Abstract
Book Essay: Psychoanalysis and the Law
We open this issue of JAPA Review of Books with an essay by Nomi Stolzenberg, a legal scholar whose discerning reading of Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan informs a rich body of work at the juncture of law with political theory, culture, and religion. Stolzenberg discusses two books by fellow legal scholars—Maria Aristodemou’s Law, Psychoanalysis, and Society: Taking the Unconscious Seriously and Anne Dailey’s Law and the Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective—and one by a psychoanalyst, Jill Gentile’s Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire. In an informative essay titled “Law, Gender, and the Liberal Project in American Psychoanalytic Thought,” Stolzenberg notes that all three works share “a critical perspective on gender and a keen awareness of the masculine bias present in both psychoanalysis and law.” However, they diverge in their appeals to different portions of the psychoanalytic literature, and—commensurately—in their takes on the gendered nature of legal theory. Aristodemou draws from Lacan, and consequently figures law as a “phallic” system in which forbidden desire for incestuous union with the mother is repressed. In contrast, Dailey’s view of legal authority rests on Winnicott’s conception of “maternal function.” Gentile’s goal, writes Stolzenberg, is to construct a model of “feminine law” that combines “the French tradition of Lacan and Kristeva and the British and American traditions of object relations theory and ego psychology.” Stolzenberg questions whether this combination can succeed in serving Gentile’s goal of creating a system of law that “liberate[s]” and “democratize[s] desire.” But she applauds the effort to meld Lacanian and Winnicottian thought about language, perception, infant development, and maternal and paternal authority to construct a model of law based on traditionally female functions. And she notes the timely nature of Gentile’s work: “as the specter of illiberal democracy returns to Europe and America,” she writes, “so, too, psychoanalysis is returning to help us diagnose our political maladies and, perhaps, to offer a cure.”
Childhood and Adolescence
At this moment—with a global pandemic laying bare economic, societal, racial, and ethnic divides, when the most vulnerable of our population face daily risks and hardship—we do well to wonder how psychoanalysts who evaluate and treat children and teens might grapple with emerging mental health, developmental, and neurobiological challenges. In his review of Lisa Farley’s Childhood beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis, Timothy Rice explores Farley’s argument that childhood is “a construct, a container of idealizations, and an affirmation of adulthood as an age of reason.” Rice suggests that psychoanalysts have a great deal to learn from Farley’s invitation to consider the developmental stage of childhood as a cultural creation, moored in specific sociopolitical developments and subject to reconceptualization. He thoughtfully explores Farley’s argument that classical psychoanalytic views of development are limited and can have potentially detrimental effects on disenfranchised groups, such as those with neurodevelopmental disorders or gender dysphoria, and those facing racial discrimination. Rice tempers Farley’s view by suggesting that her contribution be integrated with significant insights from classical models of development “containing truths that extend beyond the idea of childhood as a mere social construction.”
Charles Parks’s review of Mentalization-Based Treatment for Children: A Time-Limited Approach—by Nick Midgley, Karin Ensink, Karin Lindqvist, Norka Malberg, and Nicole Muller—offers a close look at short-term mentalization-based therapy for children (MBT-C), based on the work of Peter Fonagy and his colleagues. Parks agrees that mentalization is a necessary component for the development of self-regulation and the formation of mutuality in relationships. Impaired mentalization can engender cycles of poor interaction, developmental difficulties, and distressing or coercive interactions. The aim of MBT-C, according to Parks, is “the acquisition of a core developmental capacity that enhances resilience in children from a wide range of clinical presentations.” Parks praises Midgely and his colleagues for a thoughtful and sensitive approach to the dynamics of child treatment, with emphasis on openness to the child’s experience, curiosity about the child’s play, and commitment to holding the child in mind. Parks questions the time-limited nature of MBT-C, which may not allow deep issues to surface. However, he finds value in the focus of mentalization-based treatments, which help children understand intentional mental states in themselves and in others. “The goal,” Parks explains, “is an enhanced capacity for mentalization rather than the acquisition of knowledge or insight.”
In her timely review of two books by Mary Brady, The Body in Adolescence: Psychic Isolation and Physical Symptoms and Analytic Engagements with Adolescents: Sex, Gender, and Subversion, Carla Neely highlights the author’s discussion of how young people navigate the developmental transition to adulthood. According to Brady, Neely notes, adolescents seek refuge from psychic isolation through bodily symptoms such as cutting, substance use, and eating disorders. Of equal importance are adolescent concerns surrounding sexuality and gender, which Brady considers within the framework of contemporary perspectives on development and in cultural context. On the nature of psychic isolation, Neely writes that “adolescents find their dawning awareness that as individuals we stand essentially alone in the world, in a certain fundamental sense, to be an enormous emotional challenge.” Neely emphasizes that the teen, in order to tolerate and mediate intense and uncomfortable emotions, must feel “grounded in relationship, in the experience of being fully seen and understood by the reflective mind of the other.” In this era of pronounced social isolation due to Covid-19, it is more important than ever that analysts strive to connect authentically with their adolescent patients, and help them discover meaning in their inner lives.
The Analytic Couch
Over the past few months—as Zoom and other virtual platforms have become the primary site of our clinical work—we have all had to abandon our analytic couches. Online and in virtual meetings, colleagues discuss how our patients are adapting to the strangeness of our new workspace: Do they choose to virtually replicate our office, lying on their own couch at home and facing away from the screen while in session, or do they prefer to suspend this aspect of analytic work and face us through the screen? How do we discuss such matters with our patients? A patient told one of us recently that virtual meetings make him feel closer to his analyst; another could barely tolerate the sense of distance and longed to be back on the couch, where she felt more physically supported. Our current circumstances make it all the more interesting to read Nancy Crown’s delightful review of Nathan Kravis’s On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud. Crown finds much to appreciate in Kravis’s book, starting with the insight that use of the couch did not begin with psychoanalysis, but has a rich historical, architectural, fashion, and cultural context. She muses that the couch has become, in essence, “an iconic shorthand for the practice of psychoanalysis”; its omnipresence in art, humor, and literature allows us to see how deeply the practice of psychoanalysis has permeated our culture. Crown tells us that, according to Kravis, Freud himself had surprisingly little to say about use of the couch. Was it mainly to offer some respite from having to look at patients for hours on end, or to prevent them from seeing expressions on his face that might disrupt the free flow of their associations? Kravis believes that the couch, ultimately, was privileged both by its medical uses and the romantic ideals of subjectivity and rationalism that attached to it. Crown offers the caveat that the couch should be considered a tool, more or less useful depending on the particular dyad. Nevertheless, as Crown concludes, Kravis sees the couch as providing an opportunity for “recumbent speech” unlike anything found in the social world. In this time of Covid-driven telehealth, Kravis’s study will surely underscore for readers the question of how best to provide a virtual couch—one that facilitates the unique analytic function of experiencing oneself in a full, rich, and deeply received manner.
Why I Write
In Rosemary Balsam’s Why I Write essay, we are invited for a moment into the spirited and lyrical world of an Irish ancestry, geographically craggy and psychologically powerful. Balsam deeply admires the exquisite torment and conflict of Virginia Woolf’s struggle to keep hold of her potency as a female writer, but her own writing springs from a different source—the love of writing, she tells us, comes from the joy of talking and the pleasure in self-expression. For Balsam, writing is a form of play—from her delight in penning her words, to her ability to relive cherished moments, expand curious or novel ideas, and express her unique views in her rich, lilting voice. For, as she posits, what matters most is that writing allows for a useful exchange. She asks, is it not possible to listen, to reflect, to alter one’s views, or the views of others, to dare to say what one really thinks—to have, in the truest sense that Virginia Woolf intended, a mind of one’s own, a mind that need not, as Woolf decried, “pluck the heart out of [her] writing?” In Balsam’s beautiful, forthright, and disarming style, she reveals the essential core of the writing life: to engage in bold, thought-provoking, and lively conversations that serve as the springboard for something new to emerge between reader and writer.