Dear Colleagues,
Ah, that wonderful back-to-school season. It is that time of the year (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) when analytic talks and related offerings once again pepper the calendar, offering opportunities to re-engage with teachers and colleagues in pursuit of analytic interests old and new. I love the fresh energy each autumn brings. I hope that you too have lately happened upon one or two clinical discussions that reinvigorate you. An ongoing benefit from the time of the pandemic is how many of these learning opportunities can now be accessed around the world, time-zone permitting, thanks to how accustomed to the Zoom format we have become. While it’s not the same as being in a room together, the online forum affords us much more opportunity for academic and clinical learning than we ever had before.
Another autumn ritual of renewal for me are the Jewish High Holidays. I’ll share that Yom Kippur – which is both the Day of Atonement, wherein one reckons with one’s sinful actions from the prior year, and the Day of Judgment, in which one is or is not inscribed for another year in the Book of Life – has come to be a favorite holiday in my middle age. In younger years I regarded it as sober, forbidding, grim. Reflecting on the passing of loved ones and on our own mortality; fasting as a mark of repentance and to heighten attention to the day’s tasks; spending all or most of the day at temple – solemn stuff, an endurance test, the so-called Day of Dread.
However, in recent years my relationship to Yom Kippur has changed. It now feels like an opportunity, akin in a way to an analytic session. Being in prayer, in meditation, in reverie, and in relationship to the clergy, the liturgy, the music, the community, my family, myself – it is a reckoning, and it surfaces feelings of loss, but it is also a transitional space, sometimes at the very edge of consciousness. It is a liminal space which encourages reflection on, and appreciation of, life and relationships. We dwell on our connection to history, meaning, purpose, community, family, strangers, the future. We contemplate how well or how poorly we are living our lives. We locate, if we are able to, an intention to live differently, more fully, to reach further within and without. We cloister ourselves all day in order to reengage more deeply and meaningfully in the gift and the work of living: the renewal of spirit.
T’shuva, a watchword of Yom Kippur, means return. We return to the beginning; we return to ourselves; we return to our commitments, our covenant. The painful work of acknowledging our shortcomings and failures opens a path to renewal. We begin again, in our new year; as Balint would have it, a new beginning.
I appreciate there is a problematic tendency among many Jewish analysts to spout Yiddishisms as if every other analyst surely knows them too; my centering Yom Kippur here runs a similar risk, nu? I share these reflections, however, to convey my sense of invigoration and to mark this time of year (again, for those in the Northern Hemisphere; in the South it’s spring fever) as one offering promise for renewal and reinvestment. There is some fantasy at play here, to be sure, and sure enough the dark days of winter will come soon enough. But for now, in these early days of autumn, I find joy and hope.
Let’s keep summertime in mind as well – a great way to kick off next summer is to attend IARPP’s 20th Annual Conference, to be held June 20-23 in Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico. The theme is Relational Psychoanalysis: The Quest for Belonging and the Co-Creation of a Therapeutic “Home.” The conference will examine the myriad ways in which the notion of “home” shapes our psyche, influences our relationships, and forms our identities, emphasizing the profound impact that the quest for belonging exerts on individual and collective psyches, transcending cultural, geographical, and temporal boundaries. Mérida, the cultural and financial capital of the Yucatán Peninsula, boasts a rich cultural heritage deriving from Mayan and Spanish traditions.
Conference details can be found here, and the submissions portal is here. The deadline for submitting presentation proposals has been extended to October 16, so if you have been considering putting together a proposal, now is your last chance to submit it. Give it some thought!
Here are the latest publications and presentations our members wish to share with you:
Alejandro Ávila-Espada’s (Spain) latest collection of essays are featured in Relationality, Our Hope (Selected Writings), comprising works written between 1985 and 2022. Taken together, the pieces trace the evolution of Ávila-Espada’s thinking across a 50-year career as a psychoanalyst and nearly as long as an academic psychologist.
Adam Blum (USA) has co-written a book proposing that music is nothing less than an essential foundation of being human. Adam Phillips remarks that Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis is “not simply one of the most fascinating books written about psychoanalysis,” but that it also “shows us what many of us have always somehow thought but have never been able to know with such clarity and vision, . . . that music is at the heart of human development, of sociability, of love and desire.”
Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot (Israel) and Uri Hadar (Israel) provide an original approach to the elaborate and complex world of Jacques Lacan, one of psychoanalysis’s most innovative thinkers, in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Introduction. Honoring the philosophic influences and sensibilities that shape Lacan’s brilliant thinking, their volume presents his ideas in a lucid and concise language, offering illustrations ranging from the clinical and cultural to daily contemporary experience.
Leezah Hertzmann (UK) has co-authored Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality: A Contemporary Introduction, which recounts how the heteronormative bias has dominated psychoanalysis, relegating lived sexual experience to the sidelines. The book challenges this historic yet ongoing misconception by describing recent developments in psychoanalytic thinking and showing their impact on clinical practice, discussing current challenges that clinicians face, and using clinical vignettes to illustrate therapeutic work from a contemporary post-heteronormative position.
Steven Kuchuck‘s (USA) widely-read primer, The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (2021) has just been published in an Italian translation as La Rivoluzione Relazionale in Psicoanalisi e in Psicoterapia.
Steven Knoblauch (USA) continues to develop his work on psychoanalysis’ failures and successes in effectively registering matters of race and social relations. Ruth Lijtmaer (USA) continues limning the traumatic social injustices suffered by many and overlapping marginalized groups, most especially immigrants. Irwin Hirsch (USA) co-leads an online discussion on psychoanalytic perspectives on the meanings and functions of sports.
Billie Pivnick (USA) has written a book review, a paper on adoption, and both a paper and a chapter on building “relational citizenship” through her Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory. And I, Matt Aibel (USA), have written a chapter about the implications of political allegiances on clinical work and a reflection on my role as Submissions Editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the occasion of the journal’s twentieth anniversary.
If you would like an announcement of your recent publications and/or presentations to appear in the next IARPP Bookshelf, please send the following materials to me at MattAibel [@] gmail.com by Sunday, January 28, 2024 for inclusion in the February 2024 edition:
- Title of your recent or upcoming publication(s)/presentation(s)
- An abstract or brief description of the 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 (city/town in which you work and your email address)
- Book authors, please provide a brief bio of 75-90 words
- Presenters, please spell out organizational acronyms and include the location, if in-person
Best wishes as we head into the final months of 2023,
Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York, NY, USA
Email Matt Aibel
