Warren S Poland
Biographic Data
| ID | 4055181 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Warren S Poland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Warren S |
| FAMILY NAME | Poland |
| SIGNATURE | POLAND W S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Verizon (United States) |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0132-4897 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 180 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders
What I’m Reading Now: Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Old-Old Age
Obituary: Dale Boesky (1930–2021)
Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis
Slouching Towards Mortality: Thoughts on Time and Death
The Analyst’s Approach and The Patient’s Psychic Growth
Psychoanalysis, which shares many functions with other therapies, is built upon its unique concern for the unconscious forces active behind a patient’s symptoms and difficulties. What defines psychoanalysis is the analyst’s approach as a disciplined engagement in the service of exploring those forces and their roots, an approach that is the product of curiosity working in the service of the other. As a result of the analyst’s actualizing this app…
A Patient Returns: Discussion
Outsiderness in Human Nature
Outsiderness, the sense of self as outside the world of others, is an early factor influential in developing both the sense of self and the regard for others and otherness. After definition and discussion of the appearance of this force at different stages of life, a case illustration is offered. Clinical analysis is then viewed closely to explore how dynamics involved in mastering the sense of outsiderness may be essential to the analytic proces…
Self-Analysis and Creativity: Views from inside and Outside
Beyond Bedrock
That one can go no further in a search for meaning does not imply that there is no further that can be gone. The biological basis of psychoanalysis does not provide a legitimate conceptual escape hatch when one reaches personal limitations in psychological inquiry
Regarding the Other
Rather My Own Shortcomings
Whimsy
I Think You're on to Something: Valuing James McLaughlin
Central to the contributions James McLaughlin made to his students were his character qualities of ease with himself and associated deep respect for others
The Rest Is Silence
The Rest Is Silence Warren S. Poland My wife tells me that my epitaph should read, "NOW IT'S YOUR TURN TO TALK!" The above sentence was the result of a self-imposed challenge to see how brief a piece I could write that would still be long enough to sketch a person and an interaction. Sometimes an easy grader when it comes to myself, I at first felt content, feeling that my super-short communication succeeded in evoking both my characteristic verb…
The Memories Linger On
The Memories Linger On Warren S. Poland "Philosopher Left to Muse on Ridicule Over a Hoax." That was the title of a New York Times article (Carvajal 2010) about a famous philosopher who had cited in his new book the Paraguayan lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul, a sham philosopher widely known to be the satirical creation of Frédéric Pagès, a witty journalist. "Mr. Botul's school of thought is called Botulism, his followers are botuliennes and they …
Remembering One's Analysis: A Caveat
The Interpretations of Strangers
The Interpretations of Strangers Warren S. Poland The interpretation that yielded insight came in a jewelry store, brought to me by a clerk bearing a tray of expensive watches. No heirlooms had been handed down across the generations of my family, no embodiments of tradition passed on from the long-distant past. My grandparents were young when they first arrived in the New World: it was they—not the new world—who had been brave. While their spiri…
On: On becoming a psychoanalyst
Problems of collegial learning in psychoanalysis: Narcissism and curiosity
Despite clinical sensitivity when listening to patients, analysts have not fared well in hearing and talking to each other with respectful open-mindedness. Underlying factors are considered with particular focus on the interplay between self-aimed forces of narcissism and outward-aimed forces of curiosity. Included in examination of problems of collegial communication are limitations structurally inherent to the human mind (such as the need to ab…
Keep Looking
Keep Looking? Warren S. Poland She was one of the psychoanalysts who had managed to escape the Nazis and come to the States, and indeed she was resilient and flexible enough to prosper in the New World. Her unique combination of respect for others, unquestionable personal integrity, and uncommon youthful vitality made her someone children intuitively trusted. As a result she not only flourished as a child analyst, but with her rare passion for ps…
The Patient's Empathy
The Patient's Empathy Warren S. Poland "You're sweet." Her words startled me, and their sympathetic tone came as if from out of nowhere. So I must have sounded a touch surprised when I asked to what she was referring, what she had in mind. We were near the start of what was our last hour before a vacation break, indeed for me the final hour of a long last day before the summer interruption. She had begun to speak of her apprehensions about the im…
Never Told between Generations
Never Told between Generations Warren S. Poland For our first dinner back home after each French vacation we dine at a small local bistro, hoping to prolong the mood we have just left behind. During one such evening I turned to those at the next table and wistfully reflected on how well the food and ambiance captured the feeling of France. The unexpected response was a long tirade on the evils of the French, their rudeness and their hatred of Ame…
"The best thing in me": The analyst's courage in clinical practice
Boundaries and Beyond: Commentary on Arnold Goldberg’s “Some Limits of the Boundary Concept”
The Analyst's Witnessing and Otherness
The analyst's active though silent witnessing of the patient's self-inquiry is presented as an essential aspect of the analytic process. Witnessing, though rooted in the analyst's empathy and holding, represents a more advanced development of those functions based on relational maturation from union to self-other differentiation. Self-definition and regard for otherness are seen as intrinsically unitary. Psychoanalytic witnessing is first illustr…
On The Analyst's Neutrality
