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Adopting this stance is challenging because it requires the candidate or analyst to give up the idealization of psychoanalysis and often of the training analyst that can lie behind claims to exceptionalism and replace it with a realistic assessment. In this brief contribution, I revisit ideas that I have expressed over the past twenty years (e.g. Tuckett [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18]; Tuckett et al. [19]) and collect them together to outline six significant and inter-related barriers currently in place which prevent psychoanalysts, on the whole, from having a productive debate with each other and also with those in other disciplines, or society more generally. As Denis puts it, "If the are not to limit themselves to indoctrinating their patients with ready-made formulas, psychoanalysts must allow themselves to be taken over by their patient's psychic functioning" ([3], 43). Denis suggests that due to their everyday clinical experience analysts find it very hard to loosen their attachment to their own model of doing psychoanalysis, in part due to what he calls the traumatic quality of their work and its emotional uncertainties, which tempts them to a fetishistic solution. [Extracted from the article]

This contribution argues that Bouvet’s (1958) paper formulates a dilemma for psychoanalytic technique – what to do if the frame within which the analyst is working appears to require departure from core technique? Bouvet’s concern was that too much intuitive adaptation might promote, in effect, ›anything goes‹. He proposed his concept of distance, anchored in his original and important understanding of the formation of object relations, as a heuristic to test adaptations to situations in which patients are severely unable to separate the objects of their projection from the objects themselves. For me the dilemma is well stated, but I argue that its understanding and solution depends above all on clarity about what is supposed to constitute core technique and what a departure from it. The fragmentation of technique and loss of common understanding in today’s psychoanalytic world makes that difficult. Therefore, I approach my evaluation of Bouvet’s thinking by introducing ideas about the core suppositions every psychoanalyst must make, whether implicitly or explicitly, when he is working: suppositions about unconscious inference, unconscious repetition, the analytic situation and how to further the analytic process. I argue that the suppositions are rather different in what I sketch as the ›insight‹, ›here and now‹ and ›associative‹ approaches to psychoanalysis that characterise the modern scene. Practice that I have observed through the European comparative clinical methods project over 20 years, suggests that, under the intense emotional pressure of the clinical situation, adaptations have taken place in all three approaches so that many of the core suppositions that Freud gave us have been more or less inadvertently left behind. Bouvet proposed his concept of optimal distance as a heuristic check to allow the analyst to ask if he is stepping out of being an analyst. That check remains valuable. But how it is made depends on which of the three approaches the analyst supposes he is using and the suppositions made within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalytic training has been an object of controversy for many years. Arguments have been intense about the details, sometimes called "requirements", and particularly over whether or not training institutes should have routine external validation. We describe these arguments and present preliminary conclusions about the core challenges psychoanalytic trainings face using a unique set of detailed observations collected during structured "conversations" inside nine European institutes. We conclude that whether a psychoanalytic training is "working" is not a matter of compliance with requirements. Rather, it is an issue of how candidates, training analysts, supervisors and committee members, confront within and between each other the consequences of the unconscious dynamics that psychoanalytic training must inevitably create. Institutional psychoanalytic capacity is to take itself as the object. Consequentially, we propose that training committees that seek to claim that their psychoanalytic training is genuinely and safely producing psychoanalysts would be ones that institute routine procedures to show to themselves, transparently, how they attend to the dynamics just mentioned and how they take a neutral inquisitive stance towards them. Fear of oversight, we suggest, is a symptom of deeper anxieties. They can be faced by creating an appropriate setting. Properly conducted visits from outsiders are welcomed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution is a personal reflection on the papers presented at the New York and London anniversary conferences, in which the author takes stock to consider what they might tell us about where the discipline is now, where it has come from and where it might go. Taking the clinical contributions as evidence of the way many leading analysts in the field now proceed, it is suggested that there is an increasing and more and more subtle use of the analyst's behaviour, thoughts, fantasies, feelings and experiences, inside and outside the session, as core sources for constructing the patient's unconscious. Placing this observation in the context of issues of evidence raised in the 50th and 75th anniversary volumes, the author argues that a possible future agenda for the field may be to think more plainly about the basis of an analyst's knowledge claims, whether made implicitly or explicitly to patients in sessions. The author wonders if more disciplined understanding of transference consistent with neuroscientific findings of the last few years may be one factor that could prove useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to honour the Journal's centenary elaborates the classical view that what is primarily at stake in a psychoanalysis are ideas patients and analysts have that are prevented from becoming conscious. It is argued, drawing on a "bare bones" or parsimonious model of psychoanalytic treatment, that the ideas concerned are mainly the worrying unconscious beliefs patients have about their experience with their analysts. These are ideas saturated with feeling and derived from the internal templates that patients use to respond to current experience, based on ways they have registered experience from the beginning of their lives. Because such ideas are unconscious, they cannot be taken as hypotheses until revised. Rather, they are assumed to be facts, knowledge of which, because they generate feelings like anxiety, guilt or shame, is to be avoided and hidden. After introducing the model and discussing two short vignettes from psychoanalytic treatment, the author elaborates the view that recognising which ideas are being prevented from becoming conscious in sessions is the kernel of psychoanalytic therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What psychoanalysts consider psychoanalytic interpretation, in what setting it emerges and specifically why, when and how transference should be interpreted, have become increasingly unclear and controversial. In