The multiple dimensions of our contemporary psychoanalytic discourse

Abstract

In July 2019 I published a book with the title Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis, in which I connected the clinical approach of the abovementioned 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. I 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. A pioneer of the field of “comparative psychoanalysis,” the sociologist Edith Kurzweil (1924–2016) showed in her 1989 book The Freudians. A comparative perspective how psychoanalysis differs in the various countries of the world, and how we should take cultural, social, and political factors into consideration, together with the theoretical ones. According to Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell (1983), Roy Schafer (1922–2018) had been the pioneer of the kind of theoretically grounded “comparative psychoanalysis” so well articulated by them in Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Although I helped Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) introduce and promote his work in Italy, and still value very much his generous and creative contribution, I ended up appreciating Joseph Sandler’s (1927– 1998) “mixed model” more than a simply relational model like the one Mitchell started formulating in 1988 through Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration. Out of it came an important enrichment of our clinical work, but also an underevaluation of the complexity of psychoanalysis, Mitchell having downplayed several dimensions of it, that is, not only the originality and ongoing value of Freud’s contribution, but also, for example, the importance of empirical research. My book was so well received that it won the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis 2020 Historical Book Prize and was positively reviewed – in English – by Carlo Bonomi (2020), John Foehl (2021), and Giovanni Foresti (2022). Two days before writing this Editorial, on September 28, 2022, the German colleague Herbert Will gave a very interesting paper on the complex structure of psychoanalytic clinical work at the Munich Akademie für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie, in which he distinguished the following dimensions: general psychoanalytic theory, theory of technique, and what he called “subjective theory” (Will, 2022). Through the first dimension we learn how our psyche works, and through the second how to treat our patients, with the third one allowing us to understand what we feel and how we can best work with our individual patients. Joseph Sandler was a pioneer of the third dimension through his 1983 article “Reflections on some relations between psychoanalytic concepts and psychoanalytic practice,” in which he introduced the concept of our “private theories.” As we know, relational psychoanalysis blurred the boundary between the way in which our psyche works and how the analytic relationship impacts upon us. In Herbert Will’s paper I found a similar appreciation of the complexity of psychoanalysis to the one I tried to reconstruct in my book. I will now profit from the opportunity of introducing our readers to the articles in the present issue by formulating the complexity of psychoanalysis as a whole in terms of the following dimensions: its history; the developmental psychology it contributed to formulating, including its neuro-psychological aspects; the psychodynamic dimension behind our patients’ problems; the variety of theories on our psychic life; our theories of technique; the way we work with the individual patient; the empirical research through which our work can be documented and verified; the application of psychoanalysis to cultural and social issues; and – last but not least – the philosophical and epistemological implications of the discipline we cultivate and practice. Such a formulation of the complex nature of our contemporary psychoanalytic discourse can be a good key for the presentation of the articles of this issue. In their article “1927–2017: Ferenczi and the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis, the debate continues,” the Italian colleagues Antonio Puglisi