The Anxious Amalgam of the Wish for “Recognition/Revenge/Reparation”: Discussion of Rina Lazar’s “What Are We Doing There? A Therapeutic Tale”

Abstract

In this discussion, the clinical utility of Winnicott’s notion of “object usage” is described and applied to Rina Lazar’s clinical material. In the light of this concept, our understanding of trauma and the role of the other in both constituting and ameliorating the effects of trauma are considered. A related area of inquiry is how the realm of intergenerational transmission of trauma might be traced out by the particular conjunction of the object’s availability for use in the face of the subject’s trauma. In weaving together the ideas of “use of the object” and trauma, the question of regression and its manifestations and meanings in clinical work are illuminated.

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Notes on contributors

Sam Gerson

Sam Gerson, Ph.D., is a founder and Past-President of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP) and of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), where he is currently on the faculty and serves as a Training and Supervising Analyst. Dr. Gerson is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and an Editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. In 2007 he received the Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of Genocide and the Holocaust from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his paper entitled “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust.” His most recent published paper is entitled “Hysteria and Humiliation” and appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in October 2011.