Psychoanalytic QuarterlyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-08-24DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2026.2696510
Judith A Yanof
{"title":"Playing with \"The Imaginer and the Imagined\".","authors":"Judith A Yanof","doi":"10.1080/00332828.2026.2696510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2026.2696510","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines Lucy LaFarge's \"The Imaginer and the Imagined\" through the lens of Winnicottian play. LaFarge's detailed clinical material shows how primitive fantasies about communication-beliefs that minds can omnipotently control or annihilate one another-become part of the analytic field and can get enacted bidirectionally to produce stalemates in the <i>analytic</i> process. This commentary compares Ms. O's adult analysis to a child case in which imaginative play opened access to fears of dependency and aggression. It underscores play's paradoxical, transitional quality as a therapeutic medium that permits exploration without real-world consequences. Drawing on Winnicott, Bion, Parsons, and others, the author contends that fostering a shared capacity to play-maintaining the analytic paradoxical space, tolerating uncertainty, and attending to countertransference-is crucial for transforming defensive enactments into meaningful analytic progress across ages.</p>","PeriodicalId":46869,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalytic Quarterly","volume":"95 3","pages":"409-427"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148814441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Psychoanalytic QuarterlyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-05-08DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2026.2649268
Hannah Wallerstein
{"title":"On Being and Knowing: A Response to Thomas Ogden's \"Ontological\" Model.","authors":"Hannah Wallerstein","doi":"10.1080/00332828.2026.2649268","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00332828.2026.2649268","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper addresses trends in how the concept of experience is currently operating in our field. Taking Thomas Ogden's <i>ontological</i> framework (2019) as a prominent example, I argue that a subtle idealization and reification of the experiential aspects of our work may shut down space for thought. Through close comparison of Ogden's framework with those articulated by Winnicott and Bion, I will contend that the inextricability of being and knowing is central to the psychoanalytic project, and that the contemporary focus on experience, as represented by Ogden, enacts a split between the two that paradoxically makes it more difficult to attend to all that experience entails.</p>","PeriodicalId":46869,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalytic Quarterly","volume":"95 2","pages":"263-288"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147844400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Psychoanalytic QuarterlyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-08-24DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2026.2707970
Catalina Bronstein
{"title":"On Lafarge's Paper \"The Imaginer and the Imagined\": To Know the Other, to be Known by the Other, to be Owned/Disowned by the Other.","authors":"Catalina Bronstein","doi":"10.1080/00332828.2026.2707970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2026.2707970","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper elaborates on Lucy LaFarge's thought-provoking paper \"The Imaginer and the Imagined,\" focusing on how projective identification shapes unconscious phantasies within the analytic relationship. It argues that in narcissistic patients early phantasies of being known (imagined) by the primary object, together with the wish to know the object's phantasies about oneself, may-when dominated by excessive projective identification-undermine the experience of separateness between self and other. Instead, they become conflated with a phantasy of <i>owning and being owned</i> by the object. This might be particularly relevant in cases where there is felt to be a narcissistic mother who could not tolerate an infant that is different from her. The patient's confusion between the capacity to know another person while preserving an area of unknowability, and the omnipotent phantasy of completely knowing, possessing, and controlling the other, obliterates a sense of separateness and forecloses the potential for genuine imagination and creative exchange. This paper explores the various means through which such states are communicated and enacted within the analytic relationship, including forms of non-verbal communication. A brief clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these dynamics and their implications for psychoanalytic work.</p>","PeriodicalId":46869,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalytic Quarterly","volume":"95 3","pages":"429-449"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148814451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Psychoanalytic QuarterlyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-01-27DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2025.2609538
Steven H Cooper
{"title":"Some Vicissitudes of playing related to containment and disruption.","authors":"Steven H Cooper","doi":"10.1080/00332828.2025.2609538","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00332828.2025.2609538","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In agreement with Winnicott, the author considers all forms of playing as a place of transit between inner and outer reality and between unsymbolized and symbolized experience. Some forms of playing serve more exclusively to clarify the current state of the patient's separate mind, while other forms of playing additionally introduce and mark forms of separateness between patient and analyst that are more likely to cause temporary disruption. This paper aims to distinguish between these two forms of play. Through clinical vignettes, the author demonstrates how each form of play offers various forms of containment, differing in the mechanisms of how to facilitate the process of metabolization. He also suggests that sometimes we can only know a posteriori of the patient's experience of disruption and containment rendering these distinctions between types of playing as a rough scaffolding. Playing always implies a process that is in flux.</p>","PeriodicalId":46869,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalytic Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"59-79"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146067358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Psychoanalytic QuarterlyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-01-29DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2025.2609532
Adam Blum
{"title":"Potential Time: The Music of Potential Space.","authors":"Adam Blum","doi":"10.1080/00332828.2025.2609532","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00332828.2025.2609532","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper introduces <i>potential time</i> as a psychoanalytic concept that extends and complements Winnicott's potential space. Revisiting Freud's principle of constancy, Winnicott's theory of <i>transitional phenomena</i>, and Peter Goldberg's contemporary insights on framing, transitionality, and duration, it develops potential time as both a theoretical framework and a clinical necessity. In an era increasingly hostile to sustained temporal experience, the paper explores how the rhythmic reliability of analytic framing creates the conditions in which psychic life can unfold. Clinical illustrations reveal how the analyst's handling of time fosters the emergence of a patient's own temporal signature. Reflections on mourning and music illuminate how potential time allows for living with loss, coordinating multiple temporalities, and sustaining creative living.</p>","PeriodicalId":46869,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalytic Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"111-141"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146087558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Psychoanalytic QuarterlyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-01-27DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2025.2609534
Joseph Aguayo
{"title":"W. R. Bion's Case of the Imaginary Twin: An Implicit Method of Clinical Inquiry.","authors":"Joseph Aguayo","doi":"10.1080/00332828.2025.2609534","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00332828.2025.2609534","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>W. R. Bion's (1950) case of the Imaginary Twin is revisited from different vertices. This paper has remained underappreciated because of two sets of factors: one related to how Bion structured his text in a baffling manner; and the other related to some of the uses to which the paper has been put. In subsequent commentaries on the Twin case (e.g., Bion's own epistemological commentary alongside the questionable thesis of playwright Samuel Beckett as the patient in question), these aspects have distracted from the Twin as a genuine contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic technique. It is a close clinical reading of how Bion went about analyzing a patient who was quite deft in unwittingly hiding in plain sight and illuminates his unique contributions to analytic technique. While accounting for the analytic mentors who inspired his psychoanalytic work, a thesis is maintained that in this first psychoanalytic case study Bion began to craft what would become his defining signature, namely an interactional/emotional focus in his technique of the <i>here and now</i>. The author terms it Bion's <i>implicit method of clinical inquiry</i>. While he adroitly articulated some of Melanie Klein's ideas, he simultaneously and quietly distanced his technical approach from hers.</p>","PeriodicalId":46869,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalytic Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"7-34"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146067460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}