Abstract
Winnicott’s Collected Works: A Series of Reviews (Continued)
In this issue of JAPA Review of Books, we offer the seventh installment in a series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, curated by guest editors Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris. In a review essay on Volume 7 (1964–1966), titled “Winnicott at Work,” Glen Gabbard brings us a Winnicott who, despite feeling wounded and at times overlooked or misunderstood by his colleagues, nonetheless worked tirelessly to educate the public and—significantly—to provide space for listening. During this period, Winnicott enriched our understanding of some of his most enduring and impactful ideas, particularly of the importance of preserving silence, at times, for the gradual emergence of patients’ capacity to “recognize who they are.” As Gabbard states, “We have learned from Winnicott to listen carefully to the patient’s perspective and recognize that patients are attempting in their own way to let us know who they are.”
A View of Relationships across Time
How do psychoanalytic concepts percolate into popular culture? Often their influence is pervasive but subtle; sometimes they are rendered as preposterous shadows of themselves. Occasionally, a psychoanalyst who is also a gifted writer—or a talented author with serious psychoanalytic chops—takes hold of a psychoanalytic concept and presents it in a way that captures the public imagination, helping others see the world through a psychoanalytic lens. In her book essay, Laura Whitman—a psychoanalyst who treats children, adolescents, and adults—looks at three works rooted in an essentially psychoanalytic view of development across the human lifespan. In The Rough Patch, Daphne de Marneffe combines her work as a couples therapist with her reading of psychoanalytic theory and developmental research to explore how two partners might nurture each other’s ongoing development, even through the inevitable experience of conflict in a long-term relationship. In The Peacock Feast, the novelist and psychoanalyst Lisa Gornick weaves a work of historical fiction around the lives of a 101-year-old woman—the daughter of a gardener at the Tiffany estate—and a couple Whitman describes as “the first family of psychoanalysis”: Anna Freud and Dorothy (Tiffany) Burlingham. Judith Viorst’s Nearing 90 is the eighth installment of a chronological series of memoirs, each written in humorous verse, that began in 1987, with When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices. Viorst, a research graduate of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, brings to this series the same psychoanalytic sensibility that informed her 1986 bestseller, Necessary Losses, which would serve well as a primer on psychoanalytic developmental theory. Whitman appreciates and recommends each of the three works she reviews, and we’re confident you’ll enjoy her playful, creatively written essay about them.
Developmental Considerations
Two reviews in this issue invite us to reconsider familiar significant developmental trends in a new light, spotlighting themes perhaps most salient at opposing ends of the lifespan.
During the shutdown that resulted from the pandemic, those of us who treat children and teens witnessed the effects on adolescents of being deprived of the ordinary worldly experiences that are wrapped into their developmental scaffolding—the physical contact with others that facilitates transitions; new sensations and perceptions regarding their bodies; and swirling social group dynamics that contain and reflect their emerging sense of self and their ability to engage with others in the service of gradual separation while flexing the new muscles of autonomy and selfhood. We have seen the dramatic developmental impact of a world abruptly stilled. For many adolescents during Covid-19, normative developmental processes played out in private, internal spaces—for example, in the virtual world, where social media, video games, and the creation of avatars became, alternatively, a vehicle for imaginative explorationof new selves or a lonely, isolating world devoid of human contact.In Gretchen Schmutz’s thoughtful review of Alice Waddell’s On Adolescence: Inside Stories, issues surrounding the adolescent’s uniquely paired experiences of the ordinary and the alien are captured with clarity and sensitivity. While the book was written before the pandemic, many may find it especially resonant in the current moment, as adolescents begin to reengage with a world that has revealed itself to be unreliable, dangerous, and perilous. Schmutz particularly appreciates Waddell’s focus on the themes of fiction—aliens, extreme experiences, or tales of hardship and resilience, which “can capture and help the adolescent integrate what she calls ‘parallel universes’ of the extreme and the ordinary.” As Schmutz explains, Waddell shows how such stories provide an open space, parallel to the virtual world, for adolescents to tolerate “a kind of ‘capsizing’ of the personality as the adolescent tries to integrate newly arriving selves” including “painful feelings like dread and uncertainty, as well as sexual and destructive urges.” Schmutz points out that adolescents rely on groups, projections, and the containment they provide in order to grow their capacity for separation, loss, and aloneness. By slowly learning “to manage emotions in a time of great change and uncertainty,” they prepare to set off on a path toward cultivating and fine-tuning a mind of their own. How, we may well wonder, will this process unfold in our pandemic-torn world?
Sandra Buechler’s writing is notable for the depth and complexity of her analytic musings, but also for the compassion and humanity that lie at the core of her work. As Irene Landsman writes in her view of Buechler’s most recent work, Psychoanalytic Approaches to Problems in Living, “This is a volume to be kept near at hand, one to revisit when needing to clarify, at the deepest level, what the nature of our clinical work is and why we do it.” Landsman highlights eight core clinical values that Buechler describes, including curiosity, hope, kindness, courage, sense of purpose, emotional balance, ability to bear loss, and integrity—“a list,” Landsman writes, “that has been on my bulletin board from the day I first read this book.” Among the “problems in living” that Buechler describes, Landsman spotlights Buechler’s reflections about the significant developmental experiences that are part of the aging process. As Landsman suggests, Buechler usefully reminds us that “with age comes not only limitation but newfound freedom, as she reflects on the rules and boundaries that govern so much of life.” While the world in general seems to tilt toward youth, the accumulation of experiences—becoming practiced, for example, at grief and loss, at change and transition, at disappointment and heartache—allows for the possibility of a sturdy and hearty investment in life throughout its duration. Landsman points out, however, that “refusal to adapt can come out of a recognition that getting back to normal in the wake of trauma or loss is not always an option.” This notion seems particularly apt today as the world reels under the effects of the pandemic. According to Landsman, “Buechler doesn’t tell us what to do, but reminds us how to find our own way to answering the most enduring questions in practice and in life.”
Theory and Technique
Here we present reviews of two edited volumes on the theory and practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Beginning Psychoanalysis, by Bernard Roth and colleagues, presents what reviewer Jérémie Richard describes as a pioneering use of “grounded theory”—a qualitative research method [that has gained adherents in the social sciences]—“to investigate the processes and core dynamics underlying initial interviews in psychoanalysis.” The volume outlines research conducted, under the auspices of the European Psychoanalytical Federation’s Ten-Year European Scientific Initiative, by the Working Party on Initiating Psychoanalysis—a group convened to study “the specific dynamics of preliminary interviews, how psychoanalysts work with them, and what it is in these dynamics that leads a potential patient to enter full analysis (or not).” Richard’s review speaks to the value of the book as both a report on rigorous, clinically useful psychoanalytic research and a form of guidance to beginning clinicians. “Reading this book,” writes Richard, “has encouraged me, as a clinician-in-training, to consider the unconscious dynamics underlying initial interviews and overcome my apprehension regarding initial sessions.”
For all their prominence in the history of our field, trauma and trauma theory do not belong solely to psychoanalysis; they have long been of interest across several disciplines. In Trauma and Transcendence, editors Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto present contemporary trauma scholarship from philosophers, social theorists, theologians, and psychoanalysts. Reviewer Jeremy Elkins—a political and legal theorist—helps us distinguish between “trauma theory” and “theory of trauma,” and guides us through a series of tensions central to this domain of study: the theory of trauma offers a “promise of intelligibility,” but how can this be reconciled with the “‘irreducibility’ of trauma itself”? How can theory grasp “the ungraspable”? And how are we to square “the ethical demand to bear witness to the uniqueness and overwhelmingness of trauma” with “the aim of a theory of trauma to give an account of it across differences”? Boynton and Capretto’s work should be of interest to psychoanalysts concerned with current takes on the theory of trauma—and perhaps to all of us, as we struggle through a distinctive period of shared social and environmental trauma.
Sandra Buechler: The Writing Cure
In her rich and lucid Why I Write essay, “The Writing Cure,” Sandra Buechler speaks directly to the heart of the analyst’s dilemma: we are rarely alone, as we spend hour after hour in the company of our patients; nonetheless, there can be a profound loneliness in our professional life—one that can be counterbalanced more or less successfully by the internalized chorus of supervisors, analysts, teachers, and colleagues offering balance, encouragement, understanding, and compassion. Yet, Buechler wonders, how do we modulate our experience of aloneness when we do not feel grounded in a sense of being known or seen in our work with our patients—when our patients (perhaps inevitably) cannot fathom our experience or our behavior? (Indeed, perhaps such experiences have been rendered all the more acute during this period of working from virtual consulting rooms, deprived of the physicality of being together in our familiar shared spaces.) Buechler highlights the particularly profound moments of feeling as though we have lost ourselves: “There are times,” she writes, “when I feel like a cubist portrait of myself. All the familiar parts are there, but some are exaggerated and unaligned.” Buechler’s writing life provides a pathway back to herself—a chance to integrate the meanings of a bewildering or disappointing experience, the possibility of new discovery or understanding, a forum for growth. In language that is pure, straightforward, and alive yet carries complexity and nuance, Buechler invites us to deepen our appreciation of the analytic experience and, perhaps, to include her resonant voice in our own internalized chorus of compassionate colleagues and analytic partners.