Abstract
Profile: Joseph Lichtenberg
In this issue of the Review of Books, we are pleased to present a new essay format that we hope you will enjoy: a young colleague’s discerning reading and personal profile of an influential analytic author looking back on his long life and career. In an essay focusing on two of Joseph Lichtenberg’s recent works, reviewer Sameer Khan weaves observations from a guided tour of Lichtenberg’s extensive photography collection with an exploration of his lifelong contribution to psychoanalytic thought: an expansion of Kohut’s self psychology into a theory of “motivational systems.” As Khan notes, Lichtenberg’s work often “shift[s] emphasis away from pathology and . . . toward shoring up what goes right in development . . . toward the ways human beings adapt their energies to grow, forge connections, and generate meaning.” Through Khan’s interaction with Lichtenberg, we see the inextricable link of the theorizer’s personhood with his particular contribution to psychoanalytic thought (a link no less essential for any living analytic theorist than it was for Freud, whose laser focus on the oedipal surely reflected matters of deep personal import to him!). We also see what happens when a young clinician confronts a clinical/theoretical perspective that is largely new to him and works to absorb it into his developing understanding of our field.
Psychoanalysis and the Visual Arts
From Khan’s essay on Lichtenberg we move to Sandra Hershberg’s review of work by another psychoanalyst whose immersion in the visual arts informs her contributions to our literature. Laurie Wilson is both a trained art historian and a practicing clinical psychoanalyst, known for her earlier biography of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Her most recent book is another exquisite work of psychoanalytic biography—this one, of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist Louise Nevelson. Though Nevelson also produced collages, drawings, and prints, she is best known for monumental, monochromatic sculptures. Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow shows both Wilson’s mastery of art history and her distinctive approach to clinical psychoanalysis—in equal parts incisive and humane. To her thoughtful, appreciative reading of Wilson’s book, Hershberg brings an understanding of biography developed over many years as chair of “Writing Lives and Hearing Lives,” a long-running discussion group at APsaA that explores parallels—and other forms of relationship—between psychoanalytic clinical practice and biographical writing.
Diane O’Donoghue—author of On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious—is, like Wilson, an art historian by training. For a review of O’Donoghue’s work, we turned to another scholar with deep interest in, and knowledge of, psychoanalysis. Jeffrey Ochsner is a practicing architect, an architectural historian at the University of Washington, and the author of several papers that bring psychoanalytic understanding to bear on the study of buildings—and their builders, occupants, and visitors. Ochsner describes O’Donoghue’s book as “a work of extraordinary depth and nuance that considers the ways in which Freud’s construction was shaped by his visual surroundings and cultural milieu”—the art and architecture of his era, no less than his beloved “antiquities.” Capturing a central element of O’Donoghue’s argument, Ochsner presents her understanding of how Freud “devalue[d] the ‘manifest’ visual imagery of dreams that might reflect ‘day residues’ or serve political or social purposes, in favor of a focus on the ‘latent’ meanings that connected to the unconscious as Freud had constructed it.” In this way, Freud may have arranged not to see what stood “on dangerous ground” in front of his eyes: visual evidence of real-and-present anti-Semitism.
Confronting Bias in Psychoanalytic Theory
In this section we offer two reviews that explore matters of significance in our evolving world: gender and sexuality; intimacy in the era of technology; and relationship and lifestyle choices. The works reviewed here invite us to revisit and rework traditional psychoanalytic notions of gender diversity, homosexuality, and the relationship between body and psyche—domains in which psychoanalytic theory has been subject to damaging biases.
In Sexuality and Gender Now: Moving beyond Heteronormativity, editors Leezah Hertzmann and Juliet Newbigin hope to provide “a training text for students [and] a resource for practicing clinicians,” as we work to confront heteronormative and cisgender bias in both theory and practice. In his review, David Pauley—who has himself published in this domain—observes that change on the scale needed “does not happen in the main via impassioned appeals to the better angels of those whose minds are made up, but by building a body of scholarship that persuasively challenges prevailing assumptions and demonstrates the relevance of LGBTQ-friendly psychoanalysis to diverse lives at the present moment.” Pauley sets his review in the context of the long, bumpy journey toward an expanded understanding of gender and sexuality—and a full embrace of both patients and analysts who fall outside old norms—in both Britain (home to seven of the eleven contributors to Sexuality and Gender Now) and the U.S. Pauley appreciates the courage and honesty of the volume’s contributors. Working with transgender patients, for example, one analyst discovered that many of her theoretical views on body and psyche did not leave room for her transgender patient’s relationship to his body, leading her to rethink much of what she thought she knew. Pauley observes that “working ethically with patients . . . whose stories simply do not exist in nonpathological terms in traditional analytic accounts . . . requires such innovations. . . . Only in this way can new and efficacious modes of understanding come into being.” Hertzmann and Newbigin, Pauley tells us, offer a significant contribution toward deepening a complex, contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of gender and sexuality.
