{"title":"An Intergenerational Look at Abortion, the 1970s vs Now: Reflections on Papers by Isheh Beck and Naomi Snider","authors":"Kathy Bacon-Greenberg","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2252730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2252730","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThe papers of Beck and Snider (this issue) grapple with the place of abortion in our psychoanalytic thought and practice, locating abortion within the larger cultural and political world. At the heart of much of the difficulty surrounding a thoughtful consideration of abortion is the accompanying dissociative pressure arising from the binaries of life and death, of maternal versus fetal well-being, and the confounding of socio-cultural and personal decision making. I offer an intergenerational lens juxtaposing the polarized present with the open and accessible abortion landscape of the late 1970s. In both eras, examples are discussed where the political and cultural zeitgeist exerts dissociative pressure on patient and therapist alike, leaving little room for psychoanalytic exploration. The role of both partners in any conception is also discussed.Keywords: abortionintergenerationalabortion in the 1970sabortion dissociationabortion generativityabortion as a couple decision Notes1 American Psychological Association (APA), Division 39 Spring Meeting: Reckoning/Foresight, March 2021.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathy Bacon-GreenbergKathy Bacon-Greenberg, Ph.D. is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Supervising Analyst at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), Clinical Adjunct Professor at the Gordon Derner School of Professional Psychology, Adelphi University, and Faculty, Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. Her interests lie in the socio-political and cultural influences affecting reproductive and fertility discussions in and out of the consulting room.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135814833","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":"Abortion as a Catalyst","authors":"Isheh Beck","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2252803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2252803","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractIn both what has and has not been published in the psychoanalytic literature about abortion, those who elect abortion have been devalued. The omission of abortion perpetuates its sense of unimportance in our field. Where it features, it is relegated to a category of conflict colored by pathology and trauma. To the contrary, abortion can be experienced as a generative event. Interviews with ten women who underwent abortion reveal important themes that are underrepresented in existing theory. These women offered windows into their lives both before and after their abortions in a way that framed their abortions as pivotal turning points. I propose the possibility of viewing abortion as a catalyst for psychological growth, and discuss related clinical considerations.Keywords: abortionpregnancymotherhoodinfertilityterminationcreativity This article is part of a series including: Notes1 Participants were recruited through referrals generated by posts on professional listservs. I had no prior relationships with any of the participants. The salient inclusionary criteria consisted of experiences with both abortion and motherhood. While most participants reported trauma histories, these were not part of the selection criteria. It is worth considering whether certain psychological experiences, such as unresolved trauma, may have motivated self-selection into the study.2 See Castro (Citation2022). https://www.livescience.com/18629-pregnant-monkeys-miscarry-avoid-infanticide.html.3 See https://www.northgeorgiazoo.com/zoo-am-i-blog/ask-a-zookeeper-sacrificing-babies).4 See Burgess (Citation2020). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-03/why-tasmanian-devils-born-in-april/12114878).Additional informationNotes on contributorsIsheh BeckIsheh Beck, Psy.D., is a psychologist in Philadelphia and a psychoanalytic candidate at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She serves as Director of the Philadelphia Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology. Her clinical work centers on issues involving female embodiment, mother-daughter relationships, and biculturalism—particularly with those of Iranian descent.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135815287","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":"<scp>The Magic of a Fetal Fetish in the Face of Climate Crisis and the Expanse of Dense Temporalities</scp>","authors":"Katie Gentile","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2247797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2247797","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In times of cultural upheaval, the image of the child, typically a White girl, has been used to represent the vulnerability of humanity as a whole. In the face of escalating climate crisis the fetus is now standing in to represent the future, and the uterus has become the only environment many politicians are willing to legislate. It appears the fetus has become a flexible fetish object used both to displace growing annihilation anxieties in the present and as a way of racially colonizing the future. As fetal protection and anti-abortion laws spread across the United States, gestating bodies have been identified as the primary threats to healthy pregnancy. Integrating psychoanalytic theory with concepts from anti-Blackness and Indigenous theories, I outline a situation where the fetal fetish functions as a colonizing temporal system of affect regulation that is currently being used consolidate and secure White, cisgender, able-bodied, heteromasculinity and human exceptionalism.