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"Leffert, Mark"
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The Therapeutic Situation in the 21st Century
Extending the themes of Contemporary Psychoanalytic Foundations, The Therapeutic Situation in the 21st Century is a systematic reformulation of fundamental psychoanalytic concepts, such as transference, therapeutic action, and the uses of psychotropic drugs, in the light of recent developments in postmodernism, complexity theory, and neuroscience. Leffert offers formulations of areas not previously considered in any depth by psychoanalysts, such as power relations in the analytic couple, social matrix theory, and narrative theory informed by considerations of archaeology, genealogy, complexity, memory, and recall. He also considers new areas, such as the role of uncertainty and love in the therapeutic situation. This book is part of an ongoing effort to place psychoanalysis in the current century, and looks to outside as well as inside areas of thought to inform how we work and how we think about our work.
eBook
Postmodernism and its impact on psychoanalysis
This article explores the heterogeneity of postmodern thought and its contributions to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice; the heterogeneity of psychoanalytic theory and the claims of privilege and standing made by individual theories; and the postmodern terrain and its conflicting points of view. Its origins are also traced back to the work of classical analytic authors, notably Erikson, Gill, Hartmann, Klein, and Rapaport. A solution to the problem of theoretical plurality is suggested, addressing its ontological and epistemological roots.
Journal Article
The Psychoanalysis and Death of George Gershwin: An American Tragedy
The story of the noted composer George Gershwin's psychoanalysis and death resulting from an undiagnosed brain tumor 70 years ago are known today only in a garbled, incomplete form through biography and legend rather than history among psychoanalysts, neurologists, and neurosurgeons. This article examines his psychoanalysis with Gregory Zilboorg and the events and course of his final illness to the extent possible with the historical material now available. It provides an account of the behavior of his psychoanalyst in a variety of contexts as well as the actions of the other physicians attending him. We cannot know, but can only infer, what went on in his psychoanalytic sessions or his medical examinations; about this the reader will have to draw his or her own conclusions.
Journal Article
Complexity and Postmodernism in Contemporary Theory of Psychoanalytic Change
The contemporary literature on change in psychoanalysis has struggled to integrate recent developments in theory. Reasons for its limitations are discussed. The present article brings to bear relevant concepts drawn from postmodernism and complexity theory on ideas about how change occurs in psychoanalysis. In elaborating these two skeins, it looks critically at some recent attempts to incorporate them and considers their relationship to each other. A general description of complexity theory is offered because it has not yet been well documented in the analytic literature. Postmodern theory is talked about in relation to change; it has been discussed more generally in the author's earlier work. Ways in which postmodernism and complexity theory can inform psychoanalysis but also constrain some of its assumptions are explored. The nature and occurrence of qualitative events of psychoanalytic change are described. Four kinds of such events are described and illustrated with clinical vignettes. Analytic change viewed from a macro rather than a micro level is also discussed.
Journal Article
Some Particular Issues Concerning Therapeutic Action
Implicitly, and at times explicitly, much of this book has been concerned with therapeutic action and the clinical circumstances that foster or impede it. The chapter following this one will serve to weave these various discussions together into a sheave, at times a sheave of différance. In the meantime, there remain some specific points to be covered before moving on to those discussions. A great deal has been written about therapeutic action in recent years; we will examine that literature here in some novel ways. The very term therapeutic action came to prominence out of a desire to describe in process terms more than change and less than cure. I have written on particular aspects of the subject on several occasions (Leffert, 2003, 2007a, 2008, 2010a) and do not propose to restate this material here. What I am offering is an exclusively experience-near clinical theory, one of the two psychoanalytic theories posited by Gill (1976, 1994). Perhaps more dangerously, I am proposing to go a step beyond Gill and a step beyond the positions I have taken in the past, to posit that the second theory, metapsychology, has no ontological basis at all and that clinical theory, or theory of therapeutic action, is best formulated in its absence.
Book Chapter