It is by the application of the principle of neutrality, born of his respect for the essential otherness of the patient, that the analyst focuses the dyadic analytic work in the service of the patient's growing self-analytic capacity. Thus, the general principle of neutrality is distinguished from the technical tactic of abstinence, the latter being a specific function utilized to facilitate and foster analytic regression. Neutrality can be defin…
Insight and the Analytic Dyad
Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analyti…
The Analyst's Words
Evidence of the analyst's inner processing and self-analysis is built into his choice and use of words. The dyadic context in which he speaks and the internal formation of his words are examined and considered for their implications for the analytic process
Transference: “An Original Creation”
While the psychoanalytic process explores the past, it does so within the context of the immediacy of the present. A clinical vignette is used to demonstrate the distinction between unconscious fantasies which, though buried, are alive in the present, and the historical past which shaped those fantasies. On that basis, interpretations and reconstructions are distinguished. The tension between singular process and dyadic interaction is also consid…
From Analytic Surface to Analytic Space
Utilizing a clinical illustration, the concept of the surface of the patient's mind, which arose early in analytic history, is reexamined in relation to the analytic space, the unique affective and communicative dyadic context of the analytic process. The shift from analytic surface to analytic space reflects in clinical theory the metapsychological shift from early structural views to current appreciation of compromise formation. Also, this appr…
Reading Fiction and the Psychoanalytic Experience: Proust On Reading and On Reading Proust
Reading can at times engage one emotionally and entail inner psychological experiences in ways akin to those in clinical psychoanalysis. In that light, after a general introduction regarding the import of reading, attention is turned to Proust, Freud's literary complement, as an exemplary instance to illustrate those similarities. Ideas of Proust on reading are followed by thoughts on reading Proust, with the ending of Proust's masterpiece used t…
The Interpretive Attitude
From its start, psychoanalysis took as its primary goal the gaining of insight, and the analyst's interpretations as its primary technique for achieving that goal. Multiple factors, including the destructive impact of wild analysis and a growing appreciation of noninterpretive analytic functions, have brought those first principles into question. The author posits a conceptual division of the analyst's interpretive functions into declarative inte…
The Gift of Laughter: On the Development of a Sense of Humor in Clinical Analysis
Clinical analytic change often brings with it a maturing of the patient's sense of humor, leading to an internalized capacity to acknowledge pain and frustration while soothing oneself with wit. Both the nature of psychic functioning, especially the multiple meanings structured in words, and the nature of the dyadic aspects of clinical analysis contribute to this happy outcome. The structural similarities that jokes and humor bear to transference…
Problems of collegial learning in psychoanalysis: Narcissism and curiosity
Despite clinical sensitivity when listening to patients, analysts have not fared well in hearing and talking to each other with respectful open-mindedness. Underlying factors are considered with particular focus on the interplay between self-aimed forces of narcissism and outward-aimed forces of curiosity. Included in examination of problems of collegial communication are limitations structurally inherent to the human mind (such as the need to ab…
The Analyst's Fears
The analyst's fears, usually addressed only in terms of their eccentric or neurotic roots, are recognized as inescapable and multiply determined. The analytic process itself implies such fears, both because of the state of uncertainty in which valid exploration unfolds and because of the inevitable loss confronting the analyst's emotional attachment that results from the patient's growing autonomy. Factors related to the analyst's character and c…
Slouching Towards Mortality: Thoughts on Time and Death
The Analyst’s Approach and The Patient’s Psychic Growth
Psychoanalysis, which shares many functions with other therapies, is built upon its unique concern for the unconscious forces active behind a patient’s symptoms and difficulties. What defines psychoanalysis is the analyst’s approach as a disciplined engagement in the service of exploring those forces and their roots, an approach that is the product of curiosity working in the service of the other. As a result of the analyst’s actualizing this app…
Self-Analysis and Creativity: Views from inside and Outside
Outsiderness
Outsiderness Warren S. Poland Emotionally severely suppressed in a childhood in which there had been little tolerance for her developing a mind of her own, she was always anguished and timidly suspicious when facing the world at large. She had survived childhood by living as if in the underground, and it had taken years of difficult psychoanalytic work before she could consider that the world might ever be other than a pervasively dangerous place…
The Analyst’s Words: Empathy and Countertransference
(1984). The Analyst’s Words: Empathy and Countertransference. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 421-424
A Patient Returns: Discussion
Regarding the Other
The Interpretations of Strangers
The Interpretations of Strangers Warren S. Poland The interpretation that yielded insight came in a jewelry store, brought to me by a clerk bearing a tray of expensive watches. No heirlooms had been handed down across the generations of my family, no embodiments of tradition passed on from the long-distant past. My grandparents were young when they first arrived in the New World: it was they—not the new world—who had been brave. While their spiri…
Courage and Morals
Courage and Morals Warren S. Poland Perhaps once in a generation, as if from nowhere, an individual appears and performs an act of such daring courage as to make the whole world catch its breath. The young Chinese man who stood alone before a tank in Tiananmen Square demonstrated courage so stunning as to become a universal icon of the valor possible in the human soul. We onlookers could only gasp, proud to be members of a species capable of such…
