Hair is a powerful symbol of individual and group identity: physical and therefore personal yet public rather than private. Despite the fact that male pattern hair loss causes men considerable emotional distress, its unconscious emotional significance is almost entirely unrepresented in the psychoanalytic literature, with a few notable exceptions. After a review of the sociological literature on male

Autotheory is an emerging idea in feminist theory that emphasizes the inevitability of the subjective and embodied personal within any development, understanding, or application of theory. Autotheory offers a way to bring the sexed and gendered body of the analyst back into view in clinical practice and is a possible route to relibidinizing psychoanalytic theory. The embodied part of the "personal"

Nondualistic conceptions of the body in Vajrayana Buddhism and some schools of Zen potentially extend the range for imagining and conceptualizing the analyst's body. They add dimension to psychoanalytic explorations of nonverbal, body-to-body communication in the analytic dyad. Vajrayana Buddhism posits that the body that we have from the point of view of the conceptual mind is not our only body. The

The concept of an "unconscious sense of guilt" bedevils Freud throughout his life, rearing its head in at least twenty-four of his major works and working behind the scenes in many others. In a sense, we can see Freud's oeuvre, and psychoanalysis more generally, as a discourse of unconscious guilt. While Freud frames the oedipus complex as the central defining dynamic of human experience, the unconscious

A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we are trained to think, has destructive effects whose ghostly lingerings can, nevertheless, be durably ...

Although neither Sigmund Freud nor Jacques Lacan ever neglected the place of culture and the social field for the subject, they always opposed "culturalist" ideas, even when such ideas no longer used this label. It is important to examine what both of these figures said about culturalism, but it is just as pertinent to return to other criticisms of this movement, which developed in the United States

In the field of psychopathology, "narcissistic and identity-related suffering" refers to a type of suffering characterized by a lack of being that centrally affects narcissism and identity continuity/discontinuity. Present in many clinical and psychopathological pictures, these problems in turn invite us to undertake a rereading of the modalities of structuration of subjectivity in the course of development

The term institute is used inclusively here to refer to different organizational structures such as psychoanalytic societies and centers. Those organizations have primary tasks such as providing education and training in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Existential threats covers a range of factors, both internal and external to an organization, that may seriously impair or destroy

The termination ideal for analytic work stands at a considerable distance from clinical reality; “complete” terminations are rare indeed. This gap is perhaps best explored by considering sequels—in...

Explicit and implicit psychoanalytic assumptions concerning the analytic cure include the old “insight/interpretation” versus “relation/experience” duality. A synthesis of these two stances, ground...

Georges Perec’s memoir of his analysis, “The Scene of a Stratagem” (1977), is part of a literary oeuvre characterized by innovative forms addressing the paradoxical task of telling a story that can...

During the Covid-19 pandemic, psychotherapists quickly transitioned to provide online therapy, while facing many challenges. This study aimed to explore psychodynamic and psychoanalytically oriented therapists’ (N = 1450) experiences with online therapy during the first weeks of the pandemic and two months later. Results showed that therapists had little pre-pandemic experience with providing online

In “On Arrogance,” Wilfred Bion made a remarkable claim: “the analyst who is treating an apparently neurotic patient must regard a negative therapeutic response together with the appearance of scattered, unrelated references to curiosity, arrogance, and stupidity as evidence that he is in the presence of a psychological catastrophe with which he will have to deal.” However Bion came to believe this

In this mid-year issue, we have taken the opportunity to examine the state of psychoanalysis at the present moment, both here and abroad, as we explore complex questions regarding our changing world and its effect on training, on theory, and on technique. We look at psychoanalysts present and past who have considered these questions from within their particular sociopolitical scope, and we examine

A wide-ranging survey focusing on the experiences of analysts providing telehealth treatment approximately six months into the pandemic was sent to one hundred randomly selected APsaA graduate anal...

The post-Bionian paradigm in psychoanalysis invites us to listen to the session as a waking-dream-thought where unconscious-thinking-in progress is continuous. The hypothesis put forward here and i...

This qualitative study focuses on the process of treatment over the internet from a psychodynamic perspective based on the experiences of seventeen patients in China who underwent online treatment ...

A number of contemporary psychoanalytic writers have characterized gay childhood as a profoundly isolating experience. Within a developmentally informed self psychological framework, the loneliness of gay childhood is theorized here as a deficit in requisite twinship experience in early life. A detailed clinical example illustrates how these thwarted twinship needs may reemerge in the transference

Features of ruthlessness may come into play in the encounter between adolescents who come into the therapeutic space with clear and precise demands to be supported through their gender transition. Winnicott’s concept of ruthlessness, extended from the infant-mother matrix to the emotional situation of the clinic, allows a consideration of the conditions under which the analyst can think about adolescent

The language and theories of Winnicott offer a lens for examining the importance of play in the development of the queer, transgender, and/or gender-nonconforming patient and the safety that virtual spaces—specifically, video games—provide for this play. While much of the literature posits the primary therapeutic value of virtual space as the site of psychic battle, interaction with a video game avatar

Transphobia, now emerging as a limit to the analytic attitude, requires the kind of psychoanalytic investigation that continues in response to misogyny, homophobia, and biphobia, as they figure in both clinical practice and theory building. Without a psychoanalytic investigation into the dynamics of transphobia in psychoanalysis, efforts to conceptualize trans subjects in an analytically open and neutral

