Psychoanalytic Quarterly

This paper examines two major issues related to the concept of identity. The first of these concerns the place of this concept in psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly taking note of its limited presence in the psychoanalytic literature of the British School of psychoanalysis. My argument is that the concept and phenomena of identification has been preferred to that of identity in the discourse of British Object Relations and considers why that might be the case. The second issue concerns the salience of the concept of identity in contemporary political and cultural debate, as this has come to denote differences of a socially-constructed kind such as those of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion...

Ill children/adolescents who suffer from severe organic diseases have to cope with their inner experiences, therapies, and the global burden of the disease. Although sometimes depression, anger, and death anxiety are openly encountered in medical settings, other times they can be partially hidden by a reactive and defensive path. In these scenarios, psychoanalysis is challenged to contribute the best comprehension of the intimate communication, maybe hidden, and the needs of the ill patients to express themselves...

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In this paper I first outline a conceptual compass to think about identity generally before addressing more specifically the question of transgender identity. To this end, I draw on Gilles Deleuze's (1993) related concepts of the rhizome and of the fold. I then argue that the body has always been and is ever-more-so the place for figurating the self, for finding and substantiating identity-hence, the unconscious psychic investments that we have in our bodies are key to our theorizing about any kind of identity...

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In this paper, I present a new reading of Erik Erikson's theory of epigenetic stages of development, with particular attention to the concept of identity. I show that Erikson's psychosocial approach requires close attention to the role of the community in the formation of individual identity and to the importance of the stage of generativity as an often overlooked component in understanding both identity and the whole Eriksonian life cycle.

Karl Abraham, one of Melanie Klein's analysts, undoubtedly influenced Klein in her clinical and theoretical thinking. Abraham was arguably the first analyst to focus on character, as well as the relationship between bodily experience and object relationships-central to the concept of projective identification. His writing on mourning (like Klein's, intensely personal) described identificatory processes with the lost object. In a lesser known essay, Abraham applied some of these ideas to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur...

The Covid pandemic has forced analysts around the world, some more than others, to work using Zoom and Skype. The technical innovation is here to stay and raises questions on a theoretical level. Is online analysis 'real' analysis or not? What is lost from the analytical experience? What, if anything, is gained? The global health emergency, on the one hand, has made these questions inescapable; on the other, it has provided a kind of huge experimental field to deal with them. Here, the author argues that when viewed from the perspective of the concepts of intercorporeity (Merleau-Ponty), un-distancing (Heidegger), and aura (Benjamin), some of the issues of 'presence' in teleanalysis become clearer...

On the evening of October 5, 1955, Bion presented the paper Differentiation between the psychotic and non-psychotic personalities to the British Society of Psychoanalysis. Two days later, on October seventh, Winnicott commented on Bion's paper in a letter and in particular, discussed its clinical material. The author makes use of this exchange to examine how the transformations that took place in Bion's thought and Winnicott's contributions helped bring about a quantum revolution of the psychoanalytic paradigm...

As Williams (1997) describes, patients with anorexia nervosa have been on the receiving end of intrusive maternal projections and consequently develop a no-entry system of defense. This paper explores how deception may function as an aspect of this system in two ways. First, deception may serve as a self-preservative effort to evade emotional contact with the maternal object, which is experienced as overflowing with projections, and to attenuate accompanying persecutory anxiety. Second, rumination-painful thoughts, feelings, and sensations-about the deception being discovered by the object leverages the mind's hypnoid capacities to construct an omnipotently generated container for the self that further protects the patient from emotional contact with the maternal object's projections...

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Using the concepts of microdialect and second skin , this paper explores the idea that a patient's silence in the session may function at multiple levels of psychic and relational organization, and-by virtue of its somatically experienced qualities and the special countertransference states these may elicit-might serve as a vehicle for movement between levels. It can thus be fruitfully approached as a potential portal for access to, and creative transformation of, unrepresented experience.

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Unrepresented states are considered important obstacles to the psychoanalytic process. They describe elements that are beyond the reach of the symbolic network with which psychoanalysis is used to working. The emergence of unrepresented states has often been described as the failure of the caregiver to symbolize the child's emotions and thereby enable the child to connect his or her bodily states to the psychic representation. Psychoanalysis, however, has been reluctant to name the locus of these inscriptions beyond the symbolic network as the body-self...

The terms unrepresented and unrepresented states are increasingly being referred to in psychoanalytic discourse, without our having established a generally agreed upon consensus about their definition, use or meaning. While these particular designations were never used by Freud, a careful reading of his work reveals them to be qualities that characterize the initial state of both the drive and perception. This paper attempts to place these terms in a clinically useful, metapsychological perspective by reviewing their conceptual origin in Freud and examining their elaboration and clinical relevance in the work of Bion, Winnicott, and Green...

This article describes the various crises of the Oedipus complex. In the beginning, I address the crisis of the first traumatic days when Oedipus was to be abandoned in the wilderness. This early breakdown takes place at what may be denoted as stage zero . During this first crisis, the defensive solution is an act of doubling, according to Quinodoz's dédoublement of the parental pair, accompanied by the defenses of splitting, foreclosure, and annihilation. Protected by these defenses, the child would be able to search for a solution to the neurotic part of the Oedipus complex...

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The author questions the conceptual basis of the unrepresented , a set of terms including: the unstructured unconscious, figurability, and reverie . Because this terminology proposes a profoundly different metapsychology than Freud developed, the author contextualizes the fate of Freud's metapsychology in America and how it was confused with the authority of the classical analyst. Then excerpts of texts by Howard B. Levine, one of the main proponents of the unrepresented, are analyzed to show that the decisive element in Levine's claim of creating meaning for patients is figurability ...

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