Showing papers in "International Forum of Psychoanalysis in 2018"

Teaching for survival

Abstract: An earthquake runs through the psychotherapeutic professions (Neimeyer & Taylor, 2014). Since the 1980s, psychoanalysis has lost its leading position in clinical psychotherapy and its discursive le...

Humiliation, shame, and violence: Honor, trauma, and political extremism before and after the 2009 crisis in Greece

Abstract: Recent scholarship has mapped the dynamic between humiliation and violence, including the role of trauma and self-esteem. While existing research has mostly focused on individuals, there is a stron...

A mixed-model for psychoanalytic education*

Abstract: If psychoanalysis is to avoid total marginalization, something has to be changed in the way future generations are prepared for working with patients and doing research. Reformation of psychoanalyt...

Psychoanalysis and academia: Psychoanalysis at the crossroads between exact and human sciences

Abstract: It is proposed that the mental health crisis in “developed” societies is largely due to the fact that psychology is heavily based upon an exact science model academically, and upon a medica...

After Babel: Teaching psychoanalysis on a former battlefield – experiences in an international research network

Abstract: This article describes a psychoanalyst's personal experience in an international and interdisciplinary social trauma research network. Crises and conflicts are understood as an integral feature of such a collaboration. Using the self-reflective capacity of the psychoanalyst may help to turn them into a new perspective. Crossing disciplinary borders, reconnecting to the field of academic research, might prove to be a rather rewarding step.

Anxiety and Fragile Learning

Abstract: Learning in Higher Education is a fragile system of conscious and unconscious transactions that serve to weaken a process that is already precarious. This paper argues that learning is brittle by nature, and easily broken. Using a wide range of examples, the Fragile Learner is described as someone who is close to conceding defeat to circumstances that threaten his or her education. For the purposes of this submission, the Fragile Learner might be a student of a Higher Education Institution, but also might be an appointed educator – a lecturer or personal tutor. Fragile Learners might experience anxieties that are internal and complex – a shared attitude of wilful self-defeat, coupled with an arrangement of ready-made prejudices – which can appear to be attacks from other people. For example, anxiety creates an internal threat which presents itself as a threat from the outside. Alternatively, Fragile Learning might be a consequence of learners having suffered illness or indisposition. Alongside notions of barriers to learning and resilience, this paper explores roles and identities and the tensions that inevitably occur. Although some of the ideas that make up my picture of Fragile Learning have been researched by other contributors (notably Meyer and Land, 2006; Britzman, 2009; Hoult, 2012 & 2013), this paper views the complexities through different sets of psychoanalytic lenses. This paper is specific to adult learners (18+), and references to school children or students in institutions of Further Education are beyond its reach.

Working with Italian patients in Munich – The case of Penelope1

Abstract: With their book Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile (1989), L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg (1984) opened up a new clinical field, which had been neglected for a long time in the...

Encounters with the Irrational. My Story by André Haynal

Abstract: ISSN: 0803-706X (Print) 1651-2324 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/spsy20 Encounters with the Irrational. My Story by André Haynal Carlo Bonomi To cite this article: Carlo Bonomi (2018) Encounters with the Irrational. My Story by André Haynal, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 27:3, 188-189, DOI: 10.1080/0803706X.2017.1384570 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2017.1384570

Fresh Glimpses of the Patient

Abstract: Writing on the interweaving of the intrapsychic with the intersubjective, André Green holds that “the essence of the situation at the heart of the analytic exchange is to accomplish the return to oneself by means of a detour via the other” (Green, 2000, p. 12, italics in the original). Such a trajectory, of course, concerns both analyst and patient and is determined by transference–countertransference dialectics. Regarding the analyst, an important factor in this trajectory is his receptivity to the patient and to what the patient brings. This issue is not new. Freud himself, as early as 1912, advised the analyst “to turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient” (Freud, 1912, p. 115). However, receptivity is not necessarily a given for the analyst. Ferenczi was the first to draw attention to analysts’ lack of attention “to the highly emotional character of the analysand’s communications, often brought out only with the greatest difficulty” (Ferenczi, 1932, p. 1).The reason for this could lie first in the unavoidable “disturbance that is sparked in the analyst by his interaction with the patient” (Lia, 2017, p. 85). Michael Parsons believes that analytic work “arouse[s] powerful inward responses in all analysts throughout their careers” (2006, p. 1183), obviously due to this interaction. Listening to one’s own feelings and listening to the patient are of course regarded as a prerequisite of analytic exchange. Nevertheless, they also represent the fruit, if not the goal, of a long, perhaps lifelong, effort on the part of the analyst. In their article “Searching for Bion: Cogitations, a new Clinical Diary à la Ferenczi?,” Franco Borgogno and Silvio Arrigo Merciai follow W.R. Bion in his personal journey towards “a kind of listening more authentically centered on his own thoughts and emotions and those of the patient during the analytic encounter.” The authors believe that this struggle evolved together with Bion’s “struggle for identity,” aiming for emergence from the impasse of one-sided adherence to a position emanating from belonging to a group that was “treating with great suspicion any expression of the analyst’s subjectivity”. They consider that in Cogitations (a posthumous collection of some of Bion’s manuscripts), Bion exposes aspects of this struggle and its impasses with much honesty; and it is from such a point of view that they see it as a work comparable with Ferenczi’s Clinical diary – in which Sandor Ferenczi speaks openly of the detrimental effects of the analyst’s one-sidedness on the patient (Ferenczi, 1932). It is common knowledge that, in his late work, Bion offered a fresh glimpse of the analytic exchange and of the patient. He writes:

From (un)motivated laughter to impertinent laughter: The laughing machine

Abstract: Posing the question of the possibility of transference at the moment of a decompensation, the author proposes rethinking the psychiatric concept of “unmotivated laughter” in light of psychoanalytic experience, taking a case study as a point of departure. In the present research, the intention is to understand the rule of laughter outside the conception of the joke (Witz), by tracing the trajectory of the conceptualization of laughter from Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis. This review is needed in order to understand an experience of interpretation of laughter at the time of a decompensation in the schizophrenia of an adolescent, in which (un)motivated laughter formed a symptom. “Jouissance-laughter” necessitates changing the psychiatric understanding of laughter in schizophrenia, where its motivation is not what is comical in the here-and-now. In this laughter, the humorous or comic response of the clinician becomes an interpretation.

The concept of the 50-minute hour: Time forming a frame for the unconscious

Abstract: The 50-minute hour is a feature of psychoanalytic work that is most commonly discussed in the context of case reports. This paper examines it as a concept. The author starts by describing the origi...

Psychoanalytic interactions, clinical and applied

Abstract: We believe that an important aspect of psychoanalysis, first in its clinical dimension, consists of identifying and creating interactions and links, while being itself influenced by this very process. Freud’s connections between symptom, dream, joke, parapraxis, and transference are an example of this (Miller, 2015). Bion’s concepts of linking and containing provide an intersubjective model of such interactions, while Winnicott’s potential space (or intermediate area) defines an area where such phenomena, transference and countertransference included, can take place. A psychoanalytic journal can be conceived as a space where authors and readers, as members of the psychoanalytic community, interact through their request to be informed, to learn, and to be represented. This puts the journal in the position of a container not only of these interactions, but also of the links and interactions that the papers published in it aim to explore (Maniadakis, 2016). The clinical encounter can be rightly considered as a “royal road” for such an exploration. In this issue, the first two articles come from a panel on the work of one of the most outstanding figures in clinical psychoanalysis – Harry Stack Sullivan. At the 49th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) held in Boston, MA, at the end of July 2015, one of us (M.C.) was able to organize a panel on “The relevance of Harry Stack Sullivan’s (1892–1949) work for contemporary psychoanalysis,” in connection with the eventual acceptance of the William Alanson White Society as member society of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations. We do not know whether Sullivan would have been happy about this, but we know that his work and his legacy belong to psychoanalysis as a scientific and professional discipline. As Marco Conci showed in Sullivan revisited – Life and work, Sullivan was a psychoanalyst and remained one until the end of his life, although he preferred to speak of himself as “a social scientist whose specialty was psychiatry.” Melanie Klein considered herself as a Freudian and not as a Kleinian, but Anna Freud was apparently right to call her “a Kleinian” – and same is true for us when we refer to Sullivan as a psychoanalyst. This is also the point of view articulated in the papers by Sandra Buechler and Henry Zvi Lothane, with the titles “Sullivan’s impact on the clinician’s feelings and therapeutic style” and “Emotional reality in Freud and Sullivan: Discussion of Sandra Buechler’s paper,” respectively. Sandra Buechler’s proposal to “compare our theoretical prisms, looking at what each privileges and how it affects us as therapeutic instruments” is fascinating; the same can be said of Henry Zvi Lothane’s wish that “the IPA and the entire analytic community usher in a new era embracing interpersonal love as an ethical principle and a methodological compass and guide.” Sandra Buechler’s proposal resonates very well with Susan Kavaler-Adler’s paper “The beginning of heartache in character disorders: On the way to relatedness and intimacy through primal affects and symbolization.” Drawing from her encounter with patients traumatized during their early development, the author attempts to explore the interaction between the theories of Klein and Winnicott – two major British theorists and clinicians – conjugating Winnicott’s “object survival” with Klein’s “mourning” in her concept of “developmental mourning process.” Thanks to this new perspective and concept the paper has been nominated for the 2018 Gradiva Award for Best Article of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). Susan Kavaler-Adler’s difficult patients then lead us to the technical problems that occur in therapeutics interaction with them. In his article “Intimacy in psychotherapy: From ‘white noise’ to meaningful communication,” Sergey Profis explores modes of communication with the patient other than spoken language. He holds that “resonating affective states promote intimacy in the therapeutic encounter” and in fact represent “a vital part of the curative process of psychotherapy.” Resonating affective states entail receptivity on the part of the analyst. In his article “On patients’ unique

Like a phoenix from the ashes – or “sack cloth and ashes”?:1 The reconstitution of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany since 1945 and its consequences

Abstract: Here, I attempt to formulate some thoughts about the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis and its institutions in Germany. To do this, I have employed my varied experience as a supervisor and consultant to many such psychoanalytic institutes over the past several years. Themes discussed include the history of psychoanalysis in postwar Germany, the organizational structure of German psychoanalytic institutes, and their cultures in regard to group and organizational dynamics, and political and economic aspects. Finally, I add brief thoughts about the future, taking into account recent developments relating to planned changes in laws governing psychotherapy in Germany. Further, I attempt to analyze and comment on: coming to terms with the past; how to begin after the “Zero Hour”; the form of organization of psychoanalytic institutes in Germany; missing patients and missing candidates; constructive debate and hurting people’s feelings; the lack of “detoxification” and “recycling” of the poisono...