Dear IARPP Community,

We are pleased to present the Bookshelf edition of the IARPP eNews. The Bookshelf celebrates the creative contributions that IARPP writers, researchers, and thinkers are making to the field of relational psychoanalysis. In this edition we showcase book announcements, as well as announcements of articles and chapters published, presentations given, and special honors earned by IARPP members. The achievements of our membership are truly remarkable.

We hope you enjoy this edition of the Bookshelf. Our next deadline for submissions will be June 30, 2015.
 Please read below for instructions to submit pieces for future editions of the Bookshelf and eNews.

Sincerely,

Christina Emanuel and Maria Tammone

When submitting articles to the Bookshelf, please include the following:

1. The title of your book, article, or presentation
2. A brief description of the content, such as an abstract
3. A link to a publisher if there is one
4. Artwork or a photo of the book cover if applicable
5. For presentations, please spell out all acronyms and include the location
6. A photograph of yourself in jpeg format
7. Your professional contact information for our readers as you would like it to appear publicly
8. Please send all submissions to
   Maria Tammone: irene97@libero.it
 and Christina Emanuel: christinaemanuel@sbcglobal.net

Christina Emanuel, MFT, PsyD
16 S. Oakland Ave., Suite 201
Pasadena, CA 91101
USA
email: Christina Emanuel

Maria Tammone, MD
Via Montegrappa 46
00048 Nettuno/Roma
Italia
email: Maria Tammone

Danielle Knafo – Alone Together: Solitude and Relatedness in the Clinical Encounter
Danielle Knafo – Creataivity & Psychoanalysis: An Elegant Adaptation
Penelope Starr-Karlin – Ecstatic Temporality on the Golden Gate Bridge
Richard Raubolt – Redemption and Resiliency: Resurrecting Ghosts Buried in Detroit’s Ruins

Danielle Knafo (USA)

Alone Together: Solitude and Relatedness in the Clinical Encounter
On January 25 Danielle Knafo delivered a paper at the Austen Riggs Center in which she presented two cases that appeared very different, even nearly opposed, and yet had underlying and illuminating similarities. The first involved a married, successful woman who could not tolerate being alone. The second was about a reclusive young man who could not endure being with others. Yet, each case spoke deeply about the existential and psychological difficulty embodied in flight from a historical rupture that could not be processed or symbolized. The case narrations showed how the levels of concealment embodied in the first case of defensive relationship and the second case of defensive solitude provide hints and clues to liberation.

Creativity & Psychoanalysis: An Elegant Adaptation
The first part of this seminar, presented to the National Institute of the Psychotherapies on February 8, offered a brief overview of psychoanalytic theories of creativity. The second part of the seminar focused on creativity in the clinical situation from the perspectives of both analyst and analysand. What should one know when treating creative individuals? How can we use our creativity to overcome impasses in the work and help patients maximize their creative potential? What do the artist and the psychoanalyst have in common? Knafo spoke about the creative action of psychoanalysis in terms of working with the unconscious in the quest for transformation.

Danielle Knafo, PhD
email: Danielle Knafo
website: http://www.danielleknafo.com
blog: http://www.seriousmentalillness.net
blog: http://artfromtheedge.net

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Penelope Starr-Karlin

Ecstatic Temporality on the Golden Gate Bridge
Penelope Starr-Karlin presented this paper at The International Forum on Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE) annual conference, November 6-9, 2014, at the Hotel Kabuki, San Francisco, California, USA.  In this presentation, Starr-Karlin discussed a unitary concept of time that embraces past, present, and future, looking at how such a concept may be applied to analytic thinking.

Penelope Starr-Karlin, PsyD, MFT
email: Penelope Starr-Karlin

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Richard Raubolt (USA)

Redemption and Resiliency: Resurrecting Ghosts Buried in Detroit’s Ruins
I presented this paper at the 42nd annual conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis entitled Shame, Guilt and Prejudice: Emerging Possibilities. The presentation took place on November 15 in New York City.

