Building on his 2019 paper in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, “Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequelae of Identification with Parental Negation,” Dr. Stern will get into the weeds of the kinds of clinical process through which patients suffering from airless world syndrome can be helped to liberate themselves from their psychic captivities. He will focus on five major principles or constructs as applied in two clinical examples. They are: deconstruction, re-subjectification, the needed relationship, complex selfobjects, and breathing together. The needed relationship is the primary orienting principle. Deconstruction and re-subjectification are central elements of the needed relationship with airless world patients. A complex selfobject connection is the yield of the needed relationship as it evolves over time and is central to the transformational process. And breathing together, is a more phenomenological characterization of the emergence, and yield, of complex selfobject connectedness. Breathing together could be thought of as the psychoanalytic equivalent of secure attachment.

Ilene Philipson, PhD, PhD, PsyD holds doctorates in sociology, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, a Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and is in the private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths, and On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy. Her anthology, Have We Lost Our Love for Psychoanalysis?: Psychoanalytic Activism and Contemporary Practice, is forthcoming from Routledge.

D. Bradley Jones, Psy.D., LCSW, is a graduate of two psychoanalytic institutes: The Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (IPSS) in New York City and The Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP/LA) in Los Angeles. He is a Supervising and Training Analyst and member of the faculty at both institutes. In private practice for more than 30 years, Bradley’s special interests include working with patients exploring their relationship to substance use and misuse, professionals in the performing arts, and individuals with diverse sexual interests and identities. His writing has appeared in Self, Context, and Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Inquiry.