Traditional psychoanalytic limits and uncertainties have been challenged by the sudden intrusion of a life threatening virus. Normal psychoanalytic structure has been replaced by a 2-dimensional option. Though psychoanalytic treatment has found a way to continue in this protective virtual platform, themes of vulnerability, loss, and mortality have emerged. Uniquely organized and understood by each the dyad, the impact of each limitation is a challenge and opportunity. As psychoanalysts, we must learn how to locate the individual meaning of this life-altering event alongside the profound awareness of the existential fate that we share.

Reviewed by: The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling ed. by Robert Pinsky Paul Schwaber (bio) The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling, edited by Robert Pinsky. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, 215 pages. This adventurous and challenging anthology, compiled by three-time United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, presents fascinating moments of psychological intensity expressed in accomplished poetry. Such diverse emotions as love, grief, rage, guilt, shame, and manic laughter, as well as struggles of passion and reason, sanity and irrationality, extreme imagination, and humor and fright are presented—and through the power of language made shareable. Each pronounced psychological state is explored by poems that range in time from long ago to contemporaneity—from Fulke-Greville, Sappho, and Dante, for example, to current writers—and thereby manage to involve rhythmic, tonal, stylistic, and even socio-historical changes, too. Yet an insistent recognition offered to the reader, other than the delight and invitation to understand and experience absorbing poetry, is the ranging complication and wonder of the human mind—made possible, of course, by expressive language as well as by notably persistent continuities of humanity through time. Deriving the book’s title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mr. Pinsky keeps “cliffs of fall” in sight while exploring the shapes and kinds of extreme feelings in these intriguing poems. Thereby, he also introduces a reader to a good number of talented current poets. I, at least, did not know the work of many of them and am grateful for the opportunity to learn of and appreciate their work. Not that I understood every poem— but the mind, we know, is adept at meanings and mysteries, and the range of aesthetic, uniquely experienced moments offered here is impressive. Most of the poems are briefly and perceptively introduced by Mr. Pinsky; others, also perceptively, by his associate, Laura Marris. Certain poems, of course, have long proved memorable, and lines linger; from Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, for example: [End Page 419] Yet each I keep, and all—retrievements out of the night; The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d to my soul, With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe, With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor; With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, Comrades mine, and in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well; For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands [. . .]and this For his dear sake; Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of the soul, There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim. (p. 52) Perhaps less known, but surely also deserving of fame, is this sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay: I, being born a woman and distressedBy all the needs and notions of my kindAm urged by your propinquity to findYour person fair, and feel a certain zestTo bear your body’s weight upon my breast:So subtly is the fume of life designed,To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,And leave me once again undone, possessed.Think not for this, however, the poor treasonOf my stout blood against my staggering brain,I shall remember you with love, or seasonMy scorn with pity—let me make it plain.I find this frenzy insufficient reasonFor conversation when we meet again. (p. 95) Coming forward in time, an all-too convincing poem of self-censure by Heather McHugh, easily entrapped me: [End Page 420] Not to Be Dwelled On Self-interest cropped up even there,the day I hoisted three, insteadof the ceremonially called for two,spadefuls of loam on topof the coffin of my friend. Why shovel more than anybody else?What did I think I’d prove? More love(mud in her eye)? More will to work?(Her father what, a shirker?) Christ,what wouldn’t anybody giveto get that gesture back? She cannot die again; and Ido...

