Afterword

The papers presented here give valuable summaries of theories—Thandeka of Stern, Miller, Nussbaum, McCartney, and Goad as they touch on shame; Rubin of Freud on religion in relation to his mother; Esgalhado of Lacan and Kristeva in relation to the Portuguese writer Pessoa; Barnard on Lacan and Kristeva on Kristeva's speculations about female depression; Jones on Fairbairn and Winnicott as they deal with embodiment. Gunn takes us through a poignant koan that reads like a fairy tale, and Lawrence, with dazzling understatement, puts into bold relief the persistence of creativity amidst poverty, imprisonment, and mental illness. Brothers and Lewinberg summarize objections to Freud's oedipal theory, especially with reference to gender, replacing it with Kohut's relational model. In response to Brothers and Lewinberg, Barbre creatively draws parallels to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that understands God's inner being as relational, which radically undermines any sense of FatherSonSpirit as gender specific. Jones and Lawrence give us clinical vignettes through which to see their own approaches carried out in life—a welcome test for any theorizing.

The authors explore in their own ways what is left after what Freud and Jung predicted earlier in this century was about to happen—the withdrawal of projections into categories of the sacred and the influx of all that energy back into the psyche. Static categories of God, self, society, and gender were upended. A loosening of what had before seemed stable exposes us to what feels like chaos. We feel what Pessoa calls “naked anxiety,” made “poor orphans” whose inner and outer