The latest issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues issue opens with an introduction (free to read) by Lauren Levine, Stephen Hartman, Mary Kim Brewster, Marie Saba, and Sarah Schoen framing the special section, “Snapshots on Hope.” This collection of short essays brings together clinicians and scholars from diverse contexts to reflect on hope through psychoanalytic and personal lenses and are all available to read for free. Donna Bassin’s Hope as an Act of Repair treats hope as something constructed from brokenness. Ofra Bloch’s Pass Over and Jorge Bruce’s Dies Irae (published in both English and Spanish) bring political and cultural weight to the theme. Cynthia Chalker’s On The Occasion Of My 60th Birthday and Victor Doñas’s Times of Hearths approach hope through autobiographical reflection. Elizabeth Kita’s Between Hope and Dread and Samanta Batra Mehta’s What’s Hate Got to Do with It sit with hope’s more uncomfortable entanglements. Spyros Orfanos’s Hope Dreams, Noha Sadek’s Giving Up as Hope, Steven Stern’s Hope and Capacity, Jennifer Stevens’s On Hope, Sally Swartz’s Gardening in Africa: A Note on Hope, and Foluke Taylor’s tense hope round out the section, together creating a portrait of hope that is fragmented, contested, and deeply human.
The next cluster centers on an article by Tihamér Bakó and Katalin Zana, Transgenerational Atmospheres and Self-Knowledge in Groups which explores how unconsciously inherited trauma manifests in group therapy through what they call transgenerational “atmospheres.” Two discussions follow: Jill Salberg’s Thinking in the ‘We,’ Where Individual and Collective Traumas Meet and Silvia Rivera-Largacha’s Witnessing Together: Psychoanalytic Work with Transgenerational Trauma in Armed Conflict, the latter drawing on clinical experience in conflict zones. Bakó and Zana then respond in Reflecting Together on Trauma, Witnessing, and the Role of Psychoanalysis.
The third cluster opens with Danny Gellersen’s A Peculiar People — Mormonism, Drag Performance, and Erotic Non-Belonging at the Intersection of a Psychoanalyst’s Werk and Identity, a bold interweaving of personal history, queer identity, and clinical theory. Marty A. Cooper responds in Tattoos, Tights, and Ghosts and Ann Pellegrini in Dragging History: Mormonism and the Haunted House of U.S. Exceptionalism (open access). Gellersen closes with Unholy Ghosts: Vanishing, Recognition, and Disidentification.
The issue concludes with Danielle Novack’s Analytic Fostering, which develops a concept describing a particular relational and containing stance in clinical work. Jody Messler Davies and Rachael Peltz offer discussions — Discussion of Danielle Novack’s ‘Analytic Fostering’ (open access) and Framing the Gap: Discussing Analytic Fostering respectively — with Novack replying in Making Space on the Shelf.
You can see the full issue here, with access to the mentioned free articles.