Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on Writing Subaltern Bodies into Psychoanalysis: Autotheory Outside Acceptability presents the editors’ process of generating the idea, presenting on this topic, and being invited to assemble these works to add to psychoanalytic literature on theories of bodily relation. In the face of entrenched psychoanalytic hierarchies set on stabilizing and disciplining the subaltern, the editors find it imperative to continue adding to emerging and prominent literature that erodes the need to preserve these hierarchies and instead offers multiplicity, plurality, and new representations in psychoanalysis of common, yet singular, experiences rarely spoken from the position of the subject. This issue centers autotheory as a way of making theory in the face of limited representation. This introduction ends with an invitation to the reader to make their own theory from lived experience and psychoanalytic reflection in order to recenter curiosity and creativity, which can often be stifled or absented in the service of maintaining normative hierarchies.

ABSTRACT This clinical paper expounds upon the well-established utility of transference interpretations in general and specifically delineates resistances to their use; resistances that arose because of the analysand’s traumatic loss of her mother. The timing and violent nature of her mother’s death highlighted the developmental relevance of her premorbid, triangulated dynamic with her parents. That is, the opportunity that uncomplicated development affords with regard to working through one’s pre- and post-oedipal conflicts was unavailable to her. Rather, her mother’s untimely death left unresolved the guilty pleasure she had derived from her status as her mother’s impassioned rival and her father’s gratified, oedipal daughter. Moreover, her father’s parallel guilt and trauma led him to withdraw his affection from her such that in effect, he too was lost to her. Ultimately, she resisted mourning her losses and retained her dead objects inside, consistent with melancholia. She did not easily relinquish this position and in fact, only did so in the context of the analyst functioning as both a new developmental and transference object. 1

ABSTRACT Interpretation is the primary tool of psychoanalysts. While there are other technical interventions we use, they serve as steps toward interpretation itself. Thoughts about the meaning of interpretation, the aims of the interpretative process, and the multiple dimensions of the methods used are examined. Examples from several child psychoanalyses are given to illustrate the application of interpretation. The interpretive work contained within the analytic relationship with analyst as transference object, developmental object, and the object of projection of the patient’s sense of self are all demonstrated, as well as the interpretation of resistance, conflict, defense, and the enactment of unconscious fantasy.

ABSTRACT This paper integrates empirical developmental research with the clinical theory and treatment of sadomasochism. Three strands of argument illustrate the thesis that sadomasochistic relatedness develops from relational procedures originating in the mother–infant dyad. The first strand involves attachment research including data from infancy to adulthood and videotaped microanalyses of infant–mother dyads. The second strand addresses research on mentalization and its relationship to attachment. These strands suggest that sadomasochistic relatedness exists on continua from minor to severe as attachment modes move from secure to insecure to disorganized, and from the capacities for mentalized to prementalized recognition of the self and other. Specific relational procedural models representing insecure and disorganized attachment involve the regulation of contradictory emotions, motives, and messages conveyed through varied sensory modalities. These models suggest dissociative procedural ways of being with the other and managing internal states. They are incorporated into and shaped by later development. The third strand uses a clinical case to deepen these constructs, and illustrate the use of knowledge from infant research in work with adults. The discussion addresses the relationship of mother–infant interactions with sadomasochism and how sadomasochistic procedural relational models may contribute to the formation of sadomasochistic relatedness at different developmental levels.

Commentary on “Post-War Syndromes: Illustrating the Impact of the Social Psyche on Notions of Risk, Responsibility, Reason, and Remedy,” by Charles C. Engel, Jr.Sheila Hafter GraySheila Hafter Gray1. Teaching Psychoanalyst, Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis, Laurel, MD; Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services, University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:March 2011https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.32.2.335.35282PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutReferencesDepartment of the Army (1994a), Field Manual (FM) 8–51, Combat Stress Control in a Theatre of Operations—Tactics, Techniques, Procedures; Headquarters Department of the Army, Washington, DC, 29 September 1994. 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The more things change, the worse they get. Nathan McCall's recent "Dispatches from a Dying Generation" (1991) updated Ashmore's "In my Neighborhood An Adult is a Dead Child" (1966). While Ashmore pessimism contributed to my earlier "cata- strophizing," McCall's current observations on the escalation of black- on-black carnage and the anemic extension of violence into the black middle class demonstrate the understatement of my earlier social- psychiatric pessimism. I wrote then (1974): The existing miseries of the inner cities, I am increasingly convinced, are nurturing severe psychopathological neurotic character disorders. The defensiveness of ghetto children against caring for others, the de- personalization of their relationships, and their sadomasochistic resolu- tions of hurt and despair appear to prepare them for retaliation against their own communities with a potential for indiscriminate destructive- ness of themselves or others. As our new generation of disadvantaged blacks assimilates its ghetto education, and as it comes of age, I would revise Kardiner's (WW II) prediction, and question whether we will not see new forms of pathology that synthesize atypical neurotic configura- tions with that outward seeking for trauma that Fenichel described as the "traumatophilic neurosis." McCall noted that the work ethic developed all too well in the street's drug trade, that the ghetto's mutation of street capitalism en- Dr. Meers is affiliated with the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. Address communications to the author at 4214 Embassy Park Drive, NW. Washington, DC 20016.

The concept of rescue fantasies is traced from Freud's earliest idea of the rescue of the mother as the fallen woman to later ideas of ambivalent rescue of the father, siblings, and children. Clinical vignettes from work with children and adults illustrate these points as well as reparative rescue fantasies in response to trauma and narcissistic hurt. The contemporary family romance myth of the secret benefactor as rescuer is described. An analytic case presentation explores the narcissistic-masochistic and the positive and negative oedipal meanings of the secret benefactor rescue fantasy. Application to countertransference enactments in the analyst is suggested.

Although most couples' problems are brought to “marriage” counselors, a great percentage of these marriages, treated or not, will end in divorce. In this article, the importance of the role of the therapist's values and attitudes about divorce is stressed as a significant ingredient in the therapy on this difficult decision. A number of the tasks of RET divorce counseling are reviewed, including helping the individual(s) decide whether to remain married or divorce, reviewing their perceptions for distortions of data and their cognitions for distortions of evaluation or reasoning,and helping them to implement the decision, survive the aftermath, and work out a changed relationship with the exspouse.

(1981). The empathic mode of perception and alternative vantage points for psychoanalytic work. Psychoanalytic Inquiry: Vol. 1, On empathy, pp. 329-355.