1 And so it has always been with Psychoanalysis whether in New York or elsewhere. Indeed, how else can it be with this impossible profession that seeks acceptance even while it refuses to conform, that affirms yet continually challenges the rules of professional authority.

2 Psychoanalysis has died many times and in many places. The causes of its repeated demise are often less instructive than the conditions of its resurrection. The cause of death is always a version of the same: it is a discipline that demands too much. It is too austere and takes too long, costs too much, operates too slowly, and produces equivocal results. In short as a general condition, it is an impossible profession in a state of constant collapse.

3 How it rises again from its own ashes however is always a story about the demands that arise in a particular time and place. It is always a particular story about a particular resurrection in the face of the universal impossibility.

4 New York itself has been the site of many such deaths and resurrections in the history of the field. It is where psychoanalysis first came to die a second death after its first demise on German soil. That second death, now long ago, had already begun when Lacan was using the ‟NY School” of Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein as his foil. The post-war hegemony of Ego Psychology in that bastion of authority, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute with its venerable roots dating from 1911, turned out to be shorter lived than anyone dreamed. By the time Janet Malcolm published Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981. NY: Knopf), the hegemony of Ego Psychology was already well past. Without any assistance from the French critique, internal divisions within American psychoanalysis had engendered the Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut, the Interpersonal School associated with the Wm A. White Institute, and a burgeoning interest in Object Relations Theory, from Klein through Winnicott, leading eventually to the formation of what is called the Relational School increasingly dominant, especially in New York, since the 1990’s.

5 Of course, the serious student of psychoanalytic history could point out that none of these deaths and resurrections actually introduce new terms to the debate. The arguments one hears today, arguments about the importance of the real interpersonal and social context versus the more narrowly focused psychoanalytic view of the intrapsychic frame were arguments present from the start of Freud’s work. They return nevertheless in particular ways and have done so repeatedly on the New York psychoanalytic scene. After the Second World War, they arose in response to a certain perceived authoritarianism in the dominant institutes of the time, not just for reasons of theoretical difference about the social environment vs the intrapsychic structure. Likewise, the current American Relational School that has generated so much research and writing since the 1990’s has been carried both by its commitment to progressive feminism and gender theory and by its intellectual conflicts with Freudian orthodoxy. It has been both a political and a theoretical challenge to the hegemonic authority.

6 The contemporary resurrection of an active intersubjective psychoanalysis in the name of progressive gender theory reveals once again in a particular time and place what it is that people want psychoanalysis to be: In this instance a psychoanalysis that is a progressive and transformative theory of sex and gender rather than a conservative defender of the bourgeois family. The viability of any such resurrection is always dependent on whether psychoanalysis can successfully take on the new form that the current situation demands and yet still remain true to itself, still retain the fundamental principles of the field. Can Psychoanalysis share the versatility of the Hindu Deity who appears sometimes as Vishnu and sometimes as Siva, and yet still remains the same God?

7 A new psychoanalytic program was created at the New School University in NY in 2008 and named the Sandor Ferenczi Center. Ferenczi was chosen as the inspiration for this program, as explained on their web site, because:

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He is known for his innovative clinical work, his willingness to work with the most difficult of patients, his socially and politically progressive attitudes, and his promotion of a cultural climate that facilitated interdisciplinary conversation between psychoanalysis, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.

9 However, Ferenczi also represents the active model of mutual analysis that suits the contemporary interest in intersubjectivity He also represents the re-examination of a certain form of the Seduction Hypothesis that suits many of the contemporary relational theories of gender development. His contemporary resurrection is an over-determined expression of current psychoanalytic interests and the celebration of a particular lineage in the field.

10 For related reasons, there is also a new and contemporary interest in New York in the work of Jean Laplanche. It seems that it is Laplanche’s interest in Freud’s ‘special theory of seduction’ and in his ideas about infantile trauma and the origins of sexuality that have brought his work to the attention of New York analysts at this time. A publishing venture called Unconscious in Translation (uitbooks.com) has been created by the NY psychoanalyst, Dr. Jonathan House. The venture is devoted primarily to the translation and presentation of the work of Laplanche. Laplanche had long been known in NY but primarily for his books from the 1960’s: The Language of Psychoanalysis (w/Pontalis) and Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. His subsequent work and especially his expanded theory of sexuality was largely unknown until this new venture in translation brought attention to it.

11 An event is planned at the November, 2016 conference of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (SIPP) to be held this year in New York that will focus on Laplanche by revisiting the debate that originated at the Bonneval Conference of 1960 on the relationship between the unconscious and language. The event is planned as a formal debate between two teams, one representing Lacan and one representing Laplanche. This will also introduce a chapter of French psychanalysis largely unknown to the wider circles of New York psychoanalysis.

12 It may seem odd to French analysts to return to this debate at this time. However, such is the nature of resurrection in psychoanalysis where nothing is settled once and for all. The questions return but they do so in new contexts and with apparently new meaning. Laplanche is now celebrated among NY analysts as a theorist of sexuality and trauma. He is taken up by those who are interested in a theory of intersubjectivity that is centered on the seduction and the trauma of intergenerational sexuality.