Psychoanalytic efforts to think sexual difference beyond the restrictions of binary notions about anatomy and gender continue to prove challenging in both clinical practice and theory building. Claims that such binary notions are no longer applicable fail to take seriously the ongoing power of binary processes as they manifest both consciously and unconsciously. Without a capacity to think sexual difference

If you have been reading our series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, you may notice that in this issue of JAPA Review of Books we pause before publishing the tenth of those reviews. We’ll return to Winnicott in issue 70/4, with an excellent review of Volume 10 by John Foehl and Christopher Bonovitz. Here we open with three pieces—a book essay and two reviews—on other significant voices from

The manner in which play changes us is examined, with particular attention to the role of paradox. Sustaining paradox and illusory experiencing are held as key to the framework of psychoanalysis for patient and analyst alike. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the analyst becomes a potential object of change through playing. The transitive hospitality of playing is examined in the treatment

Attachment to the bad object has remained a durable, undertheorized clinical problem. With an extended clinical example, the experience of limit, in both patient and analyst, is examined as part of a dense undercurrent in the relationship, including transference, that gives rise to shifts in understanding the attachment to an unsatisfying internal object. Importantly, the patient’s and the analyst’s

Comparative approaches to psychoanalytic theory are a major source of exposure to different theoretical orientations and clinical technique. However, it is not always clear what the analyst actually does when translating theory into practice. As an attempt at clarification, descriptions are provided of two listening stances or attentional sets that are associated with different modes of analytic listening

In this issue of JAPA Review of Books, we are pleased to join guest editors Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris in presenting the eighth review in our series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. In “The Place Where We Live: Inside, Outside, Playing and Using in Perpetuity,” Steven Cooper offers his reading of Volume 8. Cooper notes Winnicott’s “major theoretical revision of Freud’s and Klein’s

The role of a psychoanalytic journal is at least twofold: to reflect the state of the field and to contribute to leading the field in new directions. The former is the familiar project, both necessary and reassuring, and one that JAPA takes seriously. The latter is far less clear, because publishing work in areas that some find only tangentially related to psychoanalysis calls into question the boundaries

Theoretical ideas about “narrative coherence” and “autobiographical competence” remain prevalent in contemporary therapeutic culture, and are frequently deployed in the service of the patient’s producing a narrative “I” that can tell its own story. A preference for novelistic accounts of the self is countered here by proposing the short story form as an alternative model for the telling of a self within

This contemporary Kleinian memoir explores the possible existence of an intrapsychic, adoption-specific preoedipal triad including child, birth mother, and adoptive mother that can shape the emerging mind. As an intrapsychic construct, the adoption triad comes to exist in the infantile mind, requiring that adoptees contend with four additional part-object maternal representations: a villain (bad birth

In Part I contemporary psychoanalytic concepts about suicide were synthesized with other theories and empirical research findings. Here the focus is on applying those principles and describing an integrative psychodynamic approach to treatment, one emphasizing the therapeutic alliance, unconscious and implicit processes, exploration of fantasy, and use of the therapeutic relationship as an implicitly

Kristeva’s profound and comprehensive understanding of maternal eroticism allows us to examine the ways in which a negative maternal transference, structured through the work of the abject, can be viewed as a maternal erotic transference in its devitalizing form. Through the use of a clinical case, the revitalizing experiences of maternal eroticism within analytic process facilitate the emergence of

Psychodynamic psychotherapy has an important role in suicide prevention. The psychoanalytic study of suicide has taught us a great deal about the human experience and the process of suicidality. There is also much to be learned from other fields of study and from empirical research that can be integrated into psychoanalytic therapies. Central to the psychoanalytic approach to suicide has been understanding

Several deep revisions of Freud’s theory of the drives are proposed: (1) Drives are conscious and are in fact the source of all consciousness. (2) Drive energy is equated with variational free energy and is therefore quantifiable in principle. (3) There are not two drives but many, seven of which may be described as “emotional” as opposed to “bodily” drives. (4) All drives are self-preservative or

More than a hundred years into our field’s development, examining Freud’s place in psychoanalytic education is timely. What authority does he hold for psychoanalysts in 2021? Is he still the architect, or overseer, of psychoanalysis? Freud has been a metonym for psychoanalysis, yet the history of Freud’s identification with the totality of psychoanalysis has had important unfortunate consequences.

Authority and freedom are connected, and both have external and internal forms. External authority, political or institutional, can impinge on internal freedom in ways that matter to psychoanalysts. Internal freedom requires an internal authority that can be trusted. The superego is an external authority masquerading as an internal one. The ego, with its compliance toward the id, the superego, and

Amid the swirling issues of the day, we can too easily lose track of what—in the lengthening history of psychoanalysis—remains vital over time. As our ongoing series of reviews of Winnicott’s Collected Works shows,1 analysts writing decades ago can seem prescient; we may, in our zeal to build toward the future, overlook the groundwork they have laid. Like a well-loved novel, a psychoanalytic text yields

Freud is often negatively contrasted with object relations and relational theorists for holding to a metapsychology in which drives are understood as innate and predetermined in their development, are thought to follow the pleasure principle in a “hydraulic” manner, and are not seen as influenced by real objects. While that theory is certainly one dimension of Freud’s thinking, it is paralleled by