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The author discusses a process of recommending returning to in-person analysis during the period from April to October 2021, after working by phone since March 2020. Clinical excerpts from several analytic cases are presented and discussed in terms suggested by that material and other sources. Previous work on interpretive authority and on the interpretation of verbal and nonverbal material, still generally relevant to the analytic situation, is discussed as a background for integrating more specific ideas particularly relevant to this phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, including preliminary concepts of

Amidst a pandemic and the events following George Floyd's murder in 2020, discussions of race have escalated in the psychoanalytic community. One theoretical formulation

Comparative approaches to psychoanalytic theory are a major source of exposure to different theoretical orientations and clinical technique. However, it is not always clear what the analyst actually does when translating theory into practice. As an attempt at clarification, descriptions are provided of two listening stances or attentional sets that are associated with different modes of analytic listening. These modes reside at a relatively low level of abstraction and are experience-near. The two listening stances are (1) a directed attentional set aimed at the identification of conscious or unconscious repetitious patterns, and (2) a diffuse attentional set receptive to emergent phenomena for the purpose of elaborating unconscious fantasy. These listening modes are combined in everyday practice and usually occur in an oscillating fashion; thus, separation of these listening modes in this discussion is for heuristic purposes. At the same time, these modes are prioritized differently among various theoretical models depending on the analyst’s intention and goals. They also can be correlated with different types of transferences, evoking different types of clinical material that correspond to the analyst’s goals and/or to phases in treatment. Because these attentional modes are governed by different neurophysiological substrates, it is helpful for analysts to have these modes clearly differentiated in their minds, even though engaging these modes tends to be spontaneous and rapidly oscillating. Two clinical vignettes are provided that illustrate the use of these two modes of listening where one or the other is prioritized.

Attachment to the bad object has remained a durable, undertheorized clinical problem. With an extended clinical example, the experience of limit, in both patient and analyst, is examined as part of a dense undercurrent in the relationship, including transference, that gives rise to shifts in understanding the attachment to an unsatisfying internal object. Importantly, the patient’s and the analyst’s experiences of limit are “in play” during the process of changes in the patient’s attachment to the bad object. The relation of patient and analyst to the patient’s internal objects, including bad and unsatisfying objects, is where play itself begins. Limit itself is constitutive of play. The analyst’s attempt to analyze his own thoughts and experience regarding limits in maintaining an empathic connection to the patient’s psychic reality influences the patient’s capacity to take in a new part of his or her experience.

Psychanalyse des nevroses de guerre, apres la guerre du Viet-Nam. Une histoire de cas illustre le propos

Historically, the psychoanalytic profession has been populated by white analysts. That has been changing as more people of color have enrolled in analytic institutes. But more is needed for institutes to truly be inclusive. White analysts need to be more sensitive to the experience of colleagues and candidates of color. They need to be aware of the dynamic known as White privilege, and how their own White privilege may affect their interactions with people of color. Institutes need to look at their curricula and how they teach candidates to analyze. The early generations of psychoanalytic theorists including Freud worked with White patients. The theories they wrote–and that are still being taught–have led to many analysts knowing how to work with White people, but not necessarily people of color.

While catastrophizing has traditionally been pathologized within psychoanalytic traditions, in this paper I suggest that cataclysmic realities of climate change call upon all of us to cultivate catastrophic thinking. Our new climatic normal demands of us not only new concepts and language, but also a new sort of thinking, building on Wilfred Bion's ideas that to think is to use our mind's capacity to be in touch with internal and external realities. I suggest that sometimes people are able to learn from their experiences of trauma in ways that disrupt the culturally dominant anenvironmental orientation, that is, an orientation that brackets out the more-than-human environment. Instead, they develop a capacity to think catastrophically about and to be permeable to the more-than-human environment. What I call their "traumatized sensibility" can offer guidance as we come to co-exist with and respond more consciously to our hotter planet.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy has an important role in suicide prevention. The psychoanalytic study of suicide has taught us a great deal about the human experience and the process of suicidality. There is also much to be learned from other fields of study and from empirical research that can be integrated into psychoanalytic therapies. Central to the psychoanalytic approach to suicide has been understanding the patient’s internal subjective experience of unbearable emotional or psychic pain and the urgent need for relief. Emotional pain can include intense affects such as shame, humiliation, self-hate, and rage. Factors that can increase vulnerability to suicidal states include problems with early attunement, dissociation and deficits in bodily love and protection, conscious and unconscious fantasy, and certain character traits and dynamics. Empirical research has confirmed many basic psychoanalytic concepts about suicide, including escape from unbearable pain as the primary driver of suicidal behavior, the role of dissociation in increasing risk of bodily attack, and the importance of unconscious processes. Further research into implicit processes and their role in the suicidal process holds potential to improve suicide risk assessment and to enhance psychotherapy by bringing otherwise inaccessible material into the treatment.

Today in Italy, a group of psychoanalysts works according to Field Theory. In