Psychoanalytic encounter: Conflict and change – Papers from the XXIst IFPS Forum, February 2020, Lisbon

Abstract

The papers we have put together in this issue represent the selection that our Editorial Board made of the many papers presented at the XXIst IFPS Forum held in Lisbon on February 5–8, 2020, about which one of us wrote the report published in No. 2 of Vol. 29 of this journal (Conci, 2020). Writing now, with the pandemics not fully behind us and the war in the Ukraine accompanying our daily life, we can only hope to be lucky enough to be able to meet next October 19–22 in Madrid, for the XXIInd IFPS Forum, organized by the Centro Psicoanalìtico deMadrid under the title “Psychoanalytic Theories and Techniques: Dialogue, Difficulties and Future. 60 Anniversary of the IFPS.” Of the eight papers of this issue, three come from Portugal, three from the USA, Brazil and Italy, and the last two –which were not presented in Lisbon – from Iran and from Israel. One of the best and most appreciated papers given in Lisbon was Sandra Buechler’s paper “King Lear and the challenge of retirement,” dealing as it does with a question that most of us experience as rather embarrassing, problematic, if not wholly impossible to deal with. But Sandra was courageous enough to be able to draw a line and retire from working with patients, on May 31, 2019 – the day before she turned 73. This allowed her to formulate a series of thoughtful considerations on how such a decision impacts our personal identity, and on how we can survive living without the structuring – and reassuring – routine of our analytic work. Of course, Sandra was helped in such a difficult transition by her passion for writing, which allowed her to publish her seventh book, Poetic dialogues, in the fall of 2021 (Buechler, 2021). Her first book, Clinical values: Emotions that guide psychoanalytic treatment (Buechler, 2004), was reviewed by one of us in this journal (Conci, 2006). Sandra Buechler is not only one of the most productive colleagues of the W.A. White Institute of her generation, but also the one who has most actively participated in the life of our Federation since the time in which Gerard Chrzanowski and Buechler’s own analyst, Rose Spiegel, contributed so greatly in linking their society to the IFPS (see Conci, 2021). A similar function has also been played by Jô Gondar, a Brazilian colleague and a member of the Circulo Psicoanalitico de Rio de Janeiro, a member society of the IFPS since 1980; for many years it was represented on the Executive Committee by Edson Lannes – who had trained in the 1960s with Katrin Kemper, a German pioneer of the Brazilian IPA and IFPS psychoanalysis. In her paper “‘To hear with eyes’: Gestures, expressions, rhythms,” the author borrows a Shakespearean expression used by Masud Kahn in The privacy of the self (1974), to show how his eyes could detect inscribed in the body of a patient lying on his couch different things from the ones he was hearing from the patient. Referring also to Sándor Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (Ferenczi, 1988), Jô Gondar shows how important it is to pay attention to the nonverbal aspects and to the rhythm of each patient, a dimension of our work that becomes particularly important when we work with patients suffering from traumatic experiences beyond verbal formulation. In such a case – and here the author refers also to Haag, Maiello, and Roussilion – we can even speak of psychic suffering as “a rhythmic disturbance, a dysrhythmia.” The chair of the organizing committee of the 2018 IFPS Forum, Anna Maria Loiacono, presented in Lisbon her own clinical work with a female patient through the paper “Countertransference and Oedipal love.” This is centered around the famous paper that Harold Searles wrote on this subject (Searles, 1959) and around Thomas Ogden’s revisitation of it (Ogden, 2007). The “mature relatedness” that Searles offers as a model of treatment consists in accepting the paradoxical character of the Oedipal dimension in the treatment, that is, its being at the same time both real and imaginary. In the light of her treatment of Mrs. K., the author shows how “there exists a direct proportional relationship