We are writing this Introduction to Issue 34:1: 2024 in November 2023, 7 weeks after Hamas’ horrifying attack on Israel and Israel’s devastating retaliation. Daily, we are bombarded with images of destruction and desperation, and a shared vision for peace and security feels both elusive and essential. This ongoing human rights catastrophe, saturated with intergenerational trauma, has fractured communities worldwide and within psychoanalysis; dialogue and recognition of the Other often feel impossible.
As human beings, analysts, and editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, we are reeling. But recognizing our fundamental interdependence, our responsibility to and need for one another, we are also endeavoring to generate conversation and hold complexity, creating space for reflection, trying to make the unbearable symbolizable and communicable.
In contemplating the mix of psychoanalytic ideas and experiences we have assembled In This Issue, we see that each panel reflects this effort to bear the unbearable, clinically, existentially, and socio-culturally. All of our authors, in one form or another, are wrestling with the unbearable, whether in the form of unrepresented experience, the necessity of engaging with mortality and death, or in aiding patients as they grapple with violent upheaval, exile, and loss. We invite you to think with us about this collection of papers, which are both thematically distinct and ineffably entwined.”
In “The Untelling,” Robert Grossmark offers a perspective on enactment as arising from the patient’s unrepresented history, a form of “narration in action” that is “unpast.” Any enactment entails mutual enactment, which becomes an “untelling,” a process where the patient and analyst give shape and narrative to the atemporal present, constructing a past and temporality that offers a path to new experience. Grossmark develops this novel perspective by describing an analytic treatment that illuminates and engages. In his discussion of Grossmark, Dominique Scarfone commends the originality of Grossmark’s work and yet cautions that the meanings explored are far from fixed; they are brought together constructively from a “scrapyard” of fragments into an “archive” that is eventually usable by the analytic pair. Jade McGleughlin extends the idea of mutual enactment in her discussion, highlighting how the analyst brings their own “unpast” into any “untelling” as a necessary part of therapeutic transformation.
In her compelling paper, “When the Analyst Dies and the Patient Goes Missing,” Kirsten Lentz argues for the need for us to redress a dangerous lacuna in psychoanalytic praxis, the reality that many treatments end because the analyst dies or becomes too ill to practice. Lentz calls for reforms in the field, including changes in analytic technique and institutional guidelines addressing the analyst’s vulnerability and mortality. In their deeply personal and clinical paper, “Death’s Chair: Sitting with Loss,” Rachel Kozlowski encourages analysts to engage deeply with our mortality, so that we can accompany patients as they encounter their and our eventual demise, suggesting that engagement with death be considered an essential component of the analytic function. This exploration enables us to utilize our fallibility and mortality toward growth and healing for our patients and ourselves. In her commentary, Jeannie Blaustein brings her deep reflections on these papers as co-founder of Reimagine End of Life, a nonprofit integrating the arts, healthcare, and spiritual traditions inviting people to enter into difficult conversations about death and dying, which break through familial and cultural taboos. Stephanie Brody, in her discussion, writes that death has been a muse to her and suggests that Lentz and Kozlowski’s papers balance and challenge each other, offering complementary, yet radically different perspectives.
Finally, In this Issue, we present “Notes from the Field,” a panel comprised of three clinical narratives by Spyros Orfanos, Lisa Lyons, and Marty Cooper, which chart their harrowing personal and cross-cultural journeys as they work with traumatized, courageous Afghan students from the American University in Kabul who were forced to flee their country as the Taliban assumed power in the last days of August 2021, following the chaotic US withdrawal. These papers describe the confusion, fear, and moral injury that each clinician struggled with as they sought to aid and companion their patients through terrifying dislocation, betrayal, and trauma. This panel closes with a powerful “Letter to Humanity,” penned by Shaista Shams, former student at the American University in Kabul and recent immigrant to the US, imploring the world to recognize and respond to the plight of the Afghan people.
These panels engage us because they evoke and respond to our personal, professional, and interconnected encounters with unbearable life-experience, facilitating a transformative dialogue that we hope will include us all.