It is March 2, 2022, as we gather in our zoom boxes for our Editors meeting to finalize our work on Issue 3 and share our thoughts as we compose In This Issue. Always there is a strange lag time as our words will be read in May, what can feel like a lifetime from this dire moment in our world’s history. We are shaken as individuals, analysts, and as an international analytic community by the devastation and human rights catastrophe in Ukraine. At our most frightened, it can seem that civilization is falling to bits in a kind of Bionian nightmare of beta bombardment. Our hearts and minds are with the people of Ukraine at this terrible moment, just as we are ever mindful of people the world over, fighting for survival in unimaginably brutal political conflicts.
Although difficult to extricate ourselves from the sights and sounds that envelop us, we turn to our meeting and to the question of what psychoanalysis has to offer the world in this moment As we reflect on our task as editors of this journal, we arrive at an affirmation of the value and power of community and of psychoanalytic activism, which we have probed in many papers and panels, as well as the transformative potential of human connection, healing and repair, which we explore in this issue through the clinical encounter.
In our effort to capture our thoughts, we alight on the idea of psychoanalysis as a continual process of becoming. We see the world, our field and our lives in continual flux, holding ongoing challenge and complexity. We play with Ogden’s recent work on the ontological versus epistemological. Building on Bion and Winnicott, Ogden has observed a contemporary turn in psychoanalysis from a focus on uncovering and knowing to being and becoming. This shift and its implications were thoughtfully elaborated by Steven Cooper in these pages (2021, Issue 3) and has become the focus of converging psychoanalytic inquiry in recent years. We believe that the commitment to uncertainty, to innovation and complexity, to interrogating our blind spots, and learning from our differences is at the core of the psychoanalytic project as relationally conceived.
We are delighted to be receiving submissions to the journal from a broader, more diverse, more international, and younger group of writers, introducing new ideas, revisiting seminal conversations in creative ways, and initiating novel theoretical and clinical dialogues. With each issue, our conversation is on the move, ever and always becoming, never arriving at a final or fixed destination. The varied articles In this Issue reflect that commitment to innovating, complicating, reconsidering and embracing the possibilities of becoming.
In her credo Can We Decolonize Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice?, Usha Tumalla Narra illustrates how foundational psychoanalytic conceptualizations of human development that were shaped by white colonial practices continue to impact racial minorities. With vignettes, post-colonial theory, and in conversation with credos by relational theorists, Tumalla Narra explores how assuming a position of humility allows cultural narratives to guide the decolonization of our theory, practice and training models.
David Levit explores the interweaving of Somatic Experiencing (SE) with psychoanalysis in trauma therapy, illustrating his ideas with an extended vignette of his work with a woman struggling with catastrophic dissociative dissolution linked to early childhood sexual abuse. He considers the challenges of holding and containment when working with such a patient, querying the purview of psychoanalysis. Discussions by Jody Davies and Elizabeth Howell echo in their appreciation of Levit’s clinical sensitivity, while both point to the extant literature that has addressed and incorporated integrative psychoanalytic approaches to trauma therapy. Davies elaborates on the unique ways she has applied relational theory to work with multiple self-states, while Howell describes her technical innovations in working with dissociative disorders linked to early abuse. Levit’s reply clarifies his formulations, contributing to this theoretically and clinically rich panel that explores the ongoing evolution of psychoanalysis.
In his stand-alone meditation, Steve Yadin rethinks our use of unconscious fantasy in relational terms, suggesting a “permeable boundary” between psyche and reality where analytic process offers a means of “closing the gap” between wish, belief, imagining, and a connected experience of relating with self and others in the real world.
Dinah Mendes offers a sensitive and compelling extended clinical essay that examines long-term psychoanalytic work with a woman whose life and inner world were shaped by the loss of her mother. She explores gender, trauma, mourning, and the restructuring of identity and self through the analytic process. Julie Gerhardt offers a close, thoughtful and appreciative read of Mendes’ paper, proposing alternative theoretical formulations that focus on complicated mourning, shame and guilt, the analytic process, and the role of the unconscious intersubjective third in the transformative process. Garth Stevens appreciates Mendes’ transformative clinical work and nuanced theoretical reflections, while raising some intriguing clinical and theoretical questions about the possibilities of a more triadically-inflected analysis of the relationship between the patient and her parents in understanding the recalcitrant effects of trauma inside a culturally gendered triad as well as considerations for psychoanalytic writing and training.
As we finalize this issue, we wish our readers and colleagues health and safety and hope you find some respite and sustenance in these Psychoanalytic Dialogues.