Dear colleagues,

IARPP Conference co-chairs Philip Ringstrom (USA), Hazel Ipp (Canada) and Ilene Philipson (USA) are eagerly awaiting the imminent arrival of nearly 200 attendees, IARPP members and non-members alike, in Los Angeles for our 18th Annual Conference, “Expanding Our Clinical Experiences: The Spoken, Unspoken and Unspeakable in Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.”

For those who will not be in attendance, livestreams of all five plenaries as well as Saturday’s closing remarks and roundtable panel will be made available for viewing from the comfort and safety of your own dwelling places. Scenes from the infamous Candidates Reception, however, will not be included as part of this otherwise attractive offer (unspeakable?). Just about 100 people have registered for this livestream option. To join us online, please click here for details and registration: app.ce-go.com/iarpp-2022-conference-plenary-papers-livestream.

I can neither speak nor unspeak in this particular format, but I can write, and this edition of The IARPP Bookshelf offers a lot of material worth writing and reading about.

Given how much psychoanalysts and psychotherapists today are grappling with how to address a host of societal and political crises, a new book from co-editor Roger Frie (Canada) that historicizes the radical, cross-disciplinary dialogues informing the interpersonal psychoanalytic foundation comes at a welcome time. Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Breaking Boundaries returns us to the work of pioneering analysts, particularly Sullivan, Thompson and Fromm, who viewed human suffering through the wider lens of society and culture and provided a means of addressing the pervasive issues of racism, sexuality and politics in human experience. Examining a range of subjects from assimilation and conformity to criminal justice reform and the contemporary peril of fascism, Frie’s book, according to Kirkland Vaughans (USA), “provides a critical link for conceptualizing our present racial, political, economic, and social dis-ease through a much-needed psychoanalytic lens,” with essays that “speak critically to the conformist attitudes and values embedded within our current practice.”

Social psychological, sociological, evolutionary, developmental anthropological, historical and psychoanalytic perspectives are all deployed to describe the complexity of leadership relationships and personalities in a new book co-edited by Mauricio Cortina (USA). Essays in Leadership, Psychoanalysis, and Society analyze myriad aspects of leadership, including the different kinds of leadership needed in organizations, the difference between charismatic and inspirational leadership, and the kind of training needed to develop leaders of diverse backgrounds.

From Jill Salberg (USA) comes a collection of Psychoanalytic Credos: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts, a book in which over two dozen analysts across a range of theoretical, generational and cultural groupings share their clinical philosophies and/or psychoanalytic journeys. Her project draws upon Emmanuel Ghent’s original 1989 “credo” essay, “Credo – The Dialectics of One-Person and Two-Person Psychologies,” in which he sought to represent “my own effort at articulating the beliefs (and uncertainties) that currently form the matrix of my own psychoanalytic thinking and practice.”

Patricia Gianotti’s (USA) Embracing Therapeutic Complexity: A Guidebook to Integrating the Essentials of Psychodynamic Principles Across Therapeutic Disciplines reintroduces fundamental psychodynamic touchstones to enable clinicians to apply an integrative treatment model in the service of in-depth healing and growth. Her book addresses the impacts of power and privilege on the shaping of psychological constructs and challenges cultural assumptions and blind spots that have shaped our treatment approaches.

In Transference, Love, Being: Essential Essays from the Field, Andrea Celenza (USA) incorporates her important work on sexual boundary violations into a wide-ranging consideration of such varied yet interrelated topics as love, perversity, transference and countertransference, the erotic field, being and being “in it with,” as well as an intriguingly entitled chapter, “The Inadvertent Pluralist.” Psychoanalysis, Celenza tells us, “as essentially vitalizing, is a playspace for taboo subjects within clear and safe parameters.” She aims to provide challenging new perspectives on the analyst’s subjectivity, receptivity and the immersive influence on the analytic process.

