Psychoanalysis, Self and Context

ISSN: 2472-0038 (Print) 2472-0046 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsp21

Review of Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes

of Trauma in Psychoanlysis and Demons in the
Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and
Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice

Donna M. Orange Ph.D., Psy.D.

To cite this article: Donna M. Orange Ph.D., Psy.D. (2017) Review of Ghosts in the Consulting
Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanlysis and Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of
Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice, Psychoanalysis, Self and
Context, 12:1, 91-96, DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2017.1251190

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Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 12:91–96, 2017
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 2472-0038 print / 2472-0046 online
DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2017.1251190

Review of Ghosts in the

Consulting Room: Echoes of
Trauma in Psychoanlysis and
Demons in the Consulting Room:
Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and
Extreme Trauma in
Psychoanalytic Practice
Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D.

Keywords: demons; genocide; ghosts; trauma

I n one of my favorite, perhaps also most quoted, passages in the whole

psychoanalytic literature, Hans Loewald (1960) optimistically characterized psy-
choanalysis as a process turning ghosts into ancestors through transference and
mourning:

The transference neurosis . . . is due to the blood of recognition which the patient’s
unconscious is given to taste—so that the old ghosts may reawaken to life. Those
who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost-life and led
to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while
as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow-
life. Transference is pathological in so far as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts,
and this is the beginning of the transference neurosis in analysis: ghosts of the

Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D., was educated both as a philosopher and as a psychoanalytic psycholo-
gist, and teaches at several psychoanalytic institutes, including the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of
Subjectivity in New York, the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Relational Track,
at New York University, and in worldwide humanistic psychotherapeutic settings, as well as in private study
groups. Her most recent books are Nourishing the Inner Lives of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn
in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2016), and Climate Justice, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (Routledge, 2016).

91
92 Donna M. Orange

unconscious, imprisoned by defenses but haunting the patient in the dark of his
defenses and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. In the daylight of
analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose
power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the
secondary process and contemporary objects. (p. 29)

Embedded in this account we find Loewald’s stunning re-definition of the uncon-

scious as a crowd of ghosts. He went on to emphasize the need we all have for
transference, our opportunity to let these phantoms loose, to give them blood to taste, to
bring them into the daylight. His language evokes Freud’s interest in the uncanny (das
Unheimliche) along with Freud’s and Ferenczi’s fascination with parapsychology.
Now we welcome paired volumes edited by Harris, Kalb, and Klebanoff, Ghosts and
Demons in the Consulting Room (2016a, b). Of superb quality, and unlike most edited
collections, these two reward reading cover to cover. Each piece stopped me in my tracks
and taught me something, clinical, philosophical, or both. These authors stretch both
Freud and Loewald, attuning us to clinical and historical phenomena, to the fallout of
traumatic experience, ever present but long unnamed among us. The impact of these
companion books may be lasting; time will tell.
My comments began with Loewald because the study group—originally, as I under-
stand it, an Adrienne Harris supervision group—from which these books come, began
by reading Sam Gerson’s groundbreaking paper “When the Third is Dead: Memory,
Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (Gerson, 2009). Though
Gerson does not discuss or confront Loewald directly, the question lurks: how do we
mourn losses in the absence of witness, in the absence of community to validate the loss?
Must we mourn some losses while recognizing that these ghosts will always haunt, will
never receive proper burial? Are many of us condemned to melancholia? Is this always a
bad thing, as Freud believed?

Ghosts
With these questions in the background, let us look briefly at the books before us. (For a
much better summary than I can provide, look at Sam Gerson’s afterword to each book).
The first, Ghosts in the Consulting Room, includes mostly stories reminiscent of the work of
Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) on the need for the analyst’s own trauma to illuminate
the patient’s, as well as Faimberg’s (2007) on intergenerational transmission, telescoping,
and Nachträglichkeit. Implicitly and explicitly these authors refer to relational themes all
the way back to Ferenczi. Susan Klebanoff’s opening chapter sets a high standard, both
clinically and in scholarly tone, for the whole collection. Readers of this journal will next
welcome Ferguson’s references to intersubjective systems contributions—also prominent
in Janice Gump’s chapter in the Demons volume—outside the official relational “canon.”
Ferguson’s example of the power of a simple, straightforward reparative apology enriches
the emphasis on complex enactments in other contributions like Michael Feldman’s.
Joshua Durban contributes the concept of “psycho-genetic heritage” in a stunning chap-
ter distinguishing, with two gripping clinical illustrations, between what he calls living
Review of Ghosts and Demons 93

