From Familiar and Familial Repetition to the Anxiety of Living Differently

Abstract

This article attempts to summarize the author's view of what is generative in the psychoanalytic process. Included in this discussion are reflections on the ideal aims of psychoanalysis and a perspective on mutative action. One clinical example is used to illustrate the author's theses.

Keywords:

• Psychoanalysis
• transference
• countertransference
• repetition
• generative
• therapeutic

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irwin Hirsch

Irwin Hirsch, Ph.D., is faculty, supervisor and former director, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; distinguished visiting faculty, William Alanson White Institute; adjunct professor and supervisor, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; faculty & supervisor, National Training Program, National Institute for the Psychotherapies.

Author of over 80 psychoanalytic journal and book chapters and four books: Goethe-award winning, Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self-Interest between Analyst and Patient (2008); The Interpersonal Tradition: The Origins of Psychoanalytic Subjectivity (2015); coedited with Donnel Stern, The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s: Rethinking Transference and Countertransference (2017); coedited with Donnel Stern, Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s–2010s: Evolving Interest in the Analyst's Subjectivity (2018).