{"id":11594,"date":"2022-06-02T14:10:32","date_gmt":"2022-06-02T14:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iarpp.net\/?post_type=article&p=11594"},"modified":"2022-06-10T12:26:17","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T12:26:17","slug":"from-the-editor-18","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/iarpp.net\/thesite\/article\/from-the-editor-18\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear colleagues,<\/p>\n

IARPP Conference co-chairs Philip Ringstrom (USA), Hazel Ipp (Canada) and Ilene Philipson (USA) are eagerly awaiting the imminent arrival of nearly 200 attendees, IARPP members and non-members alike, in Los Angeles for our 18th Annual Conference, \u201cExpanding Our Clinical Experiences: The Spoken, Unspoken and Unspeakable in Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

For those who will not be in attendance, livestreams of all five plenaries as well as Saturday’s\u00a0closing remarks and roundtable panel will be made available for viewing from the comfort and safety of your own dwelling places. Scenes from the infamous Candidates Reception, however, will\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>be included as part of this otherwise attractive offer (unspeakable?). Just about 100 people have registered for this livestream option.\u00a0To join us online,\u00a0please click here for details and registration:\u00a0app.ce-go.com\/iarpp-2022-conference-plenary-papers-livestream<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I can neither speak nor unspeak in this particular format, but I can write, and this edition of The IARPP Bookshelf <\/em>offers a lot of material worth writing and reading about.<\/p>\n

Given how much psychoanalysts and psychotherapists today are grappling with how to address a host of societal and political crises, a new book from co-editor Roger Frie (Canada) that historicizes the radical, cross-disciplinary dialogues informing the interpersonal psychoanalytic foundation comes at a welcome time. Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Breaking Boundaries <\/em>returns us to the work of pioneering analysts, particularly Sullivan, Thompson and Fromm, who viewed human suffering through the wider lens of society and culture and provided a means of addressing the pervasive issues of racism, sexuality and politics in human experience. Examining a range of subjects from assimilation and conformity to criminal justice reform and the contemporary peril of fascism, Frie\u2019s book, according to Kirkland Vaughans (USA), \u201cprovides a critical link for conceptualizing our present racial, political, economic, and social dis-ease through a much-needed psychoanalytic lens,\u201d with essays that \u201cspeak critically to the conformist attitudes and values embedded within our current practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Social psychological, sociological, evolutionary, developmental anthropological, historical and psychoanalytic perspectives are all deployed to describe the complexity of leadership relationships and personalities in a new book co-edited by Mauricio Cortina (USA). Essays in Leadership, Psychoanalysis, and Society<\/em> analyze myriad aspects of leadership, including the different kinds of leadership needed in organizations, the difference between charismatic and inspirational leadership, and the kind of training needed to develop leaders of diverse backgrounds.<\/p>\n

From Jill Salberg (USA) comes a collection of Psychoanalytic Credos: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts<\/em>, a book in which over two dozen analysts across a range of theoretical, generational and cultural groupings share their clinical philosophies and\/or psychoanalytic journeys. Her project draws upon Emmanuel Ghent\u2019s original 1989 \u201ccredo\u201d essay, \u201cCredo \u2013 The Dialectics of One-Person and Two-Person Psychologies,\u201d in which he sought to represent \u201cmy own effort at articulating the beliefs (and uncertainties) that currently form the matrix of my own psychoanalytic thinking and practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patricia Gianotti’s (USA) Embracing Therapeutic Complexity: A Guidebook to Integrating the Essentials of Psychodynamic Principles Across Therapeutic Disciplines <\/em>reintroduces fundamental psychodynamic touchstones to enable clinicians to\u00a0apply\u00a0an integrative treatment model in the service of in-depth healing and growth. Her book addresses the impacts of power and privilege on the shaping of psychological constructs and challenges cultural assumptions and blind spots that have shaped our treatment approaches.<\/p>\n

In Transference, Love, Being:\u00a0Essential Essays from the Field,\u00a0<\/em>Andrea Celenza (USA) incorporates her important work on sexual boundary violations into a wide-ranging consideration of such varied yet interrelated topics as love, perversity, transference and countertransference, the erotic field, being and being “in it with,” as well as an intriguingly entitled chapter, “The Inadvertent Pluralist.” Psychoanalysis, Celenza tells us, “as essentially vitalizing, is a playspace for taboo subjects within clear and safe parameters.” She aims to provide challenging new perspectives on the analyst’s subjectivity, receptivity and the immersive influence on the analytic process.<\/p>\n

William Coburn\u2019s (USA) 2014 book, Psychoanalytic Complexity: Clinical Attitudes for Therapeutic Change <\/em>has recently been translated into and published in Chinese. Coburn\u2019s book aims to render psychoanalytic complexity theory more accessible to clinicians who have felt mystified and perplexed by this seemingly arcane perspective.<\/p>\n

Noel Jeffs (Australia), an Anglican Friar with a master\u2019s degree in mental health who has trained as a psychotherapist, has written an exploration of spirituality and sexuality in \u201ca unity of life with philosophical and psychological amplification\u201d in his new book,\u00a0Maturing in the Religious Life. <\/em>Jeffs explores how identity can be reborn and refounded in a conjunction of sexuality and religious experience to attain spiritual development.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our ageist and sexist society, it is particularly hard to accept the descending of the flesh and slowing of the mind,\u201d writes Susan Sands (USA). Her book, The Inside Story: The Surprising Pleasures of Living in an Aging Body<\/em>, suggests that learning to sense and feel our bodies from the inside \u2013 building inner body awareness \u2013 can profoundly help us age more comfortably.<\/p>\n

Is it possible that the prolific Sandra Buechler (USA) has become even more active in her retirement? Her announcement of three papers, three book reviews, and (only?!) one presentation suggest this may be the case. Of particular interest is Buechler\u2019s paper using King Lear<\/em> to frame questions about the challenges and changes effected by her own retirement from psychoanalytic practice.<\/p>\n

Janine de Peyer (USA) has been nearly as prolific recently, even without benefit of retirement. She continues writing and presenting on manifestations of the uncanny, or \u201cextraordinary knowing,\u201d in clinical work. She also challenges cultural and gender prohibitions against the acknowledgment of female analytic erotic arousal in a paper exploring female erotic countertransference.<\/p>\n

Lauren Levine (USA) writes about her clinical encounters as a white analyst with three women of color. Emphasizing the imperative for white analysts to struggle with their inclination toward silence, complicity and dissociation, she argues for a radical shift in conceptualizing the analytic frame.<\/p>\n

Beatrice Beebe (USA) and colleagues have published another study on infant-parent communication, this one assessing preterm infant contingent communication in the NICU with mothers versus fathers. Very few studies have assessed infant capacity for bidirectional, contingent communication at birth, and the researchers believe theirs is the first to examine preterm infants\u00a0in the\u00a0neonatal period.<\/p>\n

Brent Willock (Canada) seeks to bridge investigation of the simultaneous sleep\/wake states of parasomnia and dream enactment (i.e. sleep disorders) with psychoanalytic dream work. As these matters are insufficiently understood in mental health, legal disciplines and public discourse, Willock sees utility in increasing the understanding of these phenomena not only in psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience but also in sleep medicine and the law.<\/p>\n

Drew Tillotson (USA) discusses his clinical encounter with an adolescent male\u2019s \u201cmelancholic terrors\u201d in the face of \u201cawakening the erotic man,\u201d a process involving the liberatory impact of the patient\u2019s working through the dangerous, destabilizing dread of Bionian \u201ccatastrophic change\u201d as he comes to mourn the \u201cpowerful object ties that paralyzed his erotic body and mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Irwin Hirsch (USA) continues presenting his idea that it is the analyst\u2019s \u201cproductive use of uncomfortable countertransference experience\u201d that saves a treatment from miring in protracted impasse. Michael Eigen (USA) seeks to capture \u201cthe evocative richness of moments in therapy\u201d in his sharing of multiple clinical vignettes across three analytic journals. Ruth Lijtmaer (USA) confronts \u201cour own and others’ implication in difficult histories\u201d by limning the cruel silence of the bystander in moral and political registers.<\/p>\n

And quite soon, those of us willing and\/or able to gather in Los Angeles \u2013 as well as those who wish to livestream plenaries from afar \u2013 will have the opportunity to engage in all matter of psychoanalytic explorations. I look forward to seeing you there.<\/p>\n

To share new of your recent or upcoming publications and presentations, please submit the following materials for the next Bookshelf<\/em> issue, to be published in November, by Sunday, October 23, 2022<\/strong>, to Matt.Aibel [@] gmail.com:<\/p>\n