Narrative Capacity.

What develops in adulthood? More specifically, what develops in adult analysis, not just in terms of thwarted childhood capacities, not just through accrued experience, but even more fundamentally in terms of abilities or structures not possible until the present moment? In this paper, I posit narrative capacity-the capacity to organize conflictual aspects of self and other in a temporary causal-motivational sequence-as a core feature of what develops in the clinical encounter between the analyst and adult patient. It develops, as I demonstrate, through play with narrative fragments, contrasts, and integrations in the analytic field. I present a clinical process note to show how these elements texture and problematize one another.

Obsessions And Compulsions: A Lifespan Perspective.

Freud traced the origin of the obsessional neurosis, which he considered a model condition for psychoanalytic inquiry, to a fixation in the anal phase of psychosexual development. Although many analysts have raised doubts about his account, and while the Sullivanian and Lacanian traditions have proposed alternatives, no approach has accounted for what Freud observed as the dizzying variety of obsessive presentations, which seem to defy a singular explanation. The broader research community has moved on, meanwhile, to genetic, neurological, and cognitive-behavioral explanations of what we now call obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The Specter of the Primitive.

Traditional psychoanalytic theories of development hold that the adult neurotic can regress, or has already regressed, to the childhood arrests and/or fixations in which his pathology originated. More recent critiques have called this possibility into question. It is unlikely that anyone can roll back the additions and modifications of lifespan development in a full-fledged return to the needs, wishes, and anxieties of childhood.

The Critique of Regression: The Person, The Field, The Lifespan.

The term regression refers to the idea that a person can return to earlier phases of mental development and the primitive modes of functioning associated with them. A core concept in both conflict and deficit models of development, the idea has nonetheless come under increasing scrutiny from critics who argue that it misleads us into a genetic fallacy whereby we reduce the issues of adolescent and adult development to their childhood precursors. Inderbitzen and Levy (2000) suggest that we focus on transformations, or shifts, in mental organization, instead of on regressions.

The Intrapsychic and Interactional Realms: A Hermeneutic approach to Mental Space.

This paper addresses the tension between Freud's emphasis on the intrapsychic world and the emphasis placed by the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG) on real interaction. Freud claimed that the intrapsychic world is primary; the BCPSG claim that interaction is primary. Both assume that these "levels" are discrete domains that can be isolated empirically, and that interact according to regulative rules in the natural world.