Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

“I feel so strongly about this [collective commemorative ritual]. I think that early psychoanalytic writing overemphasized the value of separation-individuation and pathologized the opposite. It's been through personal experience that I have come to see that in a different way with regard to Jewish commemorative ritual which takes place a couple of times a year. But also some experiences that I have had outside the realm of religion. The one that pops to mind was what President Biden did about a year after the first onslaught of the Covid epidemic. He had candles put all around the reflecting pool in Washington, one candle for every number of people who had died, and this was broadcast on television.  I sat there and I wept over thousands of deaths, and then I began to think about the power of the experience of mourning with others. Despite the fact that we didn't all lose the same person, we had all lost somebody to this virus that was not as yet being managed. There was something incredibly powerful about that - in the same way for those who lost someone on 9/11 who go down to the Twin Towers and read the list of names every year. But we analysts have not theorized this stuff and I think it's time that we did.”    Episode Description: We begin with Joyce sharing with us her evolution from being a young analyst who was essentially ever available to her struggling patients to now being "more aware of the problematic edge to a kind of responsiveness that once felt simply necessary."  We discuss what she calls analyst's 'secret delinquencies' - when the clinician intentionally withdraws from the patient into personal matters "so that the analyst becomes the single subject in the room." We consider post-treatment friendships between analyst and analysand and the nature of the evolution of the transference. Joyce shares with us her reflections on growing older and the mixed blessings it provides in terms of greater experience and clinical wisdom as well as a tempting "disengagement from an earlier sense of therapeutic discipline." We close with her suggestion that we consider the "dynamic function of commemorative ritual" not as a mere enactment but as a fulsome experience for "reworking old connections."     Our Guest:Joyce Slochower Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY; faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Steven Mitchell Center, National Training Program of NIP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies & and PINC in San Francisco.  She is the author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; & 2014) and Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006 & 2014), and co-Editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, of “De-idealizing relational theory: a Critique from Within” and “Decentering Relational Theory: a Comparative Critique” (2018).  Her new book, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, was released by Routledge in June 2024. She is in private practice in New York City.    Recommended Readings: 2024 Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken.  NY, London: Routledge.    2024 Factions are Back. Journal of the American Psychoanal.  Assn., 72(4): 561-582.   2018 Deidealizing Relational Theory: A Critique from Within.  L. Aron, S. Grand, & J. Slochower, Eds. London: Routledge.   2017 Don’t tell anyone.  Psychoanalytic Psychology, 34: 195-200.   2014 Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.   2014 Psychoanalytic Collisions: (2nd Edition), New York: Routledge. 

"What Freud may have missed here is that the investment in the lost object is a much more reconstructive and integrative process. It’s one where we remember all the stories that we have heard from the lost object - the repetitive stories about the childhood of the person or how they met significant others and all these stories are within us and revived, and we have questions. We think: ‘Too bad I never asked about this or that’ and in activating these memories we also experience joy and we have a slow process of integration which is not necessarily about loss but about how continuous this person lives in our mind and that is a little bit the focus of this novel. It's in that sense a portrait of the mind and the process of mourning."    Episode Description: We begin with recognizing Cordelia's contributions to clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis in addition to her fiction writing. Her latest novel, Memento, has been described as "a journey through the labyrinth of the dream world" and invites the reader into the experiences of ambiguity, timelessness, and the absurd. On a theoretical level, Cordelia introduces the usefulness of the term lethe - the river in the underworld of Hades that causes people to forget their past when they drink from it. We discuss the distinction between libido and lethe and how they manifest themselves in the analytic setting. She emphasizes the importance of understanding aggression not as a stand-alone but as a container of further meaning. We close with her sharing her childhood story of wanting to please her father with her detailed knowledge - a sublimation that she continues to gain pleasure from to this day.   Our Guest: Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Ph.D.,  is a Training and Supervising Analyst and on the Faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute as well as of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. Her area of expertise is metapsychology, in particular drive theory and its clinical applications. An updated version of her monograph of Freud's metapsychology, Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe, is just being published by International Psychoanalytic Books. Her psychoanalytic books and articles have been published in many languages. She has also published three novels and edited a Freud Reader, an Essay Book, and three collections of Short Stories. She is the Chair of the IPA in Culture Committee and works in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.   Recommended Readings: Freud, S (1917) Morning and Melancholia. In Freud, S. Standard Edition, Vol IVX,     239 258   Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2018) Driven to Survive. Selected Papers Psychoanalysis.      New York: International, Psychoanalytic Books.   Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2020) Memory’s Eyes. A New-York Oedipus Novel. Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books.   Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2023) Memento. A Novel in Dreams, Thoughts, and Images. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.   Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2024) Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe. A clear road through Freud's metapsychology leading to helpful findings and new concepts. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.

