Publication Announcements by Matt Aibel (USA)

Awakening to the Political – Or Is It All an Undream?

(2023). In R. Kabasakalian-McKay & D. Mark (Eds.), Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and Relational Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

This chapter argues that central tenets of relational psychoanalytic theory, grounded in a two-person model that implicates the analyst’s subjectivity, offer theoretical scaffolding and various strategies of engagement for working with political registers of clinical material. This includes patients’ legitimate concerns about the impacts of real-world sociopolitical forces as well as unconscious symbolic use of political material to communicate more “personal” family-of-origin matters, a “both/and” proposition. In an era of fierce political division, how might clinicians, most of whom are presumably left-leaning, maintain an analytic attitude of genuine curiosity towards the politics of patients with which they not only disagree but potentially regard as destructive, even abhorrent? It is proposed that relational theory is informed by a set of values that are plainly liberal-to-progressive, thus implicating relational analysts in what is essentially an a priori bias against conservative patients, a theoretical and clinical conundrum with which we have yet to reckon.

Why I Read

(2023). Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 20(3): 328-330.

On the occasion of Psychoanalytic Perspectives’ twentieth anniversary issue, its Submissions Editor of the past five years surveys the several reasons he likes reading analytic writing as much as he does. He cites its usefulness as psychoanalytic companion, psychoanalytic supervisor, and midwife of an aliveness that is its own reward

Matt Aibel, LCSW
New York, NY, USA
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