Mourning and the capacity to be alone: Cultural and existential rituals in loss

When I began writing this paper, I was amid coping with several losses. I had lost a beloved friend and a family member to COVID-19, and though it seemed that we were coming out of the woods in the US, the juggernaut virus was burning through my native country of India, where most of my family lives. As a candidate starting analytic training in 2020, Freud's Mourning and Melancholia was particularly poignant as it lays the foundation for object relations borne out of a process of coping with loss. Freud described mourning as an agonizing process of identification, disinvestment and reinvestment. He emphasized the role of intrapsychic factors in the capacity to mourn. Since then, analysts have countered by writing about the highly social nature of the task of mourning and the importance in grieving of a loving communal embrace. In this paper, I explore one's early experiences with Winnicott's holding environment and transitional phenomena as an explanation of the capacity to mourn. I will extend mourning to another form of loss, namely, transience, i.e., temporariness of time and experience. Finally, I will consider how the developmental achievement of the capacity to be alone is inherent in specific intrapsychic modes of mourning transience and could be extended to intrapsychic capacity to mourn in bereavement. I will explore these ideas with a backdrop of traditional Indian rituals and spiritual practices, which embody and uniquely elaborate other essential Winnicottian features, including paradox, dialectics and the third area. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Back to the future: when children and adolescents return to office sessions following episodes of teletherapy.

Analysts and psychotherapists are beginning to have more thorough and probing discussions about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their work. Shifting to online teletherapy has been necessary due to the public health measures put in place to curtail the spread of the virus. Much of the existing literature addresses how using online platforms for teletherapy works for adults. This paper instead looks at its effects on working with children and adolescents. A contrast between Winnicott's notion of holding and Bion's concept of container-contained is reviewed through a summary of a paper by Ogden. This author finds that holding might be more applicable to online work during a pandemic when the collective relationship to time and its usual parameters is severely upended. Containing could be more arduous and challenging online due to the lack of embodied presence to communicate and detect tiny nonverbal cues. A short questionnaire affirms that child analysts and psychotherapists have struggled with dimensions of online work that are particular to the developmental levels of their patients. Further, teletherapy may often not be a good fit for someone with learning differences.

Les analystes et les psychothérapeutes commencent à avoir des discussions plus profondes et plus pointues sur comment la pandémie de COVID-19 a affecté leur travail. Passer à la thérapie en ligne a été nécessaire du fait des mesures de santé publique mises en place pour freiner l'avancée du virus. La majeure partie de la littérature s'intéresse à comment l'utilisation des plateformes en ligne pour la psychothérapie a fonctionné pour les adultes. Par contraste, cet article se penche sur les effets dans le travail avec les enfants et les adolescents. A travers un résumé d'un article d'Ogden, un contraste entre la notion de « holding ¼ de Winnicott et le concept de contenant-contenu de Bion est examiné. L'auteur soutient que la notion de holding serait plus adaptée au travail en ligne durant une pandémie, quand la relation collective au temps et à ses paramètres habituels est gravement perturbée. La contenance (Bion) pourrait s'avérer plus délicate et plus laborieuse en ligne du fait du manque de présence incarnée pour détecter et communiquer les signes non-verbaux. Un court questionnaire confirme que les analystes d'enfants et les psychothérapeutes ont eu du mal avec les aspects du travail en ligne qui se rapportent aux niveaux de développement de leurs patients. De plus, la télé-thérapie peut souvent ne pas être adaptée pour quelqu'un qui présente des différences d'apprentissages.

Analistas y psicoterapeutas están comenzando a tener discusiones más minuciosas y agudas sobre cómo la pandemia por el COVID-19 ha afectado su trabajo. El cambio a la terapia virtual ha sido necesario debido a las medidas de salud pública tomadas para reducir la propagación del virus. Gran parte de la literatura existente da cuenta de como el uso de plataformas para la terapia virtual funciona para los adultos. El presente trabajo en cambio, presta atención a los efectos en el trabajo con niños y adolescentes. Se revisa a través de un trabajo de Ogden, el contraste entre la noción de sostenimiento de Winnicott y el concepto de contenedor-contenido de Bion. Este autor encuentra que el sostenimiento puede aplicarse más al trabajo online durante una pandemia cuando la relación del colectivo con el tiempo y sus parámetros usuales es severamente trastocada. La contención podría ser más ardua y desafiante de manera online debido a la falta de una presencia corporal que comunique y permita detectar pequeñas señales no-verbales. Un breve cuestionario afirma que analistas y psicoterapeutas de niños han luchado con aquellas dimensiones del trabajo online propias del nivel de desarrollo de sus pacientes. Además, la terapia virtual puede a menudo no ser una buena opción para alguien con diferencias en el aprendizaje.

Mourning and The Capacity To Be Alone: Cultural and Existential Rituals in Loss

When I began writing this paper, I was amid coping with several losses. I had lost a beloved friend and a family member to COVID-19, and though it seemed that we were coming out of the woods in the US, the juggernaut virus was burning through my native country of India, where most of my family lives. As a candidate starting analytic training in 2020, Freud's Mourning and Melancholia was particularly poignant as it lays the foundation for object relations borne out of a process of coping with loss. Freud described mourning as an agonizing process of identification, disinvestment and reinvestment. He emphasized the role of intrapsychic factors in the capacity to mourn. Since then, analysts have countered by writing about the highly social nature of the task of mourning and the importance in grieving of a loving communal embrace. In this paper, I explore one's early experiences with Winnicott's holding environment and transitional phenomena as an explanation of the capacity to mourn. I will extend mourning to another form of loss, namely, transience, i.e., temporariness of time and experience. Finally, I will consider how the developmental achievement of the capacity to be alone is inherent in specific intrapsychic modes of mourning transience and could be extended to intrapsychic capacity to mourn in bereavement. I will explore these ideas with a backdrop of traditional Indian rituals and spiritual practices, which embody and uniquely elaborate other essential Winnicottian features, including paradox, dialectics and the third area.

Bound by Infinities: Technology, Immediacy and Our Environmental Crisis.

This paper explores the relationship between human desire, technology, and imagination, emphasizing (1) the phenomenology of this relationship, and (2) its ontological and ecological ramifications. Drawing on the work of Bion and Winnicott, the paper will develop a psychoanalytic container for attitudes contributing to our current climate-based crisis, paying special attention to the problematic effect technology has had on our sense of time and place. Many of our technologies stunt sensuous engagement, collapse psychic space, diminish our capacity to tolerate frustration, and blind us to our dependence on worlds beyond the human. In short, our technologies trouble our relationship to our bodies and other bodies. The paper argues that omnipotent fantasies organizing our relationship to technology, to each other, and to the nonhuman world, have cocooned us in a kind of virtual reality that devastates a sense of deep obligation to the environment.