This paper engages a Winnicottian formulation of the analytic field to highlight the often unspoken, implicit erotic dimensions of analytic work. Material from an analysis with a very inhibited, emotionally constricted man shows both patient and analyst encountering difficulty in "locating" each other within the analytic field. Paradoxically, a felt sense of connection was also palpable, and possibly/impossibly erotic. Movement in the treatment required the development of what the analyst came to think of as an "erotic sonar"-a "sounding" in the erotic body of each participant that could indicate the place of creative connection. A sensing in the body for the "feel" of the analytic dyad became a kinetic reading of emotional closeness or distance, as well as indicating the subtle, and shifting, tones of the relationship. Emphasis is placed on bodily experience in a subjective registering of the erotic, both as sexuality and as a more general experience of passion, vitality, and creativity.

Drawing on 15 years of experience teaching psychoanalytic theory and therapy primarily from an object relations perspective to Chinese psychotherapists onsite and online, the authors present their learning about Chinese culture, social history, and philosophy, and the Chinese way of communicating about emotional experience. Their essay is imbued with the Chinese use of metaphor and psychosomatic symbolization, particularly involving the heart. They elaborate on the Chinese concept of Empty Heart Disease, comparing and contrasting it to Western concepts from literature, sociology and psychoanalysis, namely spleen, , dead mother, and schizoid, empty, false, and narcissistic self-states. They expand upon and extend the empty heart concept to various age groups and symptom presentations in China, illustrated by a vignette from individual psychoanalysis with a woman and three vignettes from applied psychoanalysis of a couple with no intimacy, a child with an obsessive psychosomatic symptom, and an adolescent school dropout who was self-harming and suicidal in response to academic pressure. Having emphasized the connection between symptom presentations and social life and times, they discuss the impact of trauma, its transgenerational transmission in China, and the impact of unprecedented economic growth and social change on individuals, couples and families.

The appeal of transgender pornography, especially involving "pre-op"(erative) trans women, has steadily increased placing it in the top six most searched categories. In this paper I explore one unconscious function of the "pre-op" trans woman sexual fantasy that I have observed in some young heterosexual gynandromorphophilic men (i.e., men sexually drawn to the MtF "pre-op" body) who use transgender pornography and/or escorts. In contrast to a psychoanalytic reading of gynandromorphophilia in which the "pre-op" trans woman's body is understood to be "missing nothing" because she has breasts a penis, I suggest that what is psychically compelling and sexually arousing for some men is quite the opposite: the "pre-op" trans woman has a penis, she therefore has no vagina/womb. It is the triumph over what missing and that should be there. The penis in lieu of the vagina/womb is evidence of her damaged procreative potential. In these cases, I propose that the sexual preference exposes the man's underlying womb envy. The "pre-op" trans woman is projectively identified with a felt-to-be "infertile" part of the man. The phantasized damaged woman's procreative body temporarily relieves the man of his sense of inadequacy and anxieties about his capacity to create and enliven. I illustrate this dynamic with clinical examples.

Fred Pine is a major contributor to contemporary Freudian analytic work. He expanded the of clinical psychoanalysis by showing how the analyst could integrate ever expanding perspectives in analysis, and he expanded its through greater insight into how development affects psychic structure and, thereby, the context within which unconscious conflict and compromise is experienced and processed. Both of these-his expansion of potential variables implicated in the process of dynamic conflict and his developmental focus on structural deficit-have led to a way of Freudian thinking that is highly assimilative and integrative. Pine's focus on integrating disparate points of view-not different theories, but clinical observations that are featured in different overall theories-illuminates clinical possibility and nuance. Pine's work leads to questions about the relation of psychoanalytic theory to analytic practice and the definition of contemporary Freudian psychoanalysis itself.