this paper I set out, elaborate, illustrate and argue the value for post-session reflection, certainly within the object relations traditions, of adopting a parsimonious model of practice. The model rests on the foundations of a specific understanding of free association, evenly suspended attention, resistance and transference and separating two epistemologically distinct intentions in transference interpretation. One, transference construction, aims to make a patient aware of the unconscious ways a patient is behaving in sessions (and then outside them) and how and why that is happening. A second, transference designation, focuses on the more limited aim of making patients aware of how they unconsciously experience the psychoanalyst at specific moments of resistance in sessions. Both types of interpretation may help but, I argue, it is the latter that must form the bedrock for fundamental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose conviction narrative theory (CNT) to broaden decision-making theory in order to better understand and analyse how subjectively means–end rational actors cope in contexts in which the traditional assumptions in decision-making models fail to hold. Conviction narratives enable actors to draw on their beliefs, causal models, and rules of thumb to identify opportunities worth acting on, to simulate the future outcome of their actions, and to feel sufficiently convinced to act. The framework focuses on how narrative and emotion combine to allow actors to deliberate and to select actions that they think will produce the outcomes they desire. It specifies connections between particular emotions and deliberative thought, hypothesising that approach and avoidance emotions evoked during narrative simulation play a crucial role. Two mental states, Divided and Integrated, in which narratives can be formed or updated, are introduced and used to explain some familiar problems that traditional models cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an obituary for Betty Joseph, an acclaimed teacher and supervisor.

In this article, the author arguments on a study titled "Dreaming the session.". Topics discussed include mechanisms of change in the psychoanalytical therapy, changes generated by psychoanalysis in the patient's life, and how psychoanalysis can be used as a therapeutic practice and method of knowledge.

In this paper I will explore what is that happens when a patient lies down on a couch and a Psychoanalyst sits behind. What does it mean if we say the patient then associates freely and the analyst listens to and then occasionally talks to the patient about the patient? I want to revisit the fundamental concepts of free association, resistance, transference, countertransference and enactment to discuss why it may be useful to say that the patient and the psychoanalyst dream the session and what this means. What are the key issues that arise if we try to understand this process and where might the difficulties lie? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas most commentators agree about the centrality of narratives in decision-making, the commentaries revealed little consensus about the nature of radical uncertainty. Here we consider thirteen objections to our views, including our characterization of the uncertain decision environment and associated cognitive, affective, and social processes. We conclude that under radical uncertainty, narratives rather than probabilities are the currency of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice under radical uncertainty – situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people use narratives – structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships – rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According to CNT, narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels "right" to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychoanalytic theory of the clinical situation is in increasing disarray, helping clinical psychoanalysis to drift disastrously away from a specific modality toward 'anything goes.' This article aims to discuss the core elements that the analyst's ordinary everyday clinical theory will cover as he works, whether the analysts knows it or not. A framework for discussing and discovering that theory, which I developed with my colleagues in the European Psychoanalytic Federation Working Party on Comparative Clinical Methods, is introduced. Five clinical examples showing how different psychoanalysts worked follow. Briefly, I then review 9 core elements that appear to me to divide how contemporary psychoanalysts actually work. Each element raises reasonably precise theoretical questions that are fundamental, but to which answers are often very confused. The core elements of clinical psychoanalysis require much clearer reflection, understanding and discussion, which is what I hope to provoke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The underlying concern of this paper is that psychoanalysis as practised today is in danger of losing its specificity and so losing its way. The author suggests this is possible for three reasons: the problem analysts face in responding to the strong emotional demands the great majority of patients necessarily place on them, the unintended consequences of the apparent success of 'here and now technique' and the absence of good clinical theory. The paper mainly discusses the author's ideas about some core elements of the clinical theory that all psychoanalysts must use when they are working and proposes (at the risk of being facile) some relatively simple heuristics related to them which are meant to be helpful. Recalling Kurt Lewin's maxim that 'there is nothing so practical as a good theory', he will suggest that continuous reflection on how one is using theory in daily practice is highly practical, if the theory is good enough. Theory in fact is a necessary 'third' in psychoanalytic practice which, if kept in sufficient working order close enough to clinical experience, provides an ongoing and very necessary check on our sense of reality. But, of course, as a third it can, like reality itself, be the focus of both love and hate with equally problematic consequences. The paper starts with a clinical example of a difficult but apparently successful analysis reaching its end, which will be used throughout the paper to illustrate and elaborate the theoretical ideas set out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What constitutes competent psychoanalytic work, what criteria are used to evaluate psychoanalytic competence and how can we exchange about these matters among colleagues of different psychoanalytic orientations? These are the core questions investigated in an ongoing project of the European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF) Working Party on Education (WPE). This article reports on several group discussions at EPF conferences over 4 successive years. Findings reveal a great interest in discussing the question of evaluation on one hand, but bringing up uneasiness and anxiety on the other, followed by a tendency to bypass saying “no” to not enough competent clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to explore if standard psychoanalytic thinking based on clinical experience can illuminate instability in financial markets