{"title":"The Tragedy of Love: A Study of Love And Death in Jacques Lacan’s Thought, With Special Reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet","authors":"M. Ghaffary, Ghiasuddin Alizadeh","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.2021827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.2021827","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Love is a significant concept in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory that, compared to other concepts, has received little attention from Lacan scholars and Lacanian literary critics. Through offering an analysis of the concept of love in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and its connection with the Lacanian notions of desire, subjectivity, fantasy, the Real, and death (drive), this article seeks to delineate Lacan’s contribution to the philosophy of love. Following a general exploration of the love between Romeo and Juliet, several passages of Shakespeare’s play are studied with regard to basic questions in Lacanian philosophy of love: the nature of love, the reason why one loves another, the effects of love upon the individual’s subjectivity, the difference between love and desire, and the relation between love and death. The authors argue that Lacanian concepts, such as object petit a, and the Symbolic, illuminate aspects of Romeo and Juliet’s love, leading them to know that their desire cannot be fulfilled and that there is always something more to be desired. In this tragedy, neither Romeo nor Juliet can understand what the other desires, and what they believe they themselves desire is merely an illusive construct of their own fantasies.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41715772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"At the Beginning There Was…– Re-Considering the Concepts of ‘Faith’ and ‘Trust’ as Analytic Objects","authors":"Ofrit Shapira-Berman","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.2004049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.2004049","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article proposes a distinction between “faith” and “trust,” within psychoanalysis. It puts forth the idea that one’s faith might be thought of as an inborn quality that promotes the feeling that the future holds within it more possibilities than those already encountered and allows the individual to develop and move forward. On the other hand, trust is an acquired quality, shaped within the mother-infant dyad, and is experience-based. Both trust and faith play a significant role in a patient’s ability to use their analysis to better their lives, albeit each holds a different function, complementary to one another. The author suggests that “there is no such thing as a patient” (apart from the analyst’s faith). The analyst’s capacity to have faith in the patient’s possibilities holds, within it, the dialectic tension between oneness (faith) and twoness (trust), acting as an “alpha function of faith.”","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42573878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of More Human than Otherwise: Selected Papers","authors":"Karin Ahbel-Rappe","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.1974737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.1974737","url":null,"abstract":"I rwin Hirsch has been a prolific representative and voice of the interpersonal psychoanalytical tradition for four decades now. His volume, More Human than Otherwise, collects sixteen of his previously published papers, spanning the years 1983–2017. Each essay is introduced with a short retrospective framing comment, and the volume as a whole comes with a brief introduction. In one of these essays, Hirsch immerses himself in Phillip Roth’s iconic novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. In lieu of Portnoy’s classical Freudian analyst, Hirsch figures himself as Portnoy’s interpersonally oriented analyst and imagines how their work together might unfold. Hirsch openly identifies with Roth so, if Portnoy is some version of Roth, it may not be going too far to read this as a sort of fan fictional self-analysis. By way of introduction to the chapter, Hirsch shares parts of its only-in-New York origin story. One evening, while working on the essay, and so with Portnoy on his mind, Hirsch is having dinner at an Upper East Side luncheonette. He looks down the counter only to see Phillip Roth having his own meal. Hirsch intuits that Roth is heading to his analyst’s office next, which he confirms by following him there. In addition to its wry appeal, the essay conveys two key purposes of the volume as a whole. First, More Human than Otherwise articulates the interpersonal approach to psychoanalysis and does so while engaging a wide variety of contexts and themes. In addition to analysis of fiction and television (Portnoy, Seinfeld, and others), topics include the nature of analytic","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44450251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transference, Countertransference and Mourning the Death of a Parent","authors":"R. B. Shapiro","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.1997479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.1997479","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The decline and death of an adult patient’s parent impacts treatment in ways that are often out of the awareness of analyst and patient. Internal and external family constellations, dynamics, and defenses become unsettled. A patient may unconsciously revert to earlier ways of being as they try to adapt to the changing nature of the parent/child relationship. In this adaptation, behaving and feeling as one did at an earlier time symbolically turns the present into the past. Thus, time is symbolically reversed. This rekindling of childhood fantasies—often emanating from envy, jealousy, and competition—can affect the transference and countertransference as well as the nature of the mourning process itself. Enactments, resistances, and returns to historic ways of relating become a greater part of the analytic experience. Modifications in understanding the mourning process and how it impacts transference, countertransference, and termination are illustrated with clinical examples.