with a shadow (best-case scenario), living under a shadow, or being the shadow. Sue
Grand, jargon-free as always, describes a treatment—unlike many of her other tales—
in which unrelenting “ordinary kindness” seems to have been the primary means of
confronting the residues of violence.
The second half of the first book turns to “community and culture,” consider-
ing invisible presences haunting psychoanalysis itself, for example women like Sabina
Spielrein and others currently celebrated in a special exhibit at the Freud Museum
in Vienna (http://www.freud-museum.at/en/) and discussed here by Adrienne Harris.
Kraemer and Steinberg’s work with families in the neonatal intensive care unit bring
the specters of tiny ghosts to haunt us all. The Winchester (yes, rifles) “Mystery House,”
surprising in a psychoanalytic book, belongs there for its linking of the psychological,
the political, and the ethical, via architecture. Finally, Adrienne Harris, extraordinary as
ever, tells of her shocking loss of her husband Bob Sklar (in Barcelona, 2011) by writ-
ing the article he wanted to write about the film Stairway to Heaven. She introduces the
“benevolent specter,” perhaps someone too close to become an ancestor in Loewald’s
sense. I remember well the conference in Madrid, when her group was to present about
ghosts. We wandered around the conference hotel in stunned sorrow. Not for lack of
witness and care do some specters remain; perhaps they stay to support us, forming lead-
ers in our inner chorus, as Sandra Buechler (1998) and I (2016) have written. Perhaps
Loewald’s ghosts were the more ambivalently loved parents, needing exhumation and
reburial.
Gerson wraps up this first volume with a thoughtful summary that I will not attempt
to summarize. But I must note that he sneaks in an important motivator for this recon-
sideration of uncanniness, ghosts, and ancestors: its ethical and political consequences.
He warns:

Reclaiming the neglected, banished, and devalued contributors to our field requires
that current adherents acknowledge the harms of exclusion practiced by their fore-
bears, so that its legacy is not a shadow darkening our contemporary practices but
acts as a light illuminating paths away from hierarchical and prejudicial ethics. Yet
it must also be acknowledged that contending with the force of the group to silence
and obscure that which is threatening requires a similar courage to that of the clin-
ician who deigns to enter the realms of a patient’s repressions. (Harris et al., 2016b,
p. 202).

In other words, we too may commit violence and exclusion against those we refuse
to hear, calling them non-psychoanalytic or not-relational-enough, further fragmenting
the psychoanalytic community, and engendering more unburied ghosts.

Demons
Granting that the ghosts returned in the first volume, the undead, the unburied, the
haunting from who knows where, all who carried echoes of traumatic shock into life and
treatment, infecting analyst, patient, and their relational contexts, granting that readers
94 Donna M. Orange

of these volumes in sequence will already be well-acquainted with what moves around
in the dark, the second book explodes both discourse and subject matter. It concerns
what Sue Grand (2000) has called “the reproduction of evil” (The word ‘demon’ appears
rarely in this volume, of which more later). Chapters by Margery Kalb and Gil Katz
distinguishing vampires—much more actively destructive—from ghosts who often need
dialogue and recognition, evoke an embodied clinical process much more fraught than
Loewald’s lyrical account suggests. I am reminded, in another idiom, of Paul Williams’
invasive objects (Williams, 2010). Galit Atlas tells a spellbinding Dybbuk story in this
genre, as does Arthur Fox. These patients are relentlessly persecuted by the demonic
occupiers. Unusual in this group of gripping stories, Jade McLeughlin tells of an elusive
patient with whom she finally made contact through a photography exhibit. Each of
these stories, too complex to summarize here, bears close reading.
But the book gets even better. Its “community and culture” section, though uneven,
contains sections each worth the price of the book. Emily Kuriloff’s chapter on psycho-
analysis and the specter of the Shoah serves best, in my view, to point readers to her full
book, well worth reading to understand contemporary psychoanalysis as trauma survivor,
as Aron and Starr (2012) would say. Likewise, Michael Sebek largely summarizes here
his extensive work on the totalitarian object. But the Muriel Dimen chapter—she must
have realized it would appear after her death—adds a layer of incisive, almost prosecu-
torial, questions both to everything she had ever written (Dimen, 2011) or said about
the sexual boundary violation she suffered in psychoanalysis almost 50 years ago, as well
as, implicitly, to everything written in these volumes about trauma, ghosts, and witness.
She asks not only why it took her so long to speak or write about this transgression,
but also why the psychoanalytic community shunned her once she had spoken. “How
does one opt for silence and erasure?” (Harris et al., 2016a, p. 144). “Why did you [my
colleagues] do that?” (p. 145). Beloved as Muriel Dimen has been in some sectors of the
psychoanalytic community, she tells us that she had papers rejected in her last years, was
disinvited from conferences, and a conference planned to honor her 2011 paper on the
transgression was dropped. In short, we left her to die alone with her sorrow, shame, and
rage. Community and culture, indeed.
From my cherished friend and colleague, Janice Gump, we hear the voices of
enslaved Americans whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren live among us today,
still traumatized. This violent system made monsters of those who enslaved, bought and
sold, whipped, and claimed to own other human beings, making a mockery of the ide-
als of equality and human dignity the slaveholding founders of this country professed.
Now their descendants, Gump and her patients included, our neighbors included, suf-
fer still from the effects of this violence while finding themselves blamed as if they had
brought their troubles on themselves. Gump brings slavery and its ongoing aftermath to
life, facing us with our national demons. Her writing does not accuse, but surely holds us
responsible for what she makes us hear in the voices of the enslaved themselves and of
their children.
Finally, comes a voice from post-Soviet Russia. Writing of the gulags, far less memo-
rialized than the Nazi extermination camps, Alexander Etkind thoughtfully examines
the beginning of a ghostly literature. Now comes this book’s one and only mention of
Review of Ghosts and Demons 95

