he had earned his PhD at the New School, a program from which it was difficult to graduate, but which had a faculty that was far better suited to Henry’s omnivorous intellect and anti-doctrinaire view of the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis.

It was probably very early in the 21st century, at a Division 39 spring meeting in some western city, that I was invited by Al Brok to join him for lunch with an old buddy of his from his days at the New School.

The buddy turned out to be Henry, also an old buddy of mine. The fourth person at that lunch table was Bob Prince, whom 36

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I had never met before. At that lunch, I learned that Henry’s poetry was no mere avocation. He told me how seriously he had taken the writing of poetry as a primary life’s pursuit, and how much effort he’d given to the development of his poetic gift. I was deeply impressed, because the 21-yearold I’d known at TC did not seem to be aimed in that direction. He’d been an iconoclast with political and intellectual interests, a pretty fair jump shooter when three or four of our classmates scrimmaged on the rarely used court in the TC gym, and an enthusiastic participant in our class’s social gatherings. To find that he’d become a poet was surprising and curious.

You may detect, in the friction between Henry’s version of psychology as a way of exploring all human experience and TC’s rendition that ruled out phenomena that could not be reduced to statistics, the origins of debates that arose later in such guises as the opposition of evidence-based vs. psychodynamic treatments; classical vs. relational psychoanalysis; clinical work as science vs. art; and discursive writing vs. poetry. Among all these binaries, Henry championed the second term. In his comments and questions at Division 39 Board meetings, there were echoes of the voice he’d raised at TC in defiance of the narrow zeitgeist. Henry’s wit and eloquence would often cross the grain of a prevalent opinion to lay bare its weaknesses and the crucial matters it had failed to consider. He was never loath to nudge prominent noses from their joints, both to serve the greater good and for the sheer pleasure of ulteriority, a quintessential attribute of poets.

And Henry was, first and most, a poet, especially in his later years. On one of my visits to Forest Hills, he and I drove to a Jewish deli on Queens Boulevard. During the short ride, we spoke about writing. I said, “If I had your talent, I would put all my energy into poetry, not professional papers.”

The advice was sound but overlooked the obvious truth that by this time in Henry’s life, his profession was poetry. His work as a clinician, editor, essayist, and administrator contributed experiences and provoked memories that found form and expression in his stringent and playful verse.

Early in his adult life, Henry began to take poetry courses and workshops with fellow poets and established masters. He worked assiduously at acquiring the craft and aesthetic judgment to build the miraculous verbal structures that we are able to read in his volumes of poetry. He applied the many rhetorical, semantic, and syntactical skills he’d perfected in his studies to prose

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as well. The essays in his book, The Motive for Metaphor (2016), culled from a column he wrote first for the Division 39 Newsletter and then for its successor, DIVISION/Review, called “On Poetry,” testify to his ability as a deep, close reader, and to his unconditional love of figurative language and all the devices—metaphor, metonymy, assonance, synecdoche, enjambment, etc.—by which it may become active. The copy of The Motive for Metaphor mailed to me by Henry soon after its publication bore the inscription “Metaphors be with you,” a sample of the way he packed worlds of allusive meaning into the microdot of a single phrase.

In addition to his published poetry and his regular articles about the poetry of others, Henry wrote three other books on themes that excited his interest. One, as yet unpublished, is about the longing for home. Its origins were confluent with those of his poetry, the Bronx neighborhood in which he grew up as the favored child of cultured and educated parents and doting grandmothers. You can read about them in the poems: how he became a psychologist by listening to the two grandmothers who would not speak to each other, but spoke to him; how he was outed as a “Christ-killing Jew” by a couple of older kids from a nearby parochial school; how, plying the surrounding streets, he learned to infer what was happening on the field at Yankee Stadium by the alternating patterns of crowd noise and silence, and how he tested his inferences by asking a fan, who had just left the game, what had happened.

The Bronx, his first home, was a prototype for the concept, something embraced as familiar, warm, hauntingly eidetic, and yet elusive. If you’d have visited him in Forest Hills, you’d have understood that he brought from the Bronx a fascination with the singularities and complexities of place, as well as a receptiveness to the ways in which details of architecture, foliage, native speech, customs, and the distinctive orchestrations of street sounds are a configuration that embraces and is embraced when the attunement is congenial. And because Henry’s first experience of place was predominantly sweet, his subsequent attunements were almost always congenial.

Thus, the visitor would know that Henry had a mental map of his Queens neighborhood in which many of the landmarks were restaurants: Ben’s Deli on Queens Boulevard, the Chinese dim sum place a few doors down, the Greek and Italian restaurants on Metropolitan Avenue.

She would also be aware that Henry and Sara’s house was the last one at the corner of Ascan Avenue and Juno Street that lay outside the boundary of the exclusive and affluent subdivision called Forest Hills

Gardens. You could park your car on Juno Street, to which their driveway opened, but all the spaces behind it would be reserved for residents of Forest Hills Gardens and required a special parking sticker.

I like to think of this circumstance as symbolic of Henry’s position as a defiant aristocrat, sufficiently patrician to occupy the same space as his wealthy neighbors yet asserting his renunciation of the principle by straddling the border, insisting on his proletarian roots and working class affiliation. He was, after all, neither entrepreneur nor plutocrat, but a consummate craftsman, who earned his living by fashioning one unique therapeutic hour at a time.

