Working Outside the Frame

Abstract

The author, in discussing the clinical cases reported by Ubaldo Leli, MD, and Robert S. Weinstein, PhD, sees their work as serious, engaged attempts to work outside the frame of conventional approaches to analysis and analytic understanding and as attempts to integrate new ideas about body/mind, about sexuality and character, about analyzability and about the revisioning of homosexuality as a category of experience. She also sees each essay demonstrating the difficulties of our current situation in which psychoanalytic paradigms are changing but clearly are also still in transition. The author, in criticizing Leli's use of Kernberg's theoretical language, sees danger in grafting an experience-distance, symptom-driven descriptive language of character pathology and perversion onto new forms of understanding non-normative sexuality. At the same time, the author felt Leli's clinical attention to the patient and the complexity of his experience of the patient seemed quite separate from the theoretical framing. When the theoretical understanding of character pathology is bound in techniques that hierarchialize certain patients as unfit for analysis, the theory becomes a weapon not a tool. Weinstein's essay, on the other hand, opens up a fascinating and provocative area for discussion, one that pushes the envelope of our thinking about the effects of love upon the body, bodily health and psyche. Yet a fuller understanding or exploration of the therapeutic impact both of love and of breaking the frame needs both a more demanding and self-demanding discussion and a wider framing. It is not that love cures but that loving experiences are crucial elements in health. It would be a great service to the mental health community to have this process explored and speculated about in much greater detail. Both papers, according to the author, raise the question of how one conveys the problems and pressures and values of working outside the frame. The author sees a need to widen the epistemological frame and the aesthetic frame in case write-ups and essays if work outside the frame is to really take hold of our imaginations.

Key Words:

• AIDS
• analyzability
• countertransference
• HIV
• homosexuality
• psychoanalysis
• serostatus