{"title":"Hearing oneself speak the never-before spoken: Therapeutic action from a Lacanian perspective.","authors":"Richard Tuch","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2024.2385412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2024.2385412","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Lacanian theory is dense and abstract, making it hard to discern how Lacanian analysts conduct treatment. This paper outlines basic Lacanian methods, doing so using the framework of therapeutic action-how analysis affects psychic changes as seen from a Lacanian perspective. Lacan was opposed to the clinical goal of heightening a patient's self-understanding. His clinical efforts focused more on essential knowledge (discovering \"what is\") as opposed to complex knowledge (explaining why \"what is\" is as it is). Two mutative clinical events are discussed: <i>speaking the unspoken</i> and <i>movement from empty to full speech.</i> Core Lacanian methods of bringing about such events include: \"punctuation\" (echoing noteworthy patient statements that contain more than the patient imagines), the use of oracular speech (\"curve balls\" that challenge a patient's core assumptions), and unplanned clinical moments when the analyst fails to live up to the patient's expectations (to be the one who is supposed to know). Basic Lacanian theory is outlined to gain a sense of what Lacanians see as the core human ailment: a sense of alienation and the endless search to satisfy desire that stems from one's core sense of lack-the sense of being perennially incomplete.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 3","pages":"509-527"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144754888","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 couch of paranoia - the shadow of the ancestors and a haunting ego ideal.","authors":"Hsueh-Mei Fan","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2483295","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2483295","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on her experience of working within two cultures, the author examines and explores how, in a Taiwanese context, one is encouraged to take on a different development route that emphasises maintaining identification with one's pre-Oedipal and Oedipal objects throughout one's life, in which separation and independence are discouraged and a familial-self is facilitated. This gives rise to a strong ego ideal that acquires a persecuting quality, and one could easily become prey to it. Clinical material is presented to illustrate this psychic situation, the plight it creates for the individual and how it manifests itself in the consultation room, turning the couch of understanding into a couch of paranoia.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 3","pages":"597-607"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144754892","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":"Tradition and change in psychoanalytic theory: Querying the infantile.","authors":"Stephen Seligman","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2511316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2511316","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Theory plays a crucial role in clinical choices, group formation, and organizational culture and politics. Theoretical positions seem based on reason and observation, but other motivations are often involved-belonging, recognition, and even concrete rewards, such as referrals and organizational positions. Established ideas can constrain new perspectives and observations that can enhance analytic theory and practice. I query the theory of infantile sexuality, critiquing several different theories' images of infancy: Freud's, Ego Psychology's; Melanie Klein's and Jean Laplanche's. I question both the analogy between infancy, psychic \"primitivity,\" and severe psychopathology (especially psychosis) and the idea that sexuality and aggression are the primary, endogenous motives. Rather than the essential \"first causes\" from the beginning of life, they are among an array of motives of interest to analysis. None of this precludes the core analytic ideas about the unconscious, primary process, object relations, fantasy, transference, and the salience of the inner world.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 3","pages":"588-596"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144754893","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":"But it's against the rules!! Structured competitive games as a neglected resource in child psychodynamic psychotherapy.","authors":"Celine Maroudas","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2024.2370457","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2024.2370457","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the field of child psychoanalytic psychotherapy, structured competitive games such as Monopoly, UNO or football have traditionally been regarded as less conducive to deep psychodynamically oriented work. By contrast, some contemporary authors have pointed out that in middle childhood it is often precisely in play with structured games - game-play - that spontaneity and strong emotions come to the fore. These authors suggest that game-play constitutes a potentially powerful therapeutic tool for access to, and communication with, the older child's inner world. In this paper, clinical theoretical arguments are presented alongside clinical examples in support of this view and a variety of forms of game-play encountered in the analytic playroom are discussed and analysed. The paper examines how the rules and partially predetermined content of these games act as a framing structure in which the analytic work can take place safely and spontaneously, and how the model of the container ↔ contained can be usefully applied to game-play in the child therapy room. Emphasis is placed throughout on the therapeutic role of a flexible and carefully calibrated approach to the game's rules and structure and the child's cheating.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":" ","pages":"288-308"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142740950","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":"Revisiting the constancy of analytic setting in a changing world.","authors":"Clara R Nemas","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2477841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2477841","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This series, proposed by the Educational Committee, explores different perspectives on the concept of setting, addressing the transformations it underwent following the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, most psychoanalysts faced the unprecedented challenge of not only altering the traditional way of conducting sessions but also adapting to new technologies, often unfamiliar to them. However, the evolution of the setting is not solely a response to crisis. Technological advancements have enabled psychoanalysis to reach individuals in regions where it was previously unavailable. Additionally, patients who emigrate often seek continuity in their analysis, which resulted in the need to maintain sessions remotely. Likewise, individuals living abroad have the chance to engage in analysis in their native language, leading to what has been termed long-distance analysis. This article presents four papers by psychoanalysts from diverse backgrounds, offering insights into the impact on psychoanalytic practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 2","pages":"375-384"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144042307","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 interface function.","authors":"Uta Karacaoğlan, Erwin-Josef Speckmann","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2024.2361414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2024.2361414","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Interfaces connect spaces that must both be sufficiently similar and different. The differences are the driving force for an exchange between the spaces. In doing so, interfaces control the quantity and quality of the exchange that takes place through them. In terms of spatial and temporal dimensions, interfaces are highly complex, self-organising, and finitely extended. The interface-function is a highly specialised process that enables difference-based exchange. At the driving end, it requires energy from outside, which reduces entropy and increases information, and in this way creates and maintains difference. The interface-function as a basic principle is being employed here metaphorically to develop the hypothesis that there is an analogous basic function in the psyche since interfaces are ubiquitous in the entire organism, i.e. brain and body, and function simultaneously. Transferring the assumption of the interface-function to mental processes postulates difference as a basic principle. We will illustrate our reflections here with the help of clinical vignettes from psychoanalytic treatments thus illuminating the interface-function's various properties and some aspects of its disruption and restoration.