Henry churned out a prodigious body of material about the longing for home, probably enough for at least two substantial books, but for some reason, he hesitated to publish it. Sara told me that she and her sons, Josh and Dan, will have to decide whether and how to bring it forth. In 2014, Henry was invited by Marilyn Metzl to present a paper on the subject to her colleagues in Kansas City. After accepting, he asked whether I’d like to come along as his discussant. I was delighted to be asked and pleased to do it. It was a whirlwind trip. We took off from LaGuardia at about 10:30 AM on a Saturday in June, arrived in KC only slightly late for lunch, and were whisked

by Marilyn and Kurt (her husband) to the second best barbecue restaurant in the city, where we gorged on several varieties of scorched flesh, fortifying ourselves for the presentation, to which we were then driven.

I recall that it was held in the conference room of a local hospital. The turnout was sparse. Henry spoke, I responded, there were a few questions and comments from the audience, and it was over. We repaired to Marilyn’s home and, later, were given an annotated tour of KC by our hosts. That evening, we were treated to a fine dinner outdoors at a prominent restaurant and deposited at the hotel near the airport, where we managed about four hours’ sleep before the taxi ride to the terminal and flying home. We were back in LaGuardia by noon on Sunday.

The point of this anecdote is that Marilyn, a wise, experienced, and sensitive analyst, and also a veteran Division 39 Board member, where she’d gotten to know Henry, was so taken with his work on “home” and with him as a human being, that she asked him to come to her own adoptive home to share his views on how the containing surround contributes to the essence of human experience. For Marilyn, like many of us, is an emigre: she transplanted herself from Brooklyn to KC, and though eminently successful in her life and career there, she carries a meaningful 37

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encumbrance of indelible memories from the place she grew up in and left. I think she hoped that Henry’s talk and presence would enrich and elucidate that pivotal experience. I infer this from her insistence on acquainting us with KC, its landmarks, architecture, distinctive tastes, and history, as an implementation of her intention.

For me, it was an opportunity to spend 24 consecutive hours in his company, time in which we traded stories, cracked jokes, were mutually supportive, and were just companionable. As his discussant and accompanist, I was also the beneficiary of the royal treatment, great respect, and deep affection that Marilyn gave him.

If you check the PEP Web list of Henry’s publications, you will marvel at the range of his enthusiasms and interests. There are 29 entries over a 27-year period from 1989 to 2016. In the 1980s and 1990s, he focused on clinical applications of self-psychology in two papers on “The Healing Presence” (1996 & 1997), and another on a concept he called “The Narcissistic Counterpart” (1989). In 2004, however, he began to publish papers about the interface of poetry and psychoanalysis, the beginning of a series that remained unbroken until and after his death this year. These papers often take the works of the poets he loved as points of departure for meditations on the reflective, transformative, and enriching interflow of feeling and thought that leads to the depths and nuances of experience we define as human growth. Interspersed with the poetry essays are pieces about the longing for home, the stories of Ernest Hemingway, and, in collaboration with his friend and colleague, Peter Lin, a comparison between the praxis of psychoanalytic therapy and that of the Chinese rendition of Zen (2015).

And these are only the ones listed in PEP Web. There are scores of others, both published and unpublished, in which he developed the theme that I think was his keynote as a psychologist and writer: that human engagement is essentially a narrative and poetic process, the goal of which is the attainment of reciprocal knowledge and the creation of meaning.

Two weeks before he died, Henry was hard at work, again with Peter Lin, on a paper about a metaphor involving the herding of oxen derived from the Zen tradition. They each describe the paths by which they approached becoming psychotherapists, using the steps provided by the metaphor. Henry asked me to contribute something from my own training experiences. I did. He tracked down all the references, gave me editorial advice that led to salutary changes in my piece, whipped the entire thing into shape, and submitted it to a journal only a few days before he died.

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This was emblematic of who Henry was and what he valued; he loved words and the work of placing them one after another to form chains of meaning.

Poiein is the Greek word from which the English “poet” is derived. It means one who makes, a maker. Henry’s core identity was as a maker, and his chosen materials were words, structured as poems, narratives, and concepts. He wrote them in his books and articles and spoke them in his consulting room; from the lecterns of innumerable classes, seminars, workshops, and conferences; at tables in board rooms and restaurants; and at the table where he ate meals with his family, boy and man. What he wanted to achieve by doing this was to make things clearer, simpler, more complex, richer, and yes, better!

Every summer for several consecutive years, I’d get an email from Henry inviting me to be a member of a panel he’d been developing for the Division 39 annual spring meeting. With greater or lesser prodding and encouragement from him, I would accept. He would invariably take the responsibility for collecting the abstracts and the bios and sending in the submissions. The last of these were to be about the mutual influences of poetry and psychoanalysis—no surprise there. The third member of our ensemble was Maureen Murphy, who gave it the éclat of her stature as an analyst, having a strong penchant for verse, hailing from the exotic west coast city of San Francisco, with its rich poetic heritage, and, unlike Henry and me, being of the female persuasion.

When Jill Bellinson was the program committee chair of Division 39, Henry and I prevailed on her to afford us a slot in a lunch hour series at the annual spring meetings, where the focus would be on highly interactive programming with themes of general interest. Naturally, we favored engagement with poetry in ways that would evoke widespread participation. Our first stab at it was to present the case of “J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot, 1911) to our audience and ask them how they might approach him if he were referred to them for a consultation. Many people attended, and almost everyone contributed something to the spirited discourse.

Henry inherited the chair of the Division 39 publications committee from Nancy McWilliams, who went on to become the Division’s president. He and Nancy became close friends and reciprocally supportive colleagues for all the years that followed. Another close relationship that began with a mutual interest and involvement in publications was with Bill MacGillivray.