and its widespread human consequences. Buying, holding or selling financial assets in conditions of inherent uncertainty and ambiguity, it is argued, necessarily implies an ambivalent emotional and phantasy relationship to them. Based on the evidence of historical accounts, supplemented by some interviewing, the authors suggest a psychoanalytic approach focusing on unconscious phantasy relationships, states of mind, and unconscious group functioning can explain some outstanding questions about financial bubbles which cannot be explained with mainstream economic theories. The authors also suggest some institutional features of financial markets which may ordinarily increase or decrease the likelihood that financial decisions result from splitting off those thoughts which give rise to painful emotions. Splitting would increase the future risk of financial instability and in this respect the theory with which economic agents in such markets approach their work is important. An interdisciplinary theory recognizing and making possible the integration of emotional experience may be more useful to economic agents than the present mainstream theories which contrast rational and irrational decision-making and model them as making consistent decisions on the basis of reasoning alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a paper presented at an International Conference to celebrate Freud's 150th anniversary and entitled Therapeutic Training after Freud, organized by the Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University and the Freud Museum, Saturday 20 May 2006. With thanks to the Centre for transcribing the original talk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on a paper presented at an International Conference to celebrate Freud's 150th anniversary and entitled Therapeutic Training after Freud, organized by the Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University and the Freud Museum, Saturday 20 May 2006. With thanks to the Centre for transcribing the original talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the ethical good practice when data from patients was disclosed in medical publications. Position of psychoanalysts on the disclosure of patient data; Claim of psychoanalytical psychotherapists on their profession; Issues facing the self-regulation of the profession of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Discusses the role of psychoanalysis in the wider context of the changing between medical professions and society. Features of successful modern professions; Correlation between the effectiveness of psychotherapy and affiliation of the investigator; Models of doing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

What patients understand from medical consultations and the processes by which they understand are of considerable clinical and theoretical interest. Empirical research about patients' understanding has been restricted, however, by measures which are inadequate when compared with the depth and complexity of sociological and social anthropological theories of medical consultations. One consequence has been that sociological and social anthropological ideas have been considered largely inappropriate for practical application. A "third party" method of defining the information universe which patients might be expected to grasp from the consultation and of assessing three levels of patient "understanding" is proposed. The method involves judgments about the content of what doctors actually say to patients and what it might mean. Such methods inevitably involve specifying values and therefore make apparent problems of validity which are only implicit in methods where such judgments appear to be avoided. Evidence is presented to show the approach can be reliably conducted. Moreover, the measures described discriminate groups of patients in interesting and predictable ways and help to deepen our ideas about the determinants of cognitive outcomes in medical consultations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noise in quantum computing is countered with quantum error correction. Achieving optimal performance will require tailoring codes and decoding algorithms to account for features of realistic noise, such as the common situation where the noise is biased towards dephasing. Here we introduce an efficient high-threshold decoder for a noise-tailored surface code based on minimum-weight perfect matching. The decoder exploits the symmetries of its syndrome under the action of biased noise and generalizes to the fault-tolerant regime where measurements are unreliable. Using this decoder, we obtain fault-tolerant thresholds in excess of 6% for a phenomenological noise model in the limit where dephasing dominates. These gains persist even for modest noise biases: we find a threshold of ~5% in an experimentally relevant regime where dephasing errors occur at a rate 100 times greater than bit-flip errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that a simple modification of the surface code can exhibit an enormous gain in the error correction threshold for a noise model in which Pauli Z errors occur more frequently than X or Y errors. Such biased noise, where dephasing dominates, is ubiquitous in many quantum architectures. In the limit of pure dephasing noise we find a threshold of 43.7(1)% using a tensor network decoder proposed by Bravyi, Suchara, and Vargo. The threshold remains surprisingly large in the regime of realistic noise bias ratios, for example 28.2(2)% at a bias of 10. The performance is, in fact, at or near the hashing bound for all values of the bias. The modified surface code still uses only weight-4 stabilizers on a square lattice, but merely requires measuring products of Y instead of Z around the faces, as this doubles the number of useful syndrome bits associated with the dominant Z errors. Our results demonstrate that large efficiency gains can be found by appropriately tailoring codes and decoders to realistic noise models, even under the locality constraints of topological codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users) in making decisions focuses predominantly on community-generated trust and reputation information. However, how such information impacts user judgement is still being understood. To explore such effects, we constructed an artificial SE accommodation platform where we varied the elements related to hosts’ digital identity, measuring users’ perceptions and decisions to interact. Across three studies, we find that trust and reputation information increases not only the users’ perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and sociability of hosts, but also the propensity to rent a private room in their home. This effect is seen when providing users both with complete profiles and profiles with partial user-selected information. Closer investigations reveal that three elements relating to the host’s digital identity are sufficient to produce such positive perceptions and increased rental decisions, regardless of which three elements are presented. Our findings have relevant implications for human judgment and privacy in the SE, and question its current culture of ever increasing information-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary for editor, professor and psychoanalyst Arnold M. Cooper is presented.