What Does the Patient Need Now? Discussion of “We’re Living in a Society: Ideology and the Social Object”

Abstract

In response to Eric Schwartz’s creative and timely paper, this discussion focuses on three points: First, that analytic patients of this social and cultural moment call upon us to reformulate even relatively recent understandings of—to use Stephen Mitchell’s phrase—“what the patient needs,” agreeing with Schwartz that contemporary analytic subjects are liable to be much more deeply and consistently troubled by the social realm and their places within it. Second, the concept of implication is put forward here as a way to elaborate and deepen our understanding of what is called for in the kind of intersubjective meeting that Schwartz illustrates. Third, this discussion takes up some additional considerations in applying Schwartz’s proposed adaptation of a Fairbairnian model in understanding the role of ideology in psychic structuring; concluding that in acknowledging subtle, multiple, and conflicting feelings and attachments in ourselves, we may inhabit our complex implication in ways that further the kind of responsive intersubjective engagement that our patients and our moment ask of us.

Keywords:

• ambivalence
• implication
• intersubjectivity
• patients
• relational

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay

Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay, PhD, EdM, (she/her), is a founding board member and Co-Director of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia, and is also on the faculty of the Mitchell Relational Studies Center, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) in New York. She is co-editor, with David Mark, of Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and in Relational Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2023). She has written on implication; empathy and recognition; the expansion of maternal subjectivity and thus enriched potential space made possible by Jessica Benjamin’s theory; and (with David Mark) the importance of the “intersubjective real.” Her work has appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. She is in practice in Philadelphia and New York.