Aging, Dying, and the Analytic Process.

The panel discussion presented at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute's 1066th Scientific Meeting held on June 8, 2023, takes up aging and dying of an analyst and their impact on patients and on the nature of analytic process. Participants reflect on conflicts and challenges arising with more analysts and patients living to an advanced age, on the unregulated nature of analysts' retirement, and on multilayered meanings of analysts' ethical commitment to their work.

Picasso's prolonged adolescence, Blue Period, and blind figures.

This paper explores early issues of separation-individuation, unconscious conflict, and trauma, revived and reworked in Picasso's turbulent protracted adolescence. During this critical period Picasso traveled between Barcelona and Paris four times, from age 19 to 23. His melancholic mood, related both to separation conflict and the current realities of his uprooted life and emerging career, was expressed in his painting of emaciated, despondent figures, the predominance of monochromatic blue, and his choice of social outcasts as subjects. Of particular significance are his paintings of blind persons. Separation and loss, his depressive disposition, and his choice of blind subjects were psychologically interrelated. Picasso's developmental transformation from adolescence to adulthood, marked by his finally settling in Paris, encompassed change in his personal and artistic identity.

The Creative Transformation of Trauma: Marcel Proust's in search of lost time.

Hidden childhood trauma beneath poignant memories is a central aspect of In Search of Lost Time. Marcel Proust's magnum opus may be psychoanalytically understood as an extraordinary literary transformation of severe trauma and associated unconscious confiicts. Proust's nearly fatal childhood asthma and concomitant medical mistreatment contributed to an intense ambivalent bond and bondage with his mother, replicated in the ambivalent relationships depicted in his novel. The retrieved and re-created past is relived in the novel's fantasy playground of time and space. Proust's intuitive grasp of signiflcant aspects of time, memory, trauma, and transference was consistent with psychoanalytic thought. In the vast novel, the narcissistic mortiflcation and losses of the protagonist are mourned, worked through, and partially redeemed. I interpret the famed joyous tasting of the madeleine in tea as an artfully disguised, temporally displaced, and affective reversal of life-threatening trauma. This article probes the role of Proust's intractable asthma in his breathless journey to ego mastery and timeless creativity.

Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler: art as diary and as therapy.

The Austrian artist, Oskar Kokoschka, had an affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer Gustav Mahler, 1912-1914. This affair profoundly influenced his life and art. His palette at first brightened, with thick brush strokes and flashes of light and dark, indicating his psychological and emotional lability. Painting what he did not or could not express in words, his art of this period can be understood as an intimate visual diary of the vicissitudes of his relationship with Alma Mahler. For Kokoschka his work became a form of art therapy, following the crushing loss of Alma Mahler and near fatal physical injuries sustained in World War I. His gradual recovery was associated with his extraordinary attachment to and destruction of a lifelike effigy of Alma Mahler, thereby working through childhood trauma.

Van Gogh's fantasies of replacement: being a double and a twin.

The replacement child, often given the name of the deceased, is prone to fantasies that he or she is the embodiment of the dead child. Vincent van Gogh was born one year to the day after a stillborn brother of the identical name, including the middle name, Willem. In the parish register van Gogh was given the same number twenty-nine as his predecessor brother. Van Gogh's fantasies of death and rebirth, of being a double and a twin, contributed to both his psychopathology and his creativity. The replacement theme in van Gogh's life and work is evident in his voluminous correspondence containing drawings and references to his art. His parents and his brother Theo are viewed as having shared a familial fantasy system. Van Gogh's self-portraits are regarded as relevant to his being a replacement child. No single fantasy or theme can account for the complexities of development, disorder, or creativity. Van Gogh's art was vastly overdetermined, including extraordinary endowment and the motivation of a replacement child to justify his survival, surpass his rival double/twin through great achievement, repair parental depression, and defy death through immortality.

A further excavation of seduction, seduction trauma, and the seduction theory.