13 Laplanche’s debate with Lacan on the primacy of language returns in a new context that at first appears to be quite different from its original one. Although perhaps it is not so different after all. This question could perhaps better answered by those French analysts who have closely followed the development of Laplanche’s work and whether the current discovery of Laplanche’s approach by the American Relational school is indeed an accurate recognition of Laplanche’s project all along: to develop a psychoanalysis of intersubjectivity that is less rooted in structural linguistics and more in the phenomenological trauma of the intergenerational encounter.

14 The importance of the ‘real’ interpersonal frame and especially its developmental aspects in parent-child relationships has long tugged at the psychoanalytic conscience in New York. The old orthodox model where intrapsychic processes were viewed as a discrete system unto itself, to be repeated in the transference, and affected by ideally disinterested interpretations is now widely faulted for not paying attention to the ‘realities’ of the interpersonal context for both pathogenesis and for treatment conditions. It seems, at least for the moment, that this debate is over, and the interpersonalists have won. It is now simply a matter of dividing up the spoils and deciding just how to study and theorize that interpersonal register.

15 As an expression of this trend, Attachment Theory and other developmental models that seek to identify the actual parental behaviors that are responsible for the transmission of intergenerational trauma are thus quite popular in New York today. This approach lends itself to the design of empirical studies since it is based on the principle that there are independent variables (attachment styles, parenting behaviors) that can be correlated with pathological outcomes. Likewise, the study of effective treatment variables can be facilitated by considering variables that are not unique to the analytic process itself. Expressions of empathy for instance or other identifiable behaviors can then be correlated with effective outcome as opposed to the old psychoanalytic model where the definition of effective treatment was focused on the interpretive act, an act defined tautologically by its having an effect on the treatment. Thus in a marriage of odd bedfellows, progressive theories of gender and the embrace of the post-nuclear family meet up with psychological empiricism and the grounding of psychoanalytic theory in replicable observation.

16 Somewhere the idea of psychoanalysis as its own domain remains alive, psychoanalysis neither at the service of sociopolitical transformations nor reducible to the framework of psychological empiricism. However, it is increasingly a marginalized view.

17 In this regard, an interesting independent group appeared on the NY scene several years ago. It calls itself Das Unbehagen (from Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur). The name is a bit ironic as the ‘malaise’ that Freud wrote about is of course a general condition of modern culture, where the founders of this independent group were specifically referring to their particular sense of malaise regarding the contemporary state of psychoanalysis, and especially regarding the state of psychoanalytic formation at the established institutes of New York. From a small beginning the group has expanded rapidly and now has several hundred people who participate in different ways according to a loosely organized program of events.

18 One such event was a conference held last year entitled Institute No Institute (the name involves a verbal ambiguity in English because institute can be both a verb and a noun). It gathered psychoanalysts from a variety of different schools and perspectives and a large audience to examine and critique both the current practices of psychoanalytic institutes and their history.

19 Das Unbehagen has the unusual character, for a psychoanalytic organization, of catholic inclusivity. It does not affirm any single psychoanalytic approach or school, but is devoted to the free and non-hierarchical study of psychoanalysis in the broadest sense. It seems to be an expression of the desire for psychoanalysis to affirm itself as an independent field neither attached to schools, nor to the medical model, as a field that in questioning the transmission of intrapsychic structures of authority may also refrain from reproducing those structures in its organizational extension.

20 Psychoanalysis and politics is of course high on the agenda at this time as there is a national presidential campaign underway. Candidates for political office always present themselves as temptations for diagnosis ex cathedra, but never more than in the current campaign where one of the candidates has virtually established his political visibility through the display of his personal symptoms. Naturally ‟mental health” practitioners of every stripe wanted to jump in with their views on Mr. Trump’s character. What has resulted has been a secondary debate on the inadvisability of making armchair diagnoses of public figures without the benefit of direct clinical experience.

21 Psychoanalysts here have had difficulty finding a way to address the political system that rewards theatrical lies, dramatic insults, and the demagogic appeal to exaggerated fears without committing the fallacy of ‟psychoanalyzing” the candidate. There has been much discussion in the professional listserves of what must be done to stop this dangerous figure, while yet observing the limits of professional ethics, but very little on how he represents the logical extension of a certain discourse, and how the flourishing of that discourse makes the appearance of such figures inevitable.

22 Meanwhile the other presidential candidate, Mrs. Clinton, today announced the most comprehensive plan for national support for Mental Health services ever proposed by a national contender. Should psychoanalysts welcome this effort to put psychotherapeutic interventions on parity with medical intervention? Here again, the question of psychoanalytic exceptionalism comes into play. The terms of national support for Mental health services are always those of ‘evidence-based best practices.’ And although some researchers have had success in finding ways to show that psychoanalysis can indeed be shown to have measurable success rates equal or better than other psychotherapies, there is for many psychoanalysts in New York, a great reluctance to accept these terms of the debate. Psychoanalysis has never successfully defined itself in terms of mental health standards and to try to do so now as a means of getting in on the national campaign for behavioral science may be one more step in a descent into the tomb.