This essay develops an integrated account of aesthetic experience by bringing neuroscience into dialogue with psychoanalysis. It critiques disembodied, oculocentric models of visual perception, proposing instead that aesthetic engagement is mediated by embodied simulation-a neurofunctional mechanism enabling viewers to reenact observed gestures, affects, and movements. This simulation activates a prereflective, affective unconscious rooted in bodily memory and relational experience. Drawing on Winnicott's concept of transitional phenomena and Kris's notion of regression in the service of the ego, the author frames the aesthetic image as a transitional object that facilitates affective modulation and subjective reorganization. Aesthetic experience emerges not as symbolic interpretation but as a temporally structured act of play, attunement, and transformation. By articulating the convergences between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, the essay offers a novel model for understanding how images engage our bodies, shape our unconscious, and participate in the ongoing formation of subjectivity.

In this article, the author shares observations and preoccupations that have arisen in the process of founding The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis. They make use of these experiences as an entryway into the various terrains of Asian American: as a term, as a category, as subject, and as a field of study. They highlight the potentiality of affinity based spaces for backgrounded and dissociated self-states to reemerge, rethink Asian American as "disidentity"-as theorized by late Cuban queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz, introduce , and offer four vignettes as explorations into the polymorphous becomings of Asian American.

There is an idea misattributed to Freud that a certain "race" (e.g., the Irish) cannot be analyzed. One of the problems of this statement is its particularity. Thinking a certain race cannot be analyzed not only accepts the perniciousness of categorical racial difference, but also overlooks a more central idea Freud investigated in clinical work: that an unconscious antagonism inherent to subjectivity is the motivation and resistance to know oneself. This is the premise of this paper, which illustrates samples of Filipino American experiences in the psychoanalytic consulting room. Several vignettes are presented, in which fantasies of the author's identity are conjured to facilitate and hinder the analysis. The intrapsychic, interpersonal and sociohistorical conflicts featured in these cases reflect not only how the Philippines can be positioned in American and Asian imaginations, but also how investments in the identities of self and other reveal how we relate to our constitutive lack. It finally reflects on the jouissance (enjoyment) taken in identity's rewards, exclusions and impossibility.

Fresh sources of suffering arise as the mostly successful and affluent Indian immigrants face late middle age, empty nest, retirement, death of peers, and getting old. Having actualized the dreams of professional and financial success does bring them contentment, but with a gnawing sense of renewed geocultural dislocation. Bodily changes, diminished sexuality, letting go of children, lack of familiarity with the prevalent normative patterns of parenting adult offspring and engaging with grandchildren, losing friends "back home" to illness and death, and getting old themselves in their adapted homeland leads them to experience "mental pain" and "disorienting anxiety." These can turn into "depletion melancholia." This paper describes the syndrome, the desperate defenses against it, and the possibility of thwarting it by the powers of creative sublimation and reparation offered to the good internal objects damaged by the process of immigration.

In this paper, the author, a South Asian American female analyst, discusses her technical approach to working with patients across ethnic, racial, religious, and sociopolitical boundaries. She also describes the trajectory of her analytic career over three decades: both the challenges and the high points. Certain problems in organized psychoanalysis, especially about minorities, are briefly discussed.

How might one begin to heal the transgenerational wounds of colonization in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy? Legacies of coloniality-structures of power, labor, and subjugation-continue to cause psychic harm, particularly at the intersections of gendered and racialized bodies. In the Euro-American imagination, the flesh of the feminine Asiatic body in particular becomes the site for all manner of constructions, including but not limited to inorganic objectification: commodities to be possessed, repulsed, or destroyed. This article seeks to apply Anne Anlin Cheng's concept of ornamentalism to create a path toward healing the pain of colonial objectification by complicating the categories of human and object themselves. It does so by proposing a decolonial theory of magic that allows for to occur, illustrating these concepts with a clinical vignette of a transfeminine Asian American therapist and a transfeminine Asian American patient.

The lack of mentalization of Asian American experiences has contributed to a collapsing of subjectivity within psychoanalysis and broader society. Racism directed against Asian Americans is often minimized or dismissed. This paper explores psychoanalytic perspectives on the invisibility, dissociation, and repression of Asian American experiences, the problem of homogenization, and the discomfort with multiplicity within the United States. Drawing on clinical vignettes and research findings, the author describes how subjectivity is collapsed and reclaimed, with an emphasis on the experiences of Indian Americans.

This essay explores the experiential nature of identity through a social, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and personal lens. Using reflections on racial, ethnic, and cultural categorization-particularly the tension between "Asian" and "South Asian" identities-the author examines how identity functions as both an internal construction and a reaction to external social mirrors. Drawing from ideas related to embodied cognition, relational psychoanalysis, and existential issues, the paper argues that identity is neither fixed nor merely socially imposed but is dynamically created through lived experience. The essay also considers the emotional stakes of identity loss, the role of racialized and ethnicized experience in fragmenting selfhood, and the fragile longing for continuity in a world of shifting categories.

Model Minority expectations for Asian Americans have been in circulation for more than seven decades, and their grip on the Asian American psyche endures to the present day. In previous papers, the author addressed Asian American compliance with these expectations as a trauma-based, identifying-with-aggressor adaptation to the anti-Asian racism in American society: Reeling from the long history of racial discrimination that culminated in the incarceration of 120,000 individuals of Japanese origin during WWII, Asian Americans embraced compliance and model citizenship as a way of survival. In this paper, I highlight another source of the Model Minority adaptation, namely, the unresolved historical and cultural traumas (i.e., genocides, wars, poverty, authoritarian governments) carried by immigrants from Asia and intergenerationally transmitted to their Asian American children. Intergenerational transmission of large-scale historical traumas has not been explored in the psychoanalytic literature, especially for Asian immigrants. Some immigrants unconsciously attempt to resolve their historic traumas carried from Asia by a manic pursuit of the American Dream. For illustration, I use extended clinical examples and the writing of Amy Chua, a well-known Chinese American author who extolls a harsh parenting style to coax academic performance from her children.

Autism and queerness frequently overlap but little is written about this intersection psychoanalytically and queerness or gender atypicality are often viewed as underlying symptoms of autism. Autism itself gets reduced to a problem within a person's brain by the medical model, while the disability model focuses on the social construction of autism. Psychoanalysis is uniquely positioned to theorize the interweaving of the body, mind and the social: the intrapsychic development of the autistic queer child, the way they interact and make meaning of their interaction with caregivers, and the impact of social stigma and harsh disciplining of neurodiversity and queerness alike. This paper illustrates the central role of understanding neurodiversity in fostering our autistic queer patients' ability to reclaim their developmental narrative, process trauma, and come into an overall sense of vitality and healthy self-esteem in their gendered bodies, without which desire is compromised. For many autistic queer individuals, gender queerness is intrinsically linked to the ways they experience their autistic bodies. Neuroqueering our psychoanalytic lens means coming to terms with the ways that we participate in the disciplining of divergent bodies and minds in response to the primitive anxieties elicited by autistic and trans desire, to the detriment of our patients and theories.

This essay examines how Andrew Haigh's 2023 film, , creates an immersive encounter with the workings of the unconscious mind. The film parallels a psychoanalytic process in its exploration of the central character, Adam, who progressively gains access to his memory, childhood trauma, and inner life. Viewers watch the evolving nature of Adam's psychic experience, voyeuristically participating in his deepening insights. The essay examines the "cinematic unconscious," the narrative and visual strategies that usher spectators into Adam's unconscious, affording a dreamlike experience of inhabiting another mind. Several filmic tactics enable the viewer's entry into this psychic interiority. The film disrupts conventional temporality, which estranges spectators from narrative expectation and immerses them in an asynchronous filmic unconscious. reproduces aspects of Freud's uncanny through Adam's visits to his childhood house, which is , "unhomelike," exactly like itself and utterly different because it is now occupied by his dead parents, who are stopped in time. Dissolving boundaries between characters, visual effects of mirroring and duplication, bewildering transitions between scenes depict different forms of estrangement, from the self, family, body, and social structure. These strategies replicate in filmic and meta-filmic terms Adam's psychic process of working through his arrested creativity and frozen grief.

The commentary reviews Dr. Tuckett's model for evaluating the clinical evidence for psychoanalytic theories. His analysis of Kohut's "The Two Analyses of Mr. Z" is summarized as inadequate for his purposes, since the point of the "case" is to tell Kohut's own story, not provide clinical evidence for self psychology. Such evidence, however, is abundantly available elsewhere in the Kohut's work, that of his colleagues, and in the contemporary literature. Two works in progress by Strozier and his colleagues will provide additional clinical evidence for self psychology.