The Mixed-Race Child Within:Psychoanalyzing Race, Trauma, Vermin, and Spider-Man Eric Berlatsky (bio) and Sika Dagbovie-Mullins (bio) Though psychoanalysis has, over the past thirteen decades or so, developed into an exceedingly complex and variegated discourse, incorporating and considering much that it initially ignored, it nevertheless has substantial roots, like so many theoretical paradigms, in whiteness and masculinity. This is perhaps most succinctly and easily seen in Sigmund Freud's statement in 1926's "The Question of Lay Analysis" in which the father of psychoanalysis notes, "We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology" (p. 212). In these two sentences, Freud admits that the scaffolding of early Oedipal psychoanalysis was based almost completely on less than half of the population, due to the lack of study of women (or those with any gender other than traditionally binary male), while simultaneously revealing an unsurprising investment in colonialist and racialist thinking. By borrowing phraseology from explorer/colonialist John Stanley's description of Africa as the "dark continent," Freud links all that is "dark," mysterious, and not understood about the human psyche to Africa and its inhabitants, while tying psychoanalysis itself to colonialism, exploring and bringing understanding, or "light," to an entire continent and people stereotypically and offensively defined by ignorance and incomprehensibility. While Freud, and thus psychoanalysis at its origins, claimed to be working towards the understanding of the human psyche, making a more or less universal claim, its case studies were hardly so, with the initial basis for Freudian psychoanalysis being based very heavily on white male European subjects, as well as on implicit biases [End Page 569] about people and places of color (to say nothing of the possibility that we will explore of the psychology of racial mixing). Subsequently, of course, many theorists challenged the white male biases of early Freudian psychoanalysis. As Arlene Keizer (2010) discusses: African-American writers, psychologists, and other cultural commentators have […] highlighted the limits of psychoanalysis that derive from its presupposition of white European/European American subjects as the prototypical analysts and analysands […] and [have] also suggested what psychoanalysis might bring to the understanding of racialized subjectivities and what a […] consideration of race might bring to psychoanalysis. (p. 410) In this essay, we look to some surprising comics to illustrate the tension between more and less racially biased approaches to psychoanalysis, initially focusing on the admittedly oldfashioned Freudian Oedipal dynamics invoked by the texts we consider, before exploring how these texts also challenge and reconsider these dynamics. While the Spider-Man storyline "The Child Within" (published in The Spectacular Spider-Man #178–184 in 1991–92) evokes classical Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly through its introduction of analyst Ashley Kafka as a prominent character,1 its easy analogization to Freud's "Rat Man" case study,2 and several characters' self-conscious engagements with Oedipal ambivalence, it also elucidates the ways in which the psychological structures derived from the study of European white males take on different meanings in different contexts. In particular, the Oedipal ambivalence of a mixed-race man in America (the son of a white father and an African-American mother) is categorically different from the ambivalence(s) of the white men depicted. That is, while the storyline initially gestures to Freudian Oedipal structures rooted in white masculinity, it also usefully challenges the applicability of those structures to other contexts by drawing attention to the specifics of the psychology and history of race in America. Likewise, as we will show, it challenges classical Oedipal psychoanalysis from the point of view of the "seduction [End Page 570] theory" outlined in Freud's "Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896) and controversially elaborated upon by Jeffrey Masson. Over the course of this essay, we will first explore how these comics problematize, or even reject, Freudian Oedipal dynamics by invoking and deploying the "seduction theory." We then go on to discuss the ways in which the depiction of the mixed-race Edward Whelan/Vermin further critiques Freudian Oedipalism rooted in whiteness and masculinity by highlighting the history of racial mixing...

Mother, Come HomeTrauma, Time, and Groundskeeping the Disaster Tammy Birk It's not just that we experience loss, but the things we lose can themselves seem "filled with the intent to be lost" as a feature of their very existence. —Stacey Novack (2016, p. 138) Just as, existentially, we are "always dying already," so too are we always already grieving. —Robert Stolorow (2018, p. 61) As a cross-discursive text that relies on the interplay between word and image, graphic narrative is well-positioned to explore the boundaries of what can be both said and shown. We know that these boundaries also trace and delimit the traumatic experience, so it can be argued that psychoanalysis is critically and productively allied with comics as a narrative medium. Of course, psychoanalysis already understands that its interest in the "complex relations between knowing and not knowing" overlaps with the general nature of literature (Caruth, 1996, p. 3). But here I want to suggest that the visual/textual interface of graphic narrative is uniquely situated to attend to psychoanalytic readings of unconscious complexity and conflict. This special issue of American Imago testifies to such possibilities. This essay will focus its attention on Paul Hornschemeier's 2006 graphic novel, Mother, Come Home, the story of a sevenyear-old boy, Thomas, and his father, David, who are attempting to survive the untimely death of Thomas's mother. Narrated [End Page 497] retrospectively by an adult Thomas, Mother, Come Home shares the ways in which father and son differently contend with the overwhelm of her loss: David is progressively obliviated by traumatic memory while Thomas works to manage their shared grief and blunt the effect of his mother's abandonment. Because it explores the existential uncertainty and self-shattering that extends from loss, I argue that Mother, Come Home is best understood as a trauma narrative. In this essay, I will consider how a psychoanalytic reading not only opens new critical discussion about the novel, but also evinces the illustrative role that comics might play in the portrayal of trauma. I will go on to examine the crucial role of mother loss in the text, the many ways in which the irruption of the Lacanian Real destroys David's beliefs in the authority of the symbolic, the efforts of Thomas to fantastically order and manage the loss of his parents, David's critical confrontation with an adaptive form of psychotherapy and later abandonment of a world ordered by "sense" and logic, and the response of a young Thomas as he grapples with the literal and figurative disappearance of his parents. I will conclude with a brief reading of the way that Mother, Come Home enacts the belatedness and futural dimension of traumatic narrative. Trauma and Temporality in Graphic Narrative Insofar as they complicate and resist expectations about narrative coherence, trauma narratives present a "challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge" (Luckhurst, 2008, p. 79). If we agree that trauma is marked by incomprehensibility and unassimilability, then trauma narratives dramatize the epistemological crisis that emerges when we try to represent an experience that defies symbolization. Some trauma theorists argue that it is imperative that we preserve the aporia, fragmentation, and opacity of the traumatic experience as a way of ensuring its narrative impossibility (Caruth, 1996; Felman & Laub, 1992) There is, Caruth argues, a danger in "understanding too much" about trauma—that is to say, believing prematurely and absolutely in the achievement of psychic and [End Page 498] narrative resolution. For if traumatic experience is inaccessible and unavailable for psychic integration, then it is important for trauma narrative to resist the fantasy that it can be mastered emotionally and cognitively.1 At the same time, others argue that there is an inherent impulse in trauma work—especially work that is centered on the end goal of recovery—to narrativize traumatic experience as a way of binding and moving it in the direction of integration. While trauma tends to be anti-narrative in its initial impact, it is true that "it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma" (Luckhurst, 2008, p. 79) Narrativizing trauma can be a way of detraumatizing experience—and...

