Demons in the Consulting Room

Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice

Adrienne Harris, Margery Kalb, Susan Klebanoff, Adrienne Harris, Margery Kalb, Susan Klebanoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138943490
• eBook ISBN: 9781317373087
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice isthe second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality and our character.

Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, emons in the Consulting Room, reveals how the most extreme types of trauma can continue to have effects across generations, and how these effects manifest in the consulting room. Essays in this volume consider traumas that have affected multiple generations of people, such as the Holocaust, experiences in the gulags, and the experience of slavery. Authors here consider the clinical challenges of working with the demonic force in severe childhood abuse and the effects of serious and prolonged physical injury and illness. Inevitably, there is in such difficult clinical work, the combined effects of hauntings in the analysts and in patients and often in the surrounding culture.

In this book, distinguished psychoanalysts explore the myriad forms of ghosts and the demonic, which interfere and disrupt the endlessly difficult psychic work of mourning. It will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. emons in the Consulting Room ill appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.

Index

9/11 memorial 7–8

abjection 145

Abraham, N. 3, 11, 39 n.5, 41 n.14, 106, 194

“absence-mindedness” 102, 111

absent presences 4, 19, 20, 25, 198, 201

Abuladze, Tengiz 193

abyss, working at the edge of 5

Aciman, Andre 132

affect 2, 80, 81, 163–6, 169–71, 173–4

agency 172–3

alienaction 100

alienated identifications 201

alien self 75

alien thoughts 53

aliveness, feelings of 24, 38

Althusser, Louis 180

Altman, N. 53

ambivalence 25, 38, 62, 103, 187

American Civil War 6

analysts’ own ghosts 65–6, 87–8, 95, 115, 125–37, 140–7

analytic third 23, 49

ancestors: enacted dimensions 76–81; energy for present-day living 70; ghosts as reluctant ancestors 19–45; ghosts becoming ancestors 68–70, 73, 77–8, 88, 14...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Clinical
• Chapter 1 Ghosts in the consulting room Reluctant ancestors
• Chapter 2 The Dybbuk It's me or him
• Chapter 3 Occupation A ghost story
• Chapter 4 Repressed ghosts and dissociated vampires in the enacted dimension of psychoanalytic treatment
• Chapter 5 Do we find or lose ourselves in the negative?1
• Community & culture
• Chapter 6 The past is the presence between us Psychoanalysis and the specter of the Shoah
• Chapter 7 Ghosts and the sexual boundary violation The limits of an idea
• Chapter 8 Basic uncertainty and totalitarian objects
• Chapter 9 The presence of the past Transmission of slavery's traumas
• Chapter 10 Wounded stories
• Afterword
• Index