Toward a Psychoanalytic Way-of-Being in the Game of Life: Discussion of a Paper by Steven Ablon

There are no clinical techniques not always already embedded within a psychoanalyst's way-of-being-in-the-world. This claim, grounded in the author's reading of Steven Ablon's "What Child Analysis Can Teach Us about Psychoanalytic Technique" (in this volume), takes us to Ablon's exemplary psychoanalytic comportment, with a particular focus on poetics, playfulness, practicality, and pluralism. These complex, intertwined features of child psychoanalysis have had a broad and deep impact on contemporary adult psychoanalysis, influencing praxis, conceptions of therapeutic action, ethics, and workaday worldview.