Dear Colleagues,
I’m delighted to collect for you here the bounteous riches produced by your fellow IARPP members, sharing news of their recent writing and presenting endeavors from Sydney to Seattle and from Broadway to Brazil.
Neil Altman’s critical examination of white privilege looks deeply into the concept by interrogating racial constructs, guilt and power, and complicating what he views as an artificial polarization of left and right political positions. Alert to the implications for society as well as for clinical theory and practice, Altman uses case illustrations to build towards nothing less than a new agenda for understanding and offering psychoanalytic treatment in our contemporary society, setting our sights “toward a more perfect union.”
From Steven Knoblauch comes a “psychoanalytic samba” examining embodied registrations of experience, such as tonality, accents and rhythms too fast-moving and unformulated to be symbolized. Knoblauch likewise interrogates experiences of gender, culture, class and race, which so often emerge as sources of conflict and mis-recognition. The focus on these fluid registers of expression is contextualized within recognition of cultural practices and beliefs, grounded in Fanon’s vision of embodied racism.
Silvia Naisberg Silberman has co-edited a collection of essays analyzing violent processes across the world and the circumstances enabling them to exist, towards the effort to imagine valuable, culturally sensitive interventions. Her book presents many of the atrocities we know about, those we don’t know about, and those with which we unknowingly collude.
Annie Stopford has published an interview-based interdisciplinary exploration of complex trauma in four low-income American communities. Moving between the respondents’ life narratives and clinical and academic perspectives on trauma and inequality, Stopford’s psychosocial study draws on insights from sociology, public health, history and legal studies as well as an intersubjective psychoanalytic orientation.
Willow Pearson and Helen Marlo offer a treatise on the interaction of spiritual and psychoanalytic lineages with psychotherapy. Setting Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Sufism and other spiritual traditions in conversation with a range of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Jungian, Post-Jungian, Winnicottian, Bionian, Post-Bionian and Relational orientations, Pearson and Marlo delve into the mystical dimensions of psychological and spiritual life, providing clinical vignettes to illustrate how a felt sense of the spiritual psyche may be integrated into analytic practice.
Alitta Kullman’s 2018 monograph on eating disorders, conceptualized as the “hunger for connection,” now appears in a Hebrew translation. Kullman elaborates the “body/mind” personality organization she calls the “perseverant personality,” illustrating how food and thought are linked from infancy, and for some can become the primary source of nurturance and thought-processing for a lifetime.
Henry Krutzen has published one of the first books on relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy written in Portuguese. From the vantage point of contemporary clinical practice in Brazil, Krutzen reviews and explores a number of core relational concerns such as shame, hope, countertransference, self-disclosure, affect regulation and complexity.
Another overview of the relational approach is offered by Gillian Straker and Jacqui Winship in a book pitched as much to a lay readership as to clinicians. The Australian therapists seek to break down the boundaries between “us” and “them” in the therapeutic couple, focusing on common relational dynamics that limit our degrees of relational freedom in everyday life and inviting us to recognize that to be human is to be “just a little bit mad.”
Actor-turned-therapist Mark O’Connell explores the many ways in which acting techniques can enhance the craft of psychotherapy. O’Connell suggests that clinicians can supplement their theoretical approaches with techniques that fine-tune the ways their bodies, voices and imaginations engage with and influence their patients, and he provides a number of exercises to help develop these techniques.
In addition to these new books, the October Bulletin features a number of recently published chapters and journal articles as well as presentations on a wide range of psychoanalytic topics: a qualitative study seeking to codify what a relational psychoanalyst actually does; an intersubjective and multiple self-state perspective on the mourning process as embodied in a group therapy; an exploration of the ways that relationships between psychoanalytic colleagues are frequently undone by issues of power and vulnerability, leading to alienation, rivalries and damaging splits. Freud and Klein’s differences; Freud and Jung’s differences. Cases thematizing the impacts of intergenerational trauma, collective cultural/historical and social/political trauma, emigration/immigration trauma; the silenced patient, the silenced therapist. An examination of race, power and intimacy in the clinical encounter; one analyst’s personal reflections on the demands on the analyst in these chaotic times; reflections on doing and being done to.
In addition, Robin Young’s paper describes a personal theoretical journey from a one-person classical training to the eventual embrace of a two-person relational sensibility in her own practice. Young’s intriguing argument for why relational theory offers “something more” locates the difference in the relational turn’s embrace of the female body, in contrast to her adroit observations of the classical orientation’s “repeated forgetting” of it. In this interweaving of personal, clinical and theoretical considerations, one analyst’s theoretical transformation reflects and recapitulates the past 30+ years of theoretical innovation and expansion.
Let me encourage you to submit news of your own recent or upcoming publications and presentations for the next issue of the IARPP Bookshelf, to be published in February 2021. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, January 23, 2021.
Please include the following materials with your submission:
- Title of your recent or upcoming publication or presentation
- An abstract or brief description of its content
- Link to a publisher (if applicable) so that members might access or purchase a copy
- Book cover photo or artwork (if applicable)
- Digital photograph of yourself (jpeg format)
- Professional contact information as you would like it to appear publicly for our readers (email and mailing address)
- Book authors: please provide a brief bio of 50-75 words.
- Presenters: please spell out any acronyms and provide location (including “online”).
- Please note that the Bookshelf does not include IARPP conference presentations.
Submissions should be emailed to Matt.Aibel [@] gmail.com.
With best wishes for health, safety and sanity in these troubled times,
Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York City & Northport, NY
