Richard M. Waugaman

On patients' disclosure of parents' and siblings' names during treatment.

The patients spontaneous disclosure of a parents name is frequently associated with appearance of core conflicts, especially genetic and transference themes of incest, other oedipal derivatives, and separation anxiety. Using a parents first name has the unconscious implication of incest, since one is doing something which ones other parent but not oneself is allowed to do. In some primitive cultures, saying aloud the names of ones parents was strictly forbidden. Disclosing a parents name to the analyst may parallel the developmental step during childhood when the patient learned the parent had a first name. The childs acquisition of language, including proper names, fosters object constancy and the internalization of the parents, from whom language is learned. For patients who do not usually refer to a sibling by name, disclosure of the siblings name may also reflect the concurrent emergence of central conflicts. In particular, such disclosure may accompany associations about an earlier closeness with the sibling giving way to subsequent estrangement. Naming the sibling may also mark an intensification of a sibling transference to the analyst.

Falling off the couch

The patients therapeutic regression intensifies certain unconscious meanings of the analytic couch. In addition to representing the analysis or the analyst in general, the couch can represent the unconscious, or it may lake on the symbolic significance of the analysts or mothers arms, lap, breasts, or womb. When the genetic roots of the patients transference include substantial experiences of disappointment, narcissistic injury, and mistrust, the theme of falling from the couch may emerge as a dream, an association, or even an enactment. This theme usually implies the presence of a deepening but mistrustful transference, based on earlier disappointments by the patients primary objects. Falling off the couch may be associated with being dropped as an infant, rolling out of bed as a child, birth, miscarriage, castration, death, termination, defending against passive wishes, punishment for sexual or aggressive transgressions, escaping an attack, descending into the unconscious, or wanting to be picked up and comforted.

Book Review: Shakespeare beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy:

Richard Bachman is a well-known author of several successful novels. Inexplicably, conspiracy theorists invented the improbable scenario that another person secretly wrote his books. This would mean that numerous people are keeping silent about the true author. So no rational person could believe such a preposterous idea. Actually, as some of you know, several years after the first Richard Bachman novel appeared, a perceptive bookstore clerk found evidence linking these novels to the best-selling author Stephen King, and King then confessed that he did write them. This is just one of the countless, endlessly fascinating stories of pseudonymous authorship that are receiving more attention during the past decade. It is true that William Shakspere of Stratford was once the “most plausible contender” (p. 30) for authorship of the Shakespearean canon. The name “William Shake-speare” (often hyphenated) appeared on some early editions of the canonical plays and poems. Ben Jonson listed “William Shake-Speare” (as he spelled it) as an actor in the first performance of Jonson’s play Sejanus. And Jonson’s poem in the 1623 First Folio of collected plays is widely thought to prove Shakspere’s authorship. Diligent research in the early nineteenth century uncovered many letters by Shakspere to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. But the plausibility of Shakspere’s authorship was strongest before these letters were exposed as forgeries; before scholars (e.g., North 2003; Starner and Traister 2011) began recognizing the frequency and complexity of anonymous authorship in Elizabethan literature (e.g., hyphenated authors’ names often signaled that they were pen names); and before solid research undermined every other foundation of the theory that Shakspere of Stratford wrote the works. Scholars such as David Riggs (1989), himself a “Stratfordian,” have shown convincingly that Ben Jonson was a master of ambiguity. The Shakespearean scholar George Steevens

Book Review: Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works

BieBer, i. (1980). Cognitive Psychoanalysis: Cognitive Processes in Psychopathology Northvale, NJ: Aronson. Breuer, J., & Freud, s. (1895). Studies on hysteria. Standard Edition 2. Burns, d. (1999). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. New York: Avon Books. erdeLyi, M. (1985). Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology. New York: W.H. Freeman. Jackson, s. (1999). Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pine, F. (1990). Drive, Ego, Object, and Self: A Synthesis for Clinical Work. New York: Basic Books. saFran, J. (1998). Widening the Scope of Cognitive Therapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, Emotion, and the Process of Change. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. WachteL, P. (1997). Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. WaLLin, d. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.

