This essay focuses on the liminal area of language and its particular importance for our work in psychoanalysis. It addresses the sensory/embodied system that stretches language beyond its signified meaning and expression in speech acts and focuses on the communicative pivots that intonation, rhythm, touch, movements, and facial gestures add to the way we make and understand meaning interpersonally.
The author, a poet, muses on two of his poetic muses, acknowledging their location at the liminal space between inspiration and creation, as well as their role in the service of making.
This paper explores liminal sexual and gendered subjectivities and identities - in particular bisexuality, transgenderism, and intersexuality - with an attention to the intersections of race, culture, and class. It argues that the potential space of psychoanalysis should work to make room for forms of subjectivity that defy identity, and which often fall through the cracks of cultural intelligibility. It challenges psychoanalysts to tolerate ambiguity; to allow sexuality and gender to at once orient and disorient. It addresses the problem of identity itself, arguing that good psychoanalytic practice at once acknowledges the limitations of identity and accepts that its formation is critical to helping people make sense of their own complexity. It argues that queer theory should be a necessary part of psychoanalytic education. And finally, it offers numerous clinical examples, including an extended case study of a patient who struggles with the biological ambiguity of his sexed body and with the difficulty of finding the language to make sense of it.
Integrating ideas from Buddhism and psychoanalysis, this short essay is based on introductory remarks delivered as comoderator of the panel Transcendental and the Uncanny: The Liminality of Death Itself as part of the Liminal Spaces Conference.1 A paradigm shift in psychoanalytic theorizing about the nature of consciousness is implicated.
Who am I? This is a point of inquiry that confronts us all, as members of the human race. Locked in the deepest corridors of our minds are the ingredients, the elements, that inform who we believe ourselves to be, or long to become. All too frequently, though, particularly in the aftermath of psychological trauma, critical aspects of lived experience are rendered unavailable to us. They remain defensively hidden from conscious experience, although they actively, and consistently, exert influence upon our sense of selfhood. These observations hold relevance for our work with our patients, who seek our help in locating a more stable sense of self, one that feels less intrapsychically and interpersonally alienated. How do psychoanalysts help our patients find meaning in answer to their search? The answer rests in the fact that the conduct of psychoanalysis is, itself, an act of creativity. Like poets, for instance, psychoanalysts invite our patients into liminal, or potential spaces, where internalized, dissociated experiences, might be interrogated creatively. As is true of poetry, psychoanalysis has the capacity to draw patient and analyst alike into psychic interiors, where resides the complexity of our humanity-always dynamic, always yearning, always alive, even if as yet unknown. Psychoanalysis, as does poetry, cradles us into as yet unauthorized corridors, trespassing past sentinels of the mind standing guard against truths as yet unthought. It is an otherworldly interior that we enter, one constituted of the rhythms of pain, and loss, of rage, and of the love that poetic forms elicit. The experience transcends fantasy. It is, rather, more like being in a dream-one that, in the exquisite language of D. W. Winnicott (), "ha[s] poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning related to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always, fundamentally about [one's]self" (p. 48). With two case presentations, the author discusses how psychoanalytic form and language, in concert with poetic form and language, can attenuate the power of rigid, dissociative boundaries, and guide our patients' journey toward discovery and potential change.
In this article, I use the witnessing of a tragic accident and the relationship formed between me, as a first responder, and the victim to describe how in psychoanalysis patients and analysts collide in what Apprey terms "pluperfect errands." The use of these errands can be an ontological tool in the psychoanalytic relationship and have helped form my identity as a psychoanalyst. Drawing associative links between this story and the analytic dyad, this story travels in and out of tragedy, hopefulness, and repair, resulting in mutual trauma, transformation, and healing, much like what takes place between patient and analyst. I raise the following questions in this paper: Who in analysis is listening to whom? What forms the unique analytic identity? And how does therapy repair the ruptures of previous traumas for both patient and analyst? This paper addresses the inevitable personal and professional entanglements of analysts and details how our histories and haunts are recognized and processed with our patients.
This paper argues that developments in social media, robotics, and AI complicate processes of liminality as corporeality is confronted. In the consulting room, the analyst is called upon to witness, receive, contain, and experience challenging unstable body states as liminality enters the therapeutic relationship.
The embodied impact of trauma complicates the work of helping our patients access more enlivened states of being. Like all trauma, the intersecting traumas of racism, misogyny, and sexual violence can lead to chronic autonomic nervous system dysregulation that forecloses the capacities for fantasy, imagination, and insight so central to the psychoanalytic process. Somatic approaches can be enlisted to support the patient in developing an "embodied observing ego" that tracks present moment bodily experiences signaling the presence of anxiety, defense, core affect, and trauma survival responses. As self-regulatory capacity increases, the patient is helped to consciously execute trauma survival responses which had previously been inhibited or truncated. This approach, informed by the work of Pierre Janet (1919/1925) and contemporary neurobiology and traumatology (e.g., Levine, 1997; T. Ogden, 2019), and by sensorimotor psychotherapy in particular (T. Ogden, 2019), allows patients to experience a previously inaccessible stage of "triumph," and unlocks their capacities for meaning making and integration. I outline this embodied psychodynamic approach through clinical illustrations from my work with an Indian American woman grappling with the effects of racialized and gendered trauma.
