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Psychoanalytic Dialogues 14(4): 405-422, 2004
What happens when governments, institutions, or associations betray our most cherished values and ideals? Through the tropes of melancholia, perversion, and the fetish, this paper examines the complex reactions that such a betrayal may elicit.
The author argues that betrayal evokes shame and guilt by association, and that it also engenders the complicated form of mourning implicated in melancholia. A person may disavow the betrayal itself in order to deal with these painful reactions. This disavowal may then become stabilized via the use of the fetish in its various forms (e.g. the commodity fetish, the body fetish, and the fantasy fetish). This has perverse consequences, including subtle enactments of racism and other forms of marginalization and exclusion of Otherness.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues 14(4): 503-515, 2004
Responding to Davies's extension of the classical psychoanalytic description of the Oedipus complex, the authors argue that, in theoretical thinking about the Oedipus complex, attachment and sexual relating must be carefully distinguished, although they ceaselessly interact and - in the end - their separate contributions may be hard to disentangle. Making this distinction enables these authors to suggest that it is less likely to be a refusal of romantic response that triggers the patient's relentless pursuit of love from the analyst than an earlier disorganization of the infantile attachment. Taking the transference situation as a whole, the patient's persistent demand for an unattainable gratification can then be seen as the patient's determination to create in the consulting room another person who is in beleaguered, defensive withdrawal from a relationship. The discussion further elaborates the simi