"A number of art schools in the early 60s said: “Clearly, it is the relationship of the painter to the medium that is the essence of painting - the painter must be emotionally present, and this is what we should instill in our students.” So they started to take away traditional training in art schools of representational drawing, of color theory, of figurative drawing, and what they ended up with was a generation of artists who were passionately throwing paint at canvases but unable to make art. The relationship between the fundamentals and intuition is very complicated. Nobody seemed to make the point that the great abstract expressionists  were all trained for decades in traditional art schools. That’s what they came out of, and we see this in our analytic colleagues. Many of them are writing wonderfully at the moment, but they were trained as Kleinians or trained as ego psychologists, and they have that in their bone marrow. The kind of representational work with Apple [painting of his dog] that I am talking about when I say: I draw and I draw and I draw until I can put that aside, in analytic work I go to something basic in my training. For me it happens to be something that's close to Paul Gray, it's not where I'm going to stop, but I can use Paul Gray because that's what I was trained in - I will look for transference, I'll look for defense, I'll look for resistance and I'll go back and look for the derivatives of certain affects that are enacted in the relationship. I go over it and over it until I can relinquish it like I did with the painting of Apple, and then the intuitive comes in, but the intuitive is the reward at the end of decades of hard work."   Episode Description: We begin with Jon's mother's encouragement to paint by finding the bird's vitality through "becoming the bird." This leads us to consider the relationship between intuitive seeing and the "images which I might desire to produce." We discuss his notion of the aesthetic matrix which applies both to the analytic encounter as it does to the painter's relationship to his creative process. Jon shares with us his conviction that basic technique, whether artistic or analytic, must first become part of one's inner make-up before intuition can enlighten an obscure moment. He walks us through his creative process in the face of a blank canvas on the wall in front of him. He discusses the different uses of watercolor and oil paint and how their unique properties parallel his spontaneous engagement at various periods of an analysis. He presents a clinical encounter and how he was able to unpack a countertransference impasse through working on a painting. He closes with sharing an experience he had in his native South Africa which leads him to feel that "it's a blessing to be able to work in America."   Linked Paper and Websites: The Aesthetic Matrix: A Conversation Between a Painter and a Psychoanalyst  

"The Holocaust seems to me to be the paradigmatic case of the acting out of unconscious fears, fantasies and projections onto another group that has ever occurred. It is the place therefore for psychoanalytic concepts in understanding anti-Semitism and racism more generally. Particularly in this context and thinking about Nazism and Nazi perpetrators is crucial, especially given what for me is so interesting about this is not just thinking as a historian and how can I borrow psychoanalytic ideas to enrich the thing I am interested in explaining. Also, because the history of psychoanalysis is bound up with this history. It’s why I cited Fenichel and Loewenstein - the idea of psychoanalysis as this ‘Jewish science’, of the emigrates all persecuted by Nazism and how they restarted their lives in the US or elsewhere, the grappling with the German psychoanalysts after the war, the conflicts in the International Psychoanalytic Association after the war - these are all part of the history of the Holocaust. For me, this combination of the history of psychoanalysis as an endeavor, plus the usefulness of psychoanalytic concepts in trying  to explain this phenomenon in the first place is a hugely enriching conversation.”     Episode Description: We begin with outlining the tension within the 'complemental series' where external events and intrapsychic registration of those events are both contributors to psychic difficulties. This applies to early as well as later life traumas. Dan's book invites us to additionally consider the conflicting psychoanalytic contributions to the question of what enables survival. All research points to the essential dimension of luck in enabling survival in concentration camps. As a historian he fleshes out the contrasting viewpoints of analysts Eddy de Wind and Viktor Frankl as they each describe what they felt were the essential psychological qualities that contributed to survival. De Wind and others point to a state of stupor, also characterized as estrangement or dissociation, as an essential state of mind to facilitate surviving in overwhelming circumstances. He shares with us why he as a historian feels that an analytic way of thinking is essential as "history without psychoanalysis cannot access aspects of the human experience that elude rational thought - and there are sadly many."   Our Guest: Dan Stone, PhD, is Professor of Modern History and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History; Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust; and Psychoanalysis, Historiography and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival. He is also the co-editor, with Mark Roseman, of volume I of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust. Dan chaired the academic advisory committee for the Imperial War Museum London’s redesigned Holocaust Galleries (opened in 2021) and is a member of the UK’s Advisory Group on Spoliation Matters.   Recommended Readings:   Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy (eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)   Werner Bohleber, Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2018)   Matt Ffytche and Daniel Pick (eds.), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (London: Routledge, 2016)   Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)   Emily A. Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2014)   Dori Laub and Andreas Hamburger (eds.), Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma (London: Routledge, 2017)   Steven A. Luel and Paul Marcus (eds.), Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays (New York: Ktav, 1984)   Dan Stone, Psychologists in Auschwitz: Accounting for Survival (lecture at the German Historical Institute,( London, 11 July 2024):