Search

Martti Olavi Siirala, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and a dissident in terms of Finnish cultural life, died in Helsinki on August 18, 2008, at the age of 85. He was born in Liperi, eastern Finland, on November 24, 1922. This obituary outlines his life, professional career, and literary production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archive and psychoanalysis are reconnected in a new framework. The archaeological metaphor of psychoanalysis, the traditional view of archives as storehouses of historical items, and the notion of memory as storage are revised according to the conceptions of fluid and dynamic archival and memory systems. A combination of psychoanalytic models and cognitive memory research is proposed to form developmental archival theory that will take into account the changing contexts of memory, meaning-making, negotiation of interpretation, and knowledge regulation. The three phases of registration (archivalization, archivization, and archiving) are seen in the dynamics of unconsciousness-consciousness, and in relation to the archivists' and researchers' transferences to their records as self-objects, transitional objects or evocative objects. Becoming conscious of archives is a continuous journeying through the multiple registrations and narrativizations of archives in the interaction between non-declarative and declarative memory. The archive and psychoanalysis touch upon processes that are suggested to concern metamemory and metareflection (the interplay between meta-emotion and metacognition). The futures of archives and psychoanalysis call for context-sensitive remembering and being attentive to the co-constructive translations of personal and social memory. Opening archives and psychoanalysis toward the unprecedented, without closing histories and memories, is the interminable task of encountering the "missing moment." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institution of psychoanalysis has included controversies, dissensions and expulsions at both the theoretical-methodological and personal-organizational levels. There have also been several intra- and intergroup conflicts in the history of psychoanalysis, and in constructing and patterning the future of psychoanalytic knowledge. In the context of Finnish psychoanalysis, the Therapeia Foundation (founded in 1958) met from the start with resistance from official psychiatry and also from the IPA. For example, in the mid-1960s, D. W. Winnicott, as the President of the IPA, supported the orthodox Finnish psychoanalytic study group (later to become the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society), and pronounced that the Therapeia group was too loose and was not strictly able to use the IPA-recognized designation "psychoanalytic." The Therapeia Foundation and its Training Seminar combined classical psychoanalysis and its new versions with existentialphenomenological views, anthropological medicine, research on "social pathology" and even modern theological research. On the basis of their Swiss analytic training, three Finnish psychiatrists, Martti Siirala, Kauko Kaila and Allan Johansson, organized Therapeian training to incorporate sciences and arts, and skills involving the therapeutic "carrying" of burdens. The multifacted nature of open psychoanalysis was seen to find its proper organizational expression when the Training Seminar of the Therapeia Foundation became, in 1974, a Member of the IFPS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]