Psychoanalytic understanding depends on interpretations of evidence from speech and behaviors within clinical encounters. A clinician’s particular theoretical perspective orients them to favor one interpretation over another. Yet, this continuous processing of evidence often proceeds without a careful examination of the underlying basic concept: the representation being interpreted. This essay is an

A relational theory of emotion allows one to understand complex feelings toward and about self and others. By use of state theory, schemas theory, and control process theory, emotionality can be understood in terms of sequences of experienced and expressed affects, actions, and internal thoughts, reactions, and reappraisals. This paper presents a relational theory that includes unconscious processes

This paper examines Negative Therapeutic Reaction (NTR) as proposed by Freud and extended by Kleinian and North American analysts before reinterpreting this well-known phenomenon through the lens of post-Bionian field theory. Employing Bion’s concept of the obstructive object, the author suggests that NTR is characterized by a recognizable phenomenological sequence including impairment of the analyst’s

An eighty-year-old man reports a recurrent nightmare involving a gummy substance being stuffed into his mouth and, despite his anxiety-driven efforts, being unable to remove it. A narrative of his neonatal years is developed and it is speculated that this nightmare is a rekindling of his very distressful breast feeding experience—an experience memorialized in his earliest pre-representational memory

This paper engages a Winnicottian formulation of the analytic field to highlight the often unspoken, implicit erotic dimensions of analytic work. Material from an analysis with a very inhibited, emotionally constricted man shows both patient and analyst encountering difficulty in “locating” each other within the analytic field. Paradoxically, a felt sense of connection was also palpable, and possibly/impossibly