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 2","pages":"248-266"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144052075","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":"Psychoanalysis, criminology and delinquency: The early history of the Portman Clinic.","authors":"Jessica Yakeley","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2024.2382249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2024.2382249","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Founded in 1933, the Portman Clinic, now part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, in London UK, is a nationally funded out-patient clinic providing psychoanalytic psychotherapy to children, adolescents and adults who present with delinquency, violence, and problematic sexual behaviours. The Portman Clinic came into being during the interwar years, a fertile time in which psychoanalytic theories became influential within criminology. This article describes the foundation and early history of the Clinic within the wider social and political context of the early and mid-twentieth century, including the impact of the second world war and the dawn of the welfare state. It explores the ideas of the psychoanalysts Grace Pailthorpe, Edward Glover, Kate Friedlander, and Melitta Schmideberg, which were based on their work with patients at the Portman Clinic but were also shaped by the internal war within the British psychoanalytic community, the so-called Controversial Discussions. The review draws on previously unpublished clinical material from archived records of patients seen at the Portman Clinic since 1933, providing a fascinating glimpse into the profile of these patients, and how their psychopathology and offending behaviours were influenced by changing societal norms and significant historical events.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 2","pages":"309-336"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144034969","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 frame in analysis: On Lacan's perspective.","authors":"Paola Mieli","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2476209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2476209","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The fundamental rule requiring analysands to say whatever passes through their mind has a crucial counterpart on the side of the analyst in the \"evenly suspended attention\", where having an ear finely tuned to unconscious processes, as Freud describes it, implies a suspension of any acquired knowledge. Such an attention is orientated to the sequence of the analysand's uttered signifiers, in a listening attuned to what produces effects of sense and non-sense beyond the intention of the discourse. The possibility of sustaining the position of not-knowing is, according to Lacan, what constitutes the very <i>frame</i> of the analytic process. The analyst's rigorous listening brings to the fore its own logic and the temporality associated with it.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 2","pages":"431-439"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144006478","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":"Frame as a commonly shared transitional object: Reflections on remote analysis/teleanalysis and the corona crisis using a case example.","authors":"Bernd Pütz","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2476210","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2476210","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper attempts to use Winnicott's theory of the transitional object to develop a concept of the psychoanalytic frame as a transitional object commonly shared by analyst and analysand. The process of creating the frame, often neglected in theories, is characterized by different phases. After the interview, a phase is postulated in which the symmetrical aspects of the analytic relationship are considered crucial for the formation of a frame: the commonly shared transitional object. In a following phase, the asymmetry of the relationship is considered significant: the analyst takes over the protection of the frame. Using the example of a patient who called by telephone from a moving car during his session, reflections will be made about teleanalysis/remote analysis and the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic for psychoanalytic treatment techniques. Finally, the need for considerations about a psychoanalytic media theory with reflections on the medium \"telephone\" is emphasized.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 2","pages":"400-415"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144051362","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 phenomenology of teleanalysis: A research study of the experiences of analysts and candidates in training analyses in the US during 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic.","authors":"Nicolle Zapien","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2024.2371561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2024.2371561","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There has historically been controversy among psychoanalysts about the use and efficacy of teleanalysis. As COVID-19 arrived, most analysts offered teleanalysis despite their opinions and any prior experiences of this format of analytic care. Twelve psychoanalysts and thirteen candidates in training analyses in the US using teleanalysis two years into the pandemic were interviewed. Giorgi's phenomenological research method (Giorgi, A. 2009. <i>The Descriptive Phenomenological Method for Psychology</i>. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne Press) was used to develop a generalizable description of teleanalysis including its constituent parts. Results suggest that teleanalysis allows more access to treatments at analytic frequency, but it is not equivalent to in-person analysis as there are aspects that are felt to be missing and important. The impact of the medium, including increased distractions, difficulties with maintaining the frame, and missing aspects, are felt by both analysts and candidates in training analyses, but are even more starkly felt by candidate analysands than analysts. Providing teleanalysis presents unique challenges to the analyst due to less control of the teleanalytic frame and the need to represent and analyze in some way what is missing. Analyzing the unconscious motivations, dynamics, and meanings of the use of teleanalysis (or in-person or hybrid analysis) may deepen the treatment regardless of what format is ultimately used.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 2","pages":"340-362"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144053364","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}