Richard Tuch
Biographic Data
| ID | 4505152 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Tuch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Tuch |
| SIGNATURE | TUCH R |
| AFFILIATIONS | West Los Angeles College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Defining analytic process: An overdue update of an essential analytic concept
Analytic process is a poorly understood concept often thought to have an agreed upon meaning despite evidence to the contrary. So long as it remains ill-defined, its value as a metric of both candidate progression and whether a presented case demonstrates said process is dubious. To rectify the matter, the author proposes an expansion of what is thought to constitute analytic process in order to bring that concept in line with evolving trends in …
Hearing oneself speak the never-before spoken: Therapeutic action from a Lacanian perspective
Lacanian theory is dense and abstract, making it hard to discern how Lacanian analysts conduct treatment. This paper outlines basic Lacanian methods, doing so using the framework of therapeutic action-how analysis affects psychic changes as seen from a Lacanian perspective. Lacan was opposed to the clinical goal of heightening a patient's self-understanding. His clinical efforts focused more on essential knowledge (discovering "what is") as oppos…
A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis
Doubters and Believers in the Time of the Pandemic
Silent virtues: Patience, curiosity, privacy, intimacy, humility, and dignity, by Salman Akhtar
Shifting between Alternative Modes of Cognition: Can Free Association, in and of Itself, Prove Therapeutic
From early on in his career, at the time of his treatment of Frau Emmy von N., Freud (Breuer and Freud 1895) recognized the value of listening to the patient's material without attempting to steer it along a particular course. His focus on the method of freie Einfalle (free association), to be presented to the patient as the fundamental rule of analytic treatment, led to his recommendation that the analyst listen with evenly suspended attention (…
Psychoanalytic Method in Motion: Controversies and Evolution in Clinical Theory and Practice
Between Knowing and Believing: Salvaging Illusion’s Rightful Place in Psychoanalysis
Illusion has historically received insufficient psychoanalytic attention, even though it plays an indispensable and adaptive role that helps protect individuals from becoming traumatized by the most psychically noxious aspects of reality. Trauma is mitigated by an individual's knowing about the existence of such realities yet simultaneously believing them non-existent, with neither position granted exclusivity. Psychoanalytic theory is surprising…
The Analyst’s Way of Being: Recognizing Separable Subjectivities and The Pendulum’s Swing
Whether the analyst finds the patient's emerging transference affectively tolerable or intolerable plays an important role in the analytic couple's negotiation of the configuration that the transference-countertransference relationship ultimately assumes. If the analyst is deeply repelled by transference-related roles to which he is assigned, patient-ascribed attributions, or projection-drenched interactions, he may react in violent protest, enga…
Brief Communication: Problems Applying Neuroscientific Research to the Clinical Setting
Response to Alberini
Thinking Outside The Box: A Metacognitive / Theory Of Mind Perspective On Concrete Thinking
Concrete thinking, an extraordinarily difficult condition to treat, has been psychoanalytically theorized to result from failures of symbolization—problems forming, linking, or fathoming the meaning of symbols—and/or failures of differentiation, resulting in difficulties distinguishing symbols from the thing being symbolized, fantasy from reality, self from other. Though difficulties symbolizing and differentiating are clearly evident in patients…
Murder on the mind: Tyranical power and other points along the perverse spectrum
This paper illustrates the breadth and depth of the spectrum of perversion and perversity as currently represented in the psychoanalytic literature, raises questions about recent tendencies to include a host of diverse-seeming phenomena under the same conceptual umbrella, and strives to demonstrate what these phenomena have in common that justifies lumping them together under the same rubric. One end of this spectrum is represented by the employm…
On: Dr Weisberg's reactions to ‘Unraveling the riddle of exhibitionism’
Dear Editors,I have read with interest Dr. Weisberg’s letter written in response to the paper I had published in the IJP on exhibitionism (Tuch, 2008). Weisberg presents a clinical vignette illustr
Unravelling the riddle of exhibitionism: A lesson in the power tactics of perverse interpersonal relationships
Through an examination of the varied paradoxes embedded within the phenomenon of genital exhibitionism, the author establishes exhibitionism as a paradigm for interpersonal relations whereby one individual entices another to lose himself, to a benign or dangerous degree, in a presented portrayal/enactment. Efforts to entice that cause an extreme loss of the subject's sense of self--making it exceedingly hard to break free of--are designed to rend…
