The Kore complex: on a woman's inheritance of her mother's failed Oedipus complex.

The Greek myth of Kore/Persephone captures a particular psychopathology of women who are torn between a deadened and often asexual husband (Hades) and an ongoing close relationship with a caretaking mother (Demeter). Psychoanalytic work often reveals that these women live in the shadow of their mothers' failed oedipal complex. Their identificatory preoccupation with maternal object preservation disrupted or distorted their oedipal development, and ever since continues to serve as a defense against sexual strivings.

Aggression, containment, and treatment enactments in the psychodynamics of limit setting.

Limit setting has an important role in psychotherapeutic treatment. Despite this, the psychodynamics of limit setting have been a largely neglected topic in the literature. This article will present a theoretical discussion on the psychodynamics of limit setting particularly as it relates to the parent-child and the therapist-patient relationship.

An elusive aspect of the analyst's relationship to transference.

The author discusses the analyst's reactions to being the object of the patient's transference, noting that this topic has been somewhat neglected in the psychoanalytic literature because of the centrality of transference analysis to the psychoanalytic method. He identifies different dimensions of countertransference that relate to being a transference object and discusses these in the light of "objectionable" and "unobjectionable" transference. The analyst's relationship to theory is also discussed.

Treatment preparatory to psychoanalysis: a reconsideration after twenty-five years.

The author's initial article on treatment preparatory to psychoanalysis (1983) challenged the long-held belief that a therapy with the same analyst would contaminate a subsequent analytic transference. The current article reconsiders the original process of transition from therapy to analysis and describes methods that can further its effectiveness. Although specific noninterpretive interventions to enhance preparation for analysis are rarely written about, they are discussed among colleagues and in supervision.

A different universe: reading Loewald through "On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis".

Hans Loewald's classic paper, "On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis" (1960), is one of our field's most comprehensive and elegant accounts of the analytic attitude and stance that are required to enable a psychoanalytic process leading to psychic change, as well as a fine-tuned and original conceptualization of that change. The author shows how Loewald, while not including technical or interpretive recommendations or claiming a new metapsychology, elaborates the multiple facets of the relationship between analyst and patient and provides a subtly complex description of the epistemology of clinical work. His still-fresh formulations prefigure contemporary psychoanalysis.

Privacy and disclosure in psychoanalysis.

The tension between privacy and disclosure in psychoanalysis operates in various ways in analyst, supervisee, and supervisor. Analysts need to maintain the privacy of their patients by keeping their material confidential; they also need to know and share their own internal conscious conflicts to be able to discover unconscious conflicts and their characterological ramifications. Clinical writing is one vehicle for the exploration, discovery, and communication of transference-countertransference issues and other conflicts stimulated by clinical work, but it does not provide the perspective that comes from sharing with another person.

"You've hurt me!": clinical reflections on moral sadism.

I was boarding a shuttle from New York to Boston. Three rows in front of me, a mother seemed to be in some sort of struggle with her four or five-year-old son. "You've hurt me!" the boy exclaimed.

Privacy, reverie, and the analyst's ethical imagination.

The author illustrates varying ways of using and thinking about forms of analytic reverie and the analyst's privacy. He discusses a few different registers from which the analyst can illuminate points of transference-countertransference enactment. The modality by which the analyst communicates these formulations of unconsciously held object relations and defenses varies and includes verbal interpretation through symbolic speech, interpretive action (Ogden 1994a), and, at times, interpretations that involve a construction of the analyst's subjectivity put forward to enhance the patient's understanding of enactments of the transference-countertransference.

The lethic phallus: rethinking the misery of Oedipus.

The author rethinks Sophocles' dramas Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus with a special focus on how self- and object-preservative drives are expressed in the protagonist's thoughts, feelings, and actions. What endangered Oedipus' survival at the beginning of his life-the planned infanticide-becomes the disease that later befalls his kingdom and finally culminates in his self-mutilation, which entitles the blinded Oedipus to be cared for by Antigone until he dies. The concept of the lethic phallus demonstrates how trauma and the resultant failure in structuring the lethic energies of the preservative and death drives can result in a specific pathology in which disease is used as a trophy and a means to bind the object in an ongoing caretaker relationship.

Hable con Ella (Talk to Her) through the lens of gender.

