As I settle in, excitement softening the edges of my loneliness, my grief, my alienation, the drama unfolds: Where is Steve Kuchuck? A vastly different sort of outgoing president, missing in action.<\/p>\n
Wifi problems.<\/p>\n
Ah, yes. I know the feeling, the panic. Poor Steve. My heart races; mirror neurons indeed. He\u2019s worked so hard on this event. His swan song. There\u2019s a schedule; we\u2019re waiting; the world is waiting. How could this go wrong? How now? He\u2019s hustling, somehow, from one apartment to another. How human; how technological; how of this moment; how apt. I giggle, with Hazel. Plan B, says Sharon. Steve appears. Alright! Bellisimo!<\/em> Yofeh<\/em>! He\u2019s done it! He\u2019s home. We\u2019re home. I\u2019m home. I\u2019m ready. He\u2019s ready. We\u2019re ready.<\/p>\n And so it begins, IARPP\u2019s first Online Symposium.<\/p>\n The latest announcements of members\u2019 books, chapters, papers and presentations will follow in this edition of the Bookshelf<\/em>, along with a series of reflections on the Symposium collected from participants all over the world, ranging from those who have been with IARPP since its inception to those for whom the Symposium marked their first encounter with our organization. I thank Sally Bjorklund, Margaret Black Mitchell, Rocky Chu, Gabriela Gusita, Patricia Minjares, Valentin Miu, Marie Saba, and John Sloane for generously sharing their experiences with us.<\/p>\n If you were otherwise engaged on the weekend of January 9-10, I hope these words give you a taste of what you missed. If you were there, here\u2019s your opportunity, apres coup<\/em>, to hear from fellow attendees what they made of the offerings \u2013 an important aspect of an in-person conference that the limitations of Zoom largely deprived us of, the discussion groups notwithstanding. A chance to rub shoulders, compare notes, exchange gossip, and encounter other idiosyncratic takes both familiar and distinct. Did you attend that talk? What did you think?<\/p>\n Cynthia Chalker\u2019s call \u2013 \u201cWhere are you?\u201d \u2013 reverberates. Were you there? What did you think? What are you thinking? How are you doing? Where are you? Wherever you are as you read this note and the pieces that follow, I hope they allow you to connect in some small way with this warm, thoughtful, consoling and generative community that goes on being, for all of us, in spite of every variety of glitch.<\/p>\n On to the pr\u00e9cis<\/em>:<\/p>\n In this Bookshelf <\/em>edition, Carlos Nemirovsky (Argentina) brings a Latin American perspective to his in-depth exploration of Winnicott and Kohut, two seminal analytic writers whose outlooks, Nemirovsky contends, are particularly useful in helping clinicians navigate the treatments of patients with \u201ccomplex disorders\u201d who present as unreal, empty, non-desiring, beset by feelings of futility, apathy and numbness.<\/p>\n From Virgil and Dante to Blake and Dickinson, and on to Celan, Milosz and Rankine, David Shaddock (US) provides a guide to apply a poet\u2019s imagination and precision of language to the work of psychoanalysis. His new book posits that \u201cthe imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient\u201d offers great potential for understanding and healing.<\/p>\n In parallel, Joye Weisel-Barth (US) refracts psychoanalytic understanding and clinical work through another facet of literature, in this case a focus on stories. Flowing from the tradition of narrative theory and representing \u201ca lifetime of analytic practice,\u201d Weisel-Barth\u2019s psychoanalytic tales \u201cseek to recast the creation of analytic narratives in social contexts and contemporary relational theories.\u201d<\/p>\n Hannah Hahn (US) shares immigration stories of trauma and loss, silence and denial among early 20th<\/sup> century Eastern European Jews who came to America. Utilizing an intergenerational transmission of trauma lens, she surveys the impacts of these largely disavowed histories on the ensuing generation in this personal and theoretical investigation of what is, and isn\u2019t, \u201cleft behind.\u201d<\/p>\n Ruth Lijtmaer (US) continues to explore traumatic immigration stories as well, in her case focusing on the plight of contemporary refugees whom, she argues, face abject journeys \u201cunder extreme conditions, more dangerous than in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Home is the focus of a paper by Sigal Eden Almogi (Israel). For the readership of an architectural journal, she explicates an object relations perspective of the psycho-geographics of domestic space.<\/p>\n From Irwin Hirsch, Phillip Blumberg and Robert Watson (all US) comes a co-edited volume that offers a deep analytic dive into \u201cintense involvement in sports,\u201d among both athletes and fans. A dream team of relational analysts, most of whom are themselves avidly engaged with sports, contribute chapters that examine the many psychological functions of sports and explore ways this material can be used to benefit clinical work.<\/p>\n Finally, Sean Meggeson (Canada) brings a unique dimension to the concepts of implicit relational knowing and kinesthetic empathy with a chapter essaying the non-verbal intersubjectivity that instantiates for him, his patients and Tao-Tao \u2013 his \u201ccanine co-therapist,\u201d an 11-pound Swedish Vallhund herding dog. You\u2019ll forgive me, it\u2019s quite a tale.<\/p>\n It did me good to see so many of your faces in your boxes at the top of the year. As we lean into the future, I wish you all well in these challenging times.<\/p>\n Matt Aibel, LCSW
\nNew York
\nEmail Matt Aibel<\/a><\/p>\n
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