As psychoanalysts, we practice mainly within the confines of our private offices in hushed tones, and in isolation from the intemperate world banging at our doors. With the emergence of trauma studies, our work has widened beyond the abiding focus on individuals. We can now leave our consulting rooms and venture forth without our favorite theories and comforts. Such changes in practice and perspective introduce us to the actual world of living nightmares and dreams, as well as to the death of reason in favor of emotionality and, at times, violence. This change also brings us into contact with the vibrancy of lives growing and developing no matter how uneven or messy. We can, if we choose, participate in the creation of “new nows,” often beyond what history suggests is possible.

For me this means exploring the context of both sides existing in intergenerational urban trauma: shame and resiliency. Using Detroit’s “ruins,” I seek to tell the largely untold story of “retro-visionaries.” With the Heidelberg Project as one example, I will use my new film to show what is possible when trauma, defiant interconnectedness, and creativity link up to form a resilient spirit.

Link to film: www.vimeo.com/richardraubolt

Dr. Richard Raubolt
Licensed Psychologist
Certified Psychoanalyst
www.richardraubolt.com
email: Richard Raubolt

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Billie Pivnick – Death, Mourning, and a Daughter’s Diary: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
Billie Pivnick – Managing Collapse:  Commemorating Sept. 11th through the Relational Design of a Memorial Musuem
Lewis Barth – Thoughts on Forgiveness in Psychoanalysis and Judaism
Hannah Hahn – They Left It All Behind: Psychological Experiences of Jewish Immigration and the Ambiguity of Loss

Billie Pivnick (USA)

Death, Mourning, and a Daughter’s Diary: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Chapter in Cohen, P., Sossin, K.M., and Ruth, R. (eds.). Healing After Parent Loss in Childhood and Adolescence: Therapeutic Interventions and Theoretical Considerations. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

This chapter details a treatment of a young woman who lost her father during late adolescence. Mourning required the ability to synthesize opposite feeling states in symbolic form—to transform an external absence to a lively internal presence. To hold incompatible emotions and the ideas associated with them required building the capacity to transition from holding psychological phenomena in an embodied way, to containing them in bodily states that were given meaning, and then to consider them more abstractly as categories of emotions and ideas that could be shared and compared. The patient used a journal as a portable archive of self-states to scaffold her self-cohesion. Her journal served as both transitional object and transformational object that helped create conditions for the intersubjective requirements of adult intimate relationships. At first her journal stood in for the father, then the mother, then the therapist, and helped her with separating from all three.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Healing-after-Parent-Childhood-Adolescence/dp/1442231750/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421631644&sr=1-4&keywords=billie+pivnick

Managing Collapse: Commemorating September 11^th Through the Relational Design of a Memorial Museum (co-written with Tom Hennes)

Chapter in O’Loughlin, M. (ed.). The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History, and Memory. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

This chapter describes what happened when Billie Pivnick, a psychoanalytic psychologist, joined forces with Tom Hennes of Thinc Design, a museum exhibition design firm, in what became a successful bid for the design of the National September 11 Memorial Museum. We located its ethical center in the intersubjective negotiation of meaning through the representation of multiple experiences and perspectives of the events. Used as its theoretical basis was a relational field created jointly by those who had experienced the events, represented on video, audio recordings, and text; those who created the museum through the design of space, the curation of artifacts, and the selection of narrative material; and museum visitors. By building what amounted to a holding environment in which each user could safely negotiate a field of varied experience and narrative of 9/11, we tried to facilitate the un-collapsing of time, of play, and of symbolization so that people in the museum could gain a more fully conscious sense of their own experience of 9/11, and thereby greater flexibility and tolerance for the complex world that has emerged from it.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Remembering-Consequences-Forgetting-History/dp/1442231874/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421631644&sr=1-1&keywords=billie+pivnick

Billie A. Pivnick, PhD
Clinical Psychologist
Faculty and Supervisor, William Alanson White Institute, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program
Faculty, New Directions Program in Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge, Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, Washington, DC
Private Practice:
15A East Tenth Street
New York, NY 10003
email: drbilliepivnick@gmail.com

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Lewis Barth (USA)

Thoughts on Forgiveness in Psychoanalysis and Judaism

Chapter in Meyer, M.A. and Myers, D.N. (eds). Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Rethinking an Old Opposition (Essays in Honor of David Ellenson). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014.