Thinking with, and about, patients too scared to think: Can non‐interpretive maneuvers stimulate reflective thought
Patients incapable of higher-order (symbolic) thinking can often not tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate existence, particularly when that "otherness" becomes evident in the process of the analyst's reflecting upon and interpreting how the patient experiences or represents the analyst. The patient's intolerance of the analyst's efforts to think (reflect upon and interpret) renders the usual psychoanalytic maneuvers employed to stimulate r…
Questioning the Psychoanalyst's Authority
Sources of the trend to question not just the analyst's authority to interpret, but the analyst's use of authority in general, are explored. Out of a wish to circumvent the potentially detrimental effects an analyst's interpretations can have on patients, certain psychoanalysts have modified their analytic techniques with an eye to downplaying the role of their authority. When taken to extremes, this has led analysts to act as if they have little…
The Construction, Reconstruction, and Deconstruction of Memory in the Light of Social Cognition
Psychic trauma results when the ego is overwhelmed by intolerable affect. Some childhood experiences are directly traumatic, requiring no intervening interpretive process to render them traumatic. Troublesome affect that falls short of being truly traumatic, in the strict sense of the term, may nevertheless exert a psychopathogenic effect on the child's psychic development. Whether a child is troubled by an experience depends on what that experie…
Beyond Empathy: Confronting Certain Complexities in Self Psychology Theory
Empathy is often a poorly understood concept. While some feel its value to psychoanalysis cannot be overstated, others feel it has been overemphasized as has the value of properly managing empathic failures that arise during an analysis. This paper will attempt to (1) demonstrate how patients sometimes resist empathy and erect barriers to being understood; (2) illustrate how empathy may sometimes be unachievable due to the difficulties encountere…
The Relationship between a Motherʼs Menstrual Status and her Response to Illness in Her Child
From over 1500 women who brought children to the Los Angeles County--U.S.C. Pediatric Outpatient Department during a 1 month period, 140 were randomly selected and interviewed to determine whether a woman's menstrual status (her position within the menstrual cycle) affects the way she responds to illness in her child. The study found that paramenstrual women (those who were about to have or who were having their period) were more apt to bring the…
Thinking with, and about, patients too scared to think: Can non‐interpretive maneuvers stimulate reflective thought
Patients incapable of higher-order (symbolic) thinking can often not tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate existence, particularly when that "otherness" becomes evident in the process of the analyst's reflecting upon and interpreting how the patient experiences or represents the analyst. The patient's intolerance of the analyst's efforts to think (reflect upon and interpret) renders the usual psychoanalytic maneuvers employed to stimulate r…
Beyond Empathy: Confronting Certain Complexities in Self Psychology Theory
Empathy is often a poorly understood concept. While some feel its value to psychoanalysis cannot be overstated, others feel it has been overemphasized as has the value of properly managing empathic failures that arise during an analysis. This paper will attempt to (1) demonstrate how patients sometimes resist empathy and erect barriers to being understood; (2) illustrate how empathy may sometimes be unachievable due to the difficulties encountere…
Murder on the mind: Tyranical power and other points along the perverse spectrum
This paper illustrates the breadth and depth of the spectrum of perversion and perversity as currently represented in the psychoanalytic literature, raises questions about recent tendencies to include a host of diverse-seeming phenomena under the same conceptual umbrella, and strives to demonstrate what these phenomena have in common that justifies lumping them together under the same rubric. One end of this spectrum is represented by the employm…
Unravelling the riddle of exhibitionism: A lesson in the power tactics of perverse interpersonal relationships
Through an examination of the varied paradoxes embedded within the phenomenon of genital exhibitionism, the author establishes exhibitionism as a paradigm for interpersonal relations whereby one individual entices another to lose himself, to a benign or dangerous degree, in a presented portrayal/enactment. Efforts to entice that cause an extreme loss of the subject's sense of self--making it exceedingly hard to break free of--are designed to rend…
Questioning the Psychoanalyst's Authority