Bill had edited the Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, an all-purpose newsletter cum informal journal of the Division. He, too, eventually became Division president. Henry replaced

the Psychologist-Psychoanalyst with two new publications, DIVISION/Review and the recently discontinued online newsletter, Insight. During Henry’s tenure as publications chair, Psychoanalytic Psychology, edited

by Elliot Jurist, had, according to the Journal Citation Reports, a 2016 impact factor of 1.068, ranking it 1st out of 13 journals in the category “Psychology, Psychoanalysis.”

In addition to his work on publications, Henry was an active and creative contributor to the Division 39 Board, as a member at large, and simultaneously on the board of Section V of the Division. In all of his positions, he forged enduring friendships. Among this cadre were Nancy McWilliams, Bill MacGillivray, Bob Prince, David Lichtenstein, Marilyn Metzl, the late Johanna Tabin, and me. If there are others whom I have omitted, my apologies.

I have mentioned only those whose relationships with Henry I am personally familiar with. There is a sense in which these friends were also Henry’s “cabinet” in his role as publications chair. Writers, editors, speakers, and thinkers, their focus was to find enduring and contagious language for inner experience.

They constituted a network for advisement, wise counsel, critique, feedback, support, and reciprocal potentiation of creative endeavors.

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Over the years of their collaborations, their respect and affection for each other and for Henry, whose projects often connected them with one another, grew deeper, richer, and more binding.

Henry belonged to other friendship networks, too. The Saturday after he died, six or seven friends from his early Bronx years came to an informal shiva at the Seiden house on Ascan Avenue. They were people with whom he’d kept in continuous touch since the days of his childhood and adolescence that are rendered with such vividness and immediacy in his poems.

Their talk was of those days, but also of the Henry they knew at each successive stage of his life, and the burgeoning complexity of their bonding over time.

And there were the people who learned of Henry through his poems: Phil Bromberg, for example, who saw in Henry’s verse correlates of his own concept of self states; over the last years of Henry’s life, the two developed a strong, dialogic friendship mostly on the telephone. Arnie Richards was so deeply impressed with Henry’s poetry that he published two of his collections, Spaldeen (2016) and How I Became a Psychologist (2017), under the imprint of

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International Psychoanalytic Books. The friendship and support of both these men were extremely gratifying to Henry as he battled for his life and pondered his legacy.

The evidence that he touched people deeply through his poems must have been as great a solace as he could hope for.

Henry knew how to be a friend. To be close to him was also to be close to Sara, whose warm hospitality, quick intelligence, and erudition would quickly become integral to the experience. A guest would arrive at their home and, very soon, be sitting at the table in their dining room, its wood harmonizing with the earth tones of the decor and conveying a visual warmth that echoed their hosts’.

There would be a variety of bagels accompanied by spreads, some of which would be novel, but delicious. There would be rugalach, cookies, coffee in large, wide cups, their middle circumferences made of unglazed ridges.

Oranges, tangerines, apple slices, and a variety of berries could be eaten with yogurt. All this as the matrix and lubrication of convivial talk that roved, rose, meandered, and dipped, not exactly like free association, a little more structured and often with some goal in view, because Henry’s inclination was to organize language either for the sheer pleasure of it, or

to make something happen. There would be moments when nodes of insight would erupt from the stream of dialogue, be recognized, explored, and propagate variations, like a musical theme.

Not everyone with whom Henry engaged in the course of his very active career in Division 39 liked him. Though the impetuosity that had provoked the TC faculty when he was 22 was softened by time and experience, the threshold for its emergence was not so high as to preclude his becoming impatient and testy when he felt his initiatives and innovations were being challenged unfairly, or in ignorance of their value. He was bitter when the Division 39 Board voted against raising the editorial stipend, and again when they expressed disapproval of some of the more avant-garde divergences of this journal. But his disaffection never lasted long enough or was of sufficient intensity to prevent the collaboration that was essential to the success of what he regarded as his mission to oversee publications of high quality and usefulness to the Division. Moreover, whatever grudges he may have carried were largely kept to himself; thus, they did not prevent his forming pragmatic alliances with anyone whose help he needed.

When I turned 80, I threw myself a birthday party to which I invited about 90 people, all friends and family. Henry and Sara were, of course, invited. But to be admitted, the guests were asked to write an obituary notice for me, such as might appear in the New York Times.

Had you predicted that Henry’s would be a poem, you’d have been right on the money.

So here are a few excerpts from that poem that I think will serve to round off this profile of our laureate. z REFERENCES Dollard, J. and Miller, N. (1950). Personality and psychotherapy. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Eliot, T. S. (1950). The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In L. Untermeyer (Ed.), Modern American poetry: Midcentury edition (pp.398-401). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.

Lin, P. & Seiden, H. M. (2015). Mindfulness and psychoanalytic psychotherapy: A clinical convergence. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 32(2), 321-333.

Seiden, H. M. (1989). The narcissistic counterpart.

Psychoanalytic Review, 76(1), 67-81.

Seiden, H. M. (1996). The healing presence: Part I: The witness as self-object function. Psychoanalytic Review, 83(5), 685-693.

Seiden, H. M. (1997). The healing presence: Part II: What the analyst says. Psychoanalytic Review, 84(1), 17-26.

Seiden, H. M. (2016). The motive for metaphor. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Seiden, H. M. (2016). Spaldeen. New York, NY: IPBooks.

Seiden, H. M. (2017). How I became a psychologist. New York, NY: IPBooks Shaffer, L. F. & Shoben, E. J., Jr. (1956). The psychology of adjustment. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Shoben, E. J., Jr. (1949). Psychotherapy as a problem in learning theory. Psychological Bulletin, 46, 366-392.

Things I Said to Bill and Things He Said to Me. At Teachers College in 1961 he wore ties and tweed jackets; I wore yesterday’s shirt.

