Fugue on a Figured Bass...and other duets

By Fern W. Cohen, Ph.D.

Some time ago, in the midst of revising an article under consideration by a psychoanalytic journal, I had reluctantly agreed to relinquish a musical metaphor in the concluding paragraph that compared the role of the analyst in the psychoanalytic process to that of a figured bass. It was, the editors had written, a striking analogy, but they believed that it introduced a "discordant" note in an otherwise "mellifluous" paper. In their suggestions for "fine-tuning," they felt that the rather obscure technical term would require explanation in an already longish paper and they encouraged me to end on a different "note." If the bad news was that they stood firm on their editorial ground, the good news was that they had accepted my article for a forthcoming issue of the journal. Furthermore. Since I had been "beating the drum" for my conclusion, perhaps I could come up with another paper and expand on it there?


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In Passage

By Susan E. Barbour, Ed.D.

Ralph McTell's song 'The Ferryman" (The Songs of Ralph McTell, 1991) captures my experience as a traveler and provides a metaphor for the journey of a psychoanalytic process. Psychoanalysis is an intense interpersonal and internal process and one that, as Jane Hall (1998) writes, is contingent on the therapist's ability to help the patient "recognize that this a journey worth taking and that the therapist is a trustworthy guide" (p.2). The destination cannot be anticipated for an individual, and attempting to contrive it would defeat its premise. Transformation is the ultimate goal. Freud likened the role of the analyst to that of the midwife. "As the midwife neither creates the child nor decides what he will be but only helps the mother to give birth to him safely, so the psychoanalyst can neither bring the new personality into being nor determine what it ought to be; only the person who is analyzing himself can make himself over" (Bettleheim, 1982, p. 66). Psychoanalysis is distinctive in today's world, advocating that there are no "fast answers, that advice is a disservice, and that exploring ideas and expressing feelings are the most valuable tools leading to growth" (Hall, 1998, p.4). So as Ralph McTell's song begins, the traveler is weary from his journey:

And he is very heavy laden, with the questions in his burden…
He has crossed the mountains, and he has forded streams.
And he has spent a long time surviving on his dreams.
As many times he's tried, to lighten up his heavy load,
his compromises failed him and he ends back on the road.

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Group Artistic Creation as a Lived Experience of the Unconscious

by The Unconscious Collective

The Unconscious Collective is a group of ten Duquesne University first year psychology graduate students who have joined together to study and experience "the unconscious", free of constructs or theoretical abstractions. We are clinicians in training, bringing with us influences ranging from psychoanalysis, humanism, existentialism, and phenomenology, to cultural, political, and historical theory. We come from four continents, bear different skin colors, were raised into diverse faiths, and speak different languages as our mother tongues. We have not come together to identify the best theoretical approach for understanding the unconscious, or to synthesize a bridge across the diverse theories that inspire us. Rather, we cultivate the diversity of our backgrounds in order to enrich our exploration of the phenomenon that most intrigues us: the ineffable mystery which is the unconscious.

In this short piece, we would like to introduce people to our questions and method of investigation. Our purpose is to inspire other training therapists to hold similar events and reflect on their experiences in ways that will deepen psychological praxis, as well as engender personal insight.


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Enchantments and Hauntings: Encounters with the Magic of the Unconscious

by Gabriella Serruya

The Section V 2003 Student Essay Award Competition winner is Gabriella Serruya, Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, Widener University, Chester, Pa.

In this beautifully written essay that ranges from memories of her own childhood play to insightful clinical encounters, Gabriella Serruya describes the unconscious as a ghost writer, a "story teller weaving its own logic and its own sequences into a tapestry that mezmerizes all who view it, if they dare." What Serruya has set out to do is nothing less than locate the unconscious processes that underlie Fonagy and Target's current work on the development of attachment and reflective function. In so doing, she describes a uniquely co-constructed intersubjective unconscious, very much in line with current relational models of the unconscious as unformulated experience.

—Ghislaine Boulanger

Part I: Play and Books

My parents are both psychiatrists.

Now, informing some people that your parents are psychotherapists, not to mention medical doctors, is something akin to casually mentioning that you descend from a line of witches. Inevitably, such people respond with an uncomfortable pause and a nod of the head or bland comment that screams the suspicion they forebear to admit. More often, people laugh out loud, and chuckle "So, did they analyze you all the time?" which, when they discover I am a graduate student in psychology, quickly turns to, "So, are you analyzing me?" The notion that one is an "expert" on the life of the mind seems to activate a fantasy in many ordinary, non-schizophrenic people that their thoughts can be read, almost as if thoughts had a bar code which could be scanned into consciousness by those with the proper equipment—namely, therapists.


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Discovering Child Abuse

By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Author's note: The Kalinkowitz Memorial Lecture that I gave for the NYU Post-doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis on March 14, 2003, was based upon the text below. This text is part of a longer work in progress, and it should not be read as a finished piece. Please do not cite it or circulate it in its present form. Thank you, EYB

Part 1: "Child abuse and neglect" (CAN)


Child abuse had to be discovered. People have always known, of course, that some adults beat or rape or starve children; and that some societies have explicitly sanctioned injurious acts and violence against children, even institutionalizing corporeal punishments, child labor or child prostitution, infanticide. Although most of the harm done to children was taken for granted, some of it was condemned or prosecuted even before child abuse was discovered. In the mid-18th century, for example, almost a quarter of the capital rape cases prosecuted at the Old Bailey in London involved victims of less than ten years of age; while three quarters of the men charged with rape in mid-19th century France were accused of raping children. But these actions were prosecuted as rape, not as "child abuse and neglect." That designation had to exist before crimes against children were clearly and consistently distinguished as crimes against children. But even then there was not a concept explicitly indicating that a group—children—was being targeted and attacked when a child was raped as a child. There was not a concept like the concept sexism, which indicates that women are targeted and attacked when a woman is raped as a woman. Maltreatment of people of color existed long before such maltreatment was marked with the word "racism" and understood as prejudice against a group called "Negroid."


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