Discussion: “Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequalae of Identification with Parental Negation” Steven Stern

Abstract

Discussion of Stern’s essay (this issue) on the clinical demands of work with disturbed patients with catastrophic gaps in functioning stresses a number of perspectives on gaps and disavowal with patients across a wide spectrum. Gaps, absences, negation and dissociative states are all linked to the phenomena Stern is describing. The strong influences of Ferenczi are stressed in this discussion and the sometimes contradictory clinical experience which is both of absence and invasive presence. Patients of the sort Stern is describing are both haunted and evacuated.

Notes

¹ Lewis Aron died on February 28, 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Harris

Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty and is a supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is an Editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies In Gender and Sexuality, and the IPA ejournal Psychoanalysistoday.com. In 2012, she, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safran established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School University. She, Lew Aron, Eyal Rozmarin and Steven Kuchuck co-edit the Book Series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, a series now with over 100 published volumes.