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135982362","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":"Reproductive Agency and the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma","authors":"Tracy Sidesinger","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2242578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2242578","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article supports the development of reproductive agency as a means of intercepting the transgenerational transmission of trauma through maternal subjectivity. Reproductive agency includes, among other things, abortion as a viable choice. It is my view that reproductive agency is predicated on maternal subjectivity – that is, the individual selfhood that mothers possess. However, women’s capacity for agency around reproduction as well as maternal subjectivity have long been denied, even within psychoanalysis. Under patriarchy lies the institution and mandate of motherhood. The institution implicitly demands women be passive, yet burdens them with guilt for choices they are forbidden to make themselves. In contrast, the experience of mothering is highly personal and active, and psychoanalysis has the potential to make more space for maternal subjectivity, agency, consent, and mourning. In doing so, we can support women in reckoning with reproductive decisions after the fact, as well as affecting change in future generations and intercepting the transgenerational transmission of trauma before it occurs. Importantly, exercising maternal reproductive agency is seen as a relational function. Rather than addressing the needs of one in opposition to the needs of another, it is about making discerning decisions to impact a lineage of interconnected beings. This article is part of an ongoing attempt to write theory from outside patriarchy (Cixous & Clement, 1986/1975), specifically using the author’s personal voice, to help illustrate maternal subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42495053","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":"Psychoanalysis and Reproductive Justice: Reflections on Dobbs and the Possibilities of Psychoanalytic Political Praxis","authors":"Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2241975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2241975","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay addresses the aftermath of Dobbs, the Supreme Court Decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, by looking to what can be learned from other countries, specifically psychoanalytically-informed praxis. Focusing on the role of psychoanalysts in particular, and psychoanalysis, more generally, in Argentina, I make the case for a psychoanalytic political praxis. This engages a Black feminist commitment to reproductive justice, a more expansive frame for politics that can embrace intersectional aims across a range of policy issues connected to the human right to have or to not have children, in a social and political context that supports the common good and facilitates human and environmental flourishing. In doing so, I highlight psychoanalysis’s somewhat hidden history of political commitment and engagement, particularly in terms of the interpersonal approach. I argue that only a sustained commitment from progressive forces, including among those in psychoanalysis, can forestall the further encroachment of authoritarian, anti-democratic forces operating in the US.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44031885","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":"Patriarchal Religion in U.S. Constitutional Law (Dobbs v. Jackson): Originalism as “Political Religion” (Burke) Unmasked1","authors":"D. A. Richards","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2239683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2239683","url":null,"abstract":"1 Abstract. The Supreme Court’s recent overruling of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson reflects the influence of a group of conservative Catholic thinkers, the “new natural lawyers,” 2 whose views, if made explicit, would be inconsistent with the constitutional requirement that basic rights can only be abridged on a secular basis. This inconsistency has been masked by an appeal to originalism, requiring that constitutional interpretation must be limited by the things in the world to which the founding generation would have applied the text, and nothing beyond that. This approach to constitutional interpretation does not fit much of the interpretation of basic rights to date, and is thus demonstrably inadequate. How psychologically can we understand the appeal of such an indefensible method of interpretation to recently Trump appointed justices to the Supreme Court and other justices, and to the President and Senate that appointed them? Using the framework of Edmund Burke’s (1790/2014) psychological analysis of the violence of the utopian idealization of “political religions,” this article offers a psychoanalytic account of how the conservative justices, appealing to new natural law, have developed originalism as a way of masking a sectarian patriarchal misogyny inconsistent with constitutional values, in effect, a “political religion” in Burke’s sense.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41770724","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 Abject, the Silence and the Crime: Intricacies of Abortion in Iran","authors":"N. Moshtagh","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2236508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2236508","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The author uses Kristeva’s concept of “abject” to explain the disgust, horror, and hatred toward woman’s internal organs, experienced by both men and women. The abject marks the moment when we separate ourselves from the mother. It is where we are confronted with an archaic space before linguistic binaries of self/other or subject/object. Patriarchy is conceptualized as a defense against the abject. The silence of Iranian women and the defensive criminalization of abortion by Iranian men are discussed through examining the family dynamics and power differentials within an Iranian household. The author postulates how “Name of the Mother” replaces Lacan’s “Name of the Father” out of the necessity of managing patriarchy.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48000905","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":"A review of Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: Foundation in a Revised and Expanded Ego Psychology","authors":"Morty Rosenbaum","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2194817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2194817","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47064911","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":"A Review of Trauma and Dissociation-Informed Psychotherapy: Relational Healing and the Therapeutic Connection","authors":"Jonathan Kurfirst","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2184627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2184627","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41583096","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 Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: Breaking Boundaries","authors":"S. Buechler","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2184626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2184626","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45038385","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}