Anna Kris Wolff 1931–2019 Daniel Jacobs Anna Wolff was the kind of friend everyone wants and the kind of teacher everyone needs. She would listen carefully, consider seriously what you were telling her, whether it was about yourself or a patient. Then, in no uncertain terms, she would tell you what she thought. Her response went to the core of the issue at hand in often surprising ways. Her friend and colleague Dr. Warren Poland put it best, “What she said was always original, from a fresh slant, always seeming to arise from her sense of the immediacy of the moment in the clinical process; yes, informed by theory but never originating there.” There was never anything inauthentic or artificial about her. Anna’s name was not widely known among psychoanalysts. She contributed very little to the psychoanalytic literature. She had an abhorrence of public speaking. She was a private person. She worked quietly out of her office in her home with its large, beautiful garden, of which she was very proud, on Channing Street in Cambridge, MA. She was happy there. Forced to move several times as a child, she commented: “In my grownup life, I have always wanted to stay put in one place and have a house that I could keep as my own and not have to leave.” There she was surrounded by artwork that her father Ernst, an art historian as well as analyst, had purchased. In her quiet elegance, she exemplified the many talented analysts whose outstanding work often is not fully recognized because they choose to avoid the limelight. Anna was the daughter of Ernst and Marianne Kris, analysts themselves and friends of the Freuds. Of her mother, Anna said, “She was very honest and able to tell difficult things to people. And she would always do it in a thoughtful way so that they learned, and weren’t hurt by it.” Anna was cut from the same cloth. “I don’t think I ever was in Anna‘s presence when [End Page 455] I didn’t go away feeling better about myself and the world,” a colleague reported. Anna was born in Vienna in 1931. Despite the growing danger around her, she remembered somehow feeling secure. But she also remembered not being able to go out to the park with her mother who was “Jewish looking” though Anna and her brother Anton, with their blonde hair, were allowed out with others. In 1938, her family fled Vienna, first to London, where Anna was separated from her family during the London bombing, and then to New York City in 1940. Anna attended the Fieldston School, going on to Radcliffe and Harvard Medical School. Her residency was at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Children’s Hospital of DC. She did her psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute where she became a training and supervising analyst, serving on many committees and becoming a central figure on the Library Committee. For nearly twenty years, she reviewed and recommended books, worked on historic exhibits, researched and wrote biographies of BPSI’s early members, assessed rare books, and participated in various archival research projects. When young, Anna was married briefly to Dr. Carl Wolff, a psychiatrist. She had no children. But that did not stop her from loving the children of others: her two nephews, the offspring of friends, and the children in her own practice. Her special interest in youngsters led her to the Putnam Children’s Center where was involved in longitudinal studies of atypical children. For many years she was a sought-after supervisor in the Beth Israel and Mclean child psychiatry programs. She also taught a popular child psychotherapy observation seminar. When asked about Anna’s child work, Dr. Judy Yanof, who studied and taught with her and became a very close friend, wrote: Her real gift was in being able to talk with children about their inner worlds in a language they could immediately understand. She had a fundamental grasp of where they were developmentally, and a deep, empathic creativity about how to address what troubled them. It was not just her words, but the music in the words, and...

