Showing papers in "International Forum of Psychoanalysis in 2023"

Psychoanalytic ego psychology: A European perspective

Abstract: The best way to reconstruct the history of psychoanalytic ideas is to begin from the study not of theories, but of the various authors and their contexts. Important contributions to the study of the ego in Europe had already come from Ferenczi and Fenichel, well before Hartmann founded Ego Psychology (EP), which became mainstream in North America. In Europe, before World War II, significant contributions to what here is called “psychoanalytic ego psychology” (Pep) (contrasted with Hartmann’s EP) came from Anna Freud, Paul Federn, and Gustav Bally. After World War II, contributions came from Alexander Mitscherlich, Paul Parin, and Johannes Cremerius in the German-speaking community, and from Joseph Sandler in the UK. If this is the case, we should then talk of “ego psychologies” in the same way as we talk of the various object relations theories. Pep – as it was described in the guiding principles formulated by Fenichel in the 1930s – keeps informing the clinical work of many psychoanalysts, even if they are not fully aware of it. For example, it represents the basic ingredient of the empirically verifiable “psychoanalytic therapy” formulated in detail by Helmut Thomä and Horst Kächele.

Veiling and unveiling: Identity formation in young Muslim women living in Germany

Abstract: This qualitative study addresses the question of how a background of migration, nationalization, and globalization influences young Muslim women residing in Germany who form their identity and position themselves successfully in modern society. It includes 25 interviews with young Muslim women in the age group 18–25 years whose parents or grandparents migrated to Germany from Turkey. In terms of how their identity has evolved, the participants recount a mostly positive integration into German society, especially on a professional level, contrary to the negativity and devaluation often experienced within their Turkish family. This is a symptom of how Turkish and German society place different expectations on women, with an effect on the development of their identity as well as causing conflicting emotions, especially, for example, when it comes to religious matters such as deciding whether to wear a headscarf. The different personal and subjective motivations behind this are the result of Turkish-Islamic ideas clashing with Western secular thinking. These findings are psychoanalytically explained by suras on veiling in the Quran and the Lacanian dialectic of the symbolic and imaginary phallus.

The objectification of mankind in consumerist societies: A post-Lacanian perspective

Abstract: The paper outlines the effects of consumerism on the human subject and human bonds. The present text discusses, through Freud’s conceptualization of “object,” the process leading to a possible objectification of mankind in consumerist societies. Later, Hegelian arguments are also used in an effort to differentiate “object of consumption” and “object of desire,” which are often interpreted as synonyms. Finally, contemporary authors are brought to the discussion to reflect on the effects of this confusion on contemporary subjects and their possible objectification. One might ask, then, whether the logic of consumption offers the illusion of omnipotence that places man in the position of master, that is, the illusion of independent consciousness. But isn’t the individual actually being enslaved? Thus, from the reading of Hegel, Freud, and Žižek, we think that this is what transforms the subjects dominated by consumerism into objects of consumption themselves. We believe that the wager of psychoanalysis in the Lacanian perspective is based on the immortality of desire and the responsibility of the subject for their choices. The analyst at work has the possibility of interpreting a discourse, that is, interpreting the surplus of jouissance, the modes of enjoyment of each discourse.

Origins and destinies of the Bion field theory

Abstract: The authors trace the history and development of the Bion field theory (BFT) model in Italy and around the world, and address the human and professional aspects that characterize the profession of psychoanalysis today.

One hundred years of psychotherapy and fifty years of clinical practice: Reflections of a psychotherapist and questions for psychoanalysis1

Abstract: Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy have evolved deeply over the past half century. This paper shows some the changes I have witnessed in them, and the challenges we face in this change of era, at the edge of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Some the challenges are examined: knowing how to transmit in our daily practice the essential relationality of the human being; the relational essence of the process of change through psychotherapy; and a review of our contribution to our institutions being genuinely relational, that is, that we take more care of the space that the Other can inhabit than of preserving our own. We need hope: the hope to change and (again) be people, in connection with others, regaining confidence and being able to be ourself (to be ourselves with others). That is the meaning of our activity, what it is to be a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist today.

