1st Edition

Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis

By Janice S. Lieberman Copyright 2019
    234 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    234 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Patients in psychoanalytic treatment present with a variety of problems that reflect contemporary cultural issues and values. Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis explores the effects of such societal changes on psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, covering topics such as greed, envy and deception, body narcissism, gender roles, and relationships. Janice S. Lieberman includes numerous clinical vignettes and insights into working clinically with changing norms.

    Lieberman explores how changes in values and norms of behavior in the world beyond the consulting room have influenced what is now heard by analysts within it, using clinical data to demonstrate the psychological underpinnings of the values promulgated by current trends in politics and in society more widely. She explores what she observes to be "a new superego"; where deception abounds and often goes unpunished, where greed and envy have arguably increased and there is an enhanced emphasis on the body and its appearance. Traditional gender roles have been challenged in fortuitous ways, but a certain amount of chaos and confusion has ensued. Relationships are found and maintained using technology, yet many feel lonely and empty. She writes about the clinical dilemmas she has faced and offers suggestions for resolving them in working with today’s patients. Lieberman also sees parallels for these developments in several artists’ lives and in their work.

    Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

    Overview: Loss of Integrity in Contemporary Culture and Contemporary Psyche

    Superego/ Character Issues: Deception, Greed and Envy

    1. Analyzing a New Superego: Greed and Envy in the Recent Age of Affluence
    2. Lies and Omissions in Psychoanalytic Treatment
    3. The Availability (and Responsibility) of the Analyst
    4. Construction Outside, Reconstruction Inside

    Body, Skin, Gender

    5. The Female Body

    6. The Analyst as Reluctant Spectator

    7. The Analyst’s Rush to Metaphor

    8. Body Narcissism and Linguistic Attunement

    9. Outrageous Women: the "Cleopatra Complex"

    10. The Male Psyche: An Even Darker Continent

    Relationships

    11. Issues in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Single Females over Thirty

    12. "Sex and the City" on the Couch

    13. The Search for Love in a Digital Age

    14. The Mediated Gaze

    Superego, Gender and Body in Art

    15. Violence Against Women in the Work of Women Artists

    16. The Imposturous Artist Arshile Gorky

    17. Pedophilic Themes in Balthus’ Works

    18.Is Appropriation Creative? The Case of Richard Prince

    Afterword

    Biography

    Janice S. Lieberman, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City. She is the author of Body Talk: Looking and Being Looked at in Psychotherapy and served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is a Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association Committee on Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies.