Transference.

The article presents a view of transference from the early versions of transference by Classical/Structural analysts, through a variety of analytic positions that extend and implicitly question the concept of transference. After looking at Brenner and Bird's transference positions, we trace the beginning of relational analysis as articulated by Gill. The differences among several subsequent relational positions are then explicated.

Personality disorders, attachment and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

While attachment has been a fruitful and critical concept in understanding enduring individual templates for interpersonal relationships, it does not have a well-understood relationship to personality disorders, where impairment of interpersonal functioning is paramount. Despite the recognition that attachment disturbances do not simply reflect nonoptimal caretaking environments, the relationship of underlying temperamental factors to these environmental insults has not been fully explored. In this paper we provide an alternate model for the role of neurobiological temperamental factors, including brain circuitry and neuropeptide modulation, in mediating social cognition and the internalization and maintenance of attachment patterns.

If We Listen: Discussion of Diane Ehrensaft's "Listening and Learning from Gender-Nonconforming Children".

Given the absence of reliable predictor variables that differentiate between children whose gender dysphoria will desist versus those in whom it will persist into adolescence, child analysis, with its unique capacity to search beyond the manifest content of a patient's desire, potentially offers a venue from which to assess the developmental achievements that might impact a decision to support or question the utilization of puberty blockers to forestall the physical manifestations of gender. An examination of Ehrensaft's True Gender Self Therapy notes an inherent contradiction between her stated view of gender as "an aspect of self that can be altered over the course of a lifetime" and the notion of an unchanging gender self that only needs to be uncovered. The latter position veers toward an essentialist position that neglects the exploration of gender fantasies and defines gender in a manner that necessitates an environmental or medical response.

Coherence, competence, and confusion in narratives of middle childhood.

Middle childhood is a pivotal time in character development during which enduring internal structures are formed. Fiction can offer insights into the cognitive and affective shifts of this developmental phase and how they are transformed in adulthood. While the success of beloved books for latency age children lies in the solutions they offer to the conflict between the pull toward independence and the pull back to the safety of childhood, the enduring stories for adults about children in their middle years can be seen as works of mourning for the relationship with the parents and the childhood self, but more importantly as attempts to transform their experience of middle childhood through the retrospective creation of a coherence that was initially absent.

Universal fantasy in latency: Separation, attachment and sexuality in Julio Cortázar's Bestiary.

This paper joins recent efforts to build a conceptual bridge between psychoanalysis and attachment theory. A psychoanalytic reading of Julio Cortázar's Bestiary, a story about a young girl sent away for a summer vacation, is used to conceptualize the relationship between attachment and sexuality during latency. Middle childhood is seen as a pivotal period when cognitive maturation, internalization of parental figures, increasing independence and importance of those outside the family make fantasy the central adaptive mode of functioning.

The neurobiology of personality disorders: implications for psychoanalysis.

As advances in neuroscience have furthered our understanding of the role of brain circuitry, genetics, stress, and neuromodulators in the regulation of normal behavior and in the pathogenesis of psychopathology, an increasing appreciation of the role of neurobiology in individual differences in personality and their pathology in personality disorders has emerged. Individual differences in the regulation and organization of cognitive processes, affective reactivity, impulse/action patterns, and anxiety may in the extreme provide susceptibilities to personality disorders such as borderline and schizotypal personality disorder. A low threshold for impulsive aggression, as observed in borderline and antisocial personality disorders, may be related to excessive amygdala reactivity, reduced prefrontal inhibition, and diminished serotonergic facilitation of prefrontal controls.

Stock-still behavior: a potential developmental marker.

During the course of a pilot study of toddlers' behavior and play, the experimenters observed a previously undocumented behavior. This behavior now labeled "stock-still" behavior, was noted at the age of 17.5 months and consisted of the toddlers' standing motionless at or near the doorway of a nursery when previously they had marched, seemingly intrepid, into the room on their own.

Psychoanalysis as cognitive remediation: Dynamic and Vygotskian perspectives in the analysis of an early adolescent dyslexic girl.

The interface of neurocognitive problems and dynamic concerns are examined in the treatment of an early adolescent dyslexic girl. Despite previous intensive remediation, she had been unable to master reading and spelling, but made remarkable progress after a relatively brief period of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic and Vygotskian perspectives are integrated to provide a model of how play, within the analytic context, is mutative for learning disabled children.

Language, transference, and the developmental context in child analysis.

The meaning of silence and its effect on the transferential relationship in child analysis are examined through the analysis of a ten-year-old boy. Silence is treated as a multiply determined symptom whose origins can be found in the early parent-child relationship but whose meaning is reworked and intertwined with wishes, both libidinal and aggressive in nature, that are aroused during later developmental phases. Silence is conceptualized as a powerful linguistic communication, for once sound is united with meaning, there can be no blank silence.