On three strands of meaning associated with the word nigger used during the course of a psychoanalytic treatment.

The author presents an overview of recent clinical/theoretical work on the construction of otherness in structured forms of hatred. He then uses clinical material to demonstrate three interwoven strands of meaning attached to the word nigger, a pejorative used frequently by a patient during the course of a psychoanalytic treatment. As used by this patient, one strand is projective and the other essentialist.

Three varieties of authority.

Doubts about what can be known may hide what can be said. A focus on knowledge claims and norms that order them--first-, second-, and third-person authority--can replace epistemological projects of all stripes. Further, skeptical worries can be alleviated by attention to the way in which competent language users are secured from radical error by the intersubjective origin and refinement of our thought.

The dreaded promise of Christmas and the New Year.

For many patients, mixed feelings of promise and dread that can accompany the holiday season appear in consciousness faintly and fleetingly, usually in the form of bad expectations. But the "dreaded promise" (an oxymoron) of change can come to full life and is always potentially present, especially at separations, and is usually perceptible by the analyst. The dread can be accompanied by expectations full of wonderful promise.

On thinking and not being able to think: reflections on viewing the Abu Ghraib photos.

Using experiences from childhood, from encounters with contemporary art, from clinical experience, and, most elaborately, from an initial viewing of the Abu Ghraib photos, the author argues that the interpretability of experience depends upon its being legible. This legibility, in turn, depends upon the interpreter maintaining contact with his/her own capacities for thought, and, more fundamentally, with the vitally necessary community of others with whom he/she shares those capacities.

Work and motherhood: preliminary report of a psychoanalytic study.

This paper reports preliminary findings of a systematic inquiry into the manifest experience of conflict between paid work and motherhood. Psychoanalytic principles inform the design of a questionnaire and a research interview and the interpretation of data derived from both sources. An initial review of material from 140 questionnaires and 65 clinical interview series suggests that women vary tremendously in the ease or difficulty with which they navigate real obstacles to the integration of paid work and motherhood.

Psychoanalytic reconstruction and reintegration.

Psychoanalytic reconstruction has declined in theoretical and clinical interest as greater attention has been directed to the here and now of the transference-counter-transference field and inter-subjectivity. Transference, however, is based upon childhood fantasy, and is a new edition of unconscious intra-psychic representation and relationships. In this paper transference is viewed as a guide to reconstruction, but transference itself is also an object of reconstruction.

Consummated mother-son incest in latency: a case report of an adult analysis.

Reported cases of mother-son incest are very rare in the psychoanalytic literature; the fact of such incest, however, may not be so rare as has generally been believed. A detailed case report of the analysis of an adult with a history of severe physical, sexual, and verbal abuse, including consummated incest with his mother during latency, is considered in the context of other reported studies. The author raises some issues of resistance and countertransference that may influence the reporting, treatment, and perhaps even recognition of cases of mother-son incest.

The consultation process with an adult: a child analyst's perspective.

A close examination of a consultation is presented. Such a face-to-face encounter with an adult patient can suggest a parallel with another type of treatment: child analysis. It is argued that certain ways of working with children in analysis--the gliding between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic--were especially useful in bringing this adult patient to engage in analysis.

The psychoanalytic treatment of a child with deviational development.

This paper presents the analysis of Peter, a five-year-old boy with compromised ego functions including difficulties in maintaining stable internalized object representations. Despite these serious problems, which are often seen as contraindicating analysis, a predominantly traditional psychoanalytic position emphasizing dynamic interpretations was utilized. Detailed clinical material is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in facilitating therapeutic changes in Peter.

On the scientific standing of psychoanalysis.

This paper speaks for the claim that psychoanalysis qualifies as a scientific enterprise. It will derive from the conceptual and evidential structure of psychoanalysis a causal empirical hypothesis that admits of scientific intraclinical testing. Relevant topics from the philosophy of science (especially the nature of causal explanation and the work of Grünbaum) and the psychoanalytic theories of pathogenesis and therapeutic action are discussed in a preliminary way to create a framework for the demonstration.

Audience as analyst: Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective.

Author Dennis Potter has written an exceptional psychoanalytically informed television series in The Singing Detective. Potter succeeds by echewing the usual portrayal of psychoanalysis in cinema and television as a therapy which the viewer observes but instead creates, by means of the content and structure of the series, a production that forces the audience into a role of analyst. The story of the current life and the childhood of the protagonist, Philip Marlow, has depth and context which allows the audience to examine the personality of Marlow, including character pathology and traits, sexuality, fantasy, dreams, and delusions from several metapsychological viewpoints.

The meaning of perineal activity to women: an inner sphinx.

This paper is an inquiry into the close association of anal and genital functions in women and the background and meaning of that association. Excerpts from the analyses of two women with sexual and intellectual inhibitions illustrate aspects of erotic life deriving from anal-phase development, and the unconscious fantasy of an inner, erotic, and powerful "organ." Along with the lifting of their inhibitions, both analysands achieved integration of anal-sadistic and incorporative wishes with vaginal receptivity.

Freud and the repudiation of the feminine.

This paper begins with a discussion of Freud's central ideas on the feminine in his landmark paper, Female Sexuality (1931), written within months after his mother's death. It then traces the evolution of these ideas from the perspective of his own history from childhood to old age. Using some of his letters and clinical papers as reference, one sees that his experience of the feminine in himself, and especially his repudiation of the female components of his own identity, contributed to his belief that such repudiation of the feminine in males was a universal, biologically rooted phenomenon.