Given that practicing teleanalytically is relatively new and more widespread than ever, questions about to practice and teach it effectively have increased and are more pressing than ever. To contribute answers to these questions, this paper addresses long-standing and persisting negative views of teleanalysis as an inherently muted, remote, and pale experience with reduced therapeutic effectiveness. I propose that this view of teleanalysis as inherently inferior to in-office analysis limits or even precludes its therapeutic usefulness because it allows analysts to avoid making analytic use of the disturbing feelings hiding within the experience of practicing teleanalysis. Through case examples, I suggest that when analysts do not take our negative views of teleanalysis at face value but instead consider them as symbolic expressions of our and our patients' anxieties, we can improve our understanding of our analytic functioning within the tele-setting and enhance our capacity to think and engage analytically effectively in any setting. I maintain that these considerations have important implications, not only for how experienced analysts practice, but also for how we treat and teach future analysts.

Extensive clinical scholarship has described the application of object-relational principles, particularly the operation of projective identification, to psychodynamic psychotherapy with couples. The author explores the way in which a more complete depiction of projective processes, one that incorporates each partner's intrapersonal management of multiple internal object relations, interacting interpersonally in the couple therapy process, can explain the escalating cycles of conflict between couples that are elaborated in the family-systems literature, and be helpful in understanding the object-relational substrate of chronic conflict in couples more generally. A description of how to map each partner's internal object world through the identification of these cycles in the early couple therapy process is elaborated in a theoretical model and illustrated with case material.

This paper presents a collaboration between a clinician (C.M.J.) and a research team (W.B., B.M., and S.M.) to address the question: At an operational level, what happens in the special form of conversation that is psychotherapy? How can we study, beyond a priori lenses of psychoanalytic models, what we are actually doing when we engage in this process? How can we capture from the linear flow of conversation, the simultaneous, complex, active, interwoven, dimensional emotion schemas that words can only point toward? To address the question, we first present the need for new approaches in the current climate within the clinical and research communities. Next, we address the challenges for clinicians and researchers by using multiple code theory and derived linguistic measures that offer an objective view of the processes of subjectivity. We then apply the research methods to the clinical data to illustrate the yield of the collaborative effort-a yield that captures the connection between the linear flow of words and the arousal, verbal expression, and reflection/integration of emotion schemas without the usual filters of psychoanalytic models of process and change. The project illustrates the critical value of clinicians' perspectives to guide researchers and encourages clinicians to participate in research to advance our field. For researchers, this project represents a "fourth generation" of process research that includes the criteria of video-recorded, transcribed data; the clinician's report of their experience; a theory of how emotion-laden meaning and motivations (emotion schemas) are expressed in the therapeutic conversation; and reliable, valid measures to capture and represent those processes; and that encourages researchers to access the rich contributions of clinicians' understanding. The implication for clinical practice is a new way to look beyond the lens of psychoanalytic models into what is actually unfolding in real time.

Grounded in clinical examples, the text focuses on the challenges posed by working at a historical moment that, if fully taken in, presents us all-patients and analysts/therapists-with "more than mind can endure." This "too muchness" makes it particularly difficult to maintain our consulting rooms as "safe" spaces. The basic question: how to preserve a sense of safety in our clinical work while we simultaneously remain open to the disruptive and often unrepresentable dangers that surround and infiltrate us.

In this essay the author describes some of the transformations that occur as one moves from preverbal functioning to verbally symbolic language. In preverbal experience, there is a direct connection between the sign and what is signified. An infant or child signifies displeasure by throwing his food or other objects to the floor. Much of the emotional tie between mother and infant and patient and analyst is communicated in this way. When a transformation occurs from preverbal to verbally symbolic language, as occurs in early development and as one interprets a dream, meaning is not merely translated, meaning is created. On acquiring verbally symbolic language, a "space" mediated by an interpreting subject opens between the symbol (for instance, the word ) and the symbolized (the experience of guilt) and a new subjectivity is created. On entry into verbally symbolic language, one becomes able to experience oneself in a qualitatively different way; one becomes both subject and object, I and me; one becomes able to experience a far broader range of feelings and types of thinking. Helen Keller's account of her experience of acquiring verbally symbolic language is drawn upon.