This article deals with problematic aspects of forgiveness. It moves from the difficulties inherent in asking for or granting forgiveness to the peculiar history implied in the question: can forgiveness as a concept have a place within theories of psychoanalysis? This question is treated through citations from Salman Aktar and Melvin R. Lansky, followed by a discussion of the emergence of this concept in psychoanalytic literature since the late 1990s.  Particular attention is drawn to the example provided by Steven Wangh in his article “Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie Wyoming,” and the definitions of forgiveness and unforgiveness, in the writings of Everett L. Washington. The discussion then shifts to paradoxical images of revenge and forgiveness in biblical and rabbinic literature. Midrashic passages (passages built on the interpretation of biblical texts) are closely examined regarding prohibitions against “taking vengeance” and the requirement to “love one’s neighbor” as prerequisites for perpetrator and victim to engage in forgiveness. It is argued that there is a convergence of perspectives in contemporary psychoanalysis and some classical religious texts in a shared understanding that the process of forgiveness requires regret, remorse, repair, restitution and reconciliation, especially because of the fundamental need for human agency.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Between-Jewish-Tradition-Modernity-Rethinking-ebook/dp/B00OJN1J2C

Lewis M. Barth
4826 Andasol Ave.
Encino, CA 91316-3801
email: lbarth@huc.edu

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Hannah Hahn (USA)

They Left it All Behind:
Psychological Experiences of Jewish Immigration and the Ambiguity of Loss

Chapter in O’Loughlin, M. (ed.). The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History, and Memory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

How did Eastern European Jewish immigrants of my grandparents’ generation, pre-1930 arrivals, experience immigration psychologically? What was it like to be their child? In-depth psychosocial interviews with 15 college-educated individuals, most often in their 80s and with two pre-1930 immigrant parents, were completed and examined using a psychoanalytic approach. The losses and trauma of persecution and poverty led in some cases to the intergenerational transmission of trauma. A few parents who experienced migration itself as traumatic passed reverberations of this on to children. Psychological portraits bring alive the children’s narratives. The necessary losses of immigration are illustrated in both vignettes and the author’s family’s story. We often know so little about our families’ pasts because in many cases family trauma led to silence.

Link: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442231870
Reference promo code 8S15JACAT for a 30% discount until 6/30.

Hannah Hahn, PhD
email: hh122@aol.com
website: www.hannahhahnphd.com

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Richard Chefetz (USA)

Contemporary research offers some insight, but only some, into the puzzles of dissociative process gone awry. When dissociative processes are overly active in a person’s life they create a burden that is palpable and yet hidden from view. This book maps out a straightforward model of dissociative process, relying heavily on clinical work and guided by studies of attachment, affect theory, neuroscience, psychoanalytic studies, and psychotraumatology. It attempts to frame dissociative process in a way that makes it more visible, if only we stop to look for the little curls of experience that can teach us so much.

This book is divided roughly in half. The first part introduces the reader to dissociative processes, the vicissitudes of self-states, the beginnings of treatment, the politics of emotion, and the underlying neurobiology relevant to these domains. The second part of this book constitutes an immersion in difficult and challenging clinical process, in sexual addiction, countertransference driven impasse, negativity and negative therapeutic reactions, and enactment.

CONTENTS

Preface: Holding Hope

1. A Mind Hiding from Itself
2. Life as Performance Art: The Search for Felt Coherence
3. Recognizing Dissociative Experience and Self-States
4. Opening a Treatment for Persistent Dissociative Processes
5. Affect, Neurobiology, and Dissociative Processes
6. Fear and Depersonalization
7. Incest, Sexual Addiction, and Dissociative Processes
8. Waking the Dead Therapist
9. The Unconscious Fear of Feeling Real: Negativity and the Negative Therapeutic Reaction
10. Object-Coercive Doubting
11. In the Throes of an Enactment
12. Emerging from an Enactment

Reviews
“It is hard to endorse this book without gushing. Richard Chefetz, a master teacher on dissociative phenomena, integrates scientific sophistication with in-the-trenches clinical mastery. His eloquent writing – synthesizing theory and practice, mind and body, left- and right-brain processes, research and application, science and art – exemplifies the healing integration sought by every therapist familiar with dissociative disorders. Verbatim case material illuminates clinically familiar but devastating topics. I recommend it to anyone seriously interested in the treatment of fractured minds and defeated hearts, including researchers, therapists, students, and patients dealing with the agonies of traumatized lives.”
– Nancy McWilliams, PhD

