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The author explores the unconscious meanings of the physical absence of the three-dimensional world of people and how these play a critical role in children's reactions to restrictions in human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic. When children are deprived of the corporeality of loved ones, the children's continuously emerging and unstable self-and-other arrangements may trap normative feelings of envy, jealousy, hatred, rivalry, love, and idealization. During lockdowns, there is no place where these raw emotions can be tested, so they remain untempered by the real presence of others and by interactivity with them, feeding aggression that is turned back against the child with frightening ferocity. How do children who must reside in such abstinence during a pandemic pull themselves up the ladder of growth when others whom they rely upon to help them discover who they are, are not there? A description of an observation of a young child attending a Zoom classroom is included, with accompanying commentary.

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Hans Vaihinger, the early 20th Century German philosopher, contended that across a broad range of thought people tend to select one theory over others, all the while knowing that such a singular perspective is but an idealization or useful fiction of what the fuller truth is if one eventually includes those other theories. He argued for the necessity of utilizing a plurality of perspectives in order to see a more complete picture of the world despite our cognitive inability to juggle more than one theory at the same time. This vexing paradox is a focus of the contemporary philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent work that pays tribute to Vaihinger's exploration of this topic. Appiah also examines Vaihinger's view that hewing to a single fiction at certain times and for certain reasons is useful, while also considering how to expand one's scope to reach for a more inclusive multiplicity of inexact models. I apply these and related issues to the psychoanalytic clinical situation, addressing such matters as: the possible triggers for the analyst's shifts toward alternate theoretical persuasions and the complex matter of truth.

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The phrase "the war against women" refers to the overt an a stealth global prejudice against women that aims to subjugate them. Freud was not immune to this prejudice, as can be seen in those late-nineteenth-century Victorian views about sexuality that helped to shape his conceptualizations of gender. Despite the fact that many of these antediluvian views have been overturned, some continue to live on in the contemporary psychoanalytic scene. This introduction provides an overview of the contributions in this section, which explore how the war quietly or openly insinuates its way into our psychoanalytic culture. The offerings will undoubtedly appeal to the readership, whether one's interest concerning the war leans toward considering a contemporary recontextualization of foundational tenets within the psychoanalytic setting, which directly affect women; how it appears within the domain of the consulting room; third-wave feminism's reach into theory and practice; or forms of institutional and organizational prejudice on the local and national levels, including the field of child analysis.

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"The war against women" is a systemic process of discrimination that seeks to subjugate women. In this essay, I will critically examine a contemporary paper, published in a well-known psychoanalytic journal, that views the patient through the lens of Bion's "reverie-ing mother" concept. I argue that leaning upon any particular theory to explain an individual's complex psychological disturbance adheres to a reductionistic line of reasoning that falls prey to the genetic fallacy; interpreting psychological phenomena in this way becomes a myopically focused perch that narrows the clinician's range of vision in scanning the field for other features that influenced the patient's symptomatology and suffering. It defies what we know about the reorganizational potential of the developmental trajectory wherein early features undergo significant change over the course of growth. Within the context of the war against women, such a constrained perspective places the onus of responsibility upon the mother, making her the "whipping boy" for her child's difficulties. Within a blink of an eye, she turns into the embodiment of the trope of the "bad mother." The consequence of misusing a way of thinking about the early mother-child relationship has the unfortunate effect of promoting the war in our current zeitgeist.

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This paper introduces the readership of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child to the topic of transgender children, which will be investigated in the papers that follow. A flashpoint in the recent discourse that escorts children who self-describe as gender nonconforming is whether or not to support the practice of the medical suspension of puberty of these children by the administration of hormonal treatment. Relevant up-to-date research findings on this subject will be reviewed here. Despite those advocates and opponents who swarm around both poles, any reliable conclusions as to the long-term safety and psychological effects of puberty suppressants will remain provisional untilfuture studies proffer more definitive answers. While we await further study, the journal sees the necessity to press for dialogue concerning this conundrum. Anchoring this section is a clinical paper by Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D., which documents the psychotherapeutic treatment of a transgender child who was prescribed puberty suppressants. The commentaries that follow and that are briefly summarized in this introduction will accent the psychoanalytic developmental point of view. This will provide the principal framework for the study of this controversy, which underscores the complementary dimensions of linear and nonlinear progressive hierarchical growth. In this context, features such as the developmentally normative fluidity of self-structures, including gender role identity, and the evolution of concrete thinking toward metaphoricity and figurative meaning-making in middle childhood and adolescence will be examined and applied to the clinical data. In addition, the argument that the use of puberty suppressants exacts a premature foreclosure on the reorganizing potential of developmental growth, and the proposed efftcts of the crosscurrents of the sociocultural body politic on these children and on the decision to opt for the suspension of pubertal growth will be explored.