In her review of Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco’s book, The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture, Karyne Messina explores the complex realm of what Knafo and Lo Bosco call “the crooked path”—that is, as Messina writes, “a way of living, often fraught with disappointment, hatred, and mistrust peppered with rebellion that diverges from the norm.” Messina’s review highlights the book’s psychoanalytic explorations of an evolving attachment between man and machine, which has increasingly blurred the distinction between the two. Contemporary relationships between humans and machines—the bonds that people form with their smartphones, technology, cyber-friends, and inanimate objects such as dolls—have profoundly affected the human psyche. Messina notes how Knafo and Lo Bosco broaden the notion of perversion, questioning “the distinction between aberrance and mere personal preference.” For Messina, however, Klein’s understanding of the defensively split-off and unwanted parts of the self may yield a different view, one in which “the barren, empty, and schizoid aspects” of the inner world of one on Knafo and Lo Bosco’s “crooked path” could produce an “inability to connect with real people” and a turn toward “companions who are the very embodiment of insentience and lifelessness.” Ultimately, Messina tells us, Knafo and Lo Bosco “present scenarios about the confluence of human interactions with technology that may greatly change the way people navigate in the world in the future.” Their work is timely; as this issue of JAPA goes to press, COVID-19 threatens all of humanity with harm through personal contact, and analysts the world over conduct treatment remotely. So we wonder (no doubt along with Knafo and Lo Bosco, and with all of our colleagues), how will the practice of “social distancing” affect us, our patients, and the practice of psychoanalysis?
Re-envisioning Psychoanalytic Theory in Latin America
We are pleased to include Michele Ain’s review of Fanny Schkolnik’s latest book, Psychoanalytic Practice: A Task of Resignification and Symbolization, which provides a unique window onto current psychoanalytic theory and practice in Latin America. Schkolnik—an eminent Uruguayan psychoanalyst and author—reviews traditional concepts such as narcissism, symbolization, and the oedipal complex, to expand their meanings and relevance in contemporary clinical practice. Ain describes Schkolnik’s thinking as “‘spirals’—a succession of new ideas revolving around her reflections on clinical work.” For example, situating her study of narcissism under the banner of Laplanche, Schkolnik revises the concept to include the recognition of the other. In relation to the highly debated topic of symbolization and unrepresented states, Schkolnik contends that the task of psychoanalysis is a resignification of the unsymbolized traces of the psyche. Ain notes Schkolnik’s belief that while we should continue to adhere to the familiar principles of neutrality and abstinence, we must also allow for new developments in our understanding of theory and technique, “guided by a genuine interest in the patient’s suffering and an unwavering pursuit of the patient’s wellbeing.” In her review, Ain examines Schkolnik’s theoretical views while conveying the sensitivity and flexibility of her clinical style, prompting readers to challenge their own psychoanalytic convictions.
Why I Write
For much of his long career, Sheldon Bach has been a beloved teacher, supervisor, author, and psychoanalyst. He has been a pioneer in the field for many decades. In praise of Bach’s most recent book—Chimeras and Other Writings: Selected Papers (2016; to be reviewed in an upcoming issue)—Stefano Bolognini, former president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, calls Bach “a great analyst . . . gifted with both immense humanity and an admirable conceptual clarity and originality.” In his contribution to our column, Bach says, “subjectively, I have a clear and immediate response” to the question we pose: “I write in order to find out what I am thinking”; he also writes “because we have been thrown into this world unasked and exit the same way and writing is the only response that comes naturally to me.” We are delighted to have Bach with us in this world—in JAPA and beyond.
Finally, we are reprinting in this issue Donnel Stern’s Why I Write essay, “A Magic World,” originally published in JAPA Review of Books 67/6, 1 as it was inadvertently omitted from the contents listed on the back cover. While we regret the omission, it is a happy accident in that it allows us a second look at Stern’s rich and vivid reflections on the process of writing. Writing, he tells us, allows us “to bring ourselves so thoroughly to bear on the problem at hand, with so little reservation, holding back so little, that something comes into being at least a little bit differently than it has ever done before.” It is a process that emerges wholly from within the writer yet can feel as if it arrives unbidden from a hidden place, deep within. The act of writing, like the act of reading, captures something uniquely human. It provides a place to connect with the most essential aspects of ourselves and our readers and provides solace in what can be a chaotic and unpredictable world. For Stern, writing offers “a feeling like no other, a feeling of becoming, of participating in the life of something bigger than myself, of contact with mystery.” Indeed, could there be a more eloquent prayer today?