Struggling to Hear
Struggling to Hear Inevitably, I look back all the way to the start, to my first day of psychiatric residency when, totally green and feeling lost, I was given the names of a dozen patients for whose therapy I now was responsible. Bewildered, I turned to a new co-resident, an older woman who had left her pediatric practice to learn child therapy and who herself was assigned a dozen child patients. She was less confused than outraged. She stormed …
Revenge
Revenge Warren S. Poland Revenge! The very word conjures images of evil painted blood red and black. Rage for retribution, festering till satisfied by destructive acts. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Getting even. Honor redeemed by vengeful triumph. "Honor killings." Revenge slinks through the dark corridors of the soul waiting its chance to burst forth and hurt or destroy the resented other, until it can finally prevail through a justif…
Controversial Discussions
An Analyst’s Slip of the Tongue
(1992). An Analyst’s Slip of the Tongue. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 85-87
On Surmise
Pilgrimage: Action and Tradition in Self-Analysis
On Surmise
Homosexual Behavior: A Modern Reappraisal
The Analyst’s Words: Empathy and Countertransference
(1984). The Analyst’s Words: Empathy and Countertransference. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 421-424
On The Analyst's Neutrality
It is by the application of the principle of neutrality, born of his respect for the essential otherness of the patient, that the analyst focuses the dyadic analytic work in the service of the patient's growing self-analytic capacity. Thus, the general principle of neutrality is distinguished from the technical tactic of abstinence, the latter being a specific function utilized to facilitate and foster analytic regression. Neutrality can be defin…
The Analyst's Words
Evidence of the analyst's inner processing and self-analysis is built into his choice and use of words. The dyadic context in which he speaks and the internal formation of his words are examined and considered for their implications for the analytic process
Insight and the Analytic Dyad
Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analyti…
The Gift of Laughter: On the Development of a Sense of Humor in Clinical Analysis
Clinical analytic change often brings with it a maturing of the patient's sense of humor, leading to an internalized capacity to acknowledge pain and frustration while soothing oneself with wit. Both the nature of psychic functioning, especially the multiple meanings structured in words, and the nature of the dyadic aspects of clinical analysis contribute to this happy outcome. The structural similarities that jokes and humor bear to transference…
An Analyst’s Slip of the Tongue
(1992). An Analyst’s Slip of the Tongue. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 85-87
Transference: “An Original Creation”
While the psychoanalytic process explores the past, it does so within the context of the immediacy of the present. A clinical vignette is used to demonstrate the distinction between unconscious fantasies which, though buried, are alive in the present, and the historical past which shaped those fantasies. On that basis, interpretations and reconstructions are distinguished. The tension between singular process and dyadic interaction is also consid…
From Analytic Surface to Analytic Space
Utilizing a clinical illustration, the concept of the surface of the patient's mind, which arose early in analytic history, is reexamined in relation to the analytic space, the unique affective and communicative dyadic context of the analytic process. The shift from analytic surface to analytic space reflects in clinical theory the metapsychological shift from early structural views to current appreciation of compromise formation. Also, this appr…
Comment on “Monitoring the Analytic Surface”
On long analyses
On long analyses.
On long analyses
On long analyses
Commentaries
On Discovering Otherness of Mind
The Analyst's Witnessing and Otherness
The analyst's active though silent witnessing of the patient's self-inquiry is presented as an essential aspect of the analytic process. Witnessing, though rooted in the analyst's empathy and holding, represents a more advanced development of those functions based on relational maturation from union to self-other differentiation. Self-definition and regard for otherness are seen as intrinsically unitary. Psychoanalytic witnessing is first illustr…
Controversial Discussions
On Immediacy: “Vivid Contrast between Past and Present”
Psychoanalysis in the Culture
The Interpretive Attitude
From its start, psychoanalysis took as its primary goal the gaining of insight, and the analyst's interpretations as its primary technique for achieving that goal. Multiple factors, including the destructive impact of wild analysis and a growing appreciation of noninterpretive analytic functions, have brought those first principles into question. The author posits a conceptual division of the analyst's interpretive functions into declarative inte…
Reading Fiction and the Psychoanalytic Experience: Proust On Reading and On Reading Proust
Reading can at times engage one emotionally and entail inner psychological experiences in ways akin to those in clinical psychoanalysis. In that light, after a general introduction regarding the import of reading, attention is turned to Proust, Freud's literary complement, as an exemplary instance to illustrate those similarities. Ideas of Proust on reading are followed by thoughts on reading Proust, with the ending of Proust's masterpiece used t…
Struggling to Hear
Struggling to Hear Inevitably, I look back all the way to the start, to my first day of psychiatric residency when, totally green and feeling lost, I was given the names of a dozen patients for whose therapy I now was responsible. Bewildered, I turned to a new co-resident, an older woman who had left her pediatric practice to learn child therapy and who herself was assigned a dozen child patients. She was less confused than outraged. She stormed …
Psychology (55 works) · Psychoanalysis (43 works) · Philosophy (33 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications (18 works) · History (16 works) · Art (15 works) · Psychoanalytic theory (14 works) · Literature (10 works)