This paper aims to first articulate and then examine a discipline-specific psychoanalytic understanding of recursion, which inevitably then brings it uniquely into contact with clinical responsibilities. Recursion, which remarkably can be seen as both a process and a structure, presumes the later elements in an interpretive sequence must refer back to and are tested by the rules set in place by an earlier element of the sequence. If the truth claims of recursion are violated, an infinite number of definitions of reality, many of them bizarre, can lay siege to an analysis. Recursion can lead to a perverse use of reality through perception and logic defied. When recursion is not recognized, clinical analysis can degrade into two individuals hurling multiple and potentially irreconcilable versions of the real at one another. This paper recognizes that psychoanalysis is currently embedded in an historical moment where we all must take up and unfurl how rationality and logic can be defeated in so many different ways, the so-called “post-truth era.”
Arnold Wilson, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising analyst at IPTAR. He was a professor of psychology at the clinical psychology doctoral programs at the New School for Social Research and Seton Hall University, where he was Director of Clinical Training. He has also given many lectures for the National Endometriosis Foundation which, true to the times, can be found on their website and YouTube. He has served on numerous editorial boards, including the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Psychology, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and the American Psychoanalyst. He received his postdoctoral training at the Yale Psychiatric Institute, and his analytic training at the Columbia Center. He is the author of numerous articles, the recipient of several professional awards and has given named lectures, including the Heinz Hartmann II award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (with Lissa Weinstein), the Ernst and Gertrude Ticho award from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Sigmund Freud award from the New Jersey Psychoanalytic Society, the Samuel Beck Memorial award from the University of Chicago, and the Alexander Beller award from Columbia. His latest book, Selected Papers of Arnold Wilson, Ph.D., was published in 2022.
Lissa Weinstein, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, a graduate and faculty member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and a fiction writer. She is the head of Graduate Education in Psychology at APSA, and on the editorial boards of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and Psychoanalytic Psychology. Her interests include the interrelationship of neurobiology and psychoanalysis, the clinical process specifically changes in pronoun use, metaphor and repetition during analysis, as well as film and literature studies. She won the Heinz Hartmann Jr. Award winner with Dr. Arnold Wilson for their papers on the work of Lev Vygotsky and psychoanalysis. Recent publications include The Neurobiology of Personality Disorders: Implications for Psychoanalysis and Personality Disorders, Attachment and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, both with Larry Siever, M.D., Physiological and Developmental contributions to the Feeling of Reality, and Transference, North American Perspectives with Steven Ellman, Ph.D, Why Bion? Why Now? Novel Forms and the Mystical Quest and Psychoanalysis and Me. Her papers have appeared in Rivista di Psichoanalisi, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
