Treating Borderline Personality Disorder in El Barrio

An Interview with Daniel Gaztambide

Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious demonstrates that psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disenfranchised Latino populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy. As opposed to most Latin American countries, where psychoanalysis is seen as a practice tied to ...
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Treating Borderline Personality Disorder in El Barrio

A New Way to Heal Borderline Bodies

An interview with Clara Mucci

Borderline Bodies: Affect Regulation Therapy for Personality Disorders, a new book by Clara Mucci connects interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, and psychoanalytic theory with cognitive and neuroscientific work on implicit memory, trauma theory, and dissociation to propose an integrated method for treating severe borderline and narcissistic disorders, with the prime aim of ...
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A New Way to Heal Borderline Bodies

What is Psychoanalysis?

An excerpt from Robert Boyers, The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals

In The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, Robert Boyers reflects on his allegiances and disputes with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers. Centering his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers explores the process by which they fall in and out of fashion. Through encounters with authority, ...
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What is Psychoanalysis?

Engaging, and Accompanying, the Pain of Others

An excerpt from Robert Grossmark’s The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst

Robert Grossmark's The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst introduces a new psychoanalytic register for working with such patients and states, involving a present and engaged analyst who is unobtrusive to the unfolding of the patient’s inner world and the flow of mutual enactments. For the unobtrusive relational analyst, the world and idiom of ...
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When Psychoanalysis Needs to Adapt to the Patient

An Interview with Robert Grossmark

Psychoanalysts increasingly find themselves working with patients who seem to defy verbal and dialogic engagement. Such patients are challenging for a psychoanalytic approach that assumes that the patient relates in the verbal realm and is capable of reflective functioning. Both the classical stance of neutrality and abstinence and a contemporary ...
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When Psychoanalysis Needs to Adapt to the Patient

De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

Read the introduction to this volume written by the editors

Self-examination and self-critique are the conduits to growth for psychoanalytic patients. Yet within the field, psychoanalysts haven’t sufficiently utilized their own methodology, or subjected their own preferred approaches, to systematic and critical self-examination. Across theoretical divides, psychoanalytic writers and clinicians have too often responded to criticism with defensiveness rather than ...
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De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

What Do We Even Want From One Another?

Anxiety, Permeation and Identity in the Age of a Slowly Imploding Liberalism

In a time identified by the breakdown of fantasy, xenophobic malaise, and the salve of identity politics, philosopher Luce deLire and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster take us to the limits of 'the self.' They muse on anxiety's collectivizing forces, the political instrumentalization of unsolvably fractured identities, and their permeation. They suggest ...
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What Do We Even Want From One Another?

Beyond #MeToo

Female agency as heroine in The Tale

This article was originally published in the Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books. The author served as a consultant to Jennifer Fox's film "The Tale." This piece joins other related pieces published on Public Seminar, including an interview with the filmmaker, a psychoanalytic approach to understanding childhood ...
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Beyond #MeToo

From the Cyborg Manifesto to The User Unconscious

A Commentary by Patricia Ticineto Clough

In the following commentary, psychoanalyst and professor for sociology and women studies Patricia Ticineto Clough reflects on how her recent work on the user unconscious expands on/differs from Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking essay “Cyborg Manifesto” in thinking about the human’s relation to/inevitable entanglement with the other-than-human and argues that her proposed ...
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From the Cyborg Manifesto to The User Unconscious

Queer Donald Trump and the Paradoxes of Power

What does Trump’s willingness to snuggle up to Putin say about the self-avowed pussy-grabber?

The descriptions of Donald Trump’s press conference in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin made it perfectly clear. A New York Times editorial referred to “Trump’s subservience to the Russian strongman” and his “globally televised submissiveness.” John McCain said Trump had “abased himself abjectly before a tyrant.” This, from Trump the authoritarian, the blusterer, the pussy-grabber, ...
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Queer Donald Trump and the Paradoxes of Power

The Rhythm of Resilience

A Deep Ecology of Entangled Relationality

Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma, edited by Jill Salberg and Sue Grand, takes a novel view in psychoanalysis using a trans-generational, social, political and cultural model to fathom trauma and its transmission. The view is radical in its departure from orthodox psychoanalytic trajectories ...
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The Rhythm of Resilience

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Is trusted love ever an option?

Integrating Relational Psychoanalysis and EMDR: Embodied Experience and Clinical Practice provides contemporary theoretical and clinical links between Relational Psychoanalysis, attachment theory, neuroscience, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The author, Hemda Arad, delineates the ways psychoanalysis and EMDR can complement each other through a presentation of fundamental concepts and an ...
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