Sources of the trend to question not just the analyst's authority to interpret, but the analyst's use of authority in general, are explored. Out of a wish to circumvent the potentially detrimental effects an analyst's interpretations can have on patients, certain psychoanalysts have modified their analytic techniques with an eye to downplaying the role of their authority. When taken to extremes, this has led analysts to act as if they have little…
The Construction, Reconstruction, and Deconstruction of Memory in the Light of Social Cognition
Psychic trauma results when the ego is overwhelmed by intolerable affect. Some childhood experiences are directly traumatic, requiring no intervening interpretive process to render them traumatic. Troublesome affect that falls short of being truly traumatic, in the strict sense of the term, may nevertheless exert a psychopathogenic effect on the child's psychic development. Whether a child is troubled by an experience depends on what that experie…
The Analyst’s Way of Being: Recognizing Separable Subjectivities and The Pendulum’s Swing
Whether the analyst finds the patient's emerging transference affectively tolerable or intolerable plays an important role in the analytic couple's negotiation of the configuration that the transference-countertransference relationship ultimately assumes. If the analyst is deeply repelled by transference-related roles to which he is assigned, patient-ascribed attributions, or projection-drenched interactions, he may react in violent protest, enga…
Thinking Outside The Box: A Metacognitive / Theory Of Mind Perspective On Concrete Thinking
Concrete thinking, an extraordinarily difficult condition to treat, has been psychoanalytically theorized to result from failures of symbolization—problems forming, linking, or fathoming the meaning of symbols—and/or failures of differentiation, resulting in difficulties distinguishing symbols from the thing being symbolized, fantasy from reality, self from other. Though difficulties symbolizing and differentiating are clearly evident in patients…
Shifting between Alternative Modes of Cognition: Can Free Association, in and of Itself, Prove Therapeutic
From early on in his career, at the time of his treatment of Frau Emmy von N., Freud (Breuer and Freud 1895) recognized the value of listening to the patient's material without attempting to steer it along a particular course. His focus on the method of freie Einfalle (free association), to be presented to the patient as the fundamental rule of analytic treatment, led to his recommendation that the analyst listen with evenly suspended attention (…
The Relationship between a Motherʼs Menstrual Status and her Response to Illness in Her Child
From over 1500 women who brought children to the Los Angeles County--U.S.C. Pediatric Outpatient Department during a 1 month period, 140 were randomly selected and interviewed to determine whether a woman's menstrual status (her position within the menstrual cycle) affects the way she responds to illness in her child. The study found that paramenstrual women (those who were about to have or who were having their period) were more apt to bring the…
Beyond Empathy: Confronting Certain Complexities in Self Psychology Theory
Empathy is often a poorly understood concept. While some feel its value to psychoanalysis cannot be overstated, others feel it has been overemphasized as has the value of properly managing empathic failures that arise during an analysis. This paper will attempt to (1) demonstrate how patients sometimes resist empathy and erect barriers to being understood; (2) illustrate how empathy may sometimes be unachievable due to the difficulties encountere…
The Construction, Reconstruction, and Deconstruction of Memory in the Light of Social Cognition
Psychic trauma results when the ego is overwhelmed by intolerable affect. Some childhood experiences are directly traumatic, requiring no intervening interpretive process to render them traumatic. Troublesome affect that falls short of being truly traumatic, in the strict sense of the term, may nevertheless exert a psychopathogenic effect on the child's psychic development. Whether a child is troubled by an experience depends on what that experie…
Questioning the Psychoanalyst's Authority
Sources of the trend to question not just the analyst's authority to interpret, but the analyst's use of authority in general, are explored. Out of a wish to circumvent the potentially detrimental effects an analyst's interpretations can have on patients, certain psychoanalysts have modified their analytic techniques with an eye to downplaying the role of their authority. When taken to extremes, this has led analysts to act as if they have little…
Thinking with, and about, patients too scared to think: Can non‐interpretive maneuvers stimulate reflective thought
Patients incapable of higher-order (symbolic) thinking can often not tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate existence, particularly when that "otherness" becomes evident in the process of the analyst's reflecting upon and interpreting how the patient experiences or represents the analyst. The patient's intolerance of the analyst's efforts to think (reflect upon and interpret) renders the usual psychoanalytic maneuvers employed to stimulate r…
Unravelling the riddle of exhibitionism: A lesson in the power tactics of perverse interpersonal relationships
