Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

In psychology, the concept of identity goes back to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. However, in psychoanalysis the concept does not play a central role. Therefore, we provide a historical review of the implicit contributions of psychoanalysis to the concept in four steps, using Erikson’s work as the central reference point and suggesting a narrative and co-narrative conception of identity that acknowledges the interpersonal and social process character of identity based on a realist epistemological position. We review psychoanalytic contributions leading up to Erikson, especially that of his teacher Federn. We summarize Erikson’s concept of ego-identity, which served to extend a view of development driven by biological maturation and identifications to include sociocultural influences in adolescence and beyond. We identify six essential aspects of identity in his work and highlight his stress on adolescence as the cradle of identity and the life story. Object relations theory implicitly contributed to a view of identity springing from a matrix of others-with-self, but only Kernberg took up the concept of identity in a clinically relevant way. Later authors like Ogden and Ferro implicitly radicalized the interpersonal nature of identity by exclusively focusing on its moment-to-moment shifts in interaction. Finally, we argue for a narrative conception of identity, bending back to Erikson’s conception of identity as a life story that reaches beyond the couch, presenting an updated concept of narrative identity which is enriched by psychoanalytic developments of the past fifty years.

This chapter gives an account of the different psychoanalytic traditions and their approaches to PD: the Kleinian/Bionian model, the British object relations perspective, Kohut’s self psychology, the structural object relations model, the interpersonal-relational approach, and mentalizing theory. The chapter goes on to describe two contemporary psychodynamic treatments, along with their evidence base: transference-focused therapy and mentalization-based treatment. Recent developments in the authors’ thinking in relation to PD are then described, partly in the context of recent work in the area of a general psychopathology or “p” factor. In particular, the authors discuss personality disorder in relation to epistemic trust, and suggest that psychopathology might be understood as a form of disordered social cognition, perpetuated by the obstacles to communication that these social cognitive difficulties create. It is postulated that effective therapeutic interventions for PD possess the shared characteristic of stimulating epistemic trust and creating a virtuous circle of improved social communication.