We will take as our starting point an article by Robert Stoller, "Hooray for Love", that was originally published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1991 and has recently been republished in his final book, Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots—a manuscript he had prepared before his sudden, early death in 1991 but which was caught in publishing limbo until recently.

Here is an abstract of the original article from JAPA:

"Love" is a word that supposedly links an affect homogeneous enough from episode to episode or from person to person or from culture to culture to be recognized by anyone as being, clearly, love. The cautious psychoanalyst, however, knows—not the least from being unable to define love—that there really is little homogeneity. Nonetheless, analytic investigators are now facing this problem. In order to examine an aspect of the concept "love," a fragment from the report of a woman of our culture in a painful love affair is placed next to a fragment from a Sambia (New Guinea) woman. As we would expect, untender, unempathic, unpleasant, and dangerous qualities—in the form of memories and scripts—immediately appear amid the tender emotions. The roots of these unloving affects can be found in the forces that, transcending cultures, create gender identity in males and females, and give us hints as to why love is often so unloving.

The discussion will be led by Tom Campbell and backed by the panel listed above. To get access to a copy of the article before the meeting, you can contact John Waide, but the discussion will be designed to be accessible to those who haven't yet read the article.

Play is not about a specified endpoint, but a process that in therapy is collaborative, can be spoken or unspoken, and assumes different narrative forms. As Winnicott (1971) put it, psychoanalysis may be considered a "highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and with others." Here I will explore how an appreciation of narrative in terms of structure and form as well as play, may aid in the articulation of inchoate or subsymbolic meaning, regardless of plot.

In this article Asch discusses sexual masochism and moral masochism as well as various other masochistic phenomena that have been a part of various cultures throughout history.

Asch includes case studies of patients with masochistic character traits and moves into an exploration of the role of object relations in masochism. He proposes that by perpetuating the sense of being mistreated, "malignant" masochism functions as a way to maintain an attachment to a sadistic, critical internalized object.

He then turns his focus to countertransference issues and highlights the challenges of treating patients with a masochistic character structure.

This is one of Freud's clearest, most concise papers. He begins by explaining the "Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis" which, concisely put, is that the patient "should communicate everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection" and that the analyst should maintain an "evenly-suspended attention" to the patient's communications. For non-analysts, this paper provides a thought-provoking window into the psychoanalytic understanding of the person, shedding some light also on psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Most of us who know Daniel Stern’s work think of him as a “baby watcher,” a member of a group of psychoanalysts and developmental researchers who studied mother/infant interactions moment-by-moment, looking for how the movements and rhythms of their interactions tuned (and mis-tuned) the creation of the infant Self over time. This research led to the seminal work, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, published in1985 by Basic Books, Inc., NY.

For our journal group this month, we will read and discuss a major paper from the group, regarding non-interpretive processes in therapy. This paper is now 11 years old, and it has been followed by a numerous clinical and theoretical articles from BCPSG that develop the themes articulated in this 1998 piece (as well as a thick trail of critiques from writers who think the group has it wrong)…

In this paper, Stern et al., focus on implicit (or procedural) processes. These are contrasted to the explicit (semantic) processes where the work of interpretation is carried out.

Implicit processing, learning, and knowing occur “beneath the radar,” without conscious awareness, but are not necessarily in the realm of the repressed (that is, that which is madeunconscious defensively as a way of managing conflict). Implicit knowledge may become the basis for explicit knowledge as well. Tonight’s article is about “implicit relational knowing,” one variety of implicit knowing. It begins in the pre-verbal period of life between mother and infant, and continues throughout our lives, constituting our “ways of being with others,” the source of our mutual co-creations in relations (intersubjectivity). Obviously, this is going to be a "two-person" psychology!

We will be interested to hear group members’ responses to the clinical examples in the article—your reactions to their parsing of patient and therapist exchanges and the meaning that Stern et al make of this. To discuss: how does this model resonate with our own experiences of being patients and therapists?