Lewis Aron

Interpretation as expression of the analyst's subjectivity

This paper elaborates a “relational‐perspectivist”; view of interpretation as a complex intersubjective process that develops conjointly between patient and analyst. Interpretation is the principal process by which analysts position and reposition themselves interpersonally in relation to their patients, and in this sense interpretations contain aspects of the analysts subjectivity that are made available for use by the patient. Inasmuch as the analyst has captured aspects of the patients psychic life in a particular interpretation and insofar as the interpretation also expresses aspects of the analysts subjectivity, interpretation is best thought of as the quintessential container and purveyor of intersubjectivity between patient and analyst. The paper defines two dimensions of the analytic process, symmetry‐asymmetry, referring to the similarity or dissimilarity of the patients and analysts roles and functions in the analytic process, and mutuality‐lack of mutuality, referring to how reciprocal the...

The internalized primal scene

An important critique has been developing that questions the ways in which psychoanalytic theories have conceptualized gender and sexuality. Contemporary (postmodern) feminist theories and the work of gay and lesbian theorists have challenged the traditional psychoanalytic view of gender as formed primarily through fixed, unitary identifications. This paper reviews the classical concept of the primal scene and the Kleinian concept of the combined parent figure and recontextualizes these ideas within contemporary relational theory. The revised metaphor of an internalized primal scene challenges traditional notions of a unitary gender identity and lends support to the postmodern critique of the notion of a core or unified identity. This paper develops the idea that we need both a notion of gender identity and a notion of gender multiplicity; more broadly, we need an emphasis on people both as unified, stable, cohesive subjects and as multiple, fragmented, and different from moment to moment. In line with th...

Ethical Considerations in the Writing of Psychoanalytic Case Histories

An essential principle of psychoanalytic practice is the maintenance of strict confidentiality, and yet the presentation and publication of psychoanalytic case histories necessitate considerable public disclosure of the lives of our patients. Inasmuch as psychoanalysis is a particularly frequent, intensive, and lengthy process, a report of the unfolding of an analysis necessarily entails considerable revelation concerning patients, their inner worlds, and their life circumstances. This use of confidential material raises innumerable ethical concerns, and psychoanalysis, with its unique emphasis on unconscious mental processes, also adds to the complexity of ethical considerations by demanding that we take unconscious factors into account. When we speak, for example, of “informed consent” as an ethical principle, we as psychoanalytic clinicians must grapple with the problem of whether to take a patients manifest acquiescence at face value. This article explores such ethical considerations along with other ethical and clinical complications in the presentation of analytic material for professional purposes.

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 Tree of Knowledge: Good and Evil: Conflicting Interpretations

This article examines a debate concerning the exegesis of the story of the garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge, as told in Genesis. Two contradictory interpretations of the garden narrative are examined, the first as the story is elucidated by the psychoanalyst and social theorist Erich Fromm and the alternative interpretation by the Talmudic scholar and philosopher Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. This article compares and contrasts their exegeses and the respective implications of each view. The controversy, which has profound implications, reflects differences in world views concerning the good life, autonomy and relatedness, assertion and submission, will and surrender, obedience and rebellion, independence and interdependence, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Links are drawn to a variety of contemporary psychoanalytic theories, developments, and controversies.

Day, Night, or Dawn: Commentary on Paper by Steven Stern

It was in the years immediately following World War II and through the 1950s that the psychoanalytic establishment officially defined psychoanalysis as a subspecialty of psychiatry, and it was in that context of the professionalization of American medicine that they codified the distinction between psychoanalysis and (psychoanalytic) psychotherapy. In this commentary on Steven Sterns “Session Frequency and the Definition of Psychoanalysis,” I deconstruct a series of binaries that was built into the analysis/therapy distinction and that has plagued our discipline. It is argued that psychoanalysis identified itself with the culturally “masculine” and heterosexual values of autonomous individuality (the intrapsychic), while it split off all that was relational and social (interpersonal), marked as “feminine,” homosexual, and “primitive,” onto psychotherapy, which it then devalued. The paper then examines the implications for practice and psychoanalytic education.

