On being "cool".

The term "cool" likely originated in American jazz in the 1940s and was a superlative that indicated significant achievement within an aesthetic of restraint. Over the ensuing decades, the word evolved to mean a rebellious vision that breaches tradition and repudiates past versions of cool. Even though its linguistic roots are West African, the term accrued distinctly American connotations in racist, sexist, and homophobic contexts. The shimmering, mysterious indefinability of coolness-its you-know-it-when-you-see-it quality-helped conceal its phobic qualities. The author examines the homophobic context through the lens of an icon of cool, James Dean, who became for gay men an object both of identification and erotic desire. The essay considers whether the restraint of coolness is only masquerade, a product of disavowed bodily anxiety, or if it also represents integration and meaningful transformation. A clinical vignette and scenes from the film Rebel Without a Cause are used to exemplify these dilemmas from a psychoanalytic point of view.

A COMPARATIVE LOOK AT INTERSUBJECTIVE AND OBJECT RELATIONAL APPROACHES TO CLINICAL MATERIAL.

The Search for a Relational Home: An Intersubjective View of Therapeutic Action. By Chris Jaenicke. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. 100 pp.

Sexual aberration or instinctual vicissitude? Revisiting freud's "the sexual aberrations".

The author reconsiders Freud's "The Sexual Aberrations," the first of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Are the concepts of sexual aberration and norm still viable? The author argues that they are necessary but insufficient elements in current theory. He then presents a competing model in which sexuality can be reduced to a more elemental level of disturbance and wish, where it is an expression of a nonsexual wish--for example, to possess or control the object to eliminate separateness. The author presents clinical material to demonstrate this alternative model.

Paul Gray's narrowing scope: a "developmental lag" in his theory and technique.

A cental thesis of Paul Gray's work is that a "developmental lag" pervades modern psychoanalysis in its failure to assimilate and apply knowledge gained about the role of the unconscious ego in intrapsychic life. But Gray himself, it is proposed, has become a victim of a new "developmental lag," of his own construction. As he somewhat single-mindedly pursued the ramifications of his "developmental lag" concept, Gray may have foreclosed on some noteworthy ideas developing around him. The most important example is his claim--herein refuted--that proper interpretive technique can avoid being infused with transference. He also seems to have rejected the theoretical importance of the internalization of the analyst and the clinical usefulness of countertransference. While emphasizing defense analysis, he ignores defenses such as splitting, denial, and disavowal as substantive problems for his technique of close-process attention. Gray's "undoing" of the rapprochement between "ego analysis" and "id analysis" by viewing the matter as an either-or proposition undermines the very real value of his contribution to the field.

Homosexuality: coming out of the confusion.

The author asserts that earlier theoretical assumptions contribute to the conceptual confusion about homosexuality in much contemporary psychoanalytic research. Bergeret's article, recently published in this Journal, is exemplary of this confusion. The author refutes his contention that homosexuality is not 'true' sexuality but merely a defensive, narcissistic fixation away from, or a nearly psychotic denial of, heterosexuality. He then clarifies specific areas of conceptual confusion regarding homosexuality still prevalent in psychoanalytic discourse that derive from earlier theoretical premises. These areas of confusion include manifest versus latent homosexuality, narcissism and bisexuality, oedipal dynamics and development, and transference and technique.