You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Toward an emancipatory psychoanalysis, a collection of articles by Bernard Brandchaft, does a good job depicting the evolution of his thinking about accommodative tendencies and their treatment. Compiled by Brandchaft with coeditors Shelley Doctors and Dorienne Sorter, this collection includes chronologically organized articles accompanied by informative commentaries that carefully outline the points in each article and their contribution to Brandchaft's evolving narrative. Doctors and Sorter have made a significant contribution to the larger psychoanalytic community by initiating and organizing this collection. Reading the articles and the commentaries, one is impressed by the ubiquity of accommodative tendencies in development and psychopathology, and Brandchaft's ideas about how to conduct psychoanalysis with accommodative patients are instructive.
In his signature article, “To Free the Spirit from its Cell” (Brandchaft, 1993), Brandchaft presents two patients, Patrick and Marco, who vacillate inexplicably between expansive states related to authentic self-expression to more depressed states reflecting their parents' lifelong critical view of them. Brandchaft relates this vacillation to the power of their accommodative tendencies: their tendency to regard themselves and their experience according to their parents' critical and demanding perspectives.
In Brandchaft's view, patients such as Marco and Patrick grow up defining themselves in what he refers as an “accommodative” way—accommodating, that is, to their parent's view—in order to develop and sustain a positive tie with parents who have related to them as extensions or projections of their own subjectivity. Not experiencing recognition and affirmation for their own authentic perspective, these patients did not develop their own unique perspective. Instead, they adapted to the self-centered reflections they received from their caregivers. Brandchaft maintains that these patients become understandably anxious whe