Matt Aibel

• LCSW
• National Institute for the Psychotherapies, New York, NY

The author discusses a pair of articles exploring non-interpretative aspects of contemporary psychoanalytic work, Ofra Shapira-Berman’s “When Should We Not Interpret: The Analyst’s Transformative Act as a Vital Contribution to the Patient’s Sense of Being Real and Alive” and Bnaya Amid and Eytan Bachar’s “At-one-ment: Beyond Transference and Counte...

I assert that embarrassment, shame, and concern for professional reputation have inhibited analysts from discussing their struggles with countertransferential sleepiness, a phenomenon presumably more widespread than is generally acknowledged. Analysts may thus be insufficiently armed with understanding of this vexing predicament to which our work c...

Caught in the unforgiving bind of maintaining an analytic private practice while caring for two young children at home during the coronavirus pandemic quarantine, the author locates his clinical work as a site of heightened vitality and connection against a background of extended periods of challenging, draining, parenting demands. What to make, he...

The political is understood as an essential, irreducible aspect of our self-representations and an undeniably consequential factor in our difficulties in living. It can thus no longer be considered taboo in psychoanalytic theory and practice. I examine challenges of working with political material, especially as treatment conducted during the highl...

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank discusses my paper on psychoanalysis's evolving stance towards politics and political affiliations, "The Personal is Political is Psychoanalytic: Politics in the Consulting Room" (Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2018, Vol. 1). Milbank focuses on the negative impacts of Trump's election and administration on the n...

Spike Jonze’s (2013) film her uses the high concept of a man falling in love with his personalized operating system (OS) to explore our love affair with the Digital Age technology of smartphones, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. In addition to functioning as social satire, the film unfolds as an unlikely romance between user and OS. A...

A roundtable of candidates and recent graduates of New York City area psychoanalytic training programs was assembled to explore the supervision process from the perspective of the supervisee. Participants discussed issues of safety, trust, authenticity, parallel process, boundaries, and the blurring of lines between supervision and analysis in an e...

The author responds to commentaries on his paper “Being Railroaded: A Candidate’s Struggle to Stay on Track,” from Robert Grossmark and Darlene Ehrenberg.

This paper examines transference-countertransference convergences contributing to an impasse in the treatment of a patient with a history of being bullied and neglected. Issues of power and control saturate the patient’s intrapsychic and interpersonal worlds and impact the countertransference of an analytic candidate, eliciting shame, doubt, confus...