{"title":"Confidentiality, anonymisation and their digital discontents.","authors":"Elizabeth Allison","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2595824","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2595824","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Scientific communication about clinical work is complicated for psychoanalysts by the requirement to protect confidentiality, the potentially disruptive effect that seeking consent may have on the treatment, and questions about whether informed consent is possible if the unconscious is taken seriously. For these reasons, the balance of opinion has tended to favour disguise over consent, but in the digital age and with the advent of AI doubts have arisen about whether it is possible to achieve a level of disguise that would prevent any third party from recognising the patient. The papers in this Psychoanalytic Controversies section by John Churcher, Denia Barrett, Aden Evens and Sarah Ackerman, Vittorio Lingiardi and Mariana Liotti, and David Tuckett explore different aspects of the question of whether in the digital age effective anonymisation is possible.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1146-1150"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107953","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":"Breadth psychology.","authors":"Aden Evens, Sarah Ackerman","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2585380","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2585380","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Freudian psychoanalysis holds a conception of personhood in which patients are divided by a conflict between their outward presentation and their hidden, inner turmoil. The Freudian analyst too is split, occupying a position <i>within</i> the patient's internal dialogue while also listening in from <i>outside</i> of it. Addressing the analyst as both self and other, the patient's confidentiality is necessarily preserved but also inherently violated. As digital technologies reshape psychic structure, this paradox in confidentiality, constitutive of the analytic situation, may no longer arise. Personhood in the digital age is arguably less grounded in the patient's internality and instead diffused into a distributed, online self. How should our analytic task-including the preservation of confidentiality-be altered for patients who construct their selves in external digital networks? Whether the patients' growing disregard for privacy and evacuation of innerness is a defensive resistance or a tectonic shift in the structure of the psyche, the analyst must remain committed to an ethics in practice, as abstinence, neutrality, and anonymity (confidence) are not only gestures of professional respect for the analysand but <i>in situ</i> features of a successful treatment, features whose intransigence safeguards the fundamental rule and so makes it possible to vary other aspects of technique to discover what complementary subject position best frees the patient's desire, regardless of the shape of her psyche (Report on Confidentiality, 2018, p. 6).</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1173-1179"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146108029","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":"Voice, body-self and trauma in the analytic space.","authors":"Sebastian Leikert","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2503358","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2503358","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The author investigates voice and body-self in the analytic space. A look at the role of music and voice in Stone Age ritual, being the core of human culture, and at the role of the mother's voice, being the unborn child's first encounter with the Other, shows the influence of the voice on psychic life. Beyond the symbolic discourse, voice and body-self organize the exchange of emotions. This level becomes crucial when a symbolization disorder dominates the encounter as a result of traumatization. The analytic couple is not limited to a focus on words and images. Both analyst and patient have access to the perception of their body-self; moreover, the sound of the voice proves to be isomorphic to the states of the body-self and provides vocal information. In the analytic space a traumatic inscription in the body-self (encapsulated body engram) can be focused on. Somatic narration describes a way to work through such an engram. Here, the patient is invited to describe his or her body perceptions and thus the disorganized tensions of traumatization can unfold in the analytic space. This enables a cathartic process of overcoming the destructive qualities of traumatic memory. A case report illustrates the method.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1108-1126"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107948","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":"Online training: Innovation, necessity, or the end of psychoanalysis? Report on the panel at the International Psychoanalytic Congress, Lisbon, Portugal 2025.","authors":"Marina Altmann de Litvan","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2585374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2585374","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1242-1245"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146108006","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":"Working with dreams which take on a landmark significance.","authors":"Clara Nemas","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2582501","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2582501","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper examines dreams that become landmarks in analytic work, opening new pathways for understanding a patient's internal world. Through the analysis of a young patient whose sessions oscillated between despair, omnipotence, and intense claustrophobic anxieties, it shows how dreams provided a shared space for the development of imaginative conjectures. A central dream-structured as a film perceived from multiple points of view-revealed the patient's unstable contact-barrier and her confusion between psychotic and non-psychotic modes of experience. The paper shows how this dream provided a perspective from which to observe the mental functioning of the patient, changing the initial atmosphere of despair into a possibility of exploration and thinking, becoming a landmark in the development of the analytic process. A supervisory vignette further illustrates how approaching dreams as a way of understanding the architecture of the mind could transform a negative therapeutic atmosphere into one of curiosity and collaboration.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1228-1241"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107939","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":"Discussion of Francis Pasche's paper \"From the ambivalent superego to the impersonal superego\".","authors":"Vic Sedlak","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2577819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2577819","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1220-1227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107976","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":"To recognise oneself.","authors":"Uta Karacaoğlan","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2585372","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2585372","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Publishing touches on fundamental questions of abstinence, it has an impact on our treatments. It is most likely impossible to prevent patients from recognising themselves (or wanting to recognise themselves) in clinical reports, but steps should be taken to prevent third parties from identifying them. My suggestion is to view anonymisation as a multi-stage process, in which the original clinical event is first documented and recorded in the form of a narrative based on the subjective experience of the analyst. This first step already constitutes an interpretation, as it usually involves a selection and summary of the clinical material. In a second step, a more general insight must be abstracted from this initial observation, one that applies not only to this specific individual case. Only after a structure has been identified does the actual anonymisation take place in the third step, in which the knowledge or hypothesis gained (about this structure) is illustrated in the form of a clinical vignette. This multi-stage process is illustrated with a clinical example. Whether this process provides sufficient protection against recognition by third parties presumably depends on the degree of acquaintance or intimacy between the analysand and the respective third party.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1167-1172"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107956","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":"From the ambivalent superego to the impersonal superego.","authors":"Francis Pasche","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2022.2049537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2022.2049537","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1200-1210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107993","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":"Sensoriality and thought. In development and in psychopathology.","authors":"Franco De Masi, Gabriella Giustino","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2518086","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2518086","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper addresses certain aspects of the role of sensoriality in psychic functioning and, in particular, seeks to compare child sensoriality - a natural component of development that precedes the ability to think - and the perceptual-sensorial distortion that occurs in certain pathological conditions. In the course of severe psychic disorders such as psychosis, and in other respects in post-traumatic conditions, the mind is invaded by sensorial perceptions that block its functioning as an organ of knowledge. In the case of trauma, the intrusive mental phenomena are more limited and related to untransformed traumatic anxiety. Instead, the psychotic transformation of the mind is most radical; it develops into psychic retreat that shatters the ability to think and perceive psychic reality. In this instance, the mind's sensorial mode of functioning is so extreme that these patients are immersed in a newly created sensorial reality; they do not think but rather see their own thoughts or perceive sounds or voices that do not exist.</p>","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1127-1145"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107984","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 International Journal: A Psychoanalytic Anchor in Chaotic Times.","authors":"Catherine Humble","doi":"10.1080/00207578.2025.2595825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2025.2595825","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48022,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Psychoanalysis","volume":"106 6","pages":"1256-1258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146107987","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}