After 1963, you might say we went to different schools together.

He went old school, which is to say psychoanalytic institute.

I went New School, which is to say, the one on 12th Street.

At Division 39 Board of Directors meetings in the 90’s, he said Section I (old school); I said Section V (new school). We both said the difference was less and less noticeable.

We told jokes—especially when late afternoon somnolence was setting in around the large rectangular table.

He’d probably prefer a sonnet to this to celebrate his birthday. But I’m an informalist—although I no longer wear yesterday’s shirts.

We said let’s do a panel presentation. We said why were we rejected? We said this several times.

We said, those idiots—they only want music they can dance to.

Fried means peace; Seiden means silk. We know Freud means joy.

Neither of us knows what Lacan means. But we’re peaceful and smooth.

We wax nostalgic. And we talk about nostalgia, about what it means—about the sense of the future we had in the past (in those days when we went to different schools together).

And we talk about The Sense of an Ending, about the inevitability of endings…We know, every tick demands a tock.

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The Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Approach to Working with Veterans Andrew BERRY

In the earliest writings by Freud (1901/1960) on “war neurosis,” as it was then called, his first observations were those of a surviving soldier mourning the death of a brother-in-arms. Freud does not initially speak of Oedipal conflict, libido, or an interaction among id, ego, or superego in these seminal writings. He speaks instead of how one friend misses another. At its heart, this is an interpersonal perspective.

I also am interested in the interpersonal aspect of working with veterans and the symptoms of war neurosis, known now as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more often associated with fear or with biological dysfunction.

I draw my theory from my training at the White Institute, and specifically from Harry Stack Sullivan (who was a veteran himself ), one of the Institute’s eminent founders, and his landmark work, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953). For Sullivan, pathology exists because of pathology in the patient’s relationships. No psyche exists in a vacuum. Even when alone, the totality of a patient’s existence comes from relationships with those living and dead.

From the interpersonal perspective, the symptoms of PTSD, while certainly glaring and present, are not quite as monolithic as in other paradigms, and certainly not as reductive as a mere collection of symptoms to be medicated and nothing more. If we focus solely on symptomatic relief of PTSD symptoms, we are at risk for missing entirely the deeper psychological meaning of PTSD. This meaning can be found in relationships with others, and the deeper levels of healing cannot be attained without exploring these relationships.

I would also submit that the interpersonal approach focuses on early relationships affecting current relationships; what’s past is prologue. This is of significance analytically, because a child’s first relationships with caregivers are their first relationships with people in positions of supreme authority, and relationships with authority figures are the bedrock upon which the military does or does not function. Jonathan Shay (1994) points out that the subtitle to the Iliad is “The Rage of Achilles.” Achilles is incensed by the betrayal by his leadership of what is right. Shay points out that betrayal by a trusted military leader may be the most traumatic aspect of combat experience. I have often encountered veterans battling with PTSD symptoms who, concomitantly, are also reeling from years of deeply conflicted relationships with people

in positions of authority. And the interaction between the two phenomena can often be thought of as an extreme illustration of psychological potentiation, highly analogous to chemical potentiation, i.e., mixing alcohol and barbiturates and just how lethal this can be.

Imagine a child playing on the playground and skinning his knee. At best, we can hope the child goes to a mother, or father, or nurse, or whomever, and the injury is not only attended to in a physical sense with disinfectant and a bandage, but also in a psychological sense, i.e., the authority figure making the child feel soothed, safe, and not needlessly blamed for the injury.

Now, what if the same injury occurs and the child is afraid to turn to an authority figure, or otherwise has no authority figure to turn to? These children will bear not only physical scarring, but also the emotional scarring of such incidents in a cumulative sense. Through repeated, less than optimal experiences with authority figures, trust in self and the outside world is understandably eroded, if not obliterated.

Now, what if this child grows up seeking a non-blood surrogate family because of coming from circumstances of abuse or of an unavailable parent? Or of not having parents or caregivers at all? Already, when the child, now an adolescent, signs on the dotted line, takes the oath, and enlists, he or she is at risk for having the emotional makeup of someone who could have a very hard time with taking orders from any kind of authority figure, no matter how capable. And what if the authority figure, in the form of either officer or enlisted superior, is either incompetent or abusive, especially during and after combat tours, where the seeds of PTSD are sewn? What if a combat veteran becomes increasingly symptomatic, as denoted by psychiatric criteria, while still on active duty? I submit that PTSD symptoms can be deeply aggravated by such incompetence, and doubly so by the feelings of betrayal mentioned above. This can lead to disciplinary problems and puts the veteran at risk for, in some cases, less than honorable discharges. I have had Herculean difficulty reaching many of the veterans who have suffered such fates while on active duty, and who have experienced childhoods replete with neglect or abuse, in my consulting room.

As a psychologist and psychoanalyst, I am an authority figure, along with the active duty military and veterans affairs healthcare providers the veterans have en40

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countered before coming to see me. This illustrates how behaviors can repeat in terms of “What’s going on around here” and “You can’t not interact,” as Edgar Levenson points out in The Fallacy of Understanding & The Ambiguity of Change (2005). Often, it feels from the intake onward that I have been put on notice that I will have to go to great lengths to earn their trust.

In such situations, I have found that PTSD symptomology per se decreases in size and importance, in a manner of speaking, while interpersonal issues regarding authority conversely increase, and markedly so. Veterans want to be heard and not judged. Unfortunately, many clinicians often do judge, and I have to work through additional damage from this as well when I work with patients who have already had experience with clinicians who simply do not understand what they are dealing with.

This adds additional authority figures to an already long list of people perceived by the veteran as incapable or unwilling to help them in any other way than the path of least resistance via medication alone.

