Galit Atlas

Generative Enactment: Memories From the Future

This paper posits that our unconscious hopes and dreams, our goals and ends, pull us toward our destiny, and highlights how we unconsciously anticipate and rehearse for that future. From objects of fate, we become agentic subjects, creators of our destiny, of our futures. Indeed, we suggest that this goal represents an additional layer of meaning to Benjamin’s call, “where objects were, subjects must be.” The prospective function, an idea first introduced by Jung, does not mean prophetic, but rather it means that we unconsciously “look forward” to, anticipate, envision, and construct future possibilities. This paper develops our understanding of the prospective function by exploring the concept of enactment, a central means by which patients and analysts enter into each other’s inner worlds and discover themselves as participants within each other’s psychic lives. The authors suggest that enactments are not only restrictive and repetitive, with therapeutic benefit resulting from their resolution. Rather, enactments themselves may also be generative and growth enhancing. Enactments can repeat and work through the past and can at times also anticipate, rehearse, and work toward the future, toward our transformation from fatedness to destiny. This thesis is illustrated by two vibrant and pertinent clinical case illustrations, one highlighting dreams and the other enactment.

The 'too muchness' of excitement: sexuality in light of excess, attachment and affect regulation

This paper brings together contemporary thinking about early attachment and affect regulation with our clinical and theoretical understanding of the problems of adult sexuality. In addition to recent theories of affect regulation and attachment, we incorporate Laplanches idea of ‘excess’, which was an important transitional concept integrating real experience with fantasy in sexuality. We elaborate the idea of excess –‐ ‘too‐muchness’ –‐ to illuminate the early overwhelming of the psyche that affects the formation of sexuality. Linked to recent theoretical developments, this idea helps to grasp the relationship between sexual excitement and early affect regulation, showing how excitement becomes dangerous, thus impeding or distorting desire. The ‘too‐muchness’ of excitement recalls the experience of being a stimulated, overwhelmed, unsoothed child and influences later inability to tolerate sexual arousal and the excitement affect. A clinical case illustrates this connection between attachment trauma, anxiety about sexuality, as well as shameful experiences of gender identity as an area of trauma. We emphasize the importance of working through the terrors and desires of the mother–baby relationship as they emerge in the transference–countertransference in order to develop the ability to hold excitement and stimulation without experiencing the too‐much as the intolerable. This includes the working‐through of ruptures related to overstimulation as well as the delicate balance of attention to fantasy and intersubjective work in the transference.

What's Love Got to Do with It? Sexuality, Shame, and the Use of the Other

This article examines Jessica Benjamins path-blazing feminist work on domination/submission as the foundation for later studies on sexuality and emphasizes intersubjectivity both as a philosophical model and as a clinical concept. The problem of dependency in the mother-infant relationship, the terrors and desires of the mother-baby relationship, and the intersubjective aspects of sexuality as they appear in the clinical work are discussed. The article suggests that the mothers body plays a fundamental role in the discovery of oneself and of the other and particularly in the development of the capacity for love.

Eat, Pray, Dream

Abstract This short case presentation focuses on dreams as a way to open a symbolic play space. Sophie comes to therapy and asks for what we later name “fast food” in order to help her grow, have a healthy intimate relationship, and get married. She begins her work in a state of agitation, very concrete, desperately asking again and again: “What should I do? Is anything going to change soon?” Our main focus is on her desperation, hunger, and requests that I feed her as an omnipotent mother who knows everything about the past, present, and future. There is limited ability to know her mind, use symbolic language, or play with the “food” I offer; rather it is as if Sophie has to immediately “swallow” anything I give her. In the room, the use of food becomes our first playful metaphor. I present four dreams from different points in Sophies therapy, emphasizing the use of dreams not only to move from concrete to playful and symbolic thinking, but also to enhance her ownership of her own mind and subjectivity to a point when she can “have her own kitchen, cook her own food,” and even feed her analyst.

Has Sexuality Anything to Do with Relationality

This paper discusses sexuality in the framework of relational psychoanalysis. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, turning away from drive theory, often abandoned sexuality altogether. This paper calls for a return to the centrality of sexuality in understanding the mind, development, and interpersonal/object relations. The author emphasizes a relational approach that highlights dialectical thinking, the third, and that positions sex and sexuality as the link between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic, highlighting the private, internal, enigmatic, and fantastic realm along with the pragmatic, bidirectional, two-person exchange. The paper discusses how our way of thinking and working clinically with sexuality has shifted accordingly.

Gains and Loss in Translation

Snyder, M., Tanke, E. D., & Berscheid, E. (1977). Social perception and interpersonal behavior: On the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 35, 656–666. Wachtel, P. L. (1977). Psychoanalysis and behavior therapy: Toward an integration. New York, NY: Basic Books. Wachtel, P. L. (1981). Transference, schema, and assimilation: The relevance of Piaget to the psychoanalytic theory of transference. Annual of Psychoanalysis, 8, 59–76.

Breaks in Unity: The Caesura of Birth

ABSTRACT Focused on the Bionian caesura, this paper suggests that the existential caesura of birth always belongs to both mother and infant. During that process of being “born,” the mother, too, experiences a line of breaks—breaks of time and space, of meaning, of continuity, and of boundaries—all related to an emotional and physical reorganization of boundaries and therefore to the unity of the self. This position statement presents the notion of “Breaks in Unity” and discusses the unspoken aspects of childbirth and the transition to motherhood.

Lo demasiado de la excitación: la sexualidad a la luz de los excesos, el apego y la regulación afectiva

Este trabajo reúne las ideas actuales acerca del apego temprano y la regulación de los afectos, por una parte, y nuestra comprensión clínica y teórica de los problemas de la sexualidad adulta, por la otra. Además de las teorías recientes del apego, incorporamos la idea de „exceso‟ de Laplanche, un concepto transicional importante que integra la experiencia real con la fantasía en la sexualidad. Elaboramos la idea de exceso – „lo demasiado‟ – para iluminar el agobio temprano de la psique que afecta la formación de la sexualidad. Ligada a desarrollos teóricos recientes, esta idea ayuda a comprender la relación entre excitación sexual y regulación afectiva temprana, mostrando cómo la excitación deviene peligrosa y obstaculiza o distorsiona el deseo. „Lo demasiado‟ de la excitación evoca la experiencia de ser un niño estimulado, abrumado, sin tranquilizar, e influye sobre la incapacidad posterior de tolerar la excitación sexual y la excitación como afecto. Algunas viñetas clínicas ilustran esta conexión entre el trauma del apego, la angustia vinculada con la sexualidad y las experiencias de identidad que producen vergüenza como área traumática. Destacamos la importancia de elaborar los terrores y deseos de la relación madre-bebé cuando emergen en la transferencia–contratransferencia, con el fin de desarrollar la capacidad de controlar la excitación y la estimulación sin vivenciar lo demasiado como intolerable. Esto incluye la elaboración de quiebres vinculados con la sobreestimulación, así como el delicado equilibrio entre prestar atención a la fantasía y realizar un trabajo intersubjetivo en la transferencia.