{"title":"The construction of masculinity in Selk'nam culture. A psychoanalytic understanding of the initiation ceremony.","authors":"Gabriel Rivera, Pablo Santander","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2601622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2601622","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, a psychoanalytic analysis of the Hain ceremony of the Selk'nam people is undertaken with the aim of reflecting on the construction of masculinity and the threats underlying it. This ceremony, which is central to the transition from childhood to adulthood in the culture, is based on a myth chronicling the existence of a prior matriarchy. The fear of the return of this regime gives rise to a ceremony symbolising a counter-response, sustained by a pact of silence among men. The underlying threat is rooted in the fear of female domination and submission to women. It is suggested that this myth contains a specific truth connected to contact with vulnerability. It is proposed that the combination of an intense mother-son relationship, coupled with distance from the father during the early stages of development, is connected to the threat of regression to a mother-child bonding state as a form of protection from the anxieties associated with facing the world. At the same time, this generates the need to establish defensive barriers towards women.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"107 4","pages":"662-675"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149026305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"The flash of awakened consciousness\": dream images in Freud and Benjamin.","authors":"Anat Tzur Mahalel","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2525581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2525581","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay explores the role of visual images in dream imagery as a space where unconscious processes intersect with historical forces. It offers a comparative reading in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Benjamin's Arcades Project (1982). Freud conceptualizes dream images as condensed memory traces that navigate between perception and hallucination, revealing repressed desires. Conversely, Benjamin's dream images critique modernity's loss of aura, offering moments of \"Now-Time\" as opportunities for historical creation. The essay argues that both Freud and Benjamin share a foundational premise: turning a blind eye to the obscure and unknown dimensions of individual and collective experience fosters crises and destruction, whereas striving to reveal these hidden areas promotes transformation. Exploring disruptions and ruptures in the continuity of experience challenges the inclination to act according to Freud's concept of repetition compulsion or Nietzsche's eternal return, as interpreted by Benjamin. These ideas are explored through the dream of the burning child presented by Freud and the ghost dream presented by Benjamin. The dialectic of insight and blindness, alongside the image of open doors in both dreams, invite us to consider how, even amidst loss and rupture, dream images can open pathways to new realms of experiencing and remembering.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"107 4","pages":"643-661"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149026360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trans is not the new gay: How psychoanalytic elitism and the rejection of science are creating a repetition of the past.","authors":"Roberto D'Angelo","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2591921","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2591921","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Psychoanalysis has a troubled history with regard to sexual minorities. Throughout much of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, prominent analysts endorsed a highly pathologising and coercive approach to homosexuality, which was essentially a form of conversion therapy. This departure from accepted analytic technique persisted for decades due to psychoanalytic elitism and the rejection of mounting empirical science contradicting the psychoanalytic position.Today, a pressing concern for psychoanalysis is to avoid repeating this history when theorising about and working with trans people. In particular, approaches that explore the psychodynamic formation of trans identities, are being framed as forms of conversion therapy. However, this is not the case, as it is based on a misconception that equates psychodynamics with pathology. Furthermore, unquestioning gender affirmation shares an important conceptual similarity with gay conversion therapy, in that it can collude with a wish to eliminate a shame-filled or hated part of the self.In our haste to avoid repeating the past, psychoanalysis is deploying the very same tactics that insulated psychoanalysis from revision and course correction in relation to homosexuality, but now with regard to trans. The author argues that, if we are to avoid causing further harm to our patients and our profession, we ignore the science at our own peril.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"416-439"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145953198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Letter to the Editor: On D'Angelo's paper \"Trans is not the new gay: How psychoanalytic elitism and the rejection of science are creating a repetition of the past\".","authors":"Andi P Eliza-Christie, J Unterberg","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2026.2673741","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2026.2673741","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"107 3","pages":"518-520"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148406453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine\".","authors":"Ellen A Sparer","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2529298","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2529298","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Becoming a psychoanalyst in France has a long and complex history. Through a reflection on the evolution of supervision at the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute (IPP), the author illustrates how the Institute evolved into the French Model. Specific elements of supervision in its current form are also described.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"107 3","pages":"465-476"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148406306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The political phantasm underlying questions of gender.","authors":"Chiara Buoncristiani, Tommaso Romani","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2026.2658087","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2026.2658087","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on the psychoanalytic treatment of Blu, a trans/non-binary patient, this paper introduces the notion of the political phantasm as a metapsychological operator linking unconscious phantasy to historically situated regimes of recognition. Blu's suffering is not reducible to intrapsychic or familial dynamics; rather, it calls for an expanded metapsychology capable of accounting for the co-production of subjectivity within the collective. The analytic setting becomes a space in which historically situated excitations - traumas, exclusions, excesses - are co-constructed and symbolically reworked. Blu's non-binary experience destabilizes diagnostic categories, compelling psychoanalysis to rethink its models of gender, power, and unconscious life. Clinical sequences show how family transmissions, early fantasies, and collective pre-individual ontologies co-produce what counts as livable, sayable, and desirable. The political phantasm is the processual unconscious affective-collective matrix that schematises inclusion and exclusion and, in doing so, generates spectral residues - experiences without scene that return as shame, \"too-muchness\", or self-pathologisation. Clinically, the concept helps avoid both intrapsychic reductionism and identity-affirmative shortcuts, while preserving the density of the unconscious and the transformative force of collective worlds.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"107 3","pages":"391-415"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148406467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unconscious affective communication in the formation and transformation of emerging subjectivity.","authors":"Paolo Boccara","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2585381","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2585381","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The author addresses \"primitive states of mind\", a significant point of current development in contemporary psychoanalysis, with the aim of recognising and elaborating such configurations in the analytic relationship. The article revisits the views of Loewald (1980), who saw minds as organising experiences gradually over the course of development according to different principles and changeable organisational structures which continue to operate simultaneously in adult experience on a continuum that runs from consciousness to unconsciousness. The author uses a clinical example to describe various modalities that succeed in approaching these pre-conditions of thinkability so that as the analysis progresses it can set up the conditions for an affective tolerability, which may in turn lead to a potentially effective recognition of meanings. The article hypothesises that in these circumstances it may be possible to recreate the experience of a phase of development in which the patient \"uses\" the analyst (Winnicott 1967) as the infant does the mother, in such a way as to put the analyst in the state of feeling \"destroyed\" (Ogden 2016b). An analyst who survives while \"feeling they have been destroyed\" in fact enables the patient to live as a subject distinct from an object.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"107 3","pages":"352-370"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148406425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Letter in response to chairs of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Committee on Gender and Sexuality.","authors":"Roberto D'Angelo","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2026.2673743","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2026.2673743","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"107 3","pages":"521-524"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148406316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}