Bodies can be a place where co-construction of relational meanings between patient and analyst occurs. Sometimes patients may need to use our bodies (both patient's and analyst's) as liminal space-a space between inside and outside, between self and other, between language and silence. Processing this mutual experience allows the patient to experience body-states relationally and to access dissociated meanings, but it also means that the analyst is inevitably pulled into the relational dynamics implicated in the patient's symptoms. A clinical vignette is presented from the perspective of the body in liminal space. In this example it is from inside out, rather than outside in.
Intermediate space is both a psychic and material domain of association, a facilitating realm that is abridged or collapsed by some variety of haunted experience like plagues. When we are plagued, the wide world disappears; it is no longer imaginable. Paradoxically, what we need to recover imagination is imagination itself. Plagues change not only how we imagine, how we dream of the future, but how we enact it individually and collectively.
Irreverence has always been integral to psychoanalysis. In its beginnings psychoanalysis was implicitly irreverent of the conventional moral and religious ethos. This paper looks at the implication of irreverence for contemporary psychoanalysis.
There are some patients for whom otherness disrupts precarious experiences of personal coherence and stability. Analysts and patients are thus sorely challenged to find bridges between inside and outside, fantasy and reality, self and other, subjectivity and objectivity-the in-between spaces that give psychoanalysis its particular power. This article explores the clinical dilemmas in working with such patients who tend to present as either lost in subjective experience with little connection to externality, or as trapped in an objectified reality devoid of personal vitality. Winnicott's conceptualization of transitional space, and Sheldon Bach's elaboration of related capacities to move fluidly between states of subjective and objective self-awareness, are used to: 1) illuminate what's missing in both presentations, and 2) describe the enactments that unfold between "me" and "not-me." To the degree that its present, subjective experience is either disconnected from, or conflated with, externality. For patients without access to transitional space, its emergence will likely be from within these pathological organizations in which both members of the dyad struggle to keep inner and outer both separate and related.
Fascism is resurgent around the globe; its atrocities seem to be erased from historic memory. In this article, the author probes the eroticized field that exists between fascism's leaders and its followers. The article proposes that a subliminal erotic seduction is foundational to fascist structures. This phenomena is characterized by a veneer of purity and moralism, which ignites, and conceals a gendered web of perversion. The author argues that fascism writes erotic law and ignites transgressions of its own law. All of this sustains phallic mythologies of hyper-hetero-masculine supremacy and prowess. To maintain this fragile, collective masculine narcissism, fascism relies on a split off, externalized category of 'deviance,' which is persecuted. In exploring these arrangements, the article emphasizes the dread of, hatred for, and control of women. Finally, the author questions fascism's construction of the gender fluid fascist woman whose support is vital to these movements.
This article focuses on initial reflections to the clinical encounter between a victim of extreme police violence during the 2019 Chilean social protest and a psychoanalyst who has previously worked with victims of State violence arising from the Pinochet military dictatorship, (1973-1990). The author discusses similarities and differences between working with victims of both traumas. She describes ILAS (The Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights), formed in 1988 to provide psychotherapeutic care to victims of political repression during the dictatorship, and to conduct research around mental health and human rights.
This article suggests that "fascism amnesia" has occurred when the world no longer remembers enough about the antecedents and repercussions of its history. This nonmemory can fail to prevent its recurrence. Reviewing what is happening in the United States and in the world, the author argues that these are all examples of reemerging deeply oppressive fascistic forces and the ways that regimes of power exert control over minorities, their most vulnerable citizens. The author further believes that the forgetting of history can be understood as part of the phenomenon of transgenerational transmission of trauma, where the unfinished work or wounds of one generation get passed down to the next. Further, it will be argued that to break or interrupt this transmission, a bearing witness needs to happen. An example is offered of the Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, whose ongoing mourning and the persistence of memory offers successive generations an entry into the process of "continuing mentalizing." Such witnessing needs to be in the service of defying and refusing fascistic amnesia.
This article discusses several symptoms of the increasing right-wing authoritarianism in Western democracies. The author uses the examples of the growing desire for an authoritarian leader, the urban legends that arise in anti-vaccination communities, the emptying of political discourse, a polarization in public political discourse and in academic debate (or the lack of such debate due to withdrawal into opinion bubbles, especially on the issue of the claiming of historical traumas). Furthermore, the article discusses some hypotheses on the socio-psychodynamic backgrounds of said social symptoms, in particular the fear of an increasingly incomprehensible complexity of the economic and social environment in the globalized digital age.