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I wish to showcase the importance of plasticity of narrative in fantasy formations, as exemplified in Achilles' psychological trajectory in The Iliad. Applying conceptual formulations concerning the psychoanalytic developmental process to Achilles' growth piques my reflections about the sibling experience and its unique position in the mental life of children and adolescents. With developmental advance and the capacity for measured fluidity of self and other structures, the original sibling experience--whether it be tilted toward aggressiveness or toward loving concern or a place in between--may acquire new meanings. By locating it within this contextual framework, Achilles' story line can be seen as a metaphorical description of the continuous and discontinuous patterns in growth. This poses intriguing questions: What contexts are useful in pondering Achilles' psychological shifts? Might the domain of disposition prove useful? Is birth order another? Is his gradual empathic concern for the enemy a demonstration of an elasticity of imaginative capacity that reassembles murderous potential? Child and adult analysts alike may find a rich trove in Homer's masterpiece for contemplating potential sources within their patients that spur forward movement.

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This discussion of Juliet Mitchell's paper "Siblings: Thinking Theory" places her work within the context of three frameworks: nonlinear thinking, disposition, and phallocentrism. The nonlinear dimension of the developmental process demonstrates how the sibling experience is not static, but rather is subject to a natural transmogrification toward new adaptive forms and meanings that occur over the sequential progress of organizational growth. Secondly, dispositional variables tend to be overlooked in their role in how brothers and sisters engage one another, titrate closeness and separateness, and creatively live out their love, admiration, hate, envy, and rivalry with each other. Sensitivities in dispositional leanings, such as special empathic qualities, may even serve to mitigate sibling turbulence. Lastly, the phallocentricity in Western societies privileges an implicitly male perspective that envisions sibling relationships in terms of threatening competitors, as the common linguistic phrase sibling rivalry suggests. This inflection in culture disregards more-expanding qualities in object relationships and aim-giving strategies that are exchanged in sibling play. These variables are not the sole contributors to the sibling experience, but a sampling of influences both from within and outside the child that affect that experience.

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Two of the editors of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child converse with authors Kerry Kelly Novick and Jack Novick, Ph.D., about their paper "Concurrent Work with Parents of Adolescent Patients." Highlights include the authors' stated goal of restoring a positive relationship to the teen-parent bond, a new extension of the work of analysis with adolescents, the transference-countertransference complexities when the same analyst works with both adolescent and parents, and the uses of the term transformation--its traditional meaning in the developmental process of the individual and the authors' conceptualization of the term in their adolescent-parent treatment paradigm.

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The often neglected nonlinear dimension of the developmental process is described and its usefulness in the consulting room will be highlighted by a clinical example of the psychoanalytic treatment of an adolescent. The concept of transformation and its linkage with nonlinearity and discontinuity are also outlined.

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A study group on Conceptualizing Transformation in Child and Adult Analysis focused on a particular kind of change in analysis, that of transformational change, a change in organization that could not be predicted from what came before. We found that, based on careful presentations of four analytic cases, transformational or pre-transformational change did take place. A central intervening variable was the patient's development of a sense of agency. We tried to articulate the nature of the interventions leading to agency and ultimately to transformation. We added other new dimensions: an emphasis on construction in addition to reconstruction and a focus on the future.

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A transformational process from latency to adolescence is tracked in this essay of a disturbed boy who required an innovative therapeutic action that did not rely on the standard technique of interpretation of defense and conflict. The de-stabilization of the patient's mind-set as a victim was leveraged by the analyst's taking an extreme stance in keeping her own reflections to herself and, instead, assisting the boy's capacity to experience himself as an agent in his own right as he took us both on his journey towards self-discovery. This technical strategy also facilitated the shoring up of fragile self and object boundaries, provided a necessary fillip in the boy's capacity for affect differentiation and integration, and helped to create linkages between self and object representations in the present with hoped-for images of self and other in the future.

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What is presented is a summary of the study group's discussion of Dr. Olesker's work with her patient Sandy. A spotlight was thrown on the group process with an emphasis on the organic nature of how this group of psychoanalysts came to grips with the nature of Sandy's inner world. One central issue which challenged the group was how to conceptualize the structure of her mind: Was she a child whose mental life could best be described as compromised by a fundamental biological frailty so that a primary emptiness or inchoate quality of mental contents reigned? If so, technical interventions which turned on narrative building were viewed as the principal therapeutic action. On the other hand, if her difficulties were perceived as stemming primarily from primitive psychological anxieties of annihilation and separateness, a dynamic approach was agreed upon as the preferred mode of treatment. Other issues regarding the transformational potentialities in the developmental process and the use of the analyst as a transformational object were also highlighted. Lastly, I offered my own perspective as to what I imagined occurred between Dr. Olesker and Sandy over the course of her treatment which enabled Sandy to change.

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