IARPP

http://iarpp.net/
membership 2017 (2017-1-28)

Focus on Emmanuel Ghent, Donnel Stern, Harry Stack Sullivan, Marco Conci, Don Troise, Muriel Dimen. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3LI9uU7wHw
[Emmanuel Ghent - Phosphones (1970/71)]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Ghent

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEeVhwZ29GT0tWQ1E?usp=sharing (Emmanuel Ghent)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEOEQ5a1BoZXpydzg?usp=sharing (Donnel Stern)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEWHFPQzZCNnFrTTA?usp=sharing (Harry Stack Sullivan)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYERklYQ0h1bWtvVjg?usp=sharing (Marco Conci)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEZUoydTI0eURENms?usp=sharing (Don Troise)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEUEg5b195OUhvNHM?usp=sharing (Muriel Dimen)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYENndhWWZNTVpRbXc?usp=sharing (Hermeneutics)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYESnhXSDdpU0pYZFk?usp=sharing (Intersubjectivity)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEVnhPcWxaOUdIWjg?usp=sharing (Miscellaneous)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEaUxTd3dZZHJ2MlU?usp=sharing (IARPP)

https://www.routledge.com/Relational-Perspectives-Book-Series/book-series/LEARPBS?page=2&page=1 (Routledge, RPBS)

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsd20/  
http://www.pep-web.org/

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYEQkF0Q0xNVURfelU?usp=sharing (work in progress)


Emmanuel Ghent

“Credo” (1989) contains a lot of personal biography, and Mannie talks about how the college kid who thought psychology was “moosh” morphed into an analyst in training at White who entered a state of fascinated engagement with Sullivan. Listen to the precision with which he extracts Sullivan's deep view of the interpersonal from its mainstream reductions:

Sullivan's eschewal of structure in favor of relation had some farreaching consequences. It certainly made it difficult to diagram psychic phenomena in a manner analogous to what was possible with classical metapsychology, so difficult in fact that it led to the belief among classical analysts that there was no theory (i.e., metapsychology) in Sullivan's system. More importantly it was a stringent effort at ridding the field of the fetishistic structures that had come to be the shibboleths of psychoanalysis. Although Sullivan was anything but a Marxist, I believe it is fair to say that he was trying to build a non-fetishistic psychology (Ghent, 1962).

Let me explain what I mean by this. Marx (1867) put it this way: “[In commodity production, and this includes the production of ideas], the social relation between men assumes … the fantastic form of a relation between things” (p. 83). Things like money or rent, are fetishes in that they obscure the relations between people, even though those relations may not be at all visible. We almost never think of money as an interpersonal or relational concept, at root an expression of claims on the labor of others. When with cash we buy food at the supermarket we are not aware that we are redeeming claims, sometimes highly exploitative claims, on the labor of many people all along the food chain, often on a global scale. In classical analysis such concepts as instinct, id, ego, superego likewise obscure and mystify the underlying relation between people. They are fetishes. One might say that the id is the fetishistic formalization of early experience. It is seen as inhering in “nature,” so that the result (the id) of a process (human interactive experience) is, instead seen as its cause [Ghent, 1989, pp. 178-179].

The moment when an experience could transform into surrender or submission is a kind of strange-attractor, edge-of-chaos moment. 

There is a signature Ghent clinical moment. It is often an impasse in which you sense that a change might be taken, something new attempted. But the odds are uncertain. The dialectics of submission versus surrender, hate versus love, use versus relating, destruction versus survival, all circulate, assemble and reassemble into a kind of strange attractor. These constructions are fractal, complex and unpredictable, unstable; but perceptible, in that chaos, there is pattern.

These volatile, protean processes are the engines of change, the production of motivations, not the reified product or drive. This is as true for Mannie's clinical acumen and his ideas of theory as it is of his wonderful performance piece Phosphones, in which light, movement, and music arrive into and depart from coherence in an experience of unpredictable pattern. 

Harris, A. (2005). Heart Melts Forward: Emmanuel Ghent (1925-2003). Psychoanal. Dial., 15(2):211-221

Relational Psychoanalysis: Heart Melts Forward: The work of Emmanuel Ghent (Relational Perspectives Book Series), ed. by Adrienne Harris, Routledge, February 9, 2017

I first met Mannie after I published an article in the International Review of Psychoanalysis on Buddhism and psychotherapy (Epstein, 1990). This article, the only one I have ever published in that journal, was the synthesis of my thinking up to that point. Mannie called me and said that he would like to meet me. It turned out that he lived only a few blocks away—and I went to his loft one afternoon and sat and talked with him while he ate apples. 

He probably ate five or six apples while we talked. 

By turning me in this direction, Mannie helped to resolve an issue that had been nagging at me: the issue of desire. 

…

Talking to him about this while watching him eat apples was clarifying in itself. 

As Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (1973), one of the great Western scholars of Shiva's symbolism, explains, “The extreme of one force is the extreme of its opposite; tapas and kaāma, interchangeable forms of cosmic heat, replace and limit one another to maintain the balance of the universe” (p. 312).

This is a very strange concept, yet it forms the foundation of Indian spirituality. It is also the key to understanding Mannie's interpretation of Winnicott, and his orientation to psychoanalysis. In the course that Mannie and I taught on psychoanalysis and Buddhism at NYU, for example, we spent the most time on Winnicott's key paper on the difference between object relating and object usage. It was in this paper that Winnicott put forward his ideas about how destruction creates the possibility of empathy. As Mannie (1990) summarized in his “Surrender” paper, “This conception of development involving the difficult passage from object relating to object use implies a radical departure from the usual analytic notion that aggression is reactive to the encounter with external reality (the reality principle). Here it is destructiveness that creates the very quality of externality” (p. 123). 

This is Shiva in psychoanalytic garb.

The phrase that O'Flaherty (1973) used to describe the relationship between renunciation and desire is key: “correlative opposites that act as interchangeable identities in essential relationships” (p. 35). In Winnicott's formulation, something similar is proposed in the way that anger, when not retaliated against, makes possible concern for the other. Mannie understood that both psychoanalysis and meditation have the capacity to open the psyche to a place where these correlative opposites can be felt and known.

Mannie once confided to me that he regretted not going further in his “Surrender” paper than Winnicott's division of false self from true self. He knew, by the end of his life, that any concept of true self had to be false.

His craft was not only music, but also psychoanalysis, and at the close of his “Surrender” paper (1990), he gave a hint of his understanding of its spiritual dimension:

Let us not overlook the role of masochism and surrender in being a member of our profession. What other occupation requires of its practitioners that they be the objects of people's excoriations, threats and rejections, or be subjected to tantalizing offerings that plead “touch me,” yet may not be touched? What other occupation has built into it the frustration of feeling helpless, stupid and lost as a necessary part of the work? And what other occupation puts its practitioners in the position of being an onlooker or midwife to the fulfillment of others' destinies. It is difficult to find a type of existence, other than that of the psychoanalyst, who fits this job description. In a sense it is the portrait of a masochist. Yet I suspect that a deep underlying motive in some analysts at least, is again that of surrender, and their own personal growth. It may be acceptably couched in masochistic garb or denied by narcissistic and/or sadistic exploitation. When the yearning for surrender is, or begins to be, realized by the analyst, the work is immensely fulfilling and the analyst grows with his patients [p. 133].

Epstein, M. (2005). A Strange Beauty: Emmanuel Ghent and the Psychologies of East and West. Psychoanal. Dial., 5(2):125-138