Introduction to the Special Issue on “Where Do We Feel at Home? Perspectives on Belonging and Not Belonging”

Abstract

T his is the first of two special issues of the Journal intended to celebrate the evolving tradition of having the International Association for Self Psychology’s (IAPSP) International annual conferences outside of North America once every four years. In 2010, the 33rd annual conference was held in Antalya, Turkey, and the 37th conference of 2014 was held in Jerusalem, Israel, its theme being “Where Do Feel at Home? Self Psychological Perspectives on Belonging and Not-Belonging.” In the introduction to the first special issue, dedicated to the proceedings of the Antalya conference, Marcia Dobson and Amy Eldridge (2012, p. 160) refer to Frie’s and Coburn’s 2011 synthesis, of challenges to individuality in theory and practice from philosophical, biological, cultural/political, and developmental contextual views, thereby definitively situating us in a world in which clinicians can no longer consider their patients or themselves in isolation from the contexts in which they live (Dobson and Eldridge, 2012). The Antalya conference volume continued “to expand contextual ways of thinking, affirming that psychoanalysts and psychotherapists cannot do without the concept of an individual self any more than they can the notion of that individual self as inevitably connected with others” (Dobson and Eldridge, 2012, p. 160). This reference seems beautifully suited to our present issue (and the second one that will follow), its theme, and the articles that comprise it. One of the consequences of the unrest in the complex world that surrounds us is the loss of what Heinz Kohut referred to as the essential feeling of being human among humans (Kohut, 1984). We often realize that the loss of this essential feeling of belonging underlies the suffering and distress of our patients. Socio-political polarization, immigration, religious, ethnic, and racial issues, gender and sexuality issues, all are deeply intertwined in our daily contexts, affecting our own experience and that of our patients, thereby inevitably penetrating our offices. Analysts and patients are both affected, directly and indirectly, by the political and social upheavals and inequalities