Reviewed by: Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory by Karl Figlio Noëlle McAfee Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory by Karl Figlio. Essex, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 304 pages. In Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory, Karl Figlio asks how the social group of modern Germany can make reparations for the heinous wrongs of its Nazi past. How can it make amends or possibly repair in some meager way the horrors it committed in the previous century? What responsibility does the newly reunified Germany have to rectify the crimes committed in a previous incarnation? To try to answer these questions, Figlio uses an object relations psychoanalytic approach and also explores the kinship between the work of the analyst and the historian, both involving an attempt to construct a coherent memory, a story of one’s collective life, and possibly a way to come to terms with past wrongs. At the heart of Karl Figlio’s book lies catastrophe, both what is at the origin of psychic life and what haunts it thereafter. It originates with the familiar story of primary narcissism, a phantasy of undifferentiated plenum and omnipotence, which is fractured too soon, leaving the infant overcome by its helplessness until it develops a new relation to internal and external reality. But, thereafter, catastrophe can remain as an unconscious dread, easily triggered by threat. When anxiety of catastrophe becomes unbearable, the ego seeks ways to be rid of it, in Figlio’s view, often by identifying with social groups that have found reservoirs on which to project their terror. Social identifications are ways to process anxiety, to split it off, to put it in suitable reservoirs that can become targets for destruction: “The society consolidates to protect the individuals and becomes the bearer of their anxieties, as it coalesces into a society, in effect, with an anxiety of its own” (p. 53). But in an effort to protect its members, societies can wreak terrible evils. Using a Kleinian framework, Figlio identifies how such paranoid-schizoid processes can lead to destruction and guilt, which subsequently can become amenable to reparation through a depressive work of mourning. Unfortunately, what appears to be reparation can instead be a manic repetition, not true reparation. A genuine process of working through [End Page 422] will call for a convergence between inner and outer reality, for example, between one’s inner dialogue and the stories of those who have been harmed. In a nutshell, that is the theory underlying this book’s magnificent account of Nazi Germany’s psychotic delusions and the difficulties that post-war Germany has faced in trying to take full responsibility for its guilt and begin to make genuine reparations. These difficulties, for Figlio, are not merely matters of accounting, of settling debts, but of dealing with injury through love, empathy, and identification (p. 190). My aim in this review is to offer an account of the main themes of this rewarding book, largely so that the reader will be compelled to read it in its own right. In the process I will also address a question, partly motivated by my own recent work in this arena (McAfee, 2019). In Figlio’s account, the very phenomenon of social subjects seems to be pathological, but I wonder if this is necessarily so. Finally, I turn consider how Figlio’s account of reparation in the case of Germany might be extended to proposals for reparation in the United States for slavery. Psychoanalyzing Groups For this ambitious project to get off the ground, first we need an account of how social groups can be understood psychoanalytically. Is a social group like a macro-subject with its own unconscious? Is it like an individual, only larger, just as Plato imagined the city to be like an individual on a larger scale? Figlio never mentions Plato, but I think the contrast is useful. Plato uses an extended metaphor of the city and its parts to understand justice and make clear what goes on in an individual. Plato’s philosophical analysis likens the city to an individual, but the city and the individual can each be treated in isolation. Psychoanalysis of a group can...

Reviewed by: Mourning Freud by Madelon Sprengnether Shelley Ann Cross, MD. Mourning Freud by Madelon Sprengnether. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 269 pages. Freud began his monumental work at the end of the nineteenth century with the wish to create a new science, one of human behavior. Not only did he write about behavior, he also attempted, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), to construct a model of the workings of the brain capable of explaining his new psychology. A certain naïveté and conceit that the science of those days—fully reliant on rationalism—could explain the workings of the mind permeated his work. He consistently attempted to expose the unconscious, to make it fully symbolic, and to bring it under the control of consciousness and logical thought. Nothing messy or emotional was to interfere with this project, and therefore, Freud’s personal life and his body of work were to be studied separately and not as a whole. Psychoanalysis has evolved in many new directions since Freud’s death. There has been increasing recognition that Freud failed to address the role of the mother; new work on attachment theory, mother infant pairs, and early childhood development have altered our thinking in this domain. The treatment of patients who are not classically “neurotic” has grown out of these new ideas. These patients allow us a look at the psychotic core of the personality, present in all of us, but not accessible in higher functioning individuals. This is an archaic part of the personality, pre-verbal, pre-symbolic, and pre-oedipal. Feminists have also influenced psychoanalysis to correct many of its mistakes regarding the psychology of women, and criticism from gay and lesbian quarters have resulted in further corrections and improvements. Within academic circles there are now scholars concentrating on psychoanalysis, well equipped to do research into the life and work of Freud. Madelon Sprengnether is one of those scholars and she brings an interesting perspective. She is a literary critic, a