Psychology Research Digest
Psychoanalytic Psychology - Vol 42, Iss 2
Psychoanalytic Psychology serves as a resource for original contributions that reflect and broaden the interaction between psychoanalysis and psychology.
Sex on the spectrum: Sexuality’s potential to free up autistic subjectivity.
Autistic adults are scantly written about psychoanalytically, and when they are, their difference is acknowledged as deficit, a deficit which diminishes their subjecthood and potential and therefore also sexuality. This article will investigate the way that sexuality in its creative and transgressive potential can free up autistic pleasure, agency, and connection in transformative ways that resist the pathologizing meanings imposed on autistic bodyminds by allistic projections. Autistics have the right to their libidinal strivings and the freedom to constitute their subjectivity through their own search for meaning. Our work is to facilitate the process of authentic becoming or autopoiesis that may have been stalled by social trauma and stigmatization and allistic society’s lack of mentalization of autistic experience. I will discuss barriers in both analyst and analysand to this process and illustrate the challenges I had to overcome in order to empathically enter my autistic patient’s lived experience and see his sexual strivings through a new and now shared perspective, which in turn allowed him to engage in meaningful psychic work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Effects of mentalization on the therapeutic relationship from patient and therapist perspectives: A longitudinal analysis.
The therapeutic alliance is a well-established predictor of psychotherapy outcome, and the ability to mentalize has been discussed as a change mechanism in psychotherapy. Low mentalization may lead to impairments in the alliance. In the present study, we assessed mentalization effects on the therapeutic alliance over the course of treatment. Thirty-seven patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorders received 25 ± 3 sessions of integrative cognitive behavioral therapy (outpatient setting). Patient’s mentalization was coded by external raters based on transcripts of the first, eighth, 16th, and 24th therapy sessions, and the alliance quality was assessed from both patient and therapist perspectives after each session. The effects of mentalization on the alliance were investigated both within and between patients using hierarchical linear modeling. A higher patient ability to mentalize was related to a better therapist-reported but not patient-reported alliance during treatment. Mentalization did not show significant within-patient effects on the therapeutic alliance. To conclude, therapists may perceive a stronger therapeutic alliance with patients who exhibit a greater capacity for mentalization. It might be important for therapists to pay attention to a possible positive bias when patients present with a high ability to mentalize. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Interplay of the unconscious: How psychiatric inpatients’ defense mechanisms are related to their therapists’ countertransference reactions.
Countertransference (CT) as a specific aspect of the therapeutic relationship plays a crucial role in psychotherapy. It serves as a source of clinical information for initial diagnostics and is relevant over the course of the therapeutic process. Theory and research have found that some personality features in patients are significantly related to specific CT reactions in the therapists. In this interplay, the role of patients’ defense mechanisms (DM) has not been sufficiently investigated. This study aimed to explore the association between patients’ DMs and therapists’ CTs in a psychiatric inpatient sample. DMs were assessed by the Defense Style Questionnaire in 71 patients. Twelve therapists used the Therapist Response Questionnaire to rate their CT toward their patients throughout the treatment. Considering the nested data structure with therapists on Level 2 and patients on Level 1, Pearson correlations between patients’ DMs and therapists’ CTs were calculated. After Benjamini–Hochberg correction, six correlations remained significant: Patients’ DM humor was positively correlated with therapists’ positive/satisfying and sexualized CT and negatively with disengaged CT. DM acting out was positively correlated with helpless/inadequate and hostile/mistreated CT. DM splitting showed the strongest positive correlation with overwhelmed/disorganized CT and was also positively associated with special/overinvolved and hostile/mistreated CT. DM isolation was positively associated with special/overinvolved CT, and somatization was negatively associated with sexualized CT. Under careful consideration of the methodological limitations of our study, the relevance of our findings for the therapeutic relationship and process is discussed, and further research questions are pointed out. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Synchrony of physiological activity trends between patient and psychotherapist during a psychodynamic psychotherapy session: A quasi-longitudinal case series pilot study.