William Coburn’s (USA) 2014 book, Psychoanalytic Complexity: Clinical Attitudes for Therapeutic Change has recently been translated into and published in Chinese. Coburn’s book aims to render psychoanalytic complexity theory more accessible to clinicians who have felt mystified and perplexed by this seemingly arcane perspective.

Noel Jeffs (Australia), an Anglican Friar with a master’s degree in mental health who has trained as a psychotherapist, has written an exploration of spirituality and sexuality in “a unity of life with philosophical and psychological amplification” in his new book, Maturing in the Religious Life. Jeffs explores how identity can be reborn and refounded in a conjunction of sexuality and religious experience to attain spiritual development.

“In our ageist and sexist society, it is particularly hard to accept the descending of the flesh and slowing of the mind,” writes Susan Sands (USA). Her book, The Inside Story: The Surprising Pleasures of Living in an Aging Body, suggests that learning to sense and feel our bodies from the inside – building inner body awareness – can profoundly help us age more comfortably.

Is it possible that the prolific Sandra Buechler (USA) has become even more active in her retirement? Her announcement of three papers, three book reviews, and (only?!) one presentation suggest this may be the case. Of particular interest is Buechler’s paper using King Lear to frame questions about the challenges and changes effected by her own retirement from psychoanalytic practice.

Janine de Peyer (USA) has been nearly as prolific recently, even without benefit of retirement. She continues writing and presenting on manifestations of the uncanny, or “extraordinary knowing,” in clinical work. She also challenges cultural and gender prohibitions against the acknowledgment of female analytic erotic arousal in a paper exploring female erotic countertransference.

Lauren Levine (USA) writes about her clinical encounters as a white analyst with three women of color. Emphasizing the imperative for white analysts to struggle with their inclination toward silence, complicity and dissociation, she argues for a radical shift in conceptualizing the analytic frame.

Beatrice Beebe (USA) and colleagues have published another study on infant-parent communication, this one assessing preterm infant contingent communication in the NICU with mothers versus fathers. Very few studies have assessed infant capacity for bidirectional, contingent communication at birth, and the researchers believe theirs is the first to examine preterm infants in the neonatal period.

Brent Willock (Canada) seeks to bridge investigation of the simultaneous sleep/wake states of parasomnia and dream enactment (i.e. sleep disorders) with psychoanalytic dream work. As these matters are insufficiently understood in mental health, legal disciplines and public discourse, Willock sees utility in increasing the understanding of these phenomena not only in psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience but also in sleep medicine and the law.

Drew Tillotson (USA) discusses his clinical encounter with an adolescent male’s “melancholic terrors” in the face of “awakening the erotic man,” a process involving the liberatory impact of the patient’s working through the dangerous, destabilizing dread of Bionian “catastrophic change” as he comes to mourn the “powerful object ties that paralyzed his erotic body and mind.”

Irwin Hirsch (USA) continues presenting his idea that it is the analyst’s “productive use of uncomfortable countertransference experience” that saves a treatment from miring in protracted impasse. Michael Eigen (USA) seeks to capture “the evocative richness of moments in therapy” in his sharing of multiple clinical vignettes across three analytic journals. Ruth Lijtmaer (USA) confronts “our own and others’ implication in difficult histories” by limning the cruel silence of the bystander in moral and political registers.

And quite soon, those of us willing and/or able to gather in Los Angeles – as well as those who wish to livestream plenaries from afar – will have the opportunity to engage in all matter of psychoanalytic explorations. I look forward to seeing you there.

To share new of your recent or upcoming publications and presentations, please submit the following materials for the next Bookshelf issue, to be published in November, by Sunday, October 23, 2022, to Matt.Aibel [@] gmail.com:

• 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.
• Presenters: please include location (if in-person) and spell out organizational acronyms.
• Note: The Bookshelf does not include announcements of IARPP Conference presentations.

Best wishes to you all,

Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York City & Long Island, NY