Return of the Repressed: Revisiting Dissociation and the Psychoanalysis of the Traumatized Mind.

Psychoanalytic treatment is often indicated when trauma and its psyche/soma companion, dissociation, severely disrupt symbolic functioning and associative linking. After Freud's initial thinking on these matters, repression replaced rather than supplemented dissociation (which occasions segregating units of experience) as the primary defensive response to severe trauma. Because psychoanalysis had "repressed" the salience of dissociation as motivated (though experienced), an unnecessary schism has occurred between trauma theories and mainstream North American psychoanalysis, and within psychoanalysis itself.

The Elusiveness of "The Feminine" in The Male Analyst: Yet Not The Binary.

The author explores the feminine/masculine binary and what is meant by being "in" this binary versus "of" it. He considers Freud's views on female "otherness" in light of today's changing theories and practices regarding sexuality and gender. Newer ideas are seen to supplement rather than replace traditional ones; it is noted that binary dichotomies remain present in each individual's psyche but can yield to more complex and nuanced ways of thinking about gender differences.

Hypnosis and The Therapeutic Relationship: Relational Factors of Hypnosis in Psychotherapy.

Over the years, the field of hypnosis has often given more attention to the state and procedural factors of hypnosis than the relational ones. In an attempt to address this imbalance, the 60th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) had as its theme "Hypnosis and the Treatment Relationship." A centerpiece of this meeting was a collegial discussion among a panel of psychologists with expertise in relational hypnotherapy.

Gazing Back, Playing Forward: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings on the Relational Essence of Hypnotherapeutic Action.

To build bridges between hypnosis and contemporary psychoanalysis, this article addresses how hypnosis, when used in psychotherapy, facilitates curative action through its relational essence. The author's extensive experience with hypnosis, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis orient the narrative toward the unconscious patient-therapist interaction, with particular attention paid to the ethics of the inherent hypnotic seduction. Whether used primarily in relief-oriented ways or geared toward more transformative therapeutic aims, powerful unconscious factors are in play for both patient and therapist and are explicated to illustrate the interactive and frequently unformulated, intersubjective factors that facilitate effective, psychotherapeutic hypnosis.

When Fathering Fails: Violence, Narcissism, and the Father Function in Ancient Tales and Clinical Analysis.

Manifestations of failures in both symbolic and actual flesh-and-blood fathering reveal the inescapable role played by the father's unconscious transmissions in the ever present triadic matrix. Perelberg's crucial distinction between the murdered narcissistic father and the dead symbolic father suggests the problematic internalizations that fail to uphold the paternal law required for oedipal resolution. Three father-child narratives derived from classical literature and mythology are presented in order to elucidate significant unconscious paternal fantasies pertaining to lethal rivalry and neglect of the child's otherness.

THE MISSING FATHER FUNCTION IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND TECHNIQUE: THE ANALYST'S INTERNAL COUPLE AND MATURING INTIMACY.

This paper argues that recovering the "missing" paternal function in analytic space is essential for the patient's achievement of mature object relations. Emerging from the helpless infant's contact with primary caregivers, mature intimacy rests on establishing healthy triadic functioning based on an infant-with-mother-and-father. Despite a maternocentric bias in contemporary clinical theory, the emergence of triangularity and the inclusion of the paternal third as a separating element is vital in the analytic dyad.

THE VIBRANT CHALLENGES OF CLINICALLY EFFECTIVE PSYCHOANALYTIC MINDEDNESS.

In addressing the central challenges of developing and maintaining the analyst's psychoanalytic mindedness, this paper focuses on two particularly challenging core components of clinical effectiveness not so easily developed despite the rigors of the tripartite training model. The first is the analyst's receptivity to unconscious communication, which entails the analyst's curiosity, acceptance of human nature, doubt, restraint, narcissistic balance, and integrity. A brief clinical vignette illustrates this.

RECOVERING THE FATHER IN MIND AND FLESH: HISTORY, TRIADIC FUNCTIONING, AND DEVELOPMENTAL IMPLICATIONS.

This paper aims to restore the father and paternal function to their rightful place alongside the mother and maternity in order to counter the prevailing matricentric, dyadic bias in psychoanalytic theory and technique. The author contends that both the symbolic and the actual, flesh-and-blood father are necessary to optimize his child's development. The paternal function inevitably operates in a triadic matrix; thirdness is always psychically in existence-with the father ever present in the mother's unconscious mind-and the paternal third is necessary to open up symbolic space.

The elusiveness of masculinity: primordial vulnerability, lack, and the challenges of male development.

Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive-an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression.

Analytic mind use and interpsychic communication: driving force in analytic technique, pathway to unconscious mental life.

Developed from established psychoanalytic knowledge among different psychoanalytic cultures concerning unconscious interpsychic communication, analysts' use of their receptive mental experience--their analytic mind use, including the somatic, unconscious, and less accessible derivatives--represents a significant investigative road to patients' unconscious mental life, particularly with poorly symbolized mental states. The author expands upon this tradition, exploring what happens when patients unconsciously experience and identify with the analyst's psychic functioning. The technical implications of the analyst's "instrument" are described, including the analyst's ego regression, creation of inner space, taking mind as object, bearing uncertainty and intense affect, and self-analysis.

Masculinity unraveled: the roots of male gender identity and the shifting of male ego ideals throughout life.

A model of masculine gender identity development is presented that demonstrates how a male's sense of his masculinity and the ambiguities of his gender are being reworked throughout his life. Of factors shaping the boy's sense of masculinity early on, particular emphasis is placed on the role of the involved father, the nature of the parental relationship, and the mother's recognition and affirmation of her son's maleness. While healthy masculine gender identity is founded predominantly on the boy's unique struggles in separating from his mother, it does not result from what has been traditionally viewed as the boy's disidentification from her (and from the feminine more generally).

The shaping of masculinity: Revisioning boys turning away from their mothers to construct male gender identity.

This paper offers an understanding of the nature of the internalization processes involved in the shaping of male gender identity founded on the boy's unique struggles in separating from his mother. The underpinning for the initial development of a sense of masculinity is reconsidered as the author questions the widely held idea of Greenson and Stoller that a boy normatively has to 'dis-identify' from his mother to create his gender identity. Import rather is placed on the conscious and unconscious aspects of the mother's (and father's) pre-oedipal and oedipal relationship with their little boy in order better to understand the nature of the boy's unique identifications and subsequent sense of masculinity.

Accessing the multitude within: a psychoanalytic perspective on the transformation of masculinity at mid-life.

This paper reflects upon the essential components of male identity that commonly are reworked in middle age. The author argues that healthy masculine gender identity involves an ongoing, plastic process of destabilization and reconstruction at various pivotal developmental stages, particularly during middle adulthood. In essence, a man's mature transformation of his sense of masculinity results when finite concepts of gender identity are superseded by an awareness of the complexity of one's multiple, early and diverse gender identifications.