Dear colleagues,
I hope this edition of The IARPP Bulletin finds you coping, managing, pressing ahead, resting up, lying down and perhaps most of all, breathing. A wonderful song that went viral without my noticing (this is true of most pop-cultural items, I must admit), at least until quite recently, “The Keep Going Song,” captures as well as any work I know the welter of feelings wrought by the pandemic. It’s written and performed by an inspired and inspiring, fierce and tender husband-and-wife duo here in the States called The Bengsons. It is a balm for this ever-extending moment, and I share their performance with you in the hope that it might bring you joy and release as it’s brought me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs-ju_L9pEQ
A précis of IARPP members’ publication and presentation announcements contained in this edition:
Orit Badouk Epstein’s (UK) edited volume, Shame Matters: Attachment and Relational Perspectives for Psychotherapists, offers attachment, developmental, relational, philosophical, trauma and cultural perspectives on shame, conceived of as a relational problem. Attachment-informed research is featured, and the impacts of racism and socio-economic factors on the development and experience of shame are discussed and illustrated with clinical narratives.
Further on the topic of shame as a relational phenomenon, Daniel Shaw’s (USA) popular 2014 title, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, has just been released as an audiobook.
Caron Harrang, Drew Tillotson and Nancy C. Winters (all USA) contribute new clinical and theoretical perspectives to the recent resurgence of psychoanalytic interest in the body in Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond. Spanning from the prenatal experience to death, this edited volume encourages further dialogue within psychoanalysis, philosophy and the humanities, building on an object relations perspective as well as contributions from French psychoanalysis.
Sandra Buechler’s seventh book, Poetic Dialogues, offers her psychoanalytically informed reflections on a range of poems – by Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson and Lucille Clifton among others – that have special meaning for her. She unpacks their meanings, delineates their impacts and reflects on the dialogues they create with readers. “Like good interpretations,” Buechler writes, “some poems introduce us to the stranger within ourselves.”
First published in 1998, Stuart A. Pizer’s (USA) Building Bridges: The Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis brought attention to the centrality of negotiation in the analytic relationship. Routledge has now republished Pizer’s book, built on Winnicott’s ideas about paradox, as part of its Classic Editions series. This reissue features a new introduction by Donnel Stern (USA) taking stock of the book’s key contributions to Relational theory and practice.
In Loss, Grief and Transformation: The Therapist’s Personal Experience in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Shoshana Ringel (USA) offers a unique focus on the therapist’s personal experience of loss. This volume of essays, collected from a range of international Relational analysts, self psychologists and art therapists, illustrates the profound impact of loss and grief in patients and therapists: personal loss of parents and partners, and loss generated by a variety of mass traumas, including the Holocaust, the immigrant experience, COVID-19, and the degraded environment.
Loss and grief also inform a new paper from Beatrice Beebe (USA) and her colleagues from the working group of The September 11, 2001 Primary Prevention Project. On the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, the researchers revisit some early work they did with the women who were pregnant when tragically widowed that day. Close observations of interactive process in two dyads at infant age 4 months is the lens by which the group seeks to understand more about mother-infant interaction in the context of traumatic grief and loss.
Ruth Lijtmaer (USA) brings attention to apologies and forgiveness; immigration trauma and its sequelae; and racism’s erasure of an acclaimed black composer known in the late 18th Century as “Black Mozart.”
Claire Beth Steinberger (USA) recently led a couples therapy workshop. She integrates classical, object relations and relational models with contemporary research on childhood trauma, the multigenerational transmission process, and the impact of sociocultural constructions (e.g., race, gender, class, age) into her treatment model.
Irwin Hirsch (USA) recently presented and published a paper in which he argues that “analysts’ productive use of uncomfortable countertransference experience is key to ideal therapeutic outcome, whereas failure to productively use countertransference experience – usually experience that is consciously recognized by the analyst – is the primary factor in contributing to compromised or failed analyses.”
I encourage you to share with the IARPP community your news of any publications or presentations of yours for the next Bookshelf issue. We’ll take all the good news we can get these days, no? How have you kept going, kept going on? Let us know. Email me the following items by Sunday, May 22 for inclusion in the June edition:
- Title of your recent or upcoming publication or presentation
- An abstract or brief description of its content (around 150 words)
- 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 (city/town in which you practice or work; email address)
- Book authors: please provide a brief bio of 75-90 words.
Wishing you well,
Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York and Northport, NY
Email Matt Aibel