Jay Greenberg

The Analyst's pArticipation: a New Look

Over the past fifteen years or so, advocates of a relational theory of psychoanalytic process have developed a compelling challenge to the classical approach to clinical work. Their critique of a fixed `standard technique,` applicable across the board to all analyzable patients, has been particularly effective. The new approach opens the possibility of tailoring technique to individual analysands, negotiating the best way of working within each unique analytic dyad. But despite the openness of relational theory, many of the most influential clinical vignettes in the recent literature emphasize the analysts risk-taking, engaging patients in a highly personal way that breaks the traditional analytic frame. Various implications of the tendency of relational analysts to emphasize this sort of intervention are discussed, and questions raised about the way this may affect how relational thinking is received.

A classic revisited : Loewald on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis

Versions of the following papers were presented at the panel “Psychoanalytic Classics Revisited: Hans Loewalds ‘On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis’” (Gerald I. Fogel, chair) at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, December 1993. As a tribute to Loewalds lifetime of achievement, and in belated recognition of his preeminent position in the field of psychoanalysis, the exchange appears here almost in its entirety, rather than as a conventional panel report.

Commentary on José Bleger’s Theory and practice in psychoanalysis: psychoanalytic praxis

In his sweeping, visionary overview of the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and practice, Jos Bleger (2012) finds ‘‘contradictions’’ that have impeded the development of both. His paper, more manifesto than reasoned argument, is uncanny in its anticipation of the most important controversies that have preoccupied analytic thinkers working in all geographic regions and within all theoretical traditions since its original publication in 1969. Even given this shared landscape, however, Bleger’s perspective differs in subtle and not-so-subtle ways from that of his Anglophone contemporaries. His article bears the stamp of the unique vision that characterizes psychoanalysis in the Rio de la Plata, a vision that influenced his thinking and one to which he contributed significantly. Referring to his project as a ‘‘diagnosis’’ of the state of the field, Bleger calls into question many of the central assumptions that gave shape to the psychoanalysis of his time: the proper language for conducting our discourse, the ‘one-person’ model of clinical process, the nature of the analyst’s objectivity, the therapeutic value of historical reconstruction, the understanding of causality, the central role accorded to sexuality, and the weaknesses of psychoanalytic organizations and their training programs. He is a passionate diagnostician: in his view, psychoanalysis suffers profoundly under the weight of its theory. As he puts it, ‘‘just as neurosis is invariably a phenomenon of human alienation, theory has been structured in a way that reflects in its own structure the same alienation’’ (p. 997). This is a relatively short article, and Bleger’s ideas are asserted rather than developed; he does not place them in a historical context, nor does he engage alternative perspectives or acknowledge others who were trying to develop similar points of view. But despite what the reader might infer from the article’s tone, Bleger’s ideas are part of a larger movement that was under way in Buenos Aires and Montevideo at the time he was writing. Enrique Pichon-Riviere (Bleger’s analyst) had laid much of the foundation on which Bleger built, and Heinrich Racker, Willy Baranger and Madeleine Baranger – Bleger’s contemporaries – were exploring similar terrain at around the time he was writing. More surprisingly, in light of the lack of communication among analysts working in different parts of the world, in other regions theorists with backgrounds in very different traditions were grappling with very similar problems. Viewed from a contemporary perspective Bleger’s article looks strikingly prescient, but because of its style it can seem to be isolated from any wider Int J Psychoanal (2012) 93:1005–1016 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2012.00598.x

Therapeutic Action and the Analyst’s Responsibility

Models of the psychoanalytic situation can usefully be thought of as fictions. Viewed this way, the models can be understood as narrative structures that shape what we are able to see and how we are able to think about what happens between us and our analysands. Theories of therapeutic action are elements of what can be called a “controlling fiction,” mediating between these theories and our very real responsibilities, both to our preferred method and to a suffering patient. This venture into comparative psychoanalysis is illustrated by a discussion of published case material.

Disappointment: Something in the Nature of Analysis.

E verything we know of psychoanalysis, and everything we have learned from psychoanalysis, warns us that a sense of limitation and feelings of disappointment are inevitable and even essential reactions to our work. Freud—never a therapeutic optimist after the earliest, euphoric days of doing treatment—gave disappointment a central place in his vision of human experience. In “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” he wrote: “However strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction” (1912a, pp. 188–189). It does sound strange, of course, especially coming from the man who taught that the pleasure principle regulates our psychic economy. And Freud’s reasoning, his attempt to probe just what it is about “the nature of the sexual instinct” that works against full satisfaction, was necessarily shaped by the model of the mind with which he was working at the time. Because of this his thoughts about disappointment will seem incomplete today, and some contemporary analysts will find them at least a bit archaic. But they bear review, because they provide an intriguing perspective on the disappointments that are inherent in doing analytic work. There are two principal reasons that explain why the sexual instinct cannot be fully satisfied. The first has to do with the history of our loving relationships: we learn what it is to love and to be loved in our families, so at its origins love crosses a generational divide. Our first desire is directed toward an object that for any number of reasons (the taboo