The analytic field as bipersonal and multidimensional container

Abstract: The title of this article encapsulates an approach to the notion of the analytic field where the contributions of the Barangers and Bion converge, opening up new perspectives that the author began to explore together with Antonino Ferro in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While the explicit formulation of a bipersonal field model should be credited to the Barangers, it is perhaps less widely known that the term “field” also features in Bion’s writings, with a meaning that is often generic but occasionally bears more specific connotations: for example, when he assimilates the analytic situation into a multidimensional field. In the light of Bion’s theory of thinking, the unconscious dynamics of the analytic field is determined not only by crossed projective identifications, but also by the dream-work of the couple, resulting from the alpha-function of both subjects. Thus, the Barangers’ concept of bastions can be combined with that of functional aggregates (Bezoari and Ferro), understood as animated holograms allowing a shared representation of the ongoing emotional experiences.

Psychoanalytic theories and techniques: Dialogue, difficulties and future – Papers from the XXIInd IFPS Forum, Madrid, October 19–22, 2022

Abstract: What a huge relief and what great joy for all of us to be able to meet again in person after the two and a half years that had elapsed since the XXIst International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) Forum held in Lisbon on February 5–8, 2020, with the beginning of the pandemic lockdown only about one month later! This is why we were all so thankful to the Executive Committee of the IFPS and to Miguel Ángel González Torres, the president of the Centro Psicoanalítico de Madrid and the chair of the scientific committee of the Forum, and to the colleagues who collaborated with him in organizing the latest Forum. Among these had been Romulo Aguillaume, who had organized the previous Forum inMadrid inMay 1998, together with Alejandro GállegoMeré (1929–2000) both pioneers of the IFPS in Madrid. Two of the main speakers at that time had been Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013) and Adolf Grünbaum (1923–2018), the former dealing with the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, and the latter with his philosophical critique of psychoanalysis (see Conci, 1998). More than 200 colleagues from 21 countries participated in the 2022 Forum, which was hosted by the Madrid Academy of Medicine, situated behind the Reina Sofia Museum, close to the Atocha Railway Station. Four were the guest speakers, 26 the colleagues who delivered the plenary papers, and 48 those who presented the individual papers, with simultaneous translation into English and Spanish. The Forum was also meant to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the foundation of IFPS (in Amsterdam on July 30, 1962), one of the topics of the historical panel that took place on the Friday morning. As usual, the Executive Committee (EC) worked the whole day on Tuesday October 18, starting with the report on the organization of the Forum by Miguel Ángel Gonzalez Torres, the financial report by Valerie Angel, and the report on the Section of Individual Members by Jan Johansson and Darius Leskauskas. In the second part of the morning, Marco Conci presented to the EC the application of the Milan Scuola di Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica (SPP) to become a member society in its own right, having separated from the Milan Associazione di Studi Psicoanalitici (ASP). After a long and articulated discussion the EC decided that a site visit to the new group would take place in the spring of 2023 – with immediate affiliation in the case of a positive outcome. A further prospective affiliation positively discussed was represented by the South Korean group, which was put in touch with the IFPS by the New York colleague Ernesto Mujica. One of the main events of the EC meeting, as well as of the meeting of the Assembly of Delegates taking place on Wednesday October 19, was the change to the editorial board of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, with Gabriele Cassullo (Italy) succeeding Grigoris Maniadakis, who had collaborated with Marco Conci as a coeditor-in-chief since October 2014. The author of this Report started doing this work in June 2007, collaborating with Christer Sjödin (Stockholm). Both the EC and the Assembly of Delegates approved the new four-year contract (2022–2026) between the coeditors-in-chief and the IFPS, also considering the great success of the journal – an average of more than 20,000 downloads of papers a year having been reached in recent years. Last but not least, as far as the composition of the EC is concerned, Jô Gondar (Brazil) was elected to replace Jan Johansson, with Lucio Gutiérrez (Chile) and Terttu Mäkinen (Finland) as the two new alternate members, and with Juan Flores chairing the EC for two more years, until 2024. I can now come to the four guest speakers, the first one of whom was Juliet Mitchell (UK), the British pioneer of the theme psychoanalysis and feminism (see Mitchell, 1974). She inaugurated the Forum on Wednesday evening with a paper on “Ageless art: Louise Bourgeois and psychoanalysis,” through which she connected the family background of the

Voices from the war: Some notes on the emotional experience of the war in Ukraine told by two Ukrainian psychoanalysts

Abstract: What is the real experience of war? How does our mind react to the sudden threats and losses of our lives, homes, and beloved objects? What understandings can it offer to make sense of the atrocities it witnesses? What adjustments can we carry out in these circumstances? Two colleagues from Kharkiv, Ukraine, and affiliated to the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group and the Institute of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Study Group help us to shed light on these questions by sharing their personal experience and understandings of the current war that started on February 24, 2022 when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. This contribution aims to report their voices and the emotional experience of encountering their stories in order to provide readers with an unsaturated and unmediated contact with at least some aspects of the reality of war.

