Dear Colleagues,

Is it because I’m getting older? Is it a result of my mother’s death not long ago? So many friends and colleagues have lost family members in recent months. Plus the ongoing pandemic death march, the periodically fatal impacts of massive climate change, the war in Ukraine, mass shootings. It’s likely all these things, along with the apocalyptic anxiety Andrew Samuels (2020) has discussed, which have combined to make death feel more present to me these days. Despite the topsy turvy 53°F weather that warmed New York last month, a chill has often been with me.

In the midst came the recent sad and shocking news of IARPP Board Member Christina Emanuel’s passing. Anyone who knew Christina, or heard her present at IARPP or elsewhere, was immediately struck by her dynamism. How can such vitality suddenly be no more?

Alongside the usual digest of publications and presentations, you’ll find in this issue of The IARPP Bookshelf a tribute to Christina in the words of many IARPP colleagues who knew her well. I got to know Christina through the process of taking over the Bulletin’s stewardship from her nearly five years ago, and our affiliation continued through communications around the Webinar Committee reports she submitted to me a few times each year. I knew her to be organized, consciousness, punctilious, and equally irreverent, spirited and generous. She had style, distinction and heart. Her death is a significant loss to our community.

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Ken Corbett (USA), exploring the moon’s significance to Winnicott, wonders if the dying traverse the intermediate area of transitional objects, seeking a resting place and the substance of illusion as they move from life to death. Corbett posits that transitional objects may be not only the first “not-me” possession, but also the last. In a second paper Corbett writes about play.

Jan Resnick (Australia) argues that current mental health practices espoused by psychiatry and psychology are falling short in the ever-growing need for effective responses to mental unwellness. In Meaning-Fullness: Developmental Psychotherapy and the Pursuit of Mental Health, Resnick posits that the “existential vacuum,” Victor Frankl’s term pointing to a domain of experience plaguing so many contemporary patients, is best approached through Winnicott’s ideas about meaning-making as developing out of a greater capacity for play, creativity, and relationship.

Play is also the subject of An Introduction to Psychotherapeutic Playback Theater: Hall of Mirrors on Stage co-written by Ronen Kowalsky (Israel). Playback theater is an evolving form of group drama therapy based on relational and group analytic ideas: Switching continuously between “playing the other” and “allowing the other to play me,” group members use theatrical improvisation to expand the possibilities of looking at multiple self-states.

Robin Bagai (USA) has published his second book on Michael Eigen’s writing. Commentaries on the Work of Michael Eigen: Oblivion and Wisdom, Madness and Music explores and illuminates two key Eigen books, The Psychotic Core and Emotional Storm, both of which address universal human concerns of madness and the difficulties of our emotional lives.

Noel Jeffs (Australia) offers reflections on the walking meditations he undertook during an earlier period of his life that served as an important moment in the pilgrimage of a young friar. Jeffs revisits a mendicant’s life, led with global tenacity and subject to trial and error, in Walking in Stealth: After Pushkin.

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay and David Mark (both USA) use the sociological concept of the “implicated subject” to help us confront the often thorny challenges of owning our subjectivities in relation to patients both similarly and differently situated. Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis, an edited volume featuring chapters penned by numerous IARPP members, argues that the therapist’s ongoing openness to learning of our own implication in enactments is central to a relational sensibility and a progressive psychoanalysis.

Jean Petrucelli, Sarah Schoen and Naomi Snider (all USA) present an anthology of interviews and essays joining luminaries in contemporary psychoanalysis with pioneers of feminism to analyze the crushing effects of patriarchy and the role that psychoanalysis can play in moving us into a future defined by mutuality and respect. Patriarchy and Its Discontents: Psychoanalytic Perspectives uses psychoanalysis as a tool to demystify and even dismantle patriarchy, while examining how our theories, practices and institutions have been implicated in it.

Adam J. Rodríguez (USA) interviews first-generation college graduates and writes of his own relevant experiences in Know That You Are Worthy: Experiences from First-Generation College Graduates. He challenges colleges to shift from viewing these students from a deficit lens or attempting to make them more like continuing-generation students, instead holding deeply honest confrontations with their pedagogies and structures, which typically cater to continuing-generation students who are often predominantly white, middle- and upper-class.

Smadar Ashuach and Avi Berman (both Israel) have co-edited a book examining the interpersonal world of sibling relationships. Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis, with a preface by Juliet Mitchell, illustrates how central these relationships are to the development of the psyche of the individual, the group, the organization and society.

In Timeless Grandiosity and Eroticized Contempt: Technical Challenges Posed by Cases of Narcissism and Perversion, Michael Shoshani and Batya Shoshani (both Israel) propose a clinical conceptualization to enhance the understanding of extremely difficult patients whose narcissistic struggles against human fate defy truth and reality, challenging the analytic situation and the analyst. In addition to psychoanalytic concepts, the authors recruit insights from literature, film and philosophy, creating an interdisciplinary dialogue to enrich discourse on these perplexing and illusive psychic phenomena.

Mitchel Becker (Israel) has co-edited and contributed to Relational Conversations on Meeting and Becoming: The Birth of a True Other, a compendium of analytic dialogues on the human potential for intersubjective engagement and the nature of true encounter. Utilizing an interdisciplinary and experimental format, the book explores the possibility of reaching truths and meanings that each individual contributor would not have achieved on his or her own.

Susan Klebanoff (USA) explores the interweaving of personal and professional threads, including the impacts of her Russian Jewish father’s immigration story, in connection with her treatment of a female Romani patient from Eastern Europe. She draws distinctions between the experiences of one-time immigrants and migrants haunted by generations of dislocation.

Emily Kuriloff’s (USA) latest paper limns the enactments and implications of what she describes as a “so-called dialogue” that occurred at a German psychoanalytic conference between non-Jewish Germans of the second and third generations born after the Third Reich, and American and German Jews. Ruth Lijtmaer (USA) has lately presented on the impacts of political trauma and its victims’ struggle against state-imposed amnesia of its crimes against humanity; she has also been presenting on the process of dehumanization.

Alice Bar Nes (Israel) delves into the long denied yet central mystical facet of psychoanalysis, considering two aspects of psychoanalysis – mystical communication through psychic overlap, and interpretive words – that she regards as deeply interdependent. Kevin Barrett (USA) uses psychoanalytic theory to addresses another mystical aspect of clinical work that is seldom addressed in contemporary psychoanalytic journals: “psychedelic psychodynamics” in the context of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Following his second book, Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery: Leaving the Prison of Shame and Fear (Routledge, 2022), Daniel Shaw (USA) has been presenting in both online and live venues his work with ex-cult members and his ideas about the connections between narcissism and shame. Jill Salberg (USA) discusses a case in which a mother’s early death haunted the lives of many subsequent generations of mothers and daughters. Envious attacks, deadly and deadening aggression, and shame are processed in order to transform intergenerational transmission of dissociated states.

If you would like to inform the IARPP community about your recent publications or presentations, please send the following materials by Sunday, May 28, 2023 to me at MattAibel [@] gmail.com in order for your news to appear in the June edition of The IARPP Bookshelf:

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

Best wishes,

Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York, NY, USA
Email Matt Aibel