Six of us, members of a writing and supervision group, wrote these pieces in the context of work we were doing on ghosts and spectral objects. You might say that what was on our minds was some old disturbing history, some aspect of psychic life that continued to haunt as well as inform how we work. We took the chance and opportunity to craft in personal prose some deep truths about anchoring myths and traumas in our personal histories. Yet, crucially, we wrote very personally about the kinds of key issues that arise for many analysts in so many clinical moments with patients in many kinds of trouble, and in many kinds of therapeutic arrangements.
We see the truth of family therapist Bowen’s (Citation1978) and psychoanalyst Faimberg’s (Citation2004) firm belief that we always see at least three generations at a time, in both patient and analyst. So there is a crowded scene our consulting room. Henri Rey speaks of “an ambulant cemetery.” In the light of Rey’s work we can see, in these essays, how each of us carries the history of caring for others, the precocious caretaking that practically defines the childhoods of those of us who grow up to work as therapists and analysts. These personal stories animate the deep commitment the analyst makes to the care and service of the patient.
Following Rey (Citation1988)and Baranger (Citation2009), we pay attention to the long-standing contract so many of us have to care for, and work to repair, the dead and dying objects in our internal worlds. (I am mindful that the “we” I speak of is both patient and analyst.) Rey calls this living “in a frontier state.”
As it turns, out there is already a term for this kind of writing, although the six of us have come to it not through study but via our own unique pathways: “Auto-theory.” Autobiography in the service of theory. The personal is political is theoretical. Our methodology extends the lineage of Dimen (Citation2010), who articulated this particular project for herself and her students. The personal voice, the story you do and don’t want to tell, the hidden templates that are carried forward from the past, to be (hopefully) enacted and healed in the present.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Adrienne Harris
Adrienne Harris, PhD, is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is the author of Gender as Soft Assembly.
References
- Baranger, W. (2009). The dead-alive: Object structure in mourning and depressive states. In L. Fiorini (Ed.) The work of confluence; Listening and interpreting in the psychoanalytic field (pp. 203–216). London, UK: Karnac.
- Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
- Dimen, M. (2010). With culture. In M. Dimen (Ed.) With culture in mind: Psychoanalytic stories. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
- Faimberg, H. (2004). The telescoping of generations. London, UK: Karnac.
- Rey, J. H. (1988). That which patients bring to analysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 69, 457–470.