Publication & Presentation Announcements by Jill Salberg (USA)

Clinical Impasse as an Inevitable Part of Therapeutic Action

Salberg, J. (2024). Clinical impasse as an inevitable part of therapeutic action. Clinical Impasse series, TR Together (Tavistock CE Program), January 19, online.

Perhaps the greatest shift in clinical practice and literature is organized around a shared understanding across theoretical divides regarding the inevitability of impasses, collisions, and collusions in the treatment relationship. In this session, Salberg considers how intergenerational transmission affects both patient and analyst, infiltrating the treatment, disrupting alliances and blocks forward movement. She discusses clinical material that illustrates how a mother’s early death came to haunt the lives of subsequent generations of mothers and daughters. Discussant Zack Eleftheriadou addresses the impact of attachment rupture, trauma, envy, and shame as they reflect transgenerational transmission phenomena and how they were worked on, repaired, and utilized as therapeutic action.

Between Remembering and Forgetting: Reckoning with Racialized Transmissions

Salberg, J. (2023). Between remembering and forgetting: Reckoning with racialized transmissions. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 33(4): 561-578.

The backdrop for this paper has been the ongoing COVID pandemic and the author’s personal response to the murder of George Floyd and the enduring destructiveness of racism and white supremacy that resides here in the US. In writing this paper, the author argues that currently we are witnessing and living with the formidable transgenerationally transmitted return of inherited racial hatred that had been more repressed, denied, and refused. The challenge for the author, and for psychoanalysis in general, is to consider in what ways our theories and praxis keep in place whiteness as the unmarked category, a standard benefitting itself. As a result, the legacy of embedded racism continues to be reproduced. Transgenerational transmissions of racial trauma and the rupturing of attachments are examined within the author’s background and in a clinical case with a white patient.

Jill Salberg, Ph.D., ABPP
New York, NY, USA
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