memoirist, and Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. She is a coeditor of (The) Mother Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1985) and the author of The Spectral Mother: Freud Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1990) and Great River Road: Memoir [End Page 436] and Memory (2015). Now she has written a new book, Mourning Freud (2018). In this work, she examines Freud’s writing from the vantage-point of literary criticism, seeing his work as a form of literature, and, in part of her investigation, as memoir. Despite all his revisionists, critics, and detractors, Freud has endured in our psyches, changed our way of looking at the world, and influenced our culture and all its products. One reason for this is that Freud was a wonderful writer. His volumes are colorful and engaging, sometimes exactly prescient, sometimes confined within his time in history, sometimes completely off the mark and even absurd, but always engaging and interesting. One could maintain that Sprengnether’s effort is like seeing Freud in full color, as the complex human being that he was; brilliant, ambitious, imaginative and driven, as contrasted with his black and white public “scientific” persona. It is looking at the whole man, and his monumental contribution to our way of seeing ourselves and our society. Sprengnether’s focus on mourning and melancholia is the red thread throughout her book. It involves Freud’s personal mourning and melancholy in the trajectory of his life, his theorizing about this topic, especially in “Mourning and Melancholia,” and our own relation him as the father of psychoanalysis including the tendency to be caught in eternal melancholy with respect to his ideas and perspectives, and to define all analytic thought in terms of or in contrast to his. Literature has had, since Freud, an uneasy relation with psychoanalysis. From the early 20th Century onwards, analytic ideas have been used to analyze texts just as an analyst might approach a patient. But Post-Modern literary criticism proposes to look at writings in the context of their social and political milieu, and also to take into consideration the personality of the writer. It maintains that every text has more than one level of...

Reviewed by: Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer by Lana Lin Madelon Sprengnether (bio) Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer by Lana Lin. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017, 224 pages. Freud's Jaw, which adapts Melanie Klein's theory of early childhood development to the experience of cancer, offers a new and compelling way to view cancer's impact on survivors. Psychoanalytic readers will be familiar with Klein's formulation of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, which she posits as necessary stages in the infant's creation of an inner world. What they may be surprised to discover is how useful Klein's theory is in thinking about the challenges of later life, including those of illness and loss. Lin grasps the larger implications of Klein's theory and extends it into a profound meditation on mourning. Klein assumed that infants perceive the world initially in terms of "good" and "bad" objects, the mother's breast representing both, based on whether it is perceived as satisfying or frustrating. Unable to tolerate their destructive feelings towards the "bad" breast, infants split this awareness off into the fantasy of an external persecuting force. In other words: "I do not hate my mother's breast; it hates me." At a later stage of development, the infant becomes aware of its capacity for greed, envy, destructiveness, and rage. This leads to the so-called "depressive" position, in which the infant feels guilt and regret about these impulses, along with a desire to make amends. Klein understood the capacity to tolerate inner conflict and ambivalence (hence the achievement of the depressive position) as essential to human development. Once highly controversial, Klein's ideas have gained increasing acceptance over time, due in part, I would say, to a growing awareness of the power of hatred and rage on the global stage. Much of humanity now seems immersed in a paranoid-schizoid type of mentality, rather than one of ambivalence, tolerance, or recognition of the need for reparation. In this [End Page 649] sense, Klein intuited the implications of Freud's formulation of the "death instinct." Freud's emphasis on the life-giving pleasure principle in his early writings gave way in later life to a more sober realization of the forces within us that lead to death and dissolution. We know much about the losses of Freud's later years but little about how he may have felt about them. His best beloved daughter Sophie died of influenza in 1920, and his favorite grandson Heinele in 1923, the same year that Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. This sixteen-year ordeal involved numerous surgical interventions and the use of an unwieldy prosthesis, which caused difficulties in speaking and eating. Ill and in constant pain, he consented in 1938 to leave Vienna for London, where he died on September 23, 1939, less than a month after Hitler's invasion of Poland. One cannot help but wonder how Freud withstood the succession of losses of his final years. Lin's first chapter focuses on Freud's experience of cancer of the jaw, the devastations it wreaked on him, and the adjustments he made to it as a means of repairing its assault on his life and sense of personal integrity. Central to her argument is Klein's understanding that major loss can reanimate the conflicts we experience in the very first months and years of our existence. In "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States" (1940/1986), Klein wrote movingly about the impact of grief and the work of mourning in later life. The pain experienced in the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning thus seems to be partly due to the necessity, not only to renew the links to the external world and thus continuously to re-experience the loss, but at the same time and by means of this to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing. Just as the young child passing through the depressive position is struggling, in his...