Fyodor Dostoevsky, for his 4-year stay, and tremendous writing of the “house of the dead.”
The second volume’s title kept me waiting for some discussion of Dostoevsky’s Demons
(Dostoyevsky, Pevear, and Volokhonsky, 1994), or at least for the snarky devil who vis-
its Ivan Karamazov as he is descending into madness (Dostoyevsky et al., 1992) out of
fear that he is really guilty of his father’s murder. In this world of Russian Christianity,
demons, like the invasive objects of Williams, actively and maddeningly obsess those they
inhabit. As Atlas notes in an earlier chapter, this kind of haunting evokes a need for exor-
cism. Possibly the more secular world of psychoanalysis less easily speaks of the demonic
realm, finding the vampires of literature and film easier to write about. In addition, these
volumes contain many stories, including Elkind’s from Russia, where absences seem to
haunt more than do active, deliberate, evildoers. But traumatic transmission, as we have
often been reminded in these volumes, often proceeds by converting victimization into
two-sided internalizations, where we live out the persecutor and the persecuted. Trying
to live by the better angels of our nature, and to rebury ghosts loved well or ambivalently,
we find ourselves speaking and acting as the demons who crushed us and our forebears.
We can be grateful to these authors for helping us to hear and see, to mourn and to
atone.
In closing these volumes, Sam Gerson raises questions, implicitly to the clinician
working with those who suffer from histories of violence, containing multitudes of ghosts
and demons. He asks: “What does the other’s experience demand of me? Must I iden-
tify with their experience to insure their survival in me? And in this quest, must I be
traumatized as well?” (p. 200–201). In response he quotes Judith Butler:

[W]hat binds us morally has to do with how we are addressed by others in ways
that we cannot avert or avoid; this impingement by the other’s address constitutes
us first and foremost against our will or, perhaps put more appropriately, prior to the
formation of our will. (Butler, 2004, p. 130)

In other words, yes, I am my other’s keeper (Orange, 2016), and am indeed involved
in a pre-original traumatism, responsible for the other before any choice of mine. The
ghosts and demons of the other are as if mine, they are mine, as each contributor to these
volumes discovered. My own subjectivity, with all its hauntings, comes into being, called
into being by the suffering of the other. The other’s precarious life takes over my place
in the sun, as the other’s losses, hunger, and torture become more important to me than
my own. Ghosts and demons, Gerson and Butler suggest, point toward a radical ethics.

References
Aron, L. & Starr, K. (2012), A Psychotherapy for the People: Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis. New York:
Routledge.
Buechler, S. (1998), The analyst’s experience of loneliness. Contemp. Psychoanal., 34:91–113.
Butler, J. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.
Davoine, F. & Gaudillière, J.-M. (2004), History Beyond Trauma: Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One
Cannot Stay Silent. New York: Other Press.
96 Donna M. Orange

Dimen, M. (2011), Lapsus linguae, or a slip of the tongue?: A sexual violation in an analytic treatment and
its personal and theoretical aftermath. Contemp. Psychoanal., 47:35–79.
Dostoyevsky, F., Pevear, R. & Volokhonsky, L. (1992), The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with
Epilogue. London: Vintage.
Dostoyevsky, F., Pevear, R. & Volokhonsky, L. (1994), Demons: A Novel in Three Parts, 1st ed. New York:
A.A. Knopf.
Faimberg, H. (2007), A plea for a broader concept of Nachträglichkeit. Psychoanal Quart., 76:1221–1240.
Gerson, S. (2009), When the third is dead: Memory, mourning, and witnessing in the aftermath of the
Holocaust. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 90:1341–1357.
Grand, S. (2000), The reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perpsective. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Harris, A., Kalb, M. & Klebanoff, S. (2016a), Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and
Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice. Hove, East Sussex and New York: Routledge.
Harris, A., Kalb, M. & Klebanoff, S. (2016b), Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanlysis.
Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Loewald, H. W. (1960), On the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis. Internat. J. Psycho-Anal., 41:16–33.
Orange, D. (2016), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in
Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Williams, P. (2010), Invasive Objects: Minds Under Siege. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis
Group.

Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D.

570 Mayflower Rd.
Claremont, CA 91711
917-478-9290
donna.orange@gmail.com