Publications and Presentations Announcement by Matt Aibel (USA)
The Sleepy Analyst Struggles to Awaken: Dissociation, Enactment, Regression, and Altered States with Trauma Patients
(2021). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 57(1): 54-84.
The author asserts that embarrassment, shame, and concern for professional reputation have inhibited analysts from discussing their struggles with countertransferential sleepiness, a phenomenon presumably more widespread than is generally acknowledged. Analysts may thus be insufficiently armed with understanding of this vexing predicament to which our work can leave us so vulnerable—its causes, trajectories, and even, potentially, its usefulness. Building on John McLaughlin’s 1975 paper on the topic, Aibel acknowledges the analyst’s sleepiness as a defense against affect in the patient and analyst, and explores it as an enactment of parental unavailability and abandonment and a primitive communication from the patient about early states of psychological deadness and unintegration. Noting a recent trend in the relational literature toward valorizing engaged and enlivened registers, the author considers the problems and potentials of dwelling in a distanced and deadened intersubjective field.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00107530.2021.1889349
The Joy of the Session (Notes from the Pandemic Quarantine)
(2020). Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 14(2): 193-203.
Caught in the unforgiving bind of maintaining an analytic private practice while caring for two young children at home during the coronavirus pandemic quarantine, the author locates his clinical work as a site of heightened vitality and connection against a background of extended periods of challenging, draining, parenting demands. What to make, he wonders, of his reliance upon his remotely conducted practice for his psychological well-being during this period of not-enough-me-time? A mode of countertransferential confession yields to consideration of a need for heightened self-vigilance. Also considered is the possibility that the analyst’s dispositional shift may in fact prove to be facilitative to some treatments. The author seeks to bring as much good-humored grace and humility to his inevitable discombobulation as he can. “Rolling with it” may be the best one can hope for whilst doing clinical work under such strained conditions.
www.ingentaconnect.com/content/phoenix/att/2020/00000014/00000002/art00008
The Personal is Political is Psychoanalytic: Can We Talk Politics?
(2021). Minnesota Chapter, Division 39, American Psychological Association. Online, April 15.
The political sphere is understood as an essential, irreducible aspect of self and object representations and an undeniably consequential factor in our difficulties in living. Thus, political considerations can no longer rightfully be regarded as taboo in psychoanalysis. The historical disavowal of politics in psychoanalytic theory and practice will be analyzed and its theoretical relegitimization in the Interpersonal and Relational schools will be traced. The relational turn’s emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity, intersubjectivity, mutual recognition and the I/Thou ethic are seen, not without complication, as positioning Relational theory as necessarily left-leaning or progressive. We will examine challenges of working with political material, especially in our highly partisan, deeply embattled political era, which easily instantiates fierce complementarity or collusive concordance. In such instances, to what extent might the concept of values supply a “third”?
Relational Theory: An Overview of its History and Development
(2021). St. Petersburg (Russia) Relational Interest Group.
Online, May 22.
Revisiting his paper “Being Railroaded: A Candidate’s Struggle to Stay on Track” (2014), Aibel discusses the treatment of Paul, a control case saturated in sadomasochistic dynamics, and explores implications for technique around “when to engage and when to hold” (Ringstrom, 1999). Clinical quandaries faced by the candidate are now reengaged from the standpoint of a more seasoned clinical perspective. The creation of Relational theory and its evolution are outlined with an emphasis on current developments.
Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York, NY and Northport, NY
Email Matt Aibel