In this article, the author proposes a theoretical framework for examining the psychopathy construct within the context of extremist groups. Drawing from an integrative perspective that bridges psychoanalytic theory with an empirically grounded model of psychopathy, the author explores the interplay between the psychopathic features of leaders and followers in the development and maintenance of extremist groups. The author also elucidates the group-level dynamics that predispose these collectives to engage in extreme violence, sometimes paralleling the atrocities committed by notorious psychopathic murderers. To illustrate the proposed theoretical framework, the author examines the case of ISIS as a representative example of a psychopathic group. Furthermore, the author discusses the proposed framework in relation to clinical observations and empirical findings and examines its implications for the conceptualization and etiology of psychopathic personality. Finally, the author outlines strategies for preventing and mitigating the emergence of psychopathic groups.

Over the last 80 years revolutionary developments in North America have sought to modify or update perceived limitations in Freud's clinical technique. The question asked in this paper is how to know whether any suggested modifications enhance or undermine what Freud argued was the core of psychoanalysis. Deploying a new clinical theoretical framework for comparing the ways psychoanalysts work, published clinical material is examined to explore the empirical support for Kohut's revolution as an exemplar of how to consider other changes such as the relational "turn." Evidence is presented to suggest that Kohut's clinical shift from the Freudian core was based on assumptions of which Kohut was not aware. The problem that concerned him may not have derived from the core components of Freud's theory or clinical procedure, but rather from how he understood and put them into practice. The paper concludes by suggesting that we routinely review the suppositions about the analytic situation and the data we use to draw inferences that are implicit in our clinical work, particularly if we find ourselves in an impasse. This may help us to strengthen our discipline rather than propose a new "modern" clinical psychoanalysis throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Utilizing the work of philosopher Karen Barad, this paper explores the intraplays between gender, antigender discourse, and the climate crisis. In the midst of a world that is ecologically breaking down, gendered embodiment is a domain in which, for some, the dismay, despair, and reconfigured possibilities of our current world gathers. I use clinical examples to suggest that the disruptive elements constitutive of embodiment, as well as its potential porosity with the more-than-human world, make gender a possible site of resistance and ethical response-ability in the context of the climate crisis. Gender can become a powerful medium for an experience of a circulation between the density of the familiar and an alterity that is inside/outside. At the same time, as our usual coordinates are lost, the immersive panic that ensues also creates attempts to reinforce a threatened heteropatriarchal world, as is seen in Far Right ideologies. Attacks on trans children frequently center on defending "the natural" and protecting these children from "mutilation" and the "contagion" of gender ideology. The paper explores the way these claims project destructiveness and perversely distort several terrors entangled with the climate crisis-about "nature," violence, and permeability.

In his classic paper "The Function and the Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis," Lacan wrote that psychoanalysis had abandoned its original interest in speech. It had turned instead to the countertransference as a window of insight into the patient's preverbal fantasies. The danger, as the Lacanian tradition emphasizes, is that we might fall into "me-centered attention": a focus on our own meanings and resonances over those of the patient. We find an echo of this concern in the more recent worry among some American analysts that we now privilege visual-behavioral evidence, that is, the data of nonverbal transference-countertransference enactment, often anchored in the data of infant observation, over aural-oral data. There is, however, another way to think about language, an alternative grounded neither in Lacan, nor in Saussure, but in Peirce's theory of signs. I argue that when we use the countertransference-or at least when we use it well-we are not listening with egocentric attention, but, rather, engaging an interpretant, a beat in the signifying process, to hear the patient more fully. Far from abandoning speech, we find ourselves immersed in a semiotic field. I illustrate this approach in the case of single, middle-aged father.

This paper applies the concept of the negative transitional object to a classic story of alcoholism and recovery, Caroline Knapp's acclaimed 1996 memoir, . Knapp's reflections on her history with drinking and its developmental precursors reinforce the notion of the negative transitional object as a problematic, if creative, adaptation to a flawed relational surround (part internalized structure, part ritual practice and belief system) beginning very early in life. Recovery is seen as mourning the lived practices and unconscious beliefs that shape the negative transitional object and its addictive rituals, restoring the connection between bodily need, relational connection and symbolic thought. This is in contrast to the good-enough transitional object which according to Winnicott is neither internalized nor mourned but "gradually decathected . . . diffused over the whole of the cultural field."

Revisiting Freud's metapsychology regarding unconscious fantasy, and taking stock of Michel de M'Uzan's exemplary study of the problem of unconscious affect, the author contends that, strictly speaking, no more than there are truly unconscious affects, there are no unconscious fantasies. Instead, the author describes a process of fantasy-building, briefly illustrated with clinical material and put to the test of other psychoanalytic conceptualizations such as primal fantasies, , psychosomatic theory and the masochistic fantasy in Freud's "A child is being beaten."