Book Review: Understanding and Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Relational Approach

his Italian colleagues, as well as the work of North American analysts interested in exploring the commonality of the different analytic approaches. He is familiar as well with the work of contemporary French writers. While this breadth of knowledge is a real accomplishment, to me his references seem idiosyncratic and personal, rather than comprehensive. But the real mission of this book is for Bolognini to introduce his ideas on the interpsychic. “Very cutting edge,” a colleague remarked, dryly, when I told him I was reviewing this book. While I am not sure this wine is new, it is certainly in a new bottle. The book is written with a distinctive voice, and would be a welcome addition to any analyst’s library. Reading it in whole or in part will reward any reader who would like to be immersed in the clinical and theoretical thinking of our Italian colleague, whom I have had the good fortune to hear speak in New York. Bolognini is well served by his translator, Gina Atkinson, who has ably translated others of his works.

Book Review: THE DREAM INTERPRETERS: A PSYCHOANALYTIC NOVEL IN VERSE. By Howard Shevrin. New York: International Universities Press, 2003, xix + 375 pp.,

A psychoanalytic novel in verse? Come again? Wait, don’t leave—this is the best psychoanalytic novel in verse I have ever read. Okay, the only one. But it is breathtakingly good. Except for those whose masochistic streaks have been insuff iciently analyzed, I would predict that all readers of this journal will enjoy it immensely. So don’t be put off by the poetry—read this book! The novel takes place in the 1960s, in a psychiatric institution f ictionally moved eastward to Tennessee. The seven sections describe seven sessions of each of seven analyses, including three training analyses; two characters take the role of patient in one section, and analyst in another. Why seven? Maybe the week of the Creation story, with no day of rest? Shevrin takes us inside the mind of each patient and analyst, writing perceptively and movingly about the complexities of their work together. Each section enthralls with its own deftly depicted drama. But several unifying strands link each analysis to a larger whole, adding cohesion, mutually ref lecting perspectives, and (all too often) a dollop of craziness to the analytic enterprise. Shevrin explains that “The politics surrounding [the search for a new director of research for the institution] weave in and out of the seven psychoanalyses that comprise the main action” (p. xix). Like great authors in the history of literature, Shevrin has masterfully created a world of his own in this novel (“this cosmos / In perfect B o o k R e v i e w s

34.95 paper

Giovacchini tackles a number of interrelated topics in this stimulating book. His title aptly condenses several of his interests—the impact of narcissism on the patient; the impact of narcissism on the analyst; and the impact that the narcissism of each has on the other. Giovacchini won me over in his preface, where he eloquently laments the loss of what he calls the “intrapsychic focus” in contemporary psychoanalysis. Although the author has himself challenged traditional analytic beliefs during his long and productive career, he feels that we have gone too far in abandoning some of Freud’s core discoveries about the role of unconscious conf licts in psychopathology. For example, he cites reductionistic theories of pathogenesis that restrict themselves to childhood trauma alone or organic factors alone. He argues that proponents of some analytic movements are motivated primarily by narcissistic needs to challenge the status quo with their innovations. Although he characterizes his attitude toward classical theory as “ambivalent,” Giovacchini might agree with Leo Rangell (1985), who advocates a total composite theory rather than the pars pro toto fallacy of so many contemporary analytic theories that select one perspective on the mind and dismiss all others. Giovacchini gets impatient when he feels that the proponents of ostensibly new contributions to the f ield ignore the similar ideas of their predecessors. At the same time, he fails to mention attachment theory and newer thinking about dissociative identity disorder, both of which are relevant to much of his clinical material. Giovacchini alludes to one of the forces that breed intolerance in our f ield: the quasireligious nature of various analytic orthodoxies and heterodoxies. He writes of analysts who venerate Freud as an “icon” (p. 8), of the “religious atmosphere” of strict Freudians (p. 13), and of the elevation of Freud or founders of competing schools to “sainthood” (p. 62). One way of interpreting our “continuous and shameful internecine warfare” (p. 13) would be as religious wars. Bertrand Russell apparently quipped that people are only willing to die for things they feel deeply uncertain about. Unlike polytheistic religions, which can comfortably import new gods (as when the ancient B o o k R e v i e w s