Psychoanalytic ego psychology: A European perspective

Abstract: Abstract The best way to reconstruct the history of psychoanalytic ideas is to begin from the study not of theories, but of the various authors and their contexts. Important contributions to the study of the ego in Europe had already come from Ferenczi and Fenichel, well before Hartmann founded Ego Psychology (EP), which became mainstream in North America. In Europe, before World War II, significant contributions to what here is called “psychoanalytic ego psychology” (Pep) (contrasted with Hartmann’s EP) came from Anna Freud, Paul Federn, and Gustav Bally. After World War II, contributions came from Alexander Mitscherlich, Paul Parin, and Johannes Cremerius in the German-speaking community, and from Joseph Sandler in the UK. If this is the case, we should then talk of “ego psychologies” in the same way as we talk of the various object relations theories. Pep – as it was described in the guiding principles formulated by Fenichel in the 1930s – keeps informing the clinical work of many psychoanalysts, even if they are not fully aware of it. For example, it represents the basic ingredient of the empirically verifiable “psychoanalytic therapy” formulated in detail by Helmut Thomä and Horst Kächele.

Metaphors in psychoanalytic theory – Do we need them?

Abstract: The author questions Wallerstein’s conviction that psychoanalytic concepts are “scientific metaphors.” If one were to adopt his view, psychoanalysis would fall into line with Lakoff and Johnson′s thesis that the conceptual system of our thoughts and actions is basically metaphorically structured. The author rejects both their views by demonstrating how the system inherent in our conceptual structure works, and disproving Lakoff and Johnson’s thesis as an assertion. In his view, if psychoanalytic concepts are understood as metaphors without defining their target domains, they lose their cognitive function and allow general metaphors to be understood in a whole variety of ways. The author suspects that this metaphorization of psychoanalytic concepts serves to suggest that psychoanalysis has a unified theory which would guarantee the community’s scientific unity, despite the theoretical and therapeutic pluralism that currently prevails.

Attempting a metapsychology for tele-copresence1

Abstract: The concepts of immersion and digital presence have been widely used in the human–computer interaction and virtual environment research fields and have been particularly valuable when it comes to a better understanding of tele-therapy, tele-analysis, and other forms of tele-linking. Using a metapsychological perspective, we will attempt a psychoanalytic interpretation of these phenomena. We will conceptualize them as hypnoid states that reflect a compromise between internal and external conditions, including specific defensive mechanisms and psychic dynamics. This conceptualization will be applied to the tele-analytic situation and other relevant fields of application.

Safety in control-mastery theory

Abstract: This study presents an overview of the development of the main psychoanalytic conceptions regarding safety, an aspect that has received increasing attention within the psychoanalytic literature. After describing the hypotheses of Sigmund Freud, Joseph Sandler, John Bowlby, and Harry Stack Sullivan, the study focuses on the ideas proposed by Joseph Weiss and on control-mastery theory (CMT), a cognitive-dynamic relational theory of mental functioning, psychopathology, and psychotherapy. Unlike other models, CMT stresses that human beings need to feel that both themselves and the people they love are safe; each person, however, may need something different to feel safe. Two clinical vignettes are used to illustrate how the therapist can understand, from the outset of the therapeutic process, how to help the patient feel safe, stressing the case-specific nature of the conditions of safety.

Martti Siirala and Gaetano Benedetti – Friends in the dialogical and psychotherapeutic sharing of burdens

Abstract: This article explores the dialogical collaboration and friendship between Martti Siirala and Gaetano Benedetti, particularly in the development of the psychotherapy of schizophrenia and the human psychotherapeutic attitude toward carrying and sharing burdens. Siirala and Benedetti outlined a psychotherapy that considers existential and philosophical dimensions alongside the clinical aspects of illness, without being bound by schools of thought, authorities, or doctrinal systems. The main material in the article is based on documents from the Martti Siirala archive, the most important of which is the German-language correspondence between Siirala and Benedetti after Siirala moved back to Finland from Switzerland at the end of 1957. Benedetti’s activities in Basel are also illuminated by descriptions sent to Siirala by nurse Aino Kärkkäinen of her experiences in Switzerland in the late 1950s.

