Joyce Slochower

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• Ph.D., ABPP
• Professor at New York University

Robert Grossmark invites us to interrogate the implications and meanings of home for us and for our patients. We carry home with us across time. Our connection to home can be grounding; it creates a sense of continuity, sometimes nostalgia and longing. But when home was less a place of comfort and grounding than of trauma, remembrances threaten to...

I describe the evolution of my professional identity and explore both its personal and academic roots. Introduced to the concept of Winnicottian holding in graduate school, I expanded the clinical implications of “holding”by delineating its role in work with a range of issues beyond dependence. I then addressed the role of the analyst's subjectivit...

I consider the evolution and current state of intra-psychoanalytic schisms. These splits have undermined our capacity to see the other position and engage with it usefully. Using my own training experience to illustrate, I consider the dynamics informing our theoretical identity. In this context, I argue for both the value and the underbelly of hol...

The termination ideal for analytic work stands at a considerable distance from clinical reality; “complete” terminations are rare indeed. This gap is perhaps best explored by considering sequels—instances in which ex-analyst and ex-patient become nonsexual friends post treatment. The meanings and implications of these post-termination friendships—t...

How can we mourn the losses of 2020 and 2021 when, in 2022, these losses are ongoing? Is it possible for us to help our patients with something that continues to disrupt the ordinary for us all? This essay explores the impact of existential crises on our patients’ and our own ability to mourn within and outside analytic space.

This essay moves beyond my earlier focus on relational excess and turns a critical eye on my own work. After describing my relational holding model, I address its limitations—both theoretical and clinical. What is problematic in the implicit analytic ideal embedded in the concept of holding? How does this vision of therapeutic process both add to a...

Volume 2 of Winnicott's Collected Works consists of material written between 1939 and 1945. Included are 11 letters to medical journals (British Medical Journal and the Lancet), 3 three personal letters (to Roger North, Kate Friedlander, and Marjorie Franklin), 42 short and longer published papers-some intended for professional audiences and others...

I introduce Aron's essay on reflexive skepticism and consider the potential contribution and downside of inter-theoretical critique

Volume 2 of Winnicott's Collected Works consists of material written between 1939 and 1945. Included are 11 letters to medical journals (British Medical Journal and the Lancet), 3 personal letters (to Roger North, Kate Friedlander, and Marjorie Franklin), 42 short and longer published papers-some intended for professional audiences and others for p...

The concept of resistance has fallen out of favor, particularly in relational psychoanalysis. We’ve associated “resistance” with traditional analytic models—with the idea that therapeutic action lies in overcoming a patient’s defensiveness via interpretation. I invite resistance back into relational thinking by relocating the concept dyadically—in...

I address a psychoanalytic ghost with which we all will eventually contend; it’s the ghost of who we will become—the ghost of our own aging and the changes it portends. We analysts have enormous difficulty dealing with this inevitability. We rarely examine, much less theorize, its impact on us as analysts and on our patients. How will we manage the...

Silverman’s moving essay is replete with vulnerability and uncanny resonances. I try to enter her experience and imagine its possible meaning and impact on Silverman and then on me, as discussant. Finally, I play with Silverman’s clinical material and explore the potential consequences of other ways of moving in the therapeutic moment. When can we...

Michelle Shubin’s and Marc Rehm’s papers (this issue) are linked by their creative use of paradox. Each addresses the dynamics of the clinical moment and invites us to query what we assume—about psychoanalytic goals and about our role in therapeutic process. Shubin revisits the role of analytic honesty, challenging the assumption that we analysts a...

Discussion of "When the therapist becomes ill"

I consider the evolution of our relational ideal—its implications for our therapeutic goals, our 5 patients, and for ourselves. Who do we aim to be in the consulting room? How do we view our patient—her potential and her limitations? What are the clinical goals of a relational analysis? What might those goals occlude? In this context I address the...

Sexual boundary violations—and their perpetrators—are ghosts that haunt us within (and of course outside) the psychoanalytic world. Reverberating well beyond the particular analytic dyad within which they occur, these violations invade nearly every professional community. Sexual boundary violations cast a long shadow over us; they generate horror,...

Sexual boundary violations are ghosts that silence and haunt our psychoanalytic communities. In an attempt to break that silence and confront our ghosts, I put together a panel that included a faculty member (Seth Aronson), an institute graduate (Nancy Crown), and an institute candidate (Carina Grossmark). Our task: To address the particular impact...

l'articolo presenta una rassegna retrospettiva dell'uso della metafora dello sviluppo infantile nel pensiero relazionale. Le prime critiche relazionali al modello del deragliamento evolutivo e l'accanimento delle autrici femministe contro il concetto di holding nel lavoro clinico spinsero i relazionali verso una raffigurazione del paziente come nec...

Psychoanalytic Collisions Second Edition wrestles with a theme that confronts every psychotherapist: the gap between illusions and realities about the professional self. Joyce Slochower closely examines situations in which the therapist’s professional and personal wishes collide with the actuality of everyday clinical work. The book unpacks the dyn...

Analytic idealisations: Winnicott, his patients and us The author explores the dynamics of mutual idealisation in the analytic dyad. While the subject of idealisation is not a new one, very little has been written about the analyst’s participation in a patient’s idealisation or susceptibility to idealising the patient. The idea that the analyst mig...

Csillag challenges us to consider the presence and impact of the analyst’s sadism in the clinical encounter. Her theme usefully adds to the literature on the analyst’s countertransference and pushes us to look harder at ourselves. I distinguish between sadistic intent and experienced sadistic impact and suggest that Csillag is mostly speaking about...

I offer a retrospective view of the evolving baby metaphor in relational thinking. Early relational critiques of developmental tilt models and the concept of holding in clinical work, amplified by feminist writers, sharply skewed relationalists toward a vision of the patient-as-adult and a view of the analytic dialogue as inherently intersubjective...

In "Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective," Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on D. Winnicott's notion of the analytic holding environment. She presents [an] integration of Winnicott's seminal insights with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic contributions. She addresses holding in a variety...

2 Résumé Cet essai examine la place de la métaphore dans la pensée relationnelle. L'accent relationnel mis sur la récipro-cité (patient-comme-adulte) dans la confrontation clinique rentre en contra-diction avec les modèles établis pour les métaphores de développement et conduit à une critique sévère sur le concept d'holding. Ajoutant ma propre pers...

Developing a professional identity Early in graduate school, I decided to train as a psychoanalyst. That choice had a long and, in some ways, natural history; both my parents were Freudian analysts. I had grown up with psychoanalytic jargon in my ears, had listened at the perim-eter to the complex and intriguing conversations of my parents' analyst...

Marc Rehm invites us to muse about the theme of undue influence as it affects our relationships with our patients and children. Marc suggests that alongside our good intentions and loving vision of their future lie feelings of hate and destructiveness that complicate our efforts on their behalf. I address Marc's thesis, its Winnicottian roots, and...

In this beautiful work of reflection and self-reflection, Joyce Slochower wrestles with a seldom acknowledged dimension of being a psychoanalyst - the dialectic between illusions and less ideal realities that complicate the analyst's sense of who she is and of how best to meet her clinical obligations. Psychoanalytic Collisions details the various...

I describe a frustrating treatment relationship with a severely traumatized patient and consider what contributed to its successful outcome. Sexually and emotionally abused in childhood, traumatized in adulthood, Dani insistently kept associated memories and affect states sealed off and outside the treatment's scope. Dwelling with me in a deadened...

Questo lavoro esplora le dinamiche dell'idealizzazione nella coppia analitica. Anche se parlare di idealizzazione non è cosa nuova, si è scritto molto poco sul contributo dell'analista all'idealizzazione del paziente o sulla sua tendenza a idealizzare il paziente. La sola idea che potremmo trovarci ad essere idealizzati dai nostri pazienti, o ad id...

Questo lavoro esplora le dinamiche dell'idealizzazione nella coppia analitica. Anche se parlare di idealizzazione non č cosa nuova, si č scritto molto poco sul contributo dell'analista all'idealizzazione del paziente o sulla sua tendenza a idealizzare il paziente. La sola idea che potremmo trovarci ad essere idealizzati dai nostri pazienti, o ad id...

The world of Mad Men is one in which life lived on the surface and repression dominates the scene. A superficial reading seems to suggest that the classically gendered subject-object split characterizes Mad Men: women in the series appear devoid of desire, while men possess power, sexuality and agency. But despite its blatant sexism, Mad Men's rend...

This paper explores the dynamics of commemorative ritual as it is embodied and enacted outside the consulting room. While the function of lifelong acts of memorial in marking traumatic loss has been well documented, psychoanalysis has given short shrift to the value of these ongoing commemorative rituals in instances of “ordinary” (i.e., less traum...

Lester Lenoff's thoughtful article explores the intersection of my work on holding with some core Kohutian ideas. Lenoff offers a respectful consideration of our perspectives—their overlaps—and their divergences. It's important to preface my response, I think, with a clear acknowledgment of the pitfalls of cross-theoretical conversations. Kohutian...

This paper explores the dynamics of mutual idealization within the analytic dyad. While the subject of idealization is not a new one, very little has been written about the analyst's own participation in patients' idealizations or her vulnerability to idealizing the patient. I use both published and unpublished materials to muse about coconstructed...

Adam Phillips asks why we need to engage in professional policing. He exceeds my own professional comfort zone when he suggests that a great thing about psychoanalysis is that “it does not necessarily make people better.” I make a plea for a measure of professional idealism that takes account of the analyst's power. In her discussion, Linda Hopkins...

Ruth Gruenthal invites us to explore the dynamics embedded in disengagement. She suggests that this very concept is an oxymoron; by virtue of the fact that the patient is in treatment she is, in fact, engaged. Gruenthal focuses on disengagement's self-sustaining function, noting that it represents an attempt to regulate emotional distance while sti...

Farhi's rich discussion of her work with a deeply disturbed patient embodies a tension (and theoretical collision) between Winnicottian and relational perspectives on therapeutic process. To survive a treatment process characterized by states of dread and what she calls filaments of evil, Farhi struggles to enter her patient's world while still ret...

A study was conducted to investigate the conditions under which the experience of victimization alters one's responses to other victims. Subjects were led to believe they either had been fairly paid for their work on a task (nonvictims) or had been underpaid (victims). Half the subjects believed that the treatment they had received was based upon p...

Dr. Gediman locates the intersection of modern Freudian and relational theory in the arena of what she calls the “disclosures of everyday analysis” (p. 242). She suggests that because Freudian analysts, like their relational colleagues, work intersubjectively, relational theory does not itself embody a paradigm shift away from the Freudian model. I...

The experience of interiority is central to the psychoanalytic endeavor. Interiority represents the base from which we can recognize sameness and difference so that engagement with others does not obscure or negate a feeling of personal aliveness. We confront a tricky clinical situation when working with individuals who cannot access and articulate...

The experience of interiority is central to the psychoanalytic endeavor. Interiority represents the base from which we can recognize sameness and difference so that engagement with others does not obscure or negate a feeling of personal aliveness. We confront a tricky clinical situation when working with individuals who cannot access and articulate...

I respond to two key issues raised by Bernstein and Frankel. One concerns the complex and potentially useful impact of misdemeanors on the treatment process. Without, however, minimizing this dimension of misdemeanors, I focus instead on how we deal with instances when we fail our patients by deliberately placing our own needs ahead of theirs. Bern...

Despite a burgeoning literature on major analytic boundary violations, there has been little investigation of what might be called analytic delinquencies or misdemeanors—the small and virtually ubiquitous ways in which analysts deliberately withdraw from the therapeutic endeavor. I consider the impact of professional misdemeanors on patient and ana...