{"title":"Psychoanalytic ego psychology: A European perspective","authors":"M. Conci","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2022.2128210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2022.2128210","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"32 1","pages":"4 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41887811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Psychoanalytic theories and techniques: Dialogue, difficulties and future – Papers from the XXIInd IFPS Forum, Madrid, October 19–22, 2022","authors":"M. Conci","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2023.2184954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2023.2184954","url":null,"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 w","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"32 1","pages":"62 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47005024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The multiple dimensions of our contemporary psychoanalytic discourse","authors":"M. Conci","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2022.2133302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2022.2133302","url":null,"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 introduce","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"31 1","pages":"193 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44655030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Stefana, D. D’Imperio, A. Dakanalis, E. Vieta, P. Fusar-Poli, E. Youngstrom
{"title":"Probing the impact of psychoanalytic therapy for bipolar disorders: A scoping review","authors":"A. Stefana, D. D’Imperio, A. Dakanalis, E. Vieta, P. Fusar-Poli, E. Youngstrom","doi":"10.1080/0803706x.2022.2097307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706x.2022.2097307","url":null,"abstract":"No systematic review has been conducted to provide an overview of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis on outcomes for bipolar depression and mania. The present study undertakes a scoping review on the effectiveness of psychoanalysis for bipolar disorder (BD), provides a summary of the evidence base, and identifies issues for future research in this area. A thorough search of journal articles in MEDLINE, PEP-Web, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science was carried out to obtain available studies of psychoanalytic treatment for BD published 1990-2021. We searched for either quantitative or single-case studies. Twenty-six single case reports from 21 articles and no quantitative studies met a prior inclusion criteria. Qualitative analysis suggests efficacy and cost-effectiveness but thus far there is no scientific evidence in support of psychoanalysis. Although these pilot findings suggest that psychoanalysis may impact symptoms and global functioning in patients with BD, the underlying evidence is poor and should be confirmed by experimental studies.","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47381372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Being myself as the analyst I have become:” An interview with Jay B. Frankel","authors":"Aleksandar Dimitrijević","doi":"10.1080/0803706x.2022.2077435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706x.2022.2077435","url":null,"abstract":"In 2015, during the IPA Congress in Boston, Jay Frankel, Gabriele Cassullo, and I started editing a book about Sandor Ferenczi (Dimitrijevic,́ Cassullo, and Frankel, 2018). In the following couple of years, we met regularly online, for the most part once a week, and gathered in Berlin, where Jay gave a lecture at the International Psychoanalytic University, in Florence, in Paris, where we interviewed Judith Dupont (Dimitrijevic,́ in press), in New Jersey, and in Washington D.C., where all three of us presented at a conference about the “Lines of Development” book series. This collaboration – successful despite many challenges – led to a personal friendship and new joint projects (see Frankel, 2020, 2022). I had the privilege of talking to Jay about his interpretations, impressions, and plans, and about his reminiscences and contacts. I felt he had lived at the epicenter of contemporary American psychoanalysis, but I also felt that my image was only fragmentary. When my interview with Professor Michael B. Buchholz was published in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis (Dimitrijevic, 2021), a detailed conversation about Jay’s contributions, development, and experiences seemed like a most natural continuation. Recordings of our four meetings, held over April and May of 2020, were kindly transcribed by Ms. Gamze Farz, MA, edited by myself, and corrected and approved by Jay Frankel. This text is a slightly condensed version of the transcript, kindly accepted by Dr. Marco Conci and Dr. Grigoris Maniadakis, the Coeditors-in-Chief of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, without significant cuts, as this Bildungsroman deserves.","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"32 1","pages":"40 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43849068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When patients probe the analyst: Manifestations of patient testing and its complexity – An in-depth exploration of case examples of extant research","authors":"A. Novak, Jonas Luedemann, S. Andreas","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2022.2075564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2022.2075564","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Patients probe the analyst with the goal of challenging pathogenic adaptations to early experiences. As the core concept of control mastery theory (CMT), testing is contextualized within psychoanalytic theory. The current work examines 29 articles illustrating therapies performed or analyzed using the CMT approach for the occurrence of testing, which takes place through interaction, self-presentation, narratives, or the use of the setting. The various manifestations of testing and their potential meanings are described. An in-depth analysis of selected testing examples is performed to compare tests within patients and across studies. The results show that patients differ in their testing