Psychoanalysis, philosophy and politics: Aspects of 50 years of the Institut für Psychoanalyse Zürich-Kreuzlingen

Abstract: The Institut für Psychoanalyse Zürich-Kreuzlingen (IfP) was founded as a working group in 1972. Its founder Norman Elrod graduated from the Carl-Gustav-Jung-Institute in Zurich and followed a politically and philosophically reflected psychoanalysis. In addition, he was engaged in the treatment of psychotic patients. Quite a few of his co-workers worked in the Psyichiatria Democratica in Italy as well as in institutions in Germany and Switzerland, where they also contributed greatly to psychoanalytically inspired multiprofessional care for severely ill individuals, including forensic patients.

From psychoanalytic ego psychology to relational psychoanalysis, a historical and clinical perspective

Abstract: In July 2019 one of us (M.C.) published a book with the title Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis, in which he connected the clinical approach of those authors and their psychoanalytic perspective to their most important life experiences and to the scientific and interpersonal contexts in which their contributions developed, including the main partners accompanying their professional evolution. He thus tried to demonstrate not only the importance of the history of psychoanalysis for the practicing clinician, but also its relevance as a key to the pluralistic and international character of contemporary psychoanalysis. In the fall of 2018, M.C. had been contacted by Eva Papiasvili (New York) and Arne Jemstedt (Stockholm), who invited him to collaborate on the preparation of the item “Ego psychology” for the Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED). The IRED was originally conceived by Stefano Bolognini at the time of his IPA presidency (2013–2017), and is published online by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). The task that M.C. readily accepted was to contribute to the revisitation of the development of ego psychology in Europe, the reconstruction of its development in North and South America being the task of the other two regional teams, with Arne Jemstedt coordinating the European team, and Eva Papiasvili coordinating the whole work. Fascinated by such a research project and determined to do his best, M.C. came to the following two discoveries. In the first place, ego psychology had been alive and well in Europe – and not only in North America – both before and after World War II. Important ego psychologists after the war were, for example, Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982) and Paul Parin (1916–2009), who both emphasized its critical potential – which they considered to have been lost in the North American emigration. Also ego-psychologically based is the German Kassensystem, that is, in the way in which a clinical report has to be written so that the treatment will be paid by the Kassen – the German Social Security System. The nature of the most important German analytic concept, that is, the concepts of “szenisches Verstehen” and “szenische Funktion des Ich” – scenic understanding and scenic function of the ego – is ego-psychological as well. Second, M.C. came to realize that the line of thought he was articulating in the book he was then writing (see above) was in fact also applicable to ego psychology. In other words, we have almost as many approaches to ego psychology as we have pioneers dealing with it, according to their personalities and priorities. Some examples include the following: Heinz Hartmann, whose priority was the ego as the center of a new general psychology; Otto Fenichel, before him, who looked at ego psychology as the best way to formulate the analytic technique he used with his patients; Paul Federn, who developed his own ego psychology in order to better understand and work with severely disturbed patients; and, last but not least, Anna Freud, who saw Freud’s structural model as the best way to keep track of the child’s psychological development. At this point, M.C. contributed the first result of his historical research to the final elaboration of the item “Ego psychology” of the IRED, which was put online in December 2020, and he then kept working on the second perspective on his own. Over the course of 2021, with the help of Paolo Migone (Parma), he was able to further develop this perspective to the point of trying to distinguish what he called Hartmann’s ego psychology (EP) from the abovementioned branches of what he called “psychoanalytic ego psychology” (Pep), as he was able to do in the article he published in 2021 in Italian in the journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane. In other words, just as we have learned to speak of “object relations theories” in the plural, so we could profit from doing the same with ego psychology, and talk in terms of the different “ego psychologies.” After discussing this point of view with the editorial board of this journal in the spring of 2022,

Conditions for love: The psychoanalytic situation and the analyst’s emotions

Abstract: Freud has stated that the psychoanalytic cure is effected through the love of the patient for the analyst. This paper claims that the analyst’s love towards the patient is often essential as well. Countertransference love might indeed be associated with therapeutic risks, yet it is often a crucial part of the analytic process, since in order to be able to change, many people need to feel loved. The analyst’s curative love is defined by being both sublimated and passionate, modulated as well as libidinal. In addition, it is conscious, aware, and reflective, and hence any act based on it is directed solely to the patient’s psychic growth. Developing and maintaining such love is not easy. What comes to the aid of the analyst is the special construction of the analytic setting, which brings up a profound, loving interest in patients’ psyche as well as a “second self” that is consistently benevolent and loving and acts at a level of empathy rarely encountered in ordinary life.