MAX CAVITCH – Do You Love Me? The Question of the Queer Child of Psychoanalysis
STUART PIZER – “To be Honest, Raphael, I Don’t [Like You!” Intersubjective Affirmation & Analytic Negotiation
JILL SALBERG – The Texture of Traumatic Attachment: Presence & Ghostly Absence in Transgenerational Transmission
CARYN SHERMAN-MEYER – What’s Fat Got To Do With It? Losses and Gains in the Analytic Relationships
Do You Love Me? The Question of the Queer Child of Psychoanalysis
Max Cavitch (USA)
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, (21 May 2015) doi:10.1057/pcs.2015.22
Queer children and LGBT youth often continue to find in the psychotherapeutic setting and the clinical literature an ill-prepared and even aversive reception. Suicidality among such children draws especially sharp attention to the need for better alternatives to current treatment modalities—the focus here is chiefly on the relational area, with its emphasis on the coupling norm and attachment theory—and, more broadly, for the further comprehensive development of queer- and LGBT-affirmative psychoanalytic theory and practice. In advocating for at-risk queer children, I also argue that the queer child is a meaningful transferential figure for the improved life chances of psychoanalysis itself and for the enhanced role of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the realm of social transformation.
Here is the link to the article at the journal’s Web site:
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/pcs201522a.html
Max Cavitch, PhD
Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Pennsylvania
3340 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6273
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website: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/
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“To be Honest, Raphael, I Don’t [Like You]!”
Intersubjective Affirmation and Analytic Negotiation
Stuart Pizer (USA)
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Vol. 12, No 1, p. 22-29, 2015.
In discussing a compelling, intimately candid, thoughtful, and provocative paper by Alan Sirote, I focus on three issues: the centrality of negotiation in clinical process; the clinical impact of affirmation versus mystification when the intersubjective field is saturated with negative affect; and a set of questions that seek to contextualize Sirote’s notion of expanding the frame. I consider as well the larger existential frame within which the therapeutic frame is negotiated and lived within the heartbeats of a human relationship.
Stuart A. Pizer, PhD, ABPP
152 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
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The Texture of Traumatic Attachment:
Presence and Ghostly Absence in Transgenerational Transmission
Jill Salberg (USA)
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXXIV, No.1, p.21-46, 2015.
Work on the transgenerational transmission of trauma refers to unspoken stories across generations, but the actual mode of transmission has remained somewhat mysterious. Utilizing examples from her own life, the author illustrates how attachment patterns are a primary mode of transmission of trauma. When trauma revisits a person transgenerationally through dysregulated and disrupted attachment patterns, it is within the child’s empathic attunement and search for a parental bond that the mode of transmission can be found. This will become the texture of traumatic attachment: how it feels to this child to feel connected to the parent.
Link to article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2015.00002.x/abstract
Jill Salberg, PhD, ABPP
155 West 71st Street
Suite 1D
New York, NY 10023
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What’s Fat Got To Do With It?
Losses and Gains in the Analytic Relationship
Caryn Sherman-Meyer (USA)
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 3, p. 271-281, 2015.
How do the shapes of the bodies of analyst and analysand shape the treatment? This article considers the impact of their subjectivities when they are uncomfortably similar. It follows what occurs in a treatment in which both analyst and analysand are unable to examine dysregulating feelings related to body size and what their bodies convey regarding feeding, overeating, and being fat. The clinical work presented is a reconsideration of Bion’s work, with a relational emphasis on projective identification and container/contained. The article traces the analyst’s growth, starting from a position of sharing the patient’s fat hatred, through her own integration of previously dissociated and disembodied fat hatred, to the consequent emergence of an impasse, including what was learned by both analyst and patient in its working through. It highlights how the impact of the patient helps the analyst to change, reciprocally enabling the patient’s growth.
Link to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07351690.2015.1012461#.VaBNmevhFUQ
Caryn Sherman-Meyer, LCSW
250 W. 57th Street
Suite 501
New York, NY 10019
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