Freud's pre-analytic concept of seduction trauma was interwoven with the emerging concepts of an unconscious pathogenic past, repression, and reconstruction. The formulation of this theory of neurosogenesis involved important current, as well as past, determinants. Freud was psychologically seduced by Fliess and unwittingly colluded in the nearly fatal surgery Fliess performed on Emma Eckstein. The formulation and subsequent repudiation of the seduction theory approximated the period from the traumatic experience of Freud with his patient Emma Eckstein to her apparent recovery. Freud's seduction theory, with its focus on childhood sexual abuse, simultaneously defended against both aggression and the current traumatic situation. Defenses against aggression were intensified in an atmosphere of virulent anti-Semitism. The seduction theory is relevant to contemporary issues concerning psychic trauma, psychic reality and objective reality, memory, and reconstruction.

Little Hans: a centennial review and reconsideration.

Freud's "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy" has stimulated interminable "reanalysis." The case of Little Hans, an unprecedented experimental child analytic treatment, is reexamined in the light of newer theory and newly derestricted documents. The understanding of the complex overdetermination of Hans's phobia was not possible in the heroic age of psychoanalysis. Current analytic thought, as well as distance de-idealization vis-à-vis the pioneering past, has potentiated a reformation of the case. The severe disturbance of his mother had an adverse impact on Little Hans and his family. Her abuse of Hans's infant sister has been overlooked by generations of analysts. Trauma, child abuse, parental strife, and the preoedipal mother-child relationship emerge as important issues that intensified Hans's pathogenic oedipal conflicts and trauma. With limited, yet remarkable help from his father and Freud, Little Hans nevertheless had the ego strength and resilience to resolve his phobia, resume progressive development, and forge a successful creative career.

The models of Picasso's rose period: The Family of Saltimbanques.

The word "model" in this context has a variety of meanings. The concept of "model" encompasses the external person who is represented by the artist, as well as the internal, conscious and unconscious, past and present mental representations of other individuals and the work of other artists. In all of these meanings, the relationships of artist and model have been quite specific to the artist under consideration and the historical-cultural period. For Picasso, the relationship of artist and model was particularly intense, reflecting myriad aspects of his personality and artistic development. The theme of artist and model was the subject of many of his paintings and graphic works. We focus particularly on his use of harlequins, saltimbanques, and circus performers during his blue and rose periods. The change in predominant models and moods between periods is noted. Among the issues considered is the relevance of these models in this particular period. Why were they especially salient objects for identification and for his artistic identity? Identification with the model may represent or be linked to earlier identifications of adolescence and childhood. We discuss the implications of these portrayals for his object relationships and the magical power, possession, and control in the development of his art. The painting "The Family of Saltimbanques," his most ambitious work to date, the integration and culmination of this theme during this period, is of particular interest.

Little Hans: a contemporary overview.

The case of Little Hans, an unprecedented experimental child analytic treatment, is re-examined in the light of newer theory and newly derestricted documents. The understanding of the complex over-determination of Hans's phobia was not possible in the heroic age of psychoanalysis. Distance and de-idealization of the pioneer past have potentiated current reformulation of the case. Trauma, child abuse, parental strife, and the pre-oedipal mother-child relationship now emerge as important issues. With limited, yet remarkable help, Little Hans nevertheless had the ego strength and resilience to resume progressive development and to forge a successful creative career The new knowledge about Little Hans, his family, culture and child development provides new perspectives and raises new questions and challenges to the century-old pioneer report and formulations confirming and largely limited to the child's positive Oedipus complex.

Psychoanalytic reconstruction and reintegration.

Psychoanalytic reconstruction has declined in theoretical and clinical interest as greater attention has been directed to the here and now of the transference-counter-transference field and inter-subjectivity. Transference, however, is based upon childhood fantasy, and is a new edition of unconscious intra-psychic representation and relationships. In this paper transference is viewed as a guide to reconstruction, but transference itself is also an object of reconstruction. Reconstruction is a complementary agent of change, which integrates genetic interpretations and restores the continuity of the self The patient's childish traits, features, fixations, and irrational childish fantasies and behavior point to the necessity for reconstruction. Reconstruction organizes dissociated, fragmented memories, potentiating the further retrieval of repressed memories. Reconstruction is essential to the working through and attenuation of early traumatic experience. Recapture of the past is necessary to demonstrate and diminish the persistent influence of the past in the present, and to meaningfully connect past and present. A case is presented in which reconstruction had a central, vital role in the analytic process.