strategies, shift testing strategy during the process of treatment, combine tests, and test multiple conflictual themes within a single test. Therefore, the importance of applying a case-specific approach, based on a thorough understanding of a patient, becomes evident. Recommendations concerning psychoanalytic technique, including the role of interpretation, as illustrated in case vignettes, are introduced.","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"32 1","pages":"23 - 39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48158077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mentalization promotion and affect mobilization in clinical work","authors":"Daniela de Robertis","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2022.2039407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2022.2039407","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The author presents a model of clinical intervention based on patients’ mentalization, or mind reading, that is, the function of the mind to understand the mind. The action of mind reading means a type of thought, mostly not conscious, implicit, often not even encoded in words, that expresses the meaning “I think that you think that I think.” Thoughts about the analyst’s states of mind crowd the minds of patients, taking shape in these questions: “What do you think I have in mind?” and so “How do you plan to act towards me?” If the analyst does not capture and does not disambiguate the doubts, the patient’s perplexity and insecurity can intensify and produce emotions of anxiety, fear, fright, but also anger towards a silent interlocutor. Conversely, the analyst who mentalizes the state of mind of the patient and verbalizes it heteroregulates the patient’s fears and anxiety level. Mentalization and affect regulation are also related to the analyst’s recognition of the patient’s metacognition process. At the conclusion of the theoretical section, a clinical sketch shows examples, and highlights in therapeutic work the abovementioned theoretical issues.","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"31 1","pages":"218 - 225"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48458496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on dying patients, hospices, assisted suicide, and euthanasia","authors":"C. Sjödin","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2022.2032332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2022.2032332","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract My parents’ death struggle, my clinical work with dying patients, the euthanasia of Freud, and a fear of dementia form the background to my reflections on dying patients, hospices, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The change in public opinion has resulted in a displacement from Nazi crimes to the present focus on the right to self-determination. Consequently, a law allowing assisted suicide or euthanasia has been adopted in several locations, such as Oregon in the USA, the Benelux countries, Switzerland, and Canada. The fear of suffering, hopelessness, and inability are strong arguments to allow euthanasia and aided suicide. A compelling case against it is its negative social consequences, the infringement into the private sphere when the sick person and their family must decide if they are willing to accept assisted suicide or euthanasia. Although the “right to death” provides freedom to some, for others it is a forced choice that interferes with the dying process. I conclude by highlighting the palliative model, wherein death is perceived as a part of an individual’s life and as a normal process, although this task is hard for the family to contain, especially when the dying person is in pain and agony. Dying is not merely an individual process. It affects the whole family as well as the future generations’ views on reciprocity and responsibility.","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"31 1","pages":"132 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44830560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Psychoanalytic encounter: Conflict and change – Papers from the XXIst IFPS Forum, February 2020, Lisbon","authors":"M. Conci, G. Maniadakis","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2022.2093082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2022.2093082","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"31 1","pages":"61 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46617784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sanity and madness within the therapeutic setting: A case study","authors":"Alexandra Medeiros","doi":"10.1080/0803706X.2022.2075563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2022.2075563","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyses a particular case of sanity and madness within the therapeutic setting as an expression of psychosis. It describes the story of a boy named Pedro who, between the ages of 12 and 16 years, struggled with mental balance – oscillating between lucidity, within a broken mind, and the madness required to stay healthy. The psychotherapeutic path was marked by a set of characters – real and fictional – that revealed his split functioning. In the plots Pedro created, he used the evil characters of any given movie saga in order to express himself. Like a dream, these narratives functioned as metaphors and metonyms, where the condensed forces of evil took over the symptom – which brings us to psychosis – while the good side, represented by an isolated and unprotected figure with which Pedro identified, revealed the displaced material of his unconscious desire. Although the psychotic parts of Pedro’s personality had been rehabilitated and integrated, his mental functioning remained marked by dissociation with reality, linked to the psychotic dysfunctionality. Therefore, even if his psychotic parts were contained and masked by clever humor, they were an indelible trace of his mental life.","PeriodicalId":43212,"journal":{"name":"International Forum of Psychoanalysis","volume":"31 1","pages":"83 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44808179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}