Abstract
In these days of quarantine, we find family, friends, and patients often returning to pleasures of the past for solace. We’ve heard citations from favorite television shows of yore (“Remember that I Love Lucy episode when Lucy climbed into the vat of grapes . . .?”), and held tight to reassuring figures from the not-so-distant past (a Ruth Bader Ginsburg doll clutched in the hands of a three-year-old during a Zoom call, a comfort as much to her parents as to the child herself). We yearn for beloved figures who survived the travails of the past—childhood heroes who make us feel safe and understood, who can help us keep hold of the good in the world, even amid constant reminders of the bad. In keeping with this need, we are pleased to revisit the work of two psychoanalytic icons in this issue: Donald Winnicott (who survived—and helped others survive—the physical and emotional horrors of two world wars) and Edith Jacobson (whose imprisonment by the Nazis informed her thinking). Winnicott’s influence has spread throughout the psychoanalytic world, and crossed into the zeitgeist; it informs the work of at least two graphic novelists, Alison Bechdel (reviewed by Rebecca Chaplan in JAPA 62/4) and Sarah Boxer (reviewed in this issue). Jacobson’s work—and her successors’ debt to it—is somewhat less well-known; as our reviewer suggests, this may be due in part to the “missing transatlantic link of a complete English translation.”
Winnicott’s Collected Works: A Series of Reviews
We are proud to launch in this issue a series of reviews of an important, recent publication: twelve edited volumes encompassing the work of D. W. Winnicott. This impressive collection offers an opportunity to reflect on what is most enduring about both psychoanalytic thought and the inner workings of children’s minds. As a writer and a psychoanalyst, Winnicott brought to public attention some basic truths about children’s emotional well-being: that they require adults who will listen, heeding their fears and addressing their concerns; adults who will provide safety and structure. He appreciated how deeply children are affected by unexpected or traumatic separation—due to illness, loss, or catastrophic world events—and worked tirelessly to bring developmental and psychological understanding to public awareness. His enduring wisdom, captured in these reviews, is a timely reminder of how psychoanalysts can contribute a vitally important perspective in a time of national crisis and widespread personal suffering. We are grateful to Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris, guest editors of this series.
The Life and Times of Edith Jacobson
In Martina Kolb’s essay and Francis Baudry’s personal reflections, we revisit the life and times of another highly respected psychoanalyst, Edith Jacobson. Kolb, Associate Professor of German Studies at Susquehanna University and Clinical Fellowship Associate of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, reviews Judith Kessler and Ronald Kaufhold’s Edith Jacobson: Gefängnisaufzeichnungen, which Kolb translates as Edith Jacobson’s Black Prison Notebook. We have decided to extend Kolb’s essay across issues: Part 1 is presented here, while Part 2 will appear in JAPA 68.6. Like Winnicott’s Collected Works, Jacobson’s prison notebook includes writings of many kinds: diaristic reflections; theoretical fragments; poems by other poets, transcribed from memory; Jacobson’s own poems; and “prose reflections on the psychosomatic effects that confinement exerts on women (based in her own experience as a female political prisoner).” Against Jacobson’s transatlantic, bilingual background as an exile and with a focus on pain, Kolb dwells mainly on Jacobson’s verse. In Part 1 of her essay—“Poetic Agency: Edith Jacobson’s Captivity”—Kolb emphasizes the “unique therapeutic capacity of poetry to ease pain and offer consolation in states of utter deprivation.” In Part 2, “Well-Versed: Edith Jacobson’s Expressionism,” Kolb will address how pain may “energize the poem in states of an inmate’s utter monotony.”
In his personal reminiscence of Jacobson, Francis Baudry reflects on the exceptional patience, warmth, and empathy that marked his long relationship with her—first as teacher, then as supervisor, and ultimately in the course of a rich and enduring friendship. Though—as Baudry tells us—she did not speak directly about the years of imprisonment that Kolb’s review highlights, she drew from her experience a “capacity to adapt to a harsh reality and find pleasure in small things without a trace of self-pity or regret over her losses.” Baudry discovered in his friend Edith Jacobsen a deep well of resilience, optimism, and hope.
Psychoanalysis and Sexual Citizenship
The problem of sexual assault on college campuses is not new, but it is newly an object of attention long overdue, as threats to the rights and safety of women and the LGBTQ community enter public consciousness. In his essay on Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus, Leon Hoffman draws our attention to the widespread problem of unwanted sexual activity and sexual assault on college campuses, bringing a finely tuned analytic perspective to the important and comprehensive sociological study described in the book. Hoffman highlights three features of the sexual landscape that Hirsch and Khan identify as crucial to understanding the nature of sexual interaction among college students (or anyone else): “sexual projects—the specific sexual experience a person seeks, which is shaped by unique elements of his or her personal history; sexual citizenship—the understanding of one’s own right, and that of others, to sexual self-determination; and sexual geographies—the spaces within which sexual interactions take place.” In his essay, Hoffman calls upon what we know about the neurobiology and psychosexual development of adolescents and young adults, citing Fonagy’s understanding of how parents promote early affect regulation by “marking” children’s affective states. As Hoffman writes, “Sexual feelings are usually ignored. Fonagy’s observation that sexual feelings are not ‘marked’ by parents is a unique contribution to child development and parenting. The prospect of a parent marking a child’s sexual pleasure in this way immediately strikes us as wrong, for it evokes the incest taboo.” Hoffman invokes Freud’s observation of a basic parenting dilemma: how can we encourage free expression of needs and desires, while also helping children learn to modulate them? Nonetheless, Hoffman acknowledges the importance of Hirsch and Khan’s plea for early education in the development of empathic, self-aware sexual citizens.
A Graphic Novelist’s View of Psychoanalysis
Gail Boldt’s review of Sarah Boxer’s psychoanalytically informed graphic novels, In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary and “Mother May I?: A Post-Floydian Folly,” complements our introduction of the Winnicott project. Boldt appreciates Boxer’s efforts to grapple with her own complex attitude toward Freud’s works. As Boldt writes, “Boxer’s deeply conflictual feelings about Freud may do more honor to the complexities of his work and life than the jealous, worshipful guarding of his work [by some] or in the analytic insistence at times seen on reading every case as a confirmation of Freud’s theories.” In the second of the two graphic novels, Boxer brings her creative interpretation to the works of Klein and Winnicott, and attempts to address thorny psychoanalytic problems. “As we might expect from books whose subjects are love, hate, need, and dependence in psychoanalysis,” writes Boldt, “both books have many unsettling allusions to sexual aggression, willful self-interest, and, as I am suggesting here, an unresolved connection to racism in both the book and in the history of psychoanalysis.” Boldt finds Boxer’s deep grasp of Freud’s works and psychoanalytic theory rich and compelling, and advises the reader, ultimately, to approach these original renderings of psychoanalytic thought as one might a dream or a free-flowing thought: with a willingness to “accept what they give rise to.”
Why I Write: Paul Schwaber
In his concise and resonant personal essay, Paul Schwaber—who with Rosemary Balsam edited the JAPA Review of Books for fifteen years, just before our term—cites some of the many things that can make writing difficult. Writing is, as Schwaber relates, a lonely endeavor; it lacks conviviality, the immediacy of social engagement. It is to our good fortune as readers that in the end Schwaber chooses to put down on paper his reflections on the linkages—and differences—between imaginative literature and psychoanalysis. At the intersection of these two creative disciplines, Schwaber finds a world of meaning to explore—of private and shared pain, of intimacy and empathy, of suffering and loss, and, ultimately, of wonder at the breadth and poignancy of human experience.