Klein’s technique

ABSTRACT Reading these heretofore unpublished works by Melanie Klein is certain to surprise their readers, regardless of their previous familiarity with her work. Bound though she was to an earlier vision of the psychoanalytic situation and to an epistemology that today may strike many analysts as archaic, Klein’s ideas remain fresh and provocative. In this commentary I sketch out the controversies in which she was involved at the time of the lectures and seminars, and discuss how we might think about them in light of contemporary developments.

Commentary on E. Pichon Rivière's ‘The Link and the Theory of the Three Ds (Depositant, Depository, and Deposited): Role and Status’

It is hard to think of a theorist, after Freud, who has shaped the thinking of his or her psychoanalytic community as decisively as Enrique Pichon Rivi ere did in Latin America, and especially in the Rio de la Plata region. We might think of Melanie Klein’s influence in London, Lacan’s in France, or Hartmann’s in North America. But the ideas of each of these were challenged locally; Pichon’s apparently were not, at least until the rise of Lacan’s influence in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, it is impossible to understand the work of any Latin American analyst, from his contemporaries and his first generation followers such as Willy and Madeleine Baranger and Jose Bleger to contemporary authors, without taking Pichon’s views into account. Because Pichon influenced theorists whose work in turn was seminal outside Latin America (especially, at least until recently, in Europe) he must certainly be counted among the most important contributors ever to the evolution of both clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. But despite this he is relatively unknown today, especially in Anglophone communities. And even within Latin America we cannot always track Pichon’s influence directly in ways that are possible when we evaluate the contributions of leading thinkers in other psychoanalytic cultures. Rather like Harry Stack Sullivan, whose ideas can be found (often without attribution) in the work of theorists identified with many different schools of thought, Pichon himself disappears even as his impact is decisive. One reason for this, shared with Sullivan, is that he wrote rather little; most of what we know about his thinking is carried by an oral tradition and by transcriptions of his lectures by students. In addition, until the last year or two there were virtually no English translations of his work; the paper printed here and the book Enrique Pichon Rivi ere: A Psychoanalytic Pioneer (Losso et al., 2016) are among the first. Within the Rio de la Plata community itself, Pichon stirred strong emotions that make it difficult to get a clear view of the specifics of his contributions through the eyes of those who knew him best. Late in his career he turned his back on psychoanalysis, moving away from the cities in which he had lived and worked in order to pursue his social and political interests in Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98:187–200 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12604

What It Means to an Analyst When Analyses End

ABSTRACT Seven analysts reflect on the meaning of “endings” in the professional context of working with their patients, time passing, and their own aging. The loss of a particular patient; the loss of that patient’s world; the specific self-scrutiny that patient stimulates and the satisfactions and disappointments within the experiences are addressed, acknowledging as inevitable our own subjectivities and countertransferences.

On: Reply to Levine

Bleger J (2012). Theory and practice in psychoanalysis. Int J Psychoanal 93:993–1003. Faimberg H (2012). Jos e Bleger’s dialectical thinking. Int J Psychoanal 93:981–92. Greenberg J (2012). Commentary on Jos e Bleger’s Theory and practice in psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic praxis. Int J Psychoanal 93:1005–16. Levine HB (2010). Creating analysts, creating analytic patients. Int J Psychoanal 91:1385–404. Levine HB (2011). Construction then and now. In: Lewkowicz S, Bokanowski T, Pragier G, editors. On Freud’s ‘Constructions in analysis’, 87–100. London: Karnac. Levine HB (2012). The colourless canvas: Representation, therapeutic action and the creation of mind. Int J Psychoanal 93:607–29. Levine HB, Reed GS, Scarfone D, editors (2013). Unrepresented states and the construction of meaning. London: Karnac.

An Autobiographical Fragment

In this article, I attempt to locate some of the personal and professional roots of my identity as a psychoanalyst. Theoretically and clinically, I have arrived at what I think of as a “radical middle-of-the-road perspective” that includes both what I see as the most important and enduring sensibilities of mainstream Freudian thinking and what I see as the most interesting contributions of the interpersonal/relational tradition. Institutionally, I advocate a kind of cacophony that encourages respectful but most likely irresolvable debate among adherents of different points of view. My training, as a psychologist interested in psychoanalysis during the 1970s, was steeped in pluralism and conceptual heterodoxy. However, I believe that my personal history prepared me to seek out and to embrace this psychoanalytic world, which was at the time and to some extent remains slightly outside the mainstream.