A Responsible Controversy About Failures of Love: Some Comments on the Ethics of Presenting and Listening in Conference Space

Abstract

A demonstration of analytic love in conference space, based on a panel presentation at the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education, 15th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, Chicago, November 5, 2004. Two of the responders were unable to attend: the piece by Peggy DuBois was read by Bonnie Saland, Psy.D., and Katherine Schwarzenbach, Ph.D., spoke the words of Sharon Bassett.

Notes

¹In the dialogue of our work, there is a continuous fluid movement between the voice that is “we” and the separate voices that are “Gershs” and “Judy.” An alternating “I” in the body-text will reflect not only the way of writing but also the how of the actual presentation, how it is read in the conference, namely, that Gersh reads one part and Judy another. In the extended memoire, “I” refers to Judy, who wrote it in the form of a letter to Gersh. Opening up and presenting this complexity, in both the written–read and the presented–listened-to texts, is of some importance, as it tells something and demonstrates the polyphonic nature of dialogue between the many voices within the text and the many voices in the listening audience and within the reader of the text. This becomes, therefore, an in-vivo demonstration of the love-making of dialogue and autobiography.

²Our use of the word resistance from the beginning has drawn a lot of heat from readers, as well as audience. To American ears and eyes, it comes across as a vestige of Freudian authoritarianism. On the one hand, it would have been better to use a neutral word like objection, which is what, in fact, we mean, although resistance in its non-Freudian sense does convey a vital pushing-back, which objection does not. We have immense respect for resistance in its larger applications. (As Alice Walker, 1993, said so notably, it is the secret of joy.) And then the reason for not simply using a different word here is to allow for the visibility of our contribution to the difficulties we encounter in our everyday use of analytic terms. But on the other hand, we may assume that what we encountered at that moment was resistance and counterresistance: As we were experiencing the resolution of transference-based love-differences among colleagues, the colleagues being we.

³This is about how difficulty really is difficult.

⁴The paper was “From identification-relations (of power) to introjection-relations (of love): a note on identification with the aggressor,” presented to Psychanalyse, histoire, rêve, et poésie (psychoanalysis, history, dream, and poetry) organized by the European Association for Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, Paris, October 9, 2004.

⁵See discussion about the word resistance in footnote 2.