American Institute for Psychoanalysis

I describe the experience of finding that my childhood home has been unrecognizably transformed and the solace I found in Salman Rushdie’s notion that home is the past. Just like the past, home is continually retranscribed and recontextualized. And just as trauma exists in an “unpast” (Scarfone), I suggest that we can conceive of an un-home. Following Rushdie, I suggest that “the shards of memory” and the broken mirror often contain truths that the perfect mirror and memory elide. I describe an unspoken and unprocessed aspect to my family’s life that came into focus via the “breakdown” and “de-translation” (Laplanche) evoked by the image of the destroyed house. I offer a case vignette where home was the site of confusion and pain and describe the transformation found via the necessary breakdown in the patient’s un-home that emerges in the treatment.

ABSTRACT The bodies that have no bound, the boundless bodies. They break and scatter themselves across their oceans and their sky, grotesque, bent, far apart. Do you remember the sound of my mother hammering the chicken’s bones? The skin of it expanding vastly like the black and blue night sky over its broken bones … So, “What are those bodies?” I ask. Those legs running away from their feet, those toes turning inward to reach back into their dark chasm. Those nipples sinking deep into their back, and the neck stretching far up beyond the mourning moon. Those bodies do not break but hang wide like a butterflied skin. … Hold me, because, I am falling apart, and I cannot see, where I am facing. I am not dead, you know, I am just losing my bounds.

ABSTRACT In this visionary conversation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and M.E. O’Brien explore collective relations, liberatory practices and radical futures. Engaging with Black feminist theory, insurgent utopias, psychoanalytic insights, communist visions and poetic expressions, they connect the fields of race, symbolic exchange, social dreaming, speaking and listening, accountability, maternal practice, the family, poetic interventions, and envisioning through struggle. Together, they invite us all to conjure a world of shared imaginations and collective liberation.

There are no conflicts of interest.

ABSTRACT We will explore the future mutual benefit between the worlds of psychedelics and psychoanalysis by raising questions and imagining possibilities for both. We propose that psychoanalysis will profit from this unfolding dialog that promises to cross disciplines and expand our limited diagnostic world. We will show how psychedelics can be utilized to enhance the therapeutic alliance, self-regulation, structural dissociation, and trauma exposure. Finally, we ponder how deeper levels of consciousness made accessible with these medicines transforms our theories of self and field, moving us beyond intersubjectivity to the generative and emergent potentials of a unified field.

An extended therapy vignette touches dialectics between self-attack and moments of peace. The patient draws on implicit trauma worlds in tension with a deep sense of strength and beauty, as well as helplessness. Change occurs in partly unknown ways, growing out of therapy talk, sensing, and felt interaction. Therapeutic exercises add to the background mix, making use of fusions-oppositions of self-attack and moments of peace, both adding to growth.

In this discussion of Peltz’s “Where the World Ends” (this issue) the author pursues the mystery of embodied communal protest in conditions of near death. This protest challenges the limits of psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, trauma and the body. The effectiveness of this protest also illuminates the narcissistic destabilization of contemporary liberal democracy. The particulars of this protest allow citizens to restore national narcissism through the pursuit of national ideals. Given the efflorescence of neo-fascism within neo-liberal democracies, psychoanalysts need to study how national narcissistic wounds can be repaired through recourse to ideals rather than through the extrusion of the Other.

In this reply, I continue a conversation with Aronson (this issue) around the rupturing effect of trauma on attachment across multiple generations of mothers and daughters. Aborted mourning as well as the transmission of maternal inconsistency and flooding anxiety was the crucible of the analytic work especially once a self-state appeared that was identified with a perpetrator of maternal abandonment. The absences of paternal figures as antidotes to adhesive disorganized attachment issues are discussed along with issues of class and childcare practices.