“Richard Chefetz, arguably the most astute and sophisticated mind in the field of trauma and dissociation, has written his promised book, and it is a “must-read” beyond the usual meaning of the term found on a back cover. Feeling Real: Intensive Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociative Processes is a journey into the mind and consulting room of a master clinician, scientist, and educator in which he accompanies you personally. A reader surfaces from this experience, knowing first hand why “working” with dissociative processes as part of a personal relationship is the most robust and far-reaching context for healing and growth. Chefetz writes: “Dissociation is mostly not about dissociative disorders. It is about how a mind struggles to cope with the intolerable and unbearable.” As both a traumatologist and a psychodynamic clinician, Chefetz has built a bridge that links the two through exploring the joint dissociative processes that take place as part of the patient/therapist relationship. Discussing what he calls “the politics of emotion” between himself and his patient “Alice,” he comments, “No particular theoretical understanding or technique is a substitute for the power of our relationship to provide a safe space in which Alice, and I, learn and grow. Go ask Alice.” In Chefetz’s words, “attention to moment-to-moment process . . . pays much larger long term dividends than anything else. In talking about dissociative process, abstract concepts have their place. That place is not the consulting room.”
– Philip Bromberg, PhD

Published by W.W. Norton (2015).

Link: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Intensive-Psychotherapy-for-Persistent-Dissociative-Processes/ Reference promotional code FEELREAL for a 20% discount.

Richard A Chefetz, MD, is a psychiatrist in private practice in Washington, DC. He was President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (2002-3), and is a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He is a faculty member at the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, and the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.

Richard A. Chefetz, M.D.
4612 49th St., NW
Washington, DC 20016
email: Richard Chefetz

Nitza Yarom (Israel)

My new book, Psychic Threats and Somatic Shelters, is my eighth book, the third in English, within an evolving exploration of the body in the analytic process. It exposes a range of somatic manifestations through which men and women, adults and children, become acquainted with their hidden psychic threats in treatment.

In noticing the short breath mounting in the young man Joshua’s speech, the therapist says, “There are always more and more things that have to be fixed, until eventually you are out of breath, choking.” Joshua relaxes, uttering, “It’s a good point.” Yvonne, a middle-aged woman, in a dissociated sentence, says, “I know that in my body I feel this marriage,” while reporting, in the next session, that her blood pressure is rising. The seven-year-old Peter insists to his therapist, “I don’t want to hear your voice—turn around,” a trying experience for her. The aging Anna says to her analyst, “It seems to me that as long as my eyes are not a hundred percent right, I need you.”

In the book’s two parts, Somatic Shelters and Embodied Dialogue, a vast range of physical issues and encounters is explored: breathing difficulties; sensory and motor experiences related to sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and movement; issues of weight gain and loss; various physical and psychic pains; and numerous ailments developing within family relationships, such as in marital relations and between parents and children.

The value of this book is in enabling the treatment to become body-attuned within a contemporary analytic context. For the analyst, it opens up ways of relating to the patient’s somatic shelters as self-expression. It updates theoretical and clinical psychoanalytic thinking, including the relational perspective, involving the body in the countertransference, transference, and the mutually embodied dialogue between patient and analyst. It offers ways better to understand mind-body complexity in the context of our contemporary life.

In addressing clinical issues, the essentials of attuning to the patient’s body are described. The process of self-expression and resistance via the body is dealt with at the beginning of treatment, as it progresses, and at termination. The critical issue of the analyst’s attuning to his or her own body first is demonstrated. This expands the countertransference, preparing the analyst for the patient’s use of his or her body in the transference, both as an object and as a subject. Also demonstrated is the dialectic tension between the material and the metaphoric registers that is needed to interpret somatic expressions, as well as the reference to intersubjectivity in dealing with primitive mental states. The needed dialogue of body narratives and enactment as a part of honest analytic dialogue is the concluding issue.

Published by Routledge, 2015.
Link: http://www.routledgementalhealth.com/books/details/9780415835220/

Nitza Yarom,  PhD
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
15 Brandeis Street
Tel-Aviv 6200121;  Israel
email: Nitza Yarom