The Unspoken: Analyst's 'Delinquencies', Post-Treatment Contact and Aging with Joyce Slochower, PhD (New York)

Dec 15, 2024

Joyce Slochower, Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College and author of "Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken," discusses the profound impact of collective mourning rituals on personal and communal healing. She explores how early psychoanalysis often overlooked the value of attachment and shared experiences in grief. Joyce reflects on the evolution of therapeutic practices, the complexities of post-treatment relationships, and the ethical challenges analysts face as they balance personal needs with patient care while navigating their own aging process.

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ANECDOTE

Evolution of Responsiveness

Joyce Slochower recounts her shift from being a young analyst who readily offered extensive support, like daily calls with a suicidal patient.
Now, she is more aware of her limits and the potential for such responsiveness to hinder a patient's self-reliance.

ADVICE

Managing Delinquencies

Acknowledge and address personal needs to avoid "analytic delinquencies," moments of disengagement during sessions.
Reflect on why these occur instead of feeling guilty, and find ways to meet personal needs outside of sessions.

ANECDOTE

Dr. M's Boredom

Dr. M, a supervisee, confessed to Joyce Slochower about reading magazines during sessions with a "boring" patient.
This highlighted the potential for boredom to lead to inattention or enactments, masking deeper relational dynamics.

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“I feel so strongly about this [collective commemorative ritual]. I think that early psychoanalytic writing overemphasized the value of separation-individuation and pathologized the opposite. It's been through personal experience that I have come to see that in a different way with regard to Jewish commemorative ritual which takes place a couple of times a year. But also some experiences that I have had outside the realm of religion. The one that pops to mind was what President Biden did about a year after the first onslaught of the Covid epidemic. He had candles put all around the reflecting pool in Washington, one candle for every number of people who had died, and this was broadcast on television. I sat there and I wept over thousands of deaths, and then I began to think about the power of the experience of mourning with others. Despite the fact that we didn't all lose the same person, we had all lost somebody to this virus that was not as yet being managed. There was something incredibly powerful about that - in the same way for those who lost someone on 9/11 who go down to the Twin Towers and read the list of names every year. But we analysts have not theorized this stuff and I think it's time that we did.”

Episode Description: We begin with Joyce sharing with us her evolution from being a young analyst who was essentially ever available to her struggling patients to now being "more aware of the problematic edge to a kind of responsiveness that once felt simply necessary." We discuss what she calls analyst's 'secret delinquencies' - when the clinician intentionally withdraws from the patient into personal matters "so that the analyst becomes the single subject in the room." We consider post-treatment friendships between analyst and analysand and the nature of the evolution of the transference. Joyce shares with us her reflections on growing older and the mixed blessings it provides in terms of greater experience and clinical wisdom as well as a tempting "disengagement from an earlier sense of therapeutic discipline." We close with her suggestion that we consider the "dynamic function of commemorative ritual" not as a mere enactment but as a fulsome experience for "reworking old connections."

Our Guest:Joyce Slochower Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY; faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Steven Mitchell Center, National Training Program of NIP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies & and PINC in San Francisco. She is the author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; & 2014) and Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006 & 2014), and co-Editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, of “De-idealizing relational theory: a Critique from Within” and “Decentering Relational Theory: a Comparative Critique” (2018). Her new book, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, was released by Routledge in June 2024. She is in private practice in New York City.