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43882265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Difficulty to Reside: On Analytically Oriented Psychotherapy With The Homeless","authors":"Tamar Aronson","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.2022960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.2022960","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article illustrates analytically oriented psychotherapy with the homeless. The concept “Difficulty to Reside” is introduced to describe the inherent emotional difficulty of many homeless people to tolerate the idea of a home as well as an actual physical residence. This is not only the difficulty of bearing a home in the physical sense, but the difficulty of being within the envelope of a close relationship, and even a failure of the individual to be close to themself. Three layers of the difficulty to reside are noted, by means of clinical examples: the autistic-schizoid layer, the psychotic layer, and the layer of trauma, personality disorders and substance abuse. Modes of intervention are suggested. The therapist’s mind as a metaphorical home for the patient is illustrated. The emotional dynamics of treating the homeless are analogized to Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” as alternation between destruction and construction. The homelessness in the therapist’s psyche is emphasized. Finally, the metaphor of “the Edge of Chaos Theory” (physics/biology) is presented as an area of encounter between homeless patient and therapist.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46271932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Promoting the Supervisee’s Project of Becoming a Therapist","authors":"H. Yerushalmi","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.2013147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.2013147","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Beyond studying the influence of the past on the construction of the self, analytic writers have a growing interest in the process and function of visualizing one's self in the future and its impact on becoming who one envisions oneself to be, despite cultural and societal pressures. Existentialists suggest that we struggle to become who we are through our “fundamental project;” that is, the way we “hurl” ourselves into the future as free agents. In this article, I examine the application of these theoretical perceptions to explain the analytic therapist's internal professional developmental processes. I suggest that when supervisors help their supervisees reflect on their implicit fundamental professional projects, they minimize the need to analyze supervisees' countertransferential responses, facilitating the supervisees' construction of the professional self. Furthermore, after learning about a supervisee's envisioned future professional self, the supervisor helps the supervisee either consolidate the fundamental project or replace it when it ceases to express the supervisee's core sense of self-as-therapist.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47454076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Editors-in-Chief","authors":"S. Fabrick, Ruth H. Livingston","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2022.2044163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2022.2044163","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42802548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Calling Time on Timelessness: A Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist’s Narrative of Retirement","authors":"Carol Morrison Straforini","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.2001636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.2001636","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Psychoanalytic clinicians are experienced in weathering the intense feelings that arise with terminations. However, the final good-bye when the therapist retires is unchartered territory. This essay offers a two-fold reflection on the process, based primarily on the author’s experience as a retiring psychotherapist, but also including her perspective as a patient whose own therapist retired. The author will discuss the complex clinical, philosophical, and ethical issues associated with this forced ending, examining her experience through a series of detailed clinical examples. Describing an approach to retirement that sometimes remained within the conventions of the particular analytic frame in which she was trained and sometimes deviated from that frame, she candidly assesses clinical decisions she deems, in retrospect, to have been mistakes, as well as those that served her patients well.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41857754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Empathy with Strangers: Personal Reflections","authors":"S. Buechler","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.1996997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.1996997","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay explores my reactions to evident suffering in strangers. How are they (partially) a product of many years of personal and professional experiences of witnessing pain? What are some results of defensively avoiding registering these moments? In addition to my own reflections, I call upon statements by some well-known poets, including Sherman Alexie, W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, and Rainer Marie Rilke. The interpersonal analytic writings of H. S. Sullivan offer one description of the process of defensive avoidance. More generally, when my “mind’s eye” looks away, it might be imitating my reluctance to stare at sufferers on the visual plane. While this may offer me some protection, how does it limit my capacity for empathy?","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46665183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of “Don’t Be Sad When I’m Gone”: A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires","authors":"Linda Jacobs","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2021.1979377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2021.1979377","url":null,"abstract":"Don’t Be Sad When I’m Gone is, at once, a lamentation and an affirmation: an affirmation of life and the relationships that nurture it. In this touching memoir, Beatriz Dujovne invites the reader on an extraordinary journey of witnessing—witnessing her grief over the death of her deeply loved husband, Carlos, and then witnessing the reparative experience she both discovers and creates. She takes us back in time to the Argentina of her past and forward to the present, which includes her psychoanalysis with Dr. Novelli. Beatriz is a psychologist in private practice in Buenos Aires and Portland Oregon; she and her husband Carlos met in Buenos Aires while engaged in graduate studies, she in psychology and Carlos in medicine. They emigrated to the United States and lived first in Chicago where Carlos did his post medical training at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Beatriz completed her Ph.D. at the University of Missouri. Carlos’s diagnosis and death from cancer years later was devastating for Beatriz and her memoir is an account of her profound mourning, her analysis with Dr. Novelli and her struggle toward repair.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41604822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}