This study is an exploratory analysis of trends in the physiological responses of both the psychotherapist and the patient by examining heart rate and electrodermal activity during psychodynamic psychotherapy sessions. The study involved 24 patients diagnosed with neurotic disorders (F40–F48) and/or personality disorders (F60–F61) according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision criteria. The mean age of participants was 32.4 years (SD = 7.2). The sample consisted of 62.5% women (n = 15) and 37.5% men (n = 9). Data were collected from 96 psychodynamic psychotherapy sessions led by two psychotherapists. The statistical analysis involved constructing regression models for four physiological variables: heart rate, skin conductance level, skin conductance response frequency, and skin conductance response amplitude for patients and psychotherapists. Subsequently, scatter plots depicting these variables for patients and psychotherapists were juxtaposed for comparison. Additionally, correlation analysis was performed. The trends in physiological responses in the regression analysis differed significantly: Heart rate remained stable for therapists but decreased for patients, skin conductance level increased for both patients and therapists but rose more sharply for therapists, skin conductance response frequency decreased for patients but remained stable for therapists, and skin conductance response amplitude remained constant for patients but increased for therapists. Correlation analysis revealed that, over a psychotherapy session, all physiological parameters of the psychotherapists increased, while all those of the patients decreased. The findings indicate significantly divergent trends in physiological activity between psychotherapists and patients during psychotherapy sessions, suggesting an antiphase physiological synchrony trend. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Measuring personality change in psychoanalytic treatments: Opportunities for the use of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual.
Psychoanalytic treatment endeavors to improve patients’ psychological health and functioning and ameliorate personality pathology. However, these treatment outcomes are notoriously hard to capture via self-report measures and not frequently measured in naturalistic psychoanalytic practice. In this brief report, we examined the validity of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual’s Psychodiagnostic Chart–2 (PDC-2; R. M. Gordon & Bornstein, 2015) in assessing patients’ psychological health and personality pathology achieved in 27 long-term psychoanalytic treatments in naturalistic practice. We used previously collected session recordings (eight early- and eight late-phase sessions per treatment) that had previously been rated by observers on the Shedler–Westen Assessment Procedure-200 (Shedler & Westen, 1998). A group of graduate student observers rated the PDC-2. Results indicated that multiple indices of the PDC-2 showed statistically significant change from early to late in treatment. The PDC-2 was also related to ratings on the Shedler–Westen Assessment Procedure-200 at both the early and late phases of treatment, supporting the convergent validity of the measure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Review of How Philosophy Changed Psychoanalysis: From Naïve Realism to Postmodernism.
Reviews the book, How Philosophy Changed Psychoanalysis: From Naïve Realism to Postmodernism by Aner Govrin (2024). As Govrin observes, philosophy has deeply influenced psychoanalysis over time, shaping it to varying extents and in different ways. In this book, Govrin incorporates extensive textual analysis to reveal the contradictory tendencies of many psychoanalysts, offering valuable insights into the complexities of theory-making and its evolution. Overall, the book offers a unique and profound philosophical analysis of the field of psychoanalysis, presented with clarity and insight. The reviewer believes many analysts will find it highly beneficial. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Review of Your Mum and Dad.
Reviews the film, Your Mum and Dad directed and written by Klaartje Quirijns and written by Boris Gerrets (2019). This review of Your Mum and Dad, a profoundly moving film, examines the intergenerational transmission of trauma through two stories and their respective healing using psychoanalysis and art, respectively. The first story brings us into the clinic as we observe an interracial analysis of a Jewish man whose mother lost her family in the Holocaust. The second is the filmmaker’s story whose parents maintained a 50-year silence over the death of her sister who drowned at the age of 4. The film artistically demonstrates how the search for truth is both painful and liberating. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Review of Gender Without Identity.
Reviews the book, Gender without Identity by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini (2024). This book represents a challenge to the dominant, ossified, aspects of the psychoanalytic establishment, which the authors describe as a kind of Minotaur, a beast destined to be sacrificed but instead maintained on life support with the infusions of youth and vigor. The text calls for psychoanalysts to acknowledge the violence enacted in the encounter with queer and trans people including those who inflect institute policies and practices—admission decisions, curriculum choices, the anointing of heirs, and sanctified theories. The text calls for the community to acknowledge the generations of analysts who were barred from training who were never here, those who have suffered in their training and treatments, and to welcome queer and trans people—as analysands, colleagues, and teachers. It is also an invitation for the community to open itself to encounter with an outside with the power to disrupt, to disintegrate ossified and consecrated meanings, and offer possibilities for transformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Review of making room for the disavowed: Reclaiming the self in psychotherapy.
Reviews the book Making Room for the Disawowed: Reclaiming the Self in Psychotherapy by Paul Wachtel (see record
Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement.
- Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)
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