Psychoanalytic Review

As an introduction to the panel on "Aging, Dying, and the Analytic Process," and to the Focus of this issue of The Psychoanalytic Review , this article offers personal comments linked to affective neuropsychoanalytic theory, and advocates an ability to think about illness and death as an integral part of lived experience.

By revisiting the last years of a long psychoanalytic treatment of a female patient, a psychoanalyst reflects on her own development as a clinician and on the changes in her experience of psychoanalytic generativity. An increasing ability to understand patient's shifts between creativity and destructiveness brings about a different understanding of the process of mourning, while the shared aging of the analytic dyad highlights the difficulty of ending an analysis that has become a way of life.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Attention to the manifestations of death anxiety in the clinical context is often absent in the discourse of psychoanalytic training. This exchange addresses some of the causes of such an absence: a fraught relation between privacy and secrecy, primacy of psychic reality and interpretation, and cultural underpinnings of sanitization of death.

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Offering a personal example, the author argues for the protocols of respectful, confidential, and responsible institutional support as a corrective to an individual clinician's lack of optimal judgment when facing difficult clinical challenges or personal crises.

This reflection on the initial stages of treatment of a latency girl whose previous analyst died offers some insights into inner workings of mourning in children. The mourning process intersects in complex ways with a developmental stage, object constancy, unconscious phantasies, and conscious ideas about life and death. Clinical material illustrates some challenges that emerge in the transference-countertransference matrix when working with a child who lost both her primary object (the mother) and her transference object (the analyst)...

The panel discussion presented at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute's 1066th Scientific Meeting held on June 8, 2023, takes up aging and dying of an analyst and their impact on patients and on the nature of analytic process. Participants reflect on conflicts and challenges arising with more analysts and patients living to an advanced age, on the unregulated nature of analysts' retirement, and on multilayered meanings of analysts' ethical commitment to their work.

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This appreciation of the work of Alan Roland reviews his pioneering contributions to the field of cross-cultural psychoanalysis based on the clinical experience with patients from non-Western cultures, most notably India and Japan.

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The death of an analyst does not imply a socially sanctioned role for their analysand as a mourner. Through an account of experiences following her first analyst's death, the author reflects on the role of writing as a mode of grieving, on the impact of her subsequent analysis, and on the holding function of analytic community.

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In this article, I argue that psychopathology ubiquitously pervades individual and social life. As Freud wrote, each of us finds some way of distorting reality, and as Laing contended, human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-deception. History is a chronicle of fantasies, mirages, distortions, and metaphysical consolations believed as apodictic reality, and the bizarre magico-salvific stratagems people adopted to ward off disease, catastrophe, and death. And yet many (even psychoanalysts) maintain the notion (or fantasy) that we perceive reality clearly and sanely...

Within the context of the debate over teleanalysis, I wish to reintroduce the discussion of voice as the primary link between analyst and patient, a link present in analysis on the phone. Far from questioning the importance of the in-person analysis, I aim to emphasize the voice, the musical semiotics of emotions, as a critical, if not the most vital, aspect of psychoanalysis as a "talking cure" and an art of listening. Insofar as the speaking is instituted in the body, the body is present through voice, even in the virtual analytic room in teleanalysis...

The psychoanalytic journey and the psilocybin journey both reveal unconscious dynamics. In this article a psychoanalyst discusses his own psilocybin journey. Similarities and differences between these journeys are discussed. Possibilities are offered for a dialogue in which psilocybin may contribute to psychoanalytic understanding and psychoanalysis may contribute to the understanding of psychedelic sessions. Patients may benefit from this cross-fertilization.

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In this article we seek to examine what we might learn about the therapist/psychoanalyst's function as selfobject by examining the relationship between the "vocal persona" and the "instrumental persona" in the art song. The comparison was born out of our own life partnership as a therapist, currently studying in a psychoanalytic-Buddhist training program that stresses the presence of the therapist/psychoanalyst as selfobject; and a collaborative pianist who instructs and performs with singers onstage. The concept of selfobject has offered a compelling and fruitful analogy...