Dana Birksted-Breen

Biography

Dana Birksted-Breen is a training and supervising psychoanalyst in full-time private practice, as well as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and former Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis. She has taught, chaired conferences, and led clinical workshops in many countries around the world.

Birksted-Breen’s theoretical writing has always been intimately connected with her clinical work, each informing and developing the other. She is interested in the points of connection and disconnection between theory and practice, and the creative spaces formed between the two. Over many years she has investigated in depth ideas of identity, sexuality, symbolization, time and temporality, and the psychoanalyst’s mode of attention in the session. Her 2016 book, The Work of Psychoanalysis: Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind, brings together some of her explorations in these areas, including a recent development in her thinking: the concept of ‘bi-ocularity’; with this term she describes the dual attentional position in which an analyst must place himself or herself during the session in order to create space for ‘that which is ‘other,’’ and thus for the possibility of transformation in the patient (‘Bi-Ocularity, the Functioning Mind of the Psychoanalyst’, 2016).

Time and temporality have formed a prominent thread through Birksted-Breen’s work in connection with ideas of stasis, change, impasse and transformation. She emphasizes the importance of Bion’s concept of ‘reverie’, proposing the notion of ‘reverberation time’ for the time element in the process of reception and psychical transformation, which creates the potential for symbolic thinking and works to avoid impasse in the analytic situation. This is connected to Freud’s emphasis on the need for the analyst to hold an ‘evenly suspended’ attention in the session. In a paper from 2012, ‘Taking Time: The Tempo of Psychoanalysis,’ Birksted-Breen explains the fundamental significance of time in analysis:

While the issue of time in psychoanalysis is usually mentioned simply in relation to the fixed duration of sessions, I am here ascribing a central place to time as a function

of the specific modality of the analytic interchange itself, which stems from the analyst's evenly suspended mode of attention.

She has also written in depth on femininity, masculinity and sexual identity. Around this long-contested, complex topic, provocatively yet inconclusively explored by Freud, Birksted-Breen has explored a range of issues from pregnancy to anorexia and the fragile formation of masculinity. She has been especially interested in the ‘masculine element’ and the ‘feminine element’ in both sexes, and her important 1996 paper, ‘Phallus, Penis and Mental Space’ has been widely cited.

As an editor, Birksted-Breen has introduced more non-British analytic work into circulation to open up dialogues and enquiries between different countries, languages and psychoanalytic traditions. She enjoys helping authors to develop their ideas, and she finds in the editing process a parallel with the work of psychoanalysis: both involve working out what another person – author or analysand – is trying to express beyond that which he or she is aware, thereby aiding the elucidation, deepening and development of ideas. This curiosity about other people’s ideas, how they can be understand and sometimes transformed, is the curiosity that first drew Birksted-Breen to psychoanalysis as a young woman, and which continues to drive her practice as a clinician, theorist and editor.

The book Translation/Transformation, which Dana Birksted-Breen conceived and edited, was part of the celebratory events and productions for the Centenary of the International Journal, alongside an international conference (International Journal of Psychoanalysis 2019 issue 6), an exhibition at the Freud Museum she co-curated: the Enigma of the Hour, and a short film she conceived, scripted and narrated https://vimeo.com/383978034. The first part of the book discusses translation, both literal and metaphoric, and its important place in the history and theory of psychoanalysis. The early history of psychoanalysis is closely linked with specific and significant personalities and there was a close connection with the Bloomsbury group. The book also discusses the non-recognized significant role of women psychoanalysts in the editing and translation of the International Journal, in particular that of Joan Riviere. The second part of the book approaches transformations between psychoanalysis and the arts from conscious, unconscious and non-represented elements into non-verbal modes, specifically visual, poetic and musical.

Of the book, Haydee Faimberg writes: “More than about literal translation, this collection of essays is about the movement of ideas from one culture to another, from one generation to another”.

Books