Relational psychotherapy in Europe: A view from across the Atlantic

It is a delight and a privilege for me to comment on this special issue of the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling devoted to relational psychotherapy. It is also somewhat disorienting for me to hear a common language so familiar and yet spoken with a different accent, and so having the opportunity to regain my own orientation seems to me a good place to begin my comments. My understanding of ‘relational psychoanalysis’, as I am accustomed to using the term, has been shaped by my personal experiences with the development of this form of psychoanalysis from its beginnings in New York in the 1980s. I described the history of this development in the first chapter of my book, A meeting of minds (1996). While I will not review this history in detail here there are several aspects of it that I will refer to and elaborate on in this context. But to start, it is worth noticing that the term I am familiar with is ‘relational psychoanalysis’ rather than ‘relational psychotherapy’. There was never any question, within the circles in which I was associating, that this burgeoning of interest in relational theory and practice was a development within psychoanalysis rather than outside it. It was unquestionably of importance to the founders of this ‘school’, that is, once it began to be thought of as a ‘school’, that it was a school of psychoanalysis. It may be worth reviewing here that, when Greenberg and Mitchell, in what became an instant classic, Object relations in psychoanalytic theory (1983), used the term ‘relational’ they were referring to a group of theorists who themselves had

Women on the Couch: Genital Stimulation and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

Following Freuds emphasis on his rejection of hypnosis as leading up to the development of psychoanalysis, there has been little mention in the psychoanalytic literature of the larger context of the somatic medical treatment of hysteria within which Freud treated his hysterical patients, and which Freud himself practiced. We contend that Freuds emphasis obscured his association with massage, electrotherapy, and the procedure of genital stimulation practiced by his medical colleagues in the treatment of hysteria. We show that the history of genital stimulation—including its obfuscation, desexualization, medicalization, and co-option from traditional women healers by an exclusively male medical establishment—provides us with the background for a more sophisticated understanding of the context in which Freud developed his theories. Specifically, we examine the contribution of this understanding to Freuds theoretical emphases on autonomy and individuality, abstinence and the renunciation of gratification, penis envy, clitoral versus vaginal orgasm, mature genital sexuality, and the “repudiation of femininity” as the “bedrock” of psychoanalysis. We demonstrate that Freuds position as a Jew in an anti-Semitic milieu fueled his efforts to distance his psychoanalytic method from the more prurient practices of his day, including one his society associated with Jewish doctors and patients.

On the Unique Contribution of the Interpersonal Approach to Interaction: A Discussion of Stephen A. Mitchell's “Ideas of Interaction in Psychoanalysis.”

Abstract Contemporary psychoanalysts maintain a widespread consensus on the interactive nature of the psychoanalytic process. Mitchell (1997) compares and contrasts the clinical work of three well-known contemporary analysts from three different analytic traditions: Theodore Jacobs, Darlene Ehrenberg, and Thomas Ogden. Mitchell uses this exercise to demonstrate that we each have our own idiosyncratic styles of engaging the world, and thus it follows that we each participate in distinct varieties of analytic interaction. This article places Mitchells own clinical approach squarely in line with the interpersonal tradition. The article argues that among all of the various schools of psychoanalysis, the interpersonal approach is unique in the freedom that it gives to analysts to behave flexibly and spontaneously with interventions other than interpretation. The article comments on Mitchells unique qualities as a clinician and teacher.

“With you I’m Born Again”: Themes and Fantasies of Birth and the Family Circumstances Surrounding Birth as These are Mutually Evoked in Patient and Analyst

Themes of birth and rebirth, being born and born-again, can be readily observed in clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis even as they remain undertheorized. A clinical case is presented that traces the first four years of an analysis as seen through the lens of four consecutive supervisory experiences. This paper explores the central importance of fantasies and narratives of one’s origins and birth and the observations, fantasies, and expectations generated by one’s family circumstances at the time of birth. The paper examines birth narratives, fantasies, and myths of origination by following a clinical case across four supervisions. The patient’s birth-related fantasies are shown to interact with the analyst’s concordant and complementary fantasies as the analyst interacts with a series of supervisors in the process of being born as an analyst. The analyst’s personal birth narrative is linked to his fantasies about being born professionally as an analyst, and these are shown to interact with the patient’s birth fantasies. The paper suggests the ongoing significance of unconscious fantasy within the framework of contemporary relational psychoanalysis.