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doi: 10.1177/00030651231201614pmid: 37822178
Critical discourse methodology and a Black feminist lens were used to examine the discourse of contemporary psychoanalysis, specifically to investigate the relationship between language, love, and power. Findings of the analysis include the following. The discourse encourages engagement with linguistic shortcuts, wherein concepts such as oppression and bigotry are used as conduits to discuss intrapsychic experiences. The discourse frames whiteness as the center of experience and marginalizes Blackness, Indigenousness, and other nonwhite perspectives. The discourse is vague about what constitutes love and what place love should have in clinical work. Ultimately, the discourse of the texts in this analysis suggests there is more work to do, more areas in the discipline to disrupt, and more love to give.
doi: 10.1177/00030651231199237pmid: 37822173
Frantz Fanon’s reception within psychoanalysis has been hindered by an interpretive “snag” that vexes discussions of his work and relevance. This “snag” misleadingly situates Fanon’s clinical approach as necessarily outside, or antithetical to, treatment as conceived and practiced in the Freudian tradition. As a result, analytic educators, students, and therapists are prone to position Fanon on one side of a conceptual boundary and “analytic neutrality” on the other. This reading is not only misguided but detrimental to the healing potential and continued development of psychoanalysis. A closer look at one of Fanon’s oft-repeated rallying cries, in which its context is examined and its intent unpacked, allows for a disambiguating of “analytic neutrality” and affords a number of takeaways that can help readers recognize the stakes of Fanon’s contributions to psychoanalysis and appreciate their pertinence for dyadic clinical treatment. A major implication is the importance for psychoanalysis, in both pedagogy and clinical practice, to take coloniality (the continued legacies of colonial domination, including especially white supremacy) far more seriously.
doi: 10.1177/00030651231198493pmid: 37822175
Inspired by an essay by Martin Buber (1950), and then by the work of Ernest Schachtel (1959) on the idea of “embeddedness” and emergence from it, this essay is an account of the role of “distance” or “separateness” in clinical psychoanalytic work. We tend to assume that the capacity to appreciate otherness is always already present. We often lose track of the necessity to “set the other at a distance” (Buber), the prerequisite for emergence from embeddedness in the other. The entire process—i.e., setting the other at a distance and then emerging from embeddedness in the other—must take place over and over again in any treatment, and in both directions: patients must disembed from analysts, but it is just as necessary for analysts to disembed from patients. It is the emergence from embeddedness that allows the analyst’s appreciation of the patient’s otherness. Embeddedness in the other is discussed as mutual enactment. This use of these phenomena in treatment is articulated in the theory of witnessing presented elsewhere in recent years (Stern 2009, 2012, 2022b, in press). A detailed clinical illustration is presented.
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