Through an examination of the varied paradoxes embedded within the phenomenon of genital exhibitionism, the author establishes exhibitionism as a paradigm for interpersonal relations whereby one individual entices another to lose himself, to a benign or dangerous degree, in a presented portrayal/enactment. Efforts to entice that cause an extreme loss of the subject's sense of self--making it exceedingly hard to break free of--are designed to rend…
On: Dr Weisberg's reactions to ‘Unraveling the riddle of exhibitionism’
Dear Editors,I have read with interest Dr. Weisberg’s letter written in response to the paper I had published in the IJP on exhibitionism (Tuch, 2008). Weisberg presents a clinical vignette illustr
Murder on the mind: Tyranical power and other points along the perverse spectrum
This paper illustrates the breadth and depth of the spectrum of perversion and perversity as currently represented in the psychoanalytic literature, raises questions about recent tendencies to include a host of diverse-seeming phenomena under the same conceptual umbrella, and strives to demonstrate what these phenomena have in common that justifies lumping them together under the same rubric. One end of this spectrum is represented by the employm…
Thinking Outside The Box: A Metacognitive / Theory Of Mind Perspective On Concrete Thinking
Concrete thinking, an extraordinarily difficult condition to treat, has been psychoanalytically theorized to result from failures of symbolization—problems forming, linking, or fathoming the meaning of symbols—and/or failures of differentiation, resulting in difficulties distinguishing symbols from the thing being symbolized, fantasy from reality, self from other. Though difficulties symbolizing and differentiating are clearly evident in patients…
The Analyst’s Way of Being: Recognizing Separable Subjectivities and The Pendulum’s Swing
Whether the analyst finds the patient's emerging transference affectively tolerable or intolerable plays an important role in the analytic couple's negotiation of the configuration that the transference-countertransference relationship ultimately assumes. If the analyst is deeply repelled by transference-related roles to which he is assigned, patient-ascribed attributions, or projection-drenched interactions, he may react in violent protest, enga…
Brief Communication: Problems Applying Neuroscientific Research to the Clinical Setting
Response to Alberini
Between Knowing and Believing: Salvaging Illusion’s Rightful Place in Psychoanalysis
Illusion has historically received insufficient psychoanalytic attention, even though it plays an indispensable and adaptive role that helps protect individuals from becoming traumatized by the most psychically noxious aspects of reality. Trauma is mitigated by an individual's knowing about the existence of such realities yet simultaneously believing them non-existent, with neither position granted exclusivity. Psychoanalytic theory is surprising…
Shifting between Alternative Modes of Cognition: Can Free Association, in and of Itself, Prove Therapeutic
From early on in his career, at the time of his treatment of Frau Emmy von N., Freud (Breuer and Freud 1895) recognized the value of listening to the patient's material without attempting to steer it along a particular course. His focus on the method of freie Einfalle (free association), to be presented to the patient as the fundamental rule of analytic treatment, led to his recommendation that the analyst listen with evenly suspended attention (…
Psychoanalytic Method in Motion: Controversies and Evolution in Clinical Theory and Practice
Silent virtues: Patience, curiosity, privacy, intimacy, humility, and dignity, by Salman Akhtar
Doubters and Believers in the Time of the Pandemic
A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis
Defining analytic process: An overdue update of an essential analytic concept
Analytic process is a poorly understood concept often thought to have an agreed upon meaning despite evidence to the contrary. So long as it remains ill-defined, its value as a metric of both candidate progression and whether a presented case demonstrates said process is dubious. To rectify the matter, the author proposes an expansion of what is thought to constitute analytic process in order to bring that concept in line with evolving trends in …
Hearing oneself speak the never-before spoken: Therapeutic action from a Lacanian perspective
Lacanian theory is dense and abstract, making it hard to discern how Lacanian analysts conduct treatment. This paper outlines basic Lacanian methods, doing so using the framework of therapeutic action-how analysis affects psychic changes as seen from a Lacanian perspective. Lacan was opposed to the clinical goal of heightening a patient's self-understanding. His clinical efforts focused more on essential knowledge (discovering "what is") as oppos…
Psychology (17 works) · Psychoanalysis (14 works) · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications (12 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Psychoanalytic theory (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Cognitive psychology (4 works) · Medicine (4 works)