Themes of birth and rebirth, being born and born-again, can be readily observed in clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis even as they remain undertheorized. A clinical case is presented that traces the first four years of an analysis as seen through the lens of four consecutive supervisory experiences. This paper explores the central importance of fantasies and narratives of one’s origins and birth and the observations, fantasies, and expectations generated by one’s family circumstances at the time of birth. The paper examines birth narratives, fantasies, and myths of origination by following a clinical case across four supervisions. The patient’s birth-related fantasies are shown to interact with the analyst’s concordant and complementary fantasies as the analyst interacts with a series of supervisors in the process of being born as an analyst. The analyst’s personal birth narrative is linked to his fantasies about being born professionally as an analyst, and these are shown to interact with the pati...

“With you I’m Born Again”: Themes and Fantasies of Birth and the Family Circumstances Surrounding Birth as These are Mutually Evoked in Patient and Analyst

The author examines the appearances and formation processes of destructive populist developments in the Western world from a psychoanalytical perspective, using the example of Donald Trump and his voters. She draws on the concepts of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld and Otto Kernberg, which build on each other, and drafts the basic features of a psychoanalytic explanatory model of destructive populist social processes. She illustrates the phenomenon of the »destructive populist fit« between Trump and his followers by means of an analysis of Donald Trump's well-documented election campaigns in 2016 and 2020, supplemented by his actions during the COVID 19 crisis in 2020. On the psychoanalytical understanding of the effectiveness of his methods and the susceptibility of voters to destructive populism, she applies Bion's model of containing in conjunction with Herbert Rosenfeld's destructive narcissism and develops the concept of »perverted containing«: in the course of regression to a paranoid-schizoid level, aggressively destructive and omnipotent affects are idealised and the container function of democratic society is increasingly decomposed, distorted and finally twisted. Beta-elements are not detoxified and digested but, on the contrary, are fueled. This dynamic implies permanent escalation through ever new destructive-exciting acts in order to maintain the symbiotic-destructive fit in the mode of destructive narcissism.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00207578.2020.1827955

Destructive populism as "perverted containing": A psychoanalytical look at the attraction of Donald Trump

The vicissitudes of an analytic psychotherapy process with a 6-year-old girl who had suffered since birth from severe epileptic seizures, with consequent general impairment of her development, are exposed and discussed. It is proposed that an oneiric vertex be adopted to better understand the full interplay between the patient's traumatic experience and the sessions’ flow. The therapist's ability to use his reverie in order to learn the patient's language behind the words – to resonate with his patient – is proposed as a key aspect in the process of transforming the traumatic experience of uncontainable threatening emotions. Using more than words, the analytic process unfolds gradually both through the analyst's availability to engage in a deep internal working-through of the experience of being with the patient, and from his capacity to learn from the patient's experience.

From earthquakes to good vibes: Transformations through a resonance process

In her now-classic paper “Slouching Towards Bethlehem … or Thinking the Unthinkable in Psychoanalysis,” Coltart invites us to consider the process of analytic development as it unfolds in t...

On Slouching, Evolving, and Transforming: In Appreciation of Nina Coltart’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem … or Thinking the Unthinkable in Psychoanalysis”

At the site of interpersonal conflict resides the potential for learning. This paper presents psychodynamic theories, empirical research and a fictional case study of psychotherapy group supervision. Supervision is discussed in terms of teaching and learning, triangular relations, and group and organizational perspectives. We examine the interconnectedness of patterns of distress that emerge within dynamic relational systems at the levels of the macro-social, organizational, group and individual. The concepts of equivalence, parallel process and reflection process provide frameworks for this discussion. We explore the constraints and dynamic influence of the organization upon the supervision relationship and the ethical tensions that construct im/possible positions for the supervisor. The case study tells a fictional story of a supervision group situated in an organizational context – a university psychotherapy education programme. A collapse of the group into complementarity, that is into polarized conflicted positions, proffers a vitalizing opportunity for learning. Through the clinical discussion, we reveal how this is contingent on the group's capacity to think together about the meaning of their struggle and to transcend a binary conflict and achieve ‘the third’.

Learning in Psychotherapy Group Supervision: Transcending Complementarity and the Generative Potential of Group Conflict

Wilfred Bion's unpublished lectures at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in April in 1967 represent a unique opportunity for students either new to or continuing in the study of the author's unique psychoanalytic vertex. Here one can both read - and hear - the author's clear exposition of his clinical and theoretical thinking to an audience of primarily Freudian trained American analysts, most of whom were new to his ideas. The first lecture sets out the author's ideas on 'memory and desire' in a paper that set the benchmark in the origins of contemporary Kleinian clinical technique. The author discusses the various factors that facilitate optimal listening receptivity in the analyst, for example how one differentiates the 'K' link vis-a-vis 'transformations in O.' In the second lecture, the author defined projective identification, container/contained and 'beta elements'- and how these ideas serve as an orienting template for the analyst's understanding of 'proto-mental' states of mind, either in psychotic, borderline or neurotic patients. He clarifies these ideas while engaging with the queries of renowned American analysts, such as Ralph Greenson.

Barnet Malin

Papers

Wilfred Bion: Los Angeles Seminars and Supervision