What COVID-19 Laid Bare About What Children Need to Live and Grow.

The author explores the unconscious meanings of the physical absence of the three-dimensional world of people and how these play a critical role in children's reactions to restrictions in human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic. When children are deprived of the corporeality of loved ones, the children's continuously emerging and unstable self-and-other arrangements may trap normative feelings of envy, jealousy, hatred, rivalry, love, and idealization. During lockdowns, there is no place where these raw emotions can be tested, so they remain untempered by the real presence of others and by interactivity with them, feeding aggression that is turned back against the child with frightening ferocity.

Useful Untruths: Another Look at Pluralism in the Clinical Setting.

Hans Vaihinger, the early 20 Century German philosopher, contended that across a broad range of thought people tend to select one theory over others, all the while knowing that such a singular perspective is but an idealization or useful fiction of what the fuller truth is if one eventually includes those other theories. He argued for the necessity of utilizing a plurality of perspectives in order to see a more complete picture of the world despite our cognitive inability to juggle more than one theory at the same time. This vexing paradox is a focus of the contemporary philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent work that pays tribute to Vaihinger's exploration of this topic.

A Misuse of Bion's "Reverie-ing Mother": Another Weapon in the War against Women as Waged in the Consulting Room.

"The war against women" is a systemic process of discrimination that seeks to subjugate women. In this essay, I will critically examine a contemporary paper, published in a well-known psychoanalytic journal, that views the patient through the lens of Bion's "reverie-ing mother" concept. I argue that leaning upon any particular theory to explain an individual's complex psychological disturbance adheres to a reductionistic line of reasoning that falls prey to the genetic fallacy; interpreting psychological phenomena in this way becomes a myopically focused perch that narrows the clinician's range of vision in scanning the field for other features that influenced the patient's symptomatology and suffering.

The War against Women in Psychoanalytic Culture: Introduction to the Section.

The phrase "the war against women" refers to the overt an a stealth global prejudice against women that aims to subjugate them. Freud was not immune to this prejudice, as can be seen in those late-nineteenth-century Victorian views about sexuality that helped to shape his conceptualizations of gender. Despite the fact that many of these antediluvian views have been overturned, some continue to live on in the contemporary psychoanalytic scene.

The Transformation of Achilles in The Iliad: A Reading from the Views of Sibling Narratives and Nonlinear Growth.

I wish to showcase the importance of plasticity of narrative in fantasy formations, as exemplified in Achilles' psychological trajectory in The Iliad. Applying conceptual formulations concerning the psychoanalytic developmental process to Achilles' growth piques my reflections about the sibling experience and its unique position in the mental life of children and adolescents. With developmental advance and the capacity for measured fluidity of self and other structures, the original sibling experience--whether it be tilted toward aggressiveness or toward loving concern or a place in between--may acquire new meanings.