On Being the Edgy Alter-Ego: Parricide, Vitalizing Enactment, and the Analytic Attitude

Faculty and supervisor at The National Institute for the Psychotherapies and at IPSS in New York, and co-coordinator of the IPSS four-year program in psychoanalysis. He has a particular interest in comparative psychoanalysis and in efforts to integrate the clinical approaches and sensibilities represented by different theoretical perspectives, particularly self-psychological and relational viewpoints. He published a recent paper in Psychoanalytic Perspectives, “When empathy opens” (Kaufmann), that well reflects this comparative, integrative sensibility, and has also published several papers (including “Working with men who please too much” and “On transforming the reparative quest”) which represent his related interest in the topics of mourning and pathological accommodation. With Jenny Kaufmann, he has written on the theme of emerging from the shadows of parental narcissism. Most recently, as here, he has been exploring the creative role of playful assertion/aggression in therapy.