In the 2002 film Hable con Ella (Talk to Her), Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar plays with the ambiguity of gender, transcending conventional assumptions about "masculinity" and "femininity." Each of the four main characters holds complex, varied, and, in some cases, gender-bending gender identifications. The theme of gender plasticity is a prominent motif in this film.

Contributions to understanding therapeutic change: now we have a playground.

The understanding of therapeutic change is explored in two ways. The first is by providing a model of change that emphasizes moment-to-moment, "local-level" interactions in the analytic dyad. The second is to offer detailed clinical information--taken from the videotape of a child analyst's first session with a three-year-old girl--that illustrates how this change model can be useful to clinicians.

Blanche, Stella, Tennessee and Rose: the sibling relationship in a Streetcar Named Desire.

Tennessee Williams's guilty and loving relationship with his sister Rose haunted his life and influenced his writing. This paper explores that complex sibling relationship and Williams's attempt to both give voice to and resolve his conflicts over Rose through the writing of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Anna, leaving home--an adolescent girl's journey.

The author presents an in-depth exploration of psychoanalytic process from her work with Anna, a young woman in treatment from age 15 through her 18th birthday, when she left for college. Anna came to treatment with attachment problems and bulimic symptoms embedded in her character structure, the deformation of which had impaired relationships and disrupted developmental processes. A noteworthy aspect of Anna's analysis is a treatment resistance that repeated early issues of abandonment and loss, and that allowed the analyst to experience the centrality of Anna's sadomasochistic relatedness.

The threat of male-to-female erotic transference.

Vignettes from an ongoing psychoanalysis with a patient, Michael, are presented to illustrate the various dimensions of the erotic transference at different phases of the treatment. The relation to power, the experience and expression of aggression, how these may be organized by gender, and the female analyst's countertransference are discussed as potentially fostering or inhibitory in the development of an erotic transference. Traditional sociocultural gender stereotypes kept alive in fantasy can cause female analysts to subtly foreclose the impending threat of an intense erotic transference with male analysands due to a fear of outwardly directed male aggression.

Herding the animals into the barn: a parent consultation model.

Initial assessments of children with psychological problems are important both to develop appropriate diagnoses and to provide the basis for productive discussions with parents on treatment alternatives. This paper develops an assessment method referred to as the Parent Consultation Model (PCM) that emphasizes the use of videotape micro-analysis and developmental theory to provide critical information to parents as well as to the clinician in this important initial stage. The paper provides a description of the PCM and an expanded example of the use of the PCM, including illustrations of how these methods can be used to organize information and engage parents in the initial consultation.

The dreamer's use of space.

The dreamer often portrays wishes, conflicts, or current problems in terms of visual-spatial representations and metaphors. The spatial dimensions of dreams frequently signify important affective themes of the dream. In doing so, they serve to continue or reflect processes of self-recognition in relation to the environment, processes that began in early childhood, when the developing child's experience of movement through space played a central role in organizing affect and motivation systems that contribute to emerging schemata of the self.

Motor action, emotion, and motive.

The experience, imagery, and fantasy of self in motion play a central part in the dreams, aspirations, and affective life of individuals, and in their growth. Human infants are supplied with an intrinsic drive to move to, with, and against forces and objects in the natural world, for that action maps a developing self into the world. This striving is not derivative from some other drive; it is a motivational force in and of itself intertwined with other essential strivings of the developing individual.

The lure of hypocrisy.

Why are we susceptible to hypocrisy? Four preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy are delineated. The reasons for our complex attitude to hypocrisy, both condoning and condemning it, are also explored. Hypocrisy is the false claim to virtue.

Margo and me. Gender as a cause and solution to unmet needs.

This paper presents a six-year analytic treatment that began when Margo was five and a half years old. Unable to get the love and attention that her older brothers received, Margo sought repair by deciding to be both a boy and a girl. Before a solid gender identity could emerge, I needed to facilitate her development and help her obtain a cohesive sense of self that would include ego integration of feelings and object relationships.

Analysts who commit sexual boundary violations: a lost cause?

The causes of sexual misconduct by analysts are discussed, as is the viability of rehabilitation for different types of transgressors. Common misunderstandings about the transgressor (such as the assumption of psychopathy and the likelihood of multiple offenses) are countered with a summary of data derived from the evaluation and/or treatment of over two hundred cases, most of them one-time transgressors. The typical characteristics of the analyst or therapist who engages in sexual misconduct are presented and discussed as qualities that are to some extent present in analysts generally.