Dear IARPP colleagues,

I write from the midst of massive nationwide protests here in the U.S. and now internationally in response to police brutality against African-Americans, and more broadly against racial injustice and inequality.

Specifically, I write on a warm spring morning from the wraparound porch of my late 19^th century home overlooking a quaint harbor in a very white village in Long Island, NY. My town and its region are so white due in part to specific and shameful structural forms of prejudice. Realtors kept (and in some cases still keep) people of color from purchasing homes on the north shore of the island, and the Long Island Rail Road was intentionally designed to run slowly in order to make public transportation to New York City too onerous for the less affluent (i.e., people of color) to endure commuting to their city jobs from homes so far away. Thus the bucolic beauty, high property values and good schools my family enjoys are painfully implicated, as I am, in my country’s white supremacy.

I learned this sorry Long Island history some years ago during my social work education, and of course it is not merely historic but also ongoing separation, exclusion and privilege that keep my village so white. The current moment brings to the forefront this one of my many examples of white privilege, and I sit today with increased discomfort in contemplating the meanings of this troubling knowledge. This is a sobering time, a seismic time, and a time for deep reconsideration and resolve. In addition to reflecting on the dreadful disparities that racial inequality has long inflicted on people of color, I think as well about how the privileges from which white people benefit also leave us impoverished. This is an ancillary point, to be sure, as the white person’s discomfort and sense of loss in no way approach the immeasurable suffering that people of color endure. Even so, “the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed,” Nelson Mandela said, for “the oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.” There is much work to do, and I understand now more than ever that words alone go only so far.

All of which brings me to the array of books and published papers featured in this edition of the IARPP Bookshelf.

First and foremost, given the historic moment in which we are now living, comes a volume of Lynne Layton’s influential papers. Layton’s body of work, collected here by editor Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, has steadily built the case for the necessity of our legitimizing a social psychoanalysis. Examining unconscious processes as they operate in both the social world and the consulting room, Layton limns the many ways that enactments of what she has dubbed “normative unconscious processes” reinforce cultural inequalities of race, sex, gender and class at individual, interpersonal and institutional levels. Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes could not come at a better time.

From Jonathan House’s Unconscious in Translation series, UIT Books, come two new volumes on the work of Jean Laplanche. Rationalism and Emancipation in Psychoanalysis, which House has co-translated and edited, offers an overview of the French psychoanalyst’s theories, emphasizing his affiliation within the rationalist tradition. The Unfinished Copernican Revolution, also edited by House, for the first time offers English translations of a selection of Laplanche’s most important essays from 1967 to 1992. Laplanche argued against psychoanalysis retreating from the world, sealing itself off in a bubble of arcane theory. He pressed for the field to address issues of public significance and contemporary relevance, giving these titles heightened relevance in a time when so much of the world is in need of healing.

André Sassenfeld’s latest book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis’ Turns: An Introduction to Relational Psychoanalysis, distinguishes six fundamental turns in psychoanalysis: the phenomenological, the hermeneutical, the intersubjective, the body, the contextual and the ethical turn, concluding that a meta-turn might be the turn towards complexity. Sassenfeld builds upon the template laid by Lew Aron’s contemporary classic, A Meeting of Minds, adding an account of a number of theoretical and clinical developments that have occurred since Lew published his volume nearly 25 years ago.

Danielle Knafo announces the release of The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis, a survey of modern sex culture co-written with Rocco Lo Bosco. Knafo suggests ways psychoanalysis can update its theories and practice to meet the novel needs of today’s generations, paying special attention to how technology is augmenting and expanding sexual and gender possibilities. In addition, the book considers the future of sexuality and bonding in this brave new world and how psychoanalysis is best suited to meet this future.

Marie Saba offers a Spanish translation of Daniel Shaw’s popular 2014 monograph, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, under the title Narcisismo Traumático: Sistemas Relacionales de Subyugación. Shaw presents a way of understanding the traumatic impact of narcissism as it is engendered developmentally and enacted relationally. Focusing on the dynamics of narcissism as a closed relational system of subjugation, Shaw traces how the “traumatizing narcissist” objectifies another person as a means of enforcing dominance of the other’s subjectivity and extruding into the other all the traumatizing narcissist’s own badness and shame. Saba, the president of IARPP-Peru, has become a prolific Spanish translator of English-language analytic texts, and she has recently been translating IARPP colloquia papers for Spanish-language participants.

And from Koichi Togashi comes a book written from the unique perspective of a Western-trained Asian psychoanalyst applying principles of Eastern philosophy to understand the psychoanalytic relationship, psychoanalytic processes, and their uses, and limitations, for alleviating human suffering. In “The Psychoanalytic Zero: A Decolonizing Study of Therapeutic Dialogues,” Togashi uses an amalgam of self-psychological, intersubjective and relational theories to sensitize us to the appearance of clinical moments without context, “the psychoanalytic zero,” which, he argues, open infinite opportunities for growth.

As for new papers, Danielle Knafo has two, one charting the very challenging treatment of a man with perversions, the other exploring links between psychosis and loneliness. Beatrice Beebe brings her unique insights to the interpersonal transmission of trauma through a study examining the effects of the September 11, 2001 trauma on mother-infant interaction in mothers who were pregnant and widowed on 9/11.

I don’t want to close without taking a moment to acknowledge the passing last month of a leading light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, a man whose deep, incisive and foundational writing presumably has a place on all our bookshelves, Philip M. Bromberg. Besides being one of IARPP’s founders, Dr. Bromberg gave us such invaluable concepts (and pithy phrases) as “the mask and the mirror,” “standing in the spaces,” and “the shadow of the tsunami,” in his three marvelous books and 60 papers on such topics as narcissism, dissociation, multiplicity, self-states, dreaming and trauma. A full slate of remembrances and appreciations of Dr. Bromberg will grace the next edition of the IARPP Bulletin.

For now, as we consider ways that the first half of 2020 has challenged us to contemplate and instantiate deep personal, institutional and structural changes, another of Philip’s pithy, powerful sayings comes to mind. As we mourn and reflect on the tremendous losses of life owing to the twin pandemics of the novel coronavirus and white supremacy, will it suffice to find ways, in response to these tragedies and traumas, of staying the same while changing? Or does the reckoning facing white people call on us to change in ways so substantial that, in a fundamental sense, we cannot maintain the privilege of staying the same? How much change are we willing to make? I’m asking this question of myself, as I invite us all to consider it.

Best wishes,

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

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I welcome your submissions for the next IARPP Bookshelf edition. Submission deadline is Sunday, September 20, 2020. Please include the following materials with your submission:

1. Title of your recent or upcoming publication or presentation
2. Brief description of its content (such as an abstract)
3. Link to a publisher (if applicable) so that members might access or purchase a copy
4. Book cover photo or artwork (if applicable)
5. Digital photograph of yourself (jpeg format)
6. Professional contact information as you would like it to appear publicly for our readers (email and town/city; mailing address as well if you like)
7. For presentations, please include location and spell out any acronyms

Submissions should be emailed to Matt.Aibel [@] gmail.com.