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As Freud remarked in his letter to Einstein, "so long as there exist countries and nations that are prepared for the ruthless destruction of others, those others must be armed for war" (Freud [7], p.213). Referring to Freud's essay "Thoughts for the times on war and death" (Freud, [5]), Bell describes the translation of "Enttäuschung" as "disillusionment." I greatly appreciate David Bell's recent article; it is full of good points and typically deeply insightful. [Extracted from the article]

This brief introduction summarizes and gives the biographical context of Roger Money-Kyrle's 1934 paper "A psychological analysis of the causes of war". It also contextualizes his interest in the interplay between the psychological mechanisms operating within the individual, the society and groups and his personal experience with Germany in between and after two catastrophic wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrating how psychoanalysts can be useful in community settings outside the conventional consulting room, this paper describes consultation and group interventions conducted at a San Francisco mental health agency serving a largely Asian community. In the traumatic context of the COVID-19 pandemic, agency staff became fragmented, due to remote working conditions and differential work assignments, including mandated deployments to emergency sites. Two psychoanalysts worked with agency leadership to devise a weekly process group held by video conferencing over 6 months, in an attempt to heal resentments and splits in the fabric of the agency. Examples of the group process, interventions, and major themes that emerged are described, as well as recommendations made, including the formation of an ongoing clinical consultation group. The paper situates these interventions in the greater context of the pandemic which exposed not only a universal threat to life and health, but also structural vulnerabilities organized along lines of (racial) difference and inequity. The dynamics at the agency are thus described as rooted within greater nested histories: of the clinic, its leadership, and their relationship with a strained public health system, and more broadly, of the tangled intersection of these histories with anti-Asian racism. These are understood as manifestations of the Social Unconscious, and the intervention as an example of Community Psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights elements of Peirce's philosophy used by four well-known psychoanalytic authors, Ricardo Steiner, André Green, Bjorn Salomonsson and Dominique Scarfone, showing how contributions from Peirce's ideas could clarify psychoanalytic matters. The subject of Steiner's paper is how Peirce's semiotic could help to fulfill a conceptual gap mainly in Kleinian tradition in relation to phenomena that occur between what are called "symbolic equations" (representations lived as facts, by psychotic patients) and symbolization. Green's writings question Lacan's conception that the unconscious is structured like a language, suggesting that Peirce's signs, particularly the icons and indices, would be more appropriate to think about the unconscious than the linguistics used by Lacan. One of the Salomonsson's papers gives a good example of how Peirce's philosophic notions can be enlightening in the clinical area, as they are used to answer the criticism that words could not be understood by a baby in a "mother-infant" treatment; the other uses Peirce's conceptions to give interesting suggestions about Bion's beta-elements. The last paper, from Scarfone, broadly address the constitution of significations in psychoanalysis, but we will limit ourselves to consider how Peirce's concepts are used in the model proposed by Scarfone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the capacity to mourn is ubiquitously acknowledged as critical for individual psychic functioning, the impact of this capacity on a collective social level has been examined to a very limited extent in the psychoanalytic literature to date. The two papers that take up this this topic thus bring various critical and complex issues to our attention. After reviewing and commenting on these papers, I discuss how these issues are particularly relevant today to society in general and psychoanalysis in particular. I believe that the ability to mourn is under siege in the Western world at present, with respect to both "macro" mourning that is, mourning for significant losses such as a beloved person, ideal, or country, and "micro" mourning or mourning for losses inherently and unavoidably implicated in choices we make in everyday life. These mourning processes are undermined by the impact of complex socioeconomic parameters on psychic functioning, as evidenced by various internal problems and symptomatology characteristic of our times. In turn, difficulties in mourning contribute to social problems including social injustice, wars and the climate crisis. As psychoanalysts we are called upon to address these issues in our clinical work as well as in our global community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of gratitude as a fundamental concept in psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein’s classic article “Envy and Gratitude” (1957) named gratitude at one pole on an axis of human suffering and flourishing, but with a few notable exceptions, the article stimulated research into envy. This paper explores the historical and philosophical traditions that have, to some extent unconsciously, influenced our contemporary understandings of gratitude. The paper also works to explore the social and ethical meanings of gratitude as well as gratitude’s psychoanalytic significance. The aim is to uncover the overall psychic significance of gratitude and its place in human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper hopes to enhance understanding about entrenched grievance in a couple of ways: (a) Initially, the paper reviews how entrenched grievance reflects melancholic states of mind in terms of its avoidance of the pain of loss and change. But the main contribution of the paper is likely to be found in (b), that is, via detailed clinical material, the paper illustrates how earnest efforts on the part of the analyst to bring understanding may lead to cognitive entrapments such as the convictions incumbent in the “knowing” analyst. Further, that this knowing analyst may need to become aggrieved, that is, narrow, impatient and concrete towards her patient’s entrenchment, and then to recogize this plight in herself before she can genuinely hear her patient’s grievance about her from a wider view, that is as a complaint from the “lively self”, deserving recognition. The clinical detail demonstrates that such recognition softened the patient’s grievance, allowing both members of the dyad to become more collaborative and open to the pains and growth available from mourning states of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that, despite its title, "The Ego and the Id" can be seen as the book of the superego, and although it is a metapsychological work, Freud's introduction of the new conceptual tools provided by the structural model was a response to the clinical problems he faced. The implications of Freud's introduction of the superego for the analytic relationship are discussed, with an attempt to deepen our understanding of what he had in mind by reading "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" alongside "The Ego and the Id". Finally, the paper draws on Bion to consider the implications of this remodelling of the analytic scene for listening and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from Edmund Husserl's last book Experience and Judgement, this paper explores the notions of "passivity" and "receptivity" in phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Both sciences agree that receptivity differs from passivity, but they have developed different conceptualizations about the very nature of the rudimentary "ego-activity" which is the source of receptivity. In phenomenological terms, "pre-predicative" experience roots in a primary presence and openness of the ego towards the world, whilst psychoanalysis has emphasized the role of projective and introjective processes which are close to bodily experiences and unconscious phantasy. The second part of the paper draws some conclusions concerning the analytic situation, in particular the shift among receptivity, empathy, curiosity and creative imagination as central features of the analytic attitude from a mainly Kleinian point of view. The paper argues that receptivity is a field where phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches can mutually enrich and learn from each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (Freud [14]), Freud only explicitly mentions the term "passivity" once - with respect to what he terms "feminine masochism" - a derivative of primary masochism, and a form that he had already discussed at length in "A Child is Being Beaten" (Freud [11]). One of the complications with discussing Freud's terminology is that there isn't masculine or feminine passivity as such in Freud, but "activity" and "passivity", and then Freud slides "masculine" and "feminine" over those terms, sometime equating them, and sometimes not. Whereas in this paper, Freud falls back on anatomical explanations of sexual difference ("the repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex" (Freud [19], p. 253), only two years before he eschewed biological determinism: "I would only like to emphasize that we must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology just as we have kept it separate from anatomy and physiology" (Freud [18]/Steiner [35] p.380). (Freud [14], p. 163) As he did in 'A Child is Being Beaten" (Freud [11]), so in the 1924 paper Freud explains the genesis of "feminine masochism" in terms of Oedipal conflicts, specifically the repressed guilt and thrill of incestual Oedipal wishes. [Extracted from the article]

In this letter to the editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the author responds to a previous paper on transgender issues. The author praises the personal account shared by Jules Schaper, which highlights the complex and interconnected causes of suffering experienced by transgender individuals. The author emphasizes the importance of considering psychological support that addresses a broader range of problems, rather than solely focusing on gender-related distress. They also acknowledge the diverse perspectives within the transgender community and the need to listen to all experiences. The author concludes by reflecting on the ethical considerations surrounding medical transitioning and the need for a more inclusive and diverse approach within psychoanalysis. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the mechanisms that lead to a destructive tendency in the formation and functioning of the psychic apparatus, to the characteristic states of subjects who are drawn to non-life. The dynamics of the primary mother-child relationship involve a structural interaction between mind and body, subject and object. The dialectic between the life drive and the death drive is conceptualized as the structuring of homeostatic dynamic equilibria, in which both drives belong to the living, provided they are kept in a non-isolated system. This conception has analogies with other disciplines that have changed their paradigms, such as neurobiology, which, for living beings in open systems, hypothesises a continuous interconnected Becoming of undivided separation and of discontinuity. In unitary psyche-soma functioning, a dynamic homoeostatic balance marks the state of health of the relating subject; or if, instead, the system is isolated, a pathological dysregulation depending on the emotional-affective vicissitudes it undergoes. Two clinical cases illustrate these dynamics. For this tendency on the level of the somatopsychic unit, the name alloiosis has been put forward, in analogy with cellular apoptosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Death and mourning are being shaped by posthumous opportunities for the dead to affect current life in ways not possible in pre-digital generations. The psychological and sociological impact of the dead 'online' and of 'grief tech' is only beginning to be understood. It has not yet been explored psychoanalytically until this paper that examines one type of grief tech, namely the griefbot. This development is critically explored through a psychoanalytic reading of an episode of Black Mirror. I suggest that a psychoanalytic model of mourning provides an invaluable perspective to help us to think about this technology's potential as well as the psychological and ethical risks it poses. I argue that the immortalisation of the dead through digital permanence works against facing the painful reality of loss and the recognition of otherness, which is fundamental to psychic growth and to the integrity of our relationships with others. Drawing on Derrida's conceptualization of 'originary mourning', I suggest that mourning is an interminable process that challenges us to preserve within the self the otherness of the lost object. The tools we use for mourning need to be assessed first and foremost against this psychological and fundamentally ethical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author portrays the psychoanalytic therapy with a twelve-year-old refugee boy and his parents, prior to which the boy had been traumatised by the deaths of both his brothers in the civil war. In 2015 he had travelled with his father to Austria, where he was warmly received in a small community. The author examines how this child reacted to the traumatising experiences, as well as which resilience factors played a role in overcoming them. The psychoanalytic process is illuminated in a detailed analysis of the therapy sessions, which created a space for overcoming the helplessness, mourning the loss and furthering the integration process of the identity, disturbed after the traumatic experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's paper on the three caskets is revisited. His view that the lead casket represented death is supported by extracts from The Merchant of Venice, in particular the song, "Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred". It is argued that the acceptance of death is a necessary step in the transformation of romantic love to mature love. With experience of reality a disillusion of romantic idealisation becomes possible, but this means that losses have to be accepted and mourned. It is argued that this is made more bearable if an ironic stance enables an acceptance of the pleasures of romance without believing them to be literally true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transference interpretation has always been regarded as very important to psychoanalytic practice. However, analysts differ on its centrality relative to other forms of intervention. This paper argues that transference interpretation as introduced by Freud and then taken up and developed by Klein ("transference interpretation proper") is, in fact, the only form of intervention that could bring about essentially analytic change. To understand why, a taxonomy of different forms of intervention commonly practiced within the analytic situation is presented, including interventions that relate to transference, but do not constitute transference interpretation proper. The latter kind is then described in detail. Next, the paper defines analytic change. It relies on a particular perspective on what it is to come to know psychic truth; one that sees such knowing as a lived state of mind, rather than a state of having knowledge about one's dynamics. This foundational Freudian perspective has been especially advanced through Klein's notion of phantasy. Given this view of analytic change it becomes clear that it can only be brought about through transference interpretation proper. The paper also addresses reasons why it seems especially difficult to embrace this view in contemporary psychoanalytic culture, while stressing how crucial it is to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the work of a psychoanalyst working within NHS mental health services in the UK. The central contribution of a psychoanalytic approach within psychiatric care in offering a committed attempt towards understanding the patients' presentation, rather than treatment primarily aimed at symptom control, is described. Beyond this, the specific contribution of psychoanalytic ideas in establishing a containing framework for staff, and how this strengthens the capacity of the organisation as a whole to contain anxiety and to metabolize complex projective processes is outlined. Examples are given with clinical illustrations of activities which enhance this capacity in ordinary times. The author then turns to the impact of the covid-19 pandemic upon staff and patients, describing how fear, threat and experiences of multiple losses have permeated all areas of our lives and activated primitive defences. The pandemic starkly revealed profoundly disturbing questions about our assumptions and habits, adding to the intensity and multi-layered quality of the anxieties evoked. Urgent attention has been drawn to our deeply problematic relationship with the natural world, our own habitat, and indefensible social inequities have been crudely exposed. Staff have been caught between their own fear, the need to contain increased disturbance in their patients, already struggling with fragmented and disordered states of mind, and pressures from an organisation under intense strain. The capacity of mental health staff to act as containers for their patient's distress has been profoundly challenged and compromised. This paper outlines how the pandemic has highlighted the crucial role of the organisation as a container for anxiety and in supporting staff to do their work in mental health care. In order to strengthen this capacity during the crisis, the author describes how ideas derived from psychoanalytic principles were developed into guidance for NHS Mental Health Trusts during the early days of the pandemic. This guidance was adopted nationally by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and is summarised in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dana Birksted-Breen, the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis from 2007 to 2022, passed away on June 1, 2024. She was known for her extensive experience and influence as a psychoanalytic editor, as well as her generosity in promoting others and helping authors improve their submissions. Dana's own papers demonstrated a unique blend of creativity, sensitivity, and deep knowledge of classical and contemporary psychoanalysis. She made significant contributions to the International Journal during her 15-year tenure, maintaining high standards while exploring new trends and encouraging diverse perspectives from around the world. Dana's book of collected papers, "The Work of Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind," is considered an important publication in contemporary psychoanalysis. Her contributions to the field will be remembered and celebrated in a forthcoming issue of the journal. [Extracted from the article]

Failure to deal with the issue of collective and social loss increases the risk of extreme nationalism. When taken too far, a repetition of manic defence can arise that manifests itself in the form of war. In this paper, the notion of the "inability to mourn" by the German Psychoanalysts A. and M. Mitshcerlich (1967) is discussed in relation to the problem of Japan's post World War II nationalism, and its silence on social matters. The process of confronting past atrocities committed by the state is then discussed from the perspective of structural theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irma Brenman Pick, a highly respected British psychoanalyst, has passed away at the age of 89. Originally from South Africa, she moved to the UK in 1955 and received training in child psychotherapy and analytic training. She was known for her clinical work, teaching, and supervision, and was a Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Brenman Pick believed that the analyst's emotional openness to the patient was crucial in therapy, contrary to traditional views that see countertransference as a problem. Her influential paper, "Working Through in the Countertransference," explored how the analyst's work with their own countertransference feelings can deepen the analytic process. [Extracted from the article]

This paper discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic perspectives may have been limited by the Western cultural context in which they originated and explores the potential of the Indian cultural imagination to broaden psychoanalytic thinking about ego formation, the nature of Eros, bisexuality, and individuation. The case is made for the need to retain the diverse perspectives offered by the cultural imaginations of different civilisations despite the globalization of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

José Bleger’s paper on the setting (encuadre) is integral to his 1967 book Symbiosis and Ambiguity. Relevant concepts from the book are summarised before examining his view of the setting as a “non-process” consisting of “constants”, complementing the “variables” of the analytic process. Process and setting are related as figure and ground in Gestalt psychology. The ideally maintained setting is studied as a thought experiment, uniting the categories of institution, personality, body schema, and body. Deposited in the setting, the psychotic part of the personality, or “agglutinated nucleus”, is a remnant of early symbiosis with the mother. Bleger distinguishes two settings: the analyst’s and the patient’s. The latter can only be analysed by strictly maintaining the former. Ritualisation of the setting denies temporal reality. De-symbiotisation is not always possible. A concept of “internal” setting is suggested, but Bleger nowhere mentions this and the concept is problematic, leaving open the question of how to listen to the silence of the setting. Bleger’s concept of encuadre can be applied to constants (invariants) in the wider world, the psychotic part of the personality being deposited in everything that is familiar and felt to be constant, including technology, which creates a “platform” for human activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to expand José Bleger’s classic, metapsychological descriptions of the psychoanalytic frame to formulate and emphasize the role of the analyst’s internal frame in establishing a psychoanalytic observational perspective in the analytic situation. The rationale for doing so follows from clinical necessity, especially when working with patients and psychic organizations that are ‘beyond neurosis’ and in non-traditional settings such as distance and telemetric analyses. Clinically speaking, in its most effective state, the analyst’s internal frame can inform the possibility of an observational vertex aimed at the intuitive grasp of psychic reality rather than a sense-based, empirical observation of parameters denoted by the elements of a consensually validatable social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud’s very brief 1922 paper on the beheading of Medusa by Perseus wisely concludes with a call for a further examination of the sources of the legend. A now widespread interpretation of this legend is based (often without acknowledgement) on an addition to traditions concerning Medusa made in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is argued here that this Ovidian innovation has often been misinterpreted, and that a more careful reading of Metamorphoses supports neither a widely alleged exclusively vengeful portrayal of Medusa, nor Freud’s portrayal of Medusa’s decapitation as solely a pitiable and terrible symbol of castration. Instead, Ovid’s complex treatments of myths involving Medusa, Minerva and Perseus present parallels with Kleinian insights into phantasy attacks on fecundity, and into imagined revivals of dead or damaged inside babies. Thus the “displacement upwards” of the fearful castrated maternal genital envisioned in Freud’s “Medusa’s Head” must stand beside a quite different “displacement upwards” of the life-giving maternal genital. Indeed, tradition holds that Medusa’s beheading gives rise to the birth of vigorous twins. Together with allied details, this aligns Ovid’s masterwork with theories that modify or displace the so called “sexual phallic monism” that some believe taints Freud’s theories of gender development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis as representing in microcosm the developmental trajectory from late adolescence towards adulthood for the title character. This entails negotiating the problems of unconscious guilt, failure to mourn and an awareness of time in order to effect a movement from masochistic melancholy and hidden grandiosity to being able to relinquish omnipotent phantasies, say au revoir to internal persecutors and achieve a degree of self-possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author offers a new reading of Freud's "Remembering, Repeating and Working-through", examining the complex nature of central concepts that Freud presents within it. She demonstrates the text's special role in an ongoing effort of Freud's to articulate and ground the heart of his analytic insight that knowledge cures. While the insight itself is very well-known, the fact that Freud struggled throughout his life with its articulation and grounding is not. The struggle centered on questions pertaining to how analytic knowing could, not only enlighten the patient, but actually change his unconscious dynamics, and why the patient, having already "opted" for pathology in place of knowing would come to accept it; and ultimately, what was the nature of the knowledge offered in analysis and the individual's relationship to it that allowed for such dramatic changes to occur. The author briefly presents some of her earlier work on Freud's struggle with these issues and how Melanie Klein resolved them. It is in this context that she demonstrates how in Remembering, Repeating and Working-through" Freud may be seen to be taking important steps towards developing his ideas on analytic knowing and in ways that anticipate Klein's resolutions. This points to the close tie between Klein's and Freud's thinking on the nature of the analytic process and the person's desire for self-knowledge on which it relies, brings out the richness of this thinking and grounds its value to contemporary psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper confronts psychoanalytic dream theories with the findings of empirical dream research. It summarizes the discussion in psychoanalysis around the function of dreams (e.g. as the guardian of sleep), wish-fullfilment or compensation, whether there is a difference between latent and manifest content, etc. In empirical dream research some of these questions have been investigated and the results can provide clarifications for psychoanalytic theorizing. The paper provides an overview of empirical dream research and its findings, as well as of clinical dream research in psychoanalysis, which was mainly conducted in German-speaking countries. The results are used to discuss the major questions in psychoanalytic dream theories and points out some developments in contemporary approaches which have been influenced by these insights. As a conclusion the paper attempts to formulate a revised theory of dreaming and its functions, which combines psychoanalytic thinking with research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing Attacks on Linking, it is as if Bion had listened to his former analyst. In a lecture on technique given the year before, Klein expressed the wish that someone would write "a book about linking [...] one of the essential points in analysis". Later taken up and commented on in Second Thoughts, Attacks on Linking, has become perhaps Bion's most famous paper and, Freud aside, the fourth most cited article in the whole of psychoanalytic literature. In the short and scintillating essay Bion presents the enigmatic and fascinating concept of invisible-visual hallucinations, which subsequently seems never to have been taken up and discussed as such by other scholars. The author's proposal is therefore to reread Bion's text starting from this concept. To try to give a definition that is as clear and distinct as possible, a comparison is made with those of negative hallucination (Freud), dream screen (Lewin), and primitive agony (Winnicott). Finally, the hypothesis is formulated that IVH could give us the model of what stays at the origin of any representation; i.e. a micro-traumatic inscription of the trace of stimuli (but which may come to be actually traumatic) in the psychic fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the anxiety evoked in a patient threatened by invasion or engulfment by his object on the one hand, and the fears of isolation and abandonment on the other. The author illustrates the patient's strugles to find a distance between himself and his object he can tolerate. The analyst has also to cope with the anxieties evoked by the patient's projections, and find a distance between himself and his patient that enables him to think and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Masochism is central to all pathologies and its relevance in clinical practise cannot be underestimated. The initial connection made by Freud was that masochism was a component or partial instinct, still operating within the pleasure principle. The relationship between masochism and the theory of drives marks a main theoretical difference in the different authors' explorations of this subject. The understanding of what is meant by 'masochism' gained complexity following Freud's postulation of a life and death drive (which is more or less contemporary with his 1924 paper on masochism) and the differences made by him between 'primary' and 'secondary' masochism. This introduction to the papers presented in this section will address some of these differences, as well as exploring the notions of primary erotogenic masochism, feminine and moral masochism. It will also look at the notion of binding /unbinding of the life/death drives, and the role of the superego. It will introduce the different papers by Novick and Novick, Bourdin, Frank and Persano on developmental perspectives, primary masochism, views on French analysts such as Benno Rosenberg and on Kleinian ideas on the subject as well as on the role of the body, pain and self harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a specific type of therapeutic intervention relevant to therapeutic communication with patients exhibiting non-symbolic autistic defenses or traumatic characteristics. The paper focuses on clinical manifestations of developmental deficiencies and communication problems that stem from a primal psychophysical space that is unmatured, traumatized, deformed and/or chaotic. The concept of the body-container is presented as a proto-scheme of primal psychophysical space, organizing the intersections of one's anatomical structure and potentials for intersubjectivity. This conceptual context allows the therapist to conceive the patient's non-representational and non-communicative physical actions in the therapeutic setting as presence-in-action. Such presence is discussed as a crucial invitation for the emergence of the therapist's intuitive pre-symbolic creativity, which may eventually crystallize into a perceptually-presented 'constitutive intervention'. This unique kind of intervention is designed to support the patient's creative capacity for pre-symbolic realization of this multi-dimensional psychophysical proto-scheme. Various constitutive interventions, utilizing concrete gestures that involve the therapist's body and the physical aspect of the therapeutic environment, are examined theoretically and illustrated through clinical vignettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is suggested in this paper that in the Shoah one is confronted with the abolition of the Law of the Dead Father and the re-establishing of the tyranny of the narcissistic father. In the extermination of the Jews of Europe in the Shoah, the aim was the destruction of the rules of genealogy and filiation to both mother and father that establish the social and give rise to personhood and are at the core of the oedipal structure. The rule of absolute power – the destruction of any sense of maternal care and paternal rules – leads ultimately to the creation of the abject. Freud distinguished between two different types of obstacles to psychoanalytic treatment that are expressions of the death drive. The first is bound and is related to the superego; it is connected to the negative therapeutic reaction, masochism, and the unconscious sense of guilt. The other manifestation of the death drive is unbound and diffuse. If the first is understandable, the second, he suggests, escapes any understanding. The paper makes use of this distinction to examine Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the Lacanian metaphor of the mirror as a logical operator. While the mirror–stage has often been discussed regarding its imaginary relevance, the mirror as a logical operator has not yet been discussed. To mark a first approach to this, the paper discusses the formulas Lacan offers in his Seminar X, "Anxiety," as an example for the use of this operator. The formulas show a great deal of complexity that binds several elements of Lacanian thought together. Within Lacanian theory, they show a distinct relationship to the specularised and non–specularised images of the Möbius strip, as well as to the cross–cap, and they offer a deeper insight into the widely used metaphor of the mirror. These formulas also offer a wider insight into how 'mirroring' can be understood formally in non–Lacanian psychoanalysis. The mirror operator as a logical tool enables analysts to conceive of how an indeterminate element is part of our identity and how this structures angst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of war. It takes as its frame of reference the conditions of possibility in the human subject that form the basis for the detonation of such extremes of destruction. Starting with key papers of Freud that address this malaise of our "civilization" it goes on to consider the contributions from the Kleinian school (particularly Money-Kyrle and Segal). The argument is situated within a frame of reference which views the psychoanalytic contribution as part of what the author terms an interdisciplinary conversation. The paper concludes with some more general considerations regarding the horrors of our contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a phenomenon observed in parent–infant psychotherapy (PIP). Metaphors emerge in the analyst and, once voiced, they can become tools for understanding the present predicament of mother and/or child. The article contains vignettes from work with a mother and her son, four weeks old when PIP started. They are followed by a vignette of an adult analysand. In both settings, the analyst found himself in an impasse, until he came up with a metaphor expressed to the mother and the analysand, respectively. The paper investigates why PIP experiences might inspire an analyst to suggest metaphors to adult patients as well and thence to understand their suffering better. Aspects of linguistic theory underlining the infantile roots of metaphors are submitted as well as other analysts' views of using metaphors at work. It describes how the validity of a metaphor – whether it expresses something essential about the patient's internal world – should be assessed by following up his/her response to it. It defends the position that metaphor, if used with parsimony and sobriety, is a valuable tool in enabling the patient to map their internal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I divide this paper into three parts. First, I discuss Freud's ideas about repression and the unconscious sense of guilt in order to compare them with Klein's view that we disown uncomfortable facts through a process of splitting and projection, leading to a paranoid defence against guilt. Second, I describe Klein's struggle to understand the origin and the severity of the primitive super-ego which was so prominent in her child patients. She considered that an important aim of analysis was to moderate the severity of the super-ego to create a more humane inner world. Finally, I will elaborate on her view, as well as Freud's, that some of the primitive terrifying objects that lie buried deep in the unconscious are fixed and unmodifiable. I will use some ideas from Ron Britton to suggest that instead of trying to modify or get rid of these persecuting figures, it might be possible to stand up to them and to emancipate the ego from the tyranny of the super-ego. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's publication of The Ego and the Id sparked a diverging set of psychoanalytic models - ego psychology, structural conflict theory, Kleinianism, object relations theories, Lacanianism, etc. - each of which attempted to deal with the clinical limitations of his first topography in regard to unconscious guilt, negative therapeutic reactions and primitive character organizations. This paper attempts to look back on these developments from the perspective of contemporary, post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore some similarities between experiences of music and of analytic sessions. I focus on qualities of evanescence, the way that music – in contrast to many other arts – in one perspective only lasts as long as it is actually being played. Then it's over. The analyst-patient discussion in a session is similar. Yet the psychic reverberations of some transient, fugitive moments may last a lifetime. And even when no verbally profound understanding is occurring, nevertheless the patient-analyst encounter is emotionally significant. I illustrate this with a clinical example. I explore transference as illusion, and the relationship between truth and illusion in terms of Bion's O. I end with thoughts about the paradoxical value of the illusoriness of aesthetics and nature as considered by Freud in his short paper "On Transience" (1916), and the grin of Lewis Carol's Cheshire Cat, left hanging in the air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of the psychoanalytic treatment of pathological mourning in the context of early psychic trauma. I introduce the concept of blank pain, understood as a negative of early trauma, to describe a distinct type of unthinkable anxiety. And I treat pathological mourning as a defence against the unbearable pain of the latter. Clinical observations reveal the extent to which, in a situation where the patient reacts to environmental failure by maintaining a façade (an insincere self), the construction of meaning depends on the use the patient makes of the analytic process and the setting. Considering these observations, I explore the relationship between the structural phenomenon of blank pain and defensive pathological mourning through the therapeutically mutative action of processive interventions and co-enacted scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]