Another phenomenon I have encountered along these lines is clinical experiences where there really has been no relationship other than being interviewed for 15 minutes, being tagged with a diagnosis, and being prescribed medication. This process usually involves little to no eye contact, and I find there is no difference between this unfortunate occurrence and receiving inadequate attention to a skinned knee. In both scenarios, hope for a successful outcome is left wanting, and being somehow further damaged is often understandably anticipated: some patients may even provoke it—perhaps as a test of their clinician (or of themselves).

I have often heard from veterans who have been on active duty for long periods of time, sometimes for decades, that part of them still feels the same age as they went in, which offers us the idea of a psyche which retains aspects of being an emotionally immature 17-year-old, combined with another aspect of being thousands of years old, in the cases of combat veterans who have seen enough blood, gore, and death to last a thousand lifetimes. To this end, Hans Loewald’s idea of re-pare (1960) as what constitutes therapeutic action in analysis comes to mind. In addition to attempting to heal the profound levels of trauma and loss from childhood through combat, we are faced with veterans dealing with some emotional coping mechanisms on the same

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levels as those of teenagers, especially as they work through the interpersonal morass of issues with authority figures. Which authority figures can they trust? Can they come to grips with their own authority issues and have a better understanding of their own emotional immaturity and somehow work through it?

Recalling my opening reference to Freud, the interpersonal nature of the loss of brothers and sisters in arms must be addressed in treatment as an issue of paramount importance. I have heard many combat veterans refer to losing their youth and innocence during their time of war,

is frozen in time of the death of another 17-year-old, and I would submit that part of the veteran who survives to tell the tale dies on that day as well, and grieving becomes a lifelong process of survivor guilt, and obsessional thinking of “What if I had done this, or done that? Would he/she/they still be alive?”

When we hear a veteran say to us, “I lost my brother/sister that day,” while such a remark may not be literally true, in a psychical sense it is absolutely and resoundingly true, as they depend on each other 24/7, 365, for their very lives, which are often saved many times over. And as

cluding the thousand-yard stare on the face of the veteran who has seen more than he/ she can bear and has lost brothers and sisters with whom to share the burden. This journey begins as the new recruit is trained to essentially have no emotions, because they are an impediment to mission completion. This suppression becomes ostensibly set in stone by combat trauma and loss, and by the numbing effect that it has on the veteran who then takes it home. Paradoxically, many warriors believe they have finally become “good” at their job when they no longer experience emotions when terrible things happen. This is summed up in the

and never being able to experience relationships the same way again afterward. I suggest that along with losing one’s youth and innocence, that the moment they lose a brother or sister on the battlefield, that part of them arrests developmentally as well. They are robbed of the opportunity to survive the war together, to maintain an unparalleled friendship afterward, and, finally, to grow old together. So when a deep emotional bond is violently disrupted by death, the image in the 17-year-old’s mind

we hear about their interactions with each other prior to the loss, counter-transferential images come to us of boys playing together, working together, scrapping occasionally with each other, and fighting the enemy together.

Life afterward requires more will and drive to succeed and somehow bear this cross, post trauma and loss. Christmas is no longer merry, birthdays are no longer happy, and Memorial/Veterans Day festivities invoke all kinds of feelings, up to and in-

common expression among them that it “wasn’t nuthin.” But those who have never been baptized by battle need to be careful not to take this denial of feeling at face value. Family members often experience this posttraumatic emotional deep-freeze and distance most harshly and are at a loss to know how to deal with “a different person” than the one they once knew.

Oftentimes, I have heard vets say they either cannot feel anything, or that they are afraid of feelings, and being overwhelmed

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by them, and so the emotional suppression continues. It’s as if the returning veteran remains in combat mode, hypervigilant and expecting attack, and those who have known no war cannot relate to this.

The only thing we can do is to create a latter-day holding environment of safety, as outlined by Winnicott (1960). Perhaps we can understand trauma, itself, as an undoing of the holding environment: a peeling away of the entwined layers of interpersonal safety developed over the course of development. From this perspective, we may be able to understand that the path forward is in a re-weaving of the holding environment.

This requires new interactions and new interpersonal development. But isn’t this a basic aspect of all psychoanalytic psychotherapy and of all human growth? We will see, in veterans’ deep scars of trauma, primitive mind states in our consulting room, and we have to put forth our best efforts to provide a re-parenting experience that heals and does not infantilize or re-traumatize.

Lastly, I would like to invoke the idea of witnessing in our consulting rooms, and the powerful effect it can have on veterans, once we have earned their trust. Many cannot bring themselves to share what they have seen with anyone other than those they served with. Often, this reflects the deep conviction that such events (and the interpersonal experiences that resonate with them) could not be believed, understood, or even accepted by anyone who “wasn’t there.” That being said, occasionally I have worked with those who cannot live another day without finally being able to speak of their trauma aloud. I have been told that I am the first to hear about it, for whatever reason, and that finally letting someone else know goes a long way to relieving intolerable pressure, as a way of beginning to reunify the veteran’s shattered self. The projection of that self into the interpersonal space of the therapy may be the first step in that long process.

Following Winnicott, perhaps it would be still better to say “the transitional space of the therapy.” In this way, the veteran who comes

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home in a psychically fragmented state, no longer knowing who he or she is in relation to him/herself or others, can take a first step toward posttraumatic self-knowledge and blaze a new developmental path forward. z REFERENCES Freud, S. (1960). The psychopathology of everyday life. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 6, pp.114-115). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1901) Leowald, H. (1960). On the theurapeutic action of psycho-analysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 16-33.

Levenson, E. (2005). The fallacy of understanding & the ambiguity of change. Hillsdale, NY and London, UK: Analytic Press.

Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam. New York, NY: Atheneum.

Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co. Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 585-595.

I would like to thank the veterans I have consulted while writing this paper, and with special thanks to my discussant when presenting the paper, Capt. Nate Emery, USMC (Ret’d.)

-The Author

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The Candidate’s Experience: Immersion into Disavowed and Hidden Aspects of Others, Culture, and Oneself Michael KORSON

(Moving Psychoanalysis Forward in the Rapidly Changing World)

1

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ” At the heart of the psychoanalytic endeavor is the attempt to integrate rather than to disavow, evacuate, or hide from oneself unwanted aspects of the self. In this way, the candidate’s experience is itself psychoanalytic.

Given the immersive intensity of the learning experience, the candidate often meets, sometimes in painful confr ontations, unfamiliar or previously unacceptable aspects of oneself.

This experience occurs through contact with the myriad of theories studied, clinical work that involves new learning, one’s own analysis, and one’s participation in various groups.

It’s often a bumpy, circuitous road from psychotherapist to psychoanalyst, with neither familiar markings nor rest stops (classes, analysis four days a week, clinical work, weekends consumed with reading articles and writing, and, oh, personal time somewhere found in breakdowns on the shoulder of the road).

The result: a dizzying swirl of constant binding and unbinding. Moments developing a sense of conviction about oneself interspersed with panic-laced doubts about the certainty of anything. Take the uniquely challenging experience of being a beginner at something (psychoanalysis) that one has done for sometimes decades (clinical work). More than once I’ve winced at a supervisor’s suggestion that I’m just learning, had to restrain myself from yelling, “But I’m 60 years old!”, and calmed myself with Ogden’s (1992) words: “If the analyst allows himself perpetually to be the beginner that he is, it is sometimes possible to learn about that which he thought he already knew” (p.225).

I’ve been forced to grapple with my own needs and desires. I’ve met my own greed, competitiveness, and selfishness.

This is at no time more challenging than when I am conducting a training case (a requirement for progression) and the person talks about prematurely terminating. As fellow candidates have progressed at variable speeds, I’ve felt competitive and troubling fears of inadequacy and of never reaching the end (as if there were such a destination).

I’ve also been confronted with notions in the culture about psychoanalysis, cure, 1. A version of this paper was presented at the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) 37th annual spring meeting (April 2017) as part of a panel entitled “A Psychoanalyst for the 21st Century: Candidates in Conversation about Analytic Identity in a Rapidly Changing World.”

and what is valuable and important. Some of those assumptions have been voiced by patients in their initial responses to the couch (their associations drawn it would seem from New Yorker cartoons). One new patient asked, “Do they still use that?” What is essential to psychoanalysis, a process of reflection, an appreciation for an expansive sense of time, depth, and breadth, and a curiosity about what is not known nor under one’s control, is all too often anathema in the manic society (Peltz, 2005) with its emphasis on speed and efficiency. I was frequently reminded of this when conducting clinical reviews for managed care cases, when reviewers asked when I expected the treatment would end. In cases where termination was not in sight, my reply seemed met with derision and could result in a denial of coverage. No doubt my anger at the insensitive and profit-driven system neatly concealed shame, fears, and anxieties that I was operating from a back alley outside the accepted mental health world.

While I’ve wrestled with many disquieting feelings, I have been encouraged by the candidate experience to develop the ability, borrowing Bromberg’s concept, to stand in the spaces. Bromberg (1993) asserts, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. . .the capacity to feel like one self while being many” (p.166). As my identity has shifted, what I’ve thought and believed, especially about myself, has changed; I have had to occupy that space in between, a space of becoming. This process not only enlivens my own sense of continuing to develop, but deepens my empathy for my patients’ challenges to integrate split off or dissociated parts of themselves.

A clinical story comes to mind. I had been seeing Joe for five years in twice-weekly therapy. Joe was for most of that time struggling with therapy, with any sense that it could be at all helpful. Having been sexually abused as a child, to be vulnerable meant to be weak and to be close meant to be susceptible to abuse. The only “power” he knew was in resistance founded on (literally) not moving.

Joe had gotten married during the time we were working together, though predictably, he struggled in that relationship as well. Soon after he and his wife began couples therapy, Joe, quite troubled, told me that the therapist strongly denounced this treatment and actively suggested that he 43

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see another individual therapist. (She had not reached out to me and, unbeknownst to me, had provided him with referrals.)

According to her, his continued use of pornography indicated the treatment had failed, and she asserted that there were other, better proven modalities to address that problem.

After Joe informed me, I spoke with her. The conversation did not go well. She possessed confidence and certainty: five years was too long a time and he should try something different. She did allow that perhaps she should have called me first.

I understood this as an enactment of a very painful and disturbing event in Joe’s childhood, when an elder sibling removed him from their parents’ house. That had been a tremendously confusing time for him, as he both hated the abusive father and loved him, and felt compelled to rehabilitate him. He was ambivalent about leaving the home: guilty about giving up on his father and abandoning his mother to the “monster” in the house. The couples therapist was now in the role of the sibling removing him from the home and the abusive parent (me); or perhaps she was the fantasized mother who would intervene where the real mother remained passive.

Joe felt anguished, helpless once again, and caught between what others wanted. There was little relief from our understanding of the relational constellations taking shape.

Given his doubts about therapy, about any beneficial effect of relationships in general, he became quite depressed and combative in sessions for some time.

I struggled as well, not the least of which to manage strong feelings of anger and resentment at the intruding other (possibly a projective identification of his feelings toward the sibling). I heard the couples therapist as an oracular voice for societal norms and values regarding cure. Quicker! Quantifiable! I couldn’t simply evacuate my feelings (though I wanted to) through angry protest of the other therapist’s inappropriate behavior. I had to allow myself to consider her position. Perhaps I had failed him, and my relational approach was ineffective in this case. Could there be some benefit in incorporating other providers and approaches?

(In fact, Joe did see a therapist referred by the couples therapist for three sessions, who set goals for further treatment including to improve his relationships). I was not so sure my job was to eliminate his compulsive be-

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havior, but rather for us both to understand it. According to Gabbard (2009), “Some symptoms…are essential signals of inner turmoil. We can’t do without them” (p.585).

But what if I were wrong?

Aided by supervision and my own analysis, I struggled to find an in between place where I could hold doubts and, in fact, incorporate them into a more alive sense of conviction about the work. This became an incredibly valuable lesson: conviction about this work could include my doubt about it at the same time. I could stand between the spaces, knowing and not knowing, useful and useless, although teetering frequently.

I was asked to change as the patient was confronted with change, to acknowledge all sorts of disturbing feelings of shame, inadequacy, and isolation that I was asking Joe to also acknowledge. I too had to risk be-

ing vulnerable. Eventually Joe left the treatment, but not because of pressure from an intervening other. Rather, he made a decision, obtained some agency that had previously been too risky, knowing that the door was open should he be inclined to return (I’m tempted to say) home again.

The candidate’s experience prepares the analyst-in-the-making to be a vital participant in shaping the psychoanalysis of the future. Aron (1999) writes that “although the community shapes the analyst, there is a continual reciprocity of influence in this dyad too, with the individual analyst influencing the community in turn” (p.23). As candidates becoming analysts, we are shaped by multiple influences; as analysts, we contribute to the field’s capacity to enlarge and contain, integrate and evolve. Psychoanalysis must meet the pressing challenges of

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responding to this rapidly changing world.

As the culture revs up, the environment and social holds degenerate, and people become more divisive and prone to splitting and othering, the field must stand in the spaces, offering something newly conceived from the integration of the past and present. z REFERENCES Aron, L. (1999). Clinical choices and the relational matrix. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9, 1-29.

Bromberg, P. M. (1993). Shadow and substance: A relational perspective on clinical process. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 10, 147-168.

Gabbard, G. O. (2009). What is a “good enough” termination? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 57, 575-594.

Ogden, T. H. (1992). Comments on transference and countertransference in the initial analytic meeting. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 12(2), 225-247.

Peltz, R. (2005). The manic society. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 15, 347-366.

Names and descriptions of patients have been changed to protect confidentiality.

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On Dreams and Poems: A Poem by Donald Hall

Henry M. SEIDEN

Contemporary poet Donald Hall’s “Pilot of 1918” is a poem—constructed, it would seem, out of a dream—but whatever the inspiration, it certainly evokes a dream.

The Pilot of 1918 He discovers himself on an old airfield.

He thinks he was there before, but rain has washed out the lettering of a sign.

A single biplane, all struts and wires, stands in the long grass and wildflowers.

He pulls himself into the narrow cockpit although his muscles are stiff and sits like an egg in a nest of canvas.

He sees that the machine gun has rusted.

The glass over the instruments has broken, and the red arrows are gone from his gas gauge and his altimeter.

When he looks up, his propeller is turning, although no one was there to snap it.

He lets out the throttle. The engine catches and the propeller spins into the wind.

He bumps over holes in the grass, and he remembers to pull back on the stick.

He rises from the land in a high bounce which gets higher, and suddenly he is flying again.

He feels the old fear, and rising over the fields the old gratitude. In the distance, circling in a beam of late sun like birds migrating, there are the wings of a thousand biplanes. © 1990 by Houghton Mifflin [Reprinted with permission.]

This lovely poem gives us the opportunity to consider a recurring question about the difference between poems and dreams, a question often raised by people (I confess to being one of them) who live in and take comfort in developed, day-time language, people having a hard time making sense of a verbal assemblage that seems to make no sense— or if it does, has (only) the uncomfortable associative logic of a dream.

We know the familiar compelling power and/or fright and/or exhilaration of dream experience. We sense, and from the evidence our ancestors have always sensed, a profound if ineffable and mysterious message in our dreams. And, as psychoanalysts and since Freud, we’ve appreciated the importance of dreams in understanding the complexity of mental life—our own and our patients.

But compelling as dreams may be, we ask something more of poems. Everybody dreams. But a dream becomes art only when a poet turns the dream into a poem that can be dreamed by other people. By dreamed, I mean something more than the dry and eviscerated dream reports we’re accustomed to reading in clinical psychoanalytic accounts.

I mean experienced as if our own.

If “The Pilot of 1918” is a dream, it’s one I could well dream!

There’s a likely day residue, a puzzling location, the abandoned airfield; and a compelling initial symbol, the damaged antique plane. This could be my own bodily experience informing the dream—a body that is not what it used to be, the “muscles…stiff.” And it could be my anxiety: are the damaged instruments more like memories of instruments? There’s a sense of fragility (as I “sit like an egg….”). But then, a joy and a gratitude.

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With the transformational magic of a dream, “the propeller spins.” Fear is countered (by wish): I bump, I bounce, and then, I fly—and fly moreover to a reunion in the late sun with “a thousand biplanes.” What elation!

Donald Hall is a prolific and much admired figure in the world of contemporary poetry—admired as much for who he is as for his poems.

He’s a recent US poet laureate—but he left the post a year into the twoyear appointment, because he didn’t like what he regarded as the empty ceremonial aspects of the role. Earlier, he resigned a tenured position at the University of Michigan to freelance—and to live with his new young wife, Jane Kenyon, also an admired poet, on what had been his grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. In addition to books of poetry, he has published many books of prose, including a book-length essay, a favorite of mine, about his life with Kenyon and about what the work in art is all about, called Life Work (1993).

In his recent Essays After Eighty (2014), a short collection of plainspoken, deceptively simple prose pieces, he contemplates his own history from the vantage point of his now old age. Both the what I am now, the what I think about, and the how I got here….

In it, Hall says, regretfully, that poetry has “abandoned him”—leaving him to write prose. The observation is an interesting one. It makes us rethink the received psychoanalytic notion that art involves a regression to some lower level of mental functioning—a “regression in the service of the ego,” as Ernst Kris (1952) famously put it. But if all that was involved was regression, the process should be easy for an old poet in need of a nap! Danielle Knafo (2002) helps us think a little more clearly about what has to happen after the putative regressive slide (or after “the burst of testosterone,” as Hall himself theorizes, or, as the ancients would have it, after the divine gift is received—be it inspiration or madness).

That is, what happens after the dream is dreamed. Something has to get built; some ecstatic, or moving, or metaphoric communication has to take place. And inevitably, there are exacting rules for the building.

A short poem may look easier to write than a long essay. But so much of the work in any art goes into making it look easy!

Typically, in writing poetry, one attends to each word, one revises and revises, one works at getting the resonances right, making the poem look right on the page, getting the formal aspects to fit the content. Line breaks? Stanza breaks? Should this be a sonnet? rhymed quatrains? a villanelle? It takes an energy and a focused attention that even prose as good as Hall’s may not require, and that, sadly, an aging artist may no longer be able to muster.

“The Pilot of 1918” was first published in a volume of his new and selected poems in 1990 and was written when Hall was still a young man, but when he was old enough to imagine an older man’s dream.

Maybe he was thinking of his father—or his grandfather. (Many of his other poems in White Apples and the Taste of Stone [2007] feature them as characters.)

What we’re given in “The Pilot…” is regression imagined. The poet’s process is empathic and engaged, deliberate and intentional, even as it is playful and witty. This is playfulness of the highest order and not a matter of simply recording what is least and most common in all of us (like dreaming). It is a matter of exercising what is most developed in us—I would say a matter of genius. z REFERENCES Hall, D. (1990). The pilot of 1918. In White apples and the taste of stone: Selected poems, 1946-2006 (p.40). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Hall, D. (1993). Life work. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Hall, D. (2014). Essays after eighty. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Keillor, G. (2005, April 13). The old pilot [Radio program]. In J. Biles (Producer), The writer’s almanac. Minnesota, MN: Minnesota Public Radio.

Knafo, Danielle. (2002). Revisiting Ernst Kris’s concept of regression in the service of the ego in art. Psychoanalytic Psychology,19(1), 24-49.

Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic explorations in art. New York, NY: International Universities Press.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sergio Benvenuto is a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome, Italy, and a psychoanalyst, president of ISAP (Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis). He is a contributor to cultural journals such as Telos, Lettre Internationale (French, Spanish, Hungarian, Rumanian, German, and Italian editions), Texte, RISS, Journal for Lacanian Studies, and L’évolution psychiatrique.

Andrew Berry is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Saratoga County New York. He completed analytic training at the William Alanson White Institute, where he is currently a Supervisor of Psychotherapy. He specializes in PTSD. Steven Botticelli is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is a contributing editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and DIVISION/Review, and on the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Carter Carter LCSW, is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist in private practice in Amherst, MA. He is on the faculty of Lesley University Division of Expressive Therapies and the Smith College School for Social Work, and is the co-chair of the Multicultural Concerns Committee and on the board of Section IX (DIV39).

Paula L. Ellman is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Bethesda.

She is a training and supervising analyst in the Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS) and co-editor of Battling the Life and Death Forces of Sadomasochism: Clinical Perspectives [Karnac, 2013].

Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS), Honorary Member at IPTAR the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City, and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen.

Nancy Goodman is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Bethesda, MD. She is a training and supervising analyst in the Contemporary Freudian Society and co–editor of The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, and the Living Mind [Routledge, 2012].

Derek Hook is a scholar and a practitioner of psychoanalysis with expertise in the area of critical psychology and psychosocial studies. His research interests essentially converge on the theme of “the psychic life of power”, and his publications tend to take up either psychoanalytic, postcolonial, or discourse analytic perspectives on facets of contemporary post-apartheid South Africa.

Louis Rothschild is a clinical psychologist in Providence, RI. He maintains a private practice specializing in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in addition to providing supervision, writing articles and book reviews, and occasionally reviewing manuscripts.

Presently, his scholarly focus is centered on rapprochement between fathers and sons, where he has penned separate book chapters in three edited volumes.

Lara Sheehi is a licensed clinical psychologist and policy analyst teaching clinical psychology at the George Washington University Professional Psychology Program. Her research focuses on the effects of power, ideology, and structural inequities in and outside the clinic and the intersection of Psychoanalysis with political and decolonial action.

Manya Steinkoler has done analytic training and clinical work in Paris. She is in private practice in New York City and a professor of literature at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Michael Korson is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with offices in San Francisco and Berkeley, CA. He is a post-seminar candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.

Stephen Portuges is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in Oakland, CA. He is a member of the Psychoanalytic Work Group for Peace in Palestine/Israel.

William Fried is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in addition to a photographer. Dr. Fried is a member and on the faculty of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is past president of Section 1, Division 39. He practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Manhattan. He is a contributing editor of DIVISION/Review.

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