This is a new kind of anthology. More conversation than collection, it locates the psychic and the social in clinical moments illuminating the analyst's struggle to grasp a patient's internal life as voiced through individual political, social, and material contexts. Each chapter is a single detailed case vignette in which aspects of race, gender, sexual orientation, heritage, ethnicity, class – elements of the sociopolitical matrix of culture – are brought to the fore in the transference-countertransference dimension, demonstrating how they affect the analytic encounter. Additionally, discussions by three senior analysts further deconstruct patients' and analysts' cultural embeddedness as illustrated in each chapter. For the practicing clinician as well as the seasoned academic, this highly readable and intellectually compelling book clearly demonstrates that culture saturates subjective experience – something that all mental health professionals should keep in mind.
Biography
Muriel Dimen, PhD, is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Professor Emerita, Anthropology, Lehman College (CUNY). On the faculties of many institutes, she is Editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and a founding board member and former Treasurer of the International Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Her most recent book, Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, received the Goethe Award from the Canadian Psychological Association for the Best Book of Psychoanalytic Scholarship published in 2003. She has also written Surviving Sexual Contradictions (1986) and The Anthropological Imagination (1977). Her co-edited books are Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture with Virginia Goldner (2002), Storms in Her Head: New Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives on Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria with Adrienne Harris (2001), and Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus: Toward an Ethnography of Greece with Ernestine Friedl (1976). A Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, she practices in Manhattan and supervises nationally.
"This volume breaks new ground. It introduces six brilliant young psychoanalytic writers, who have grown up with both psychoanalysis and critical social theory 'in their bones.' From this perspective, they are able to take up the longstanding problem of integrating a social perspective into psychoanalytic clinical work at the most fundamental level: they organize their treatments around the core concepts of the critical social theories of Foucault, Althusser, Butler, and others who map the ways that culture expropriates individuals, integrating them with contemporary intersubjectivist analysis. Further, they reveal themselves in the same complex psychosocial fields, with a full view of how they too, as analysts, are implicated in the very same processes. Thus, the social dimensions of their analyses are not tacked on, but essential, and the vivid possibilities of this radical reorientation are not only suggested, but often realized. This is a rare achievement." - Stephen Seligman, Infant-Parent Program, UCSF, California, USA
"This is an extraordinary collection. In just a few pages of clinical case material, each author remarkably manages to shatter any illusions one might hold that the psychic and the social are separable. The writing is powerful and each vignette movingly explores the complex psychosocial interdependence of patient and therapist. Seamlessly blending high theory with experience-near clinical encounters, this book is a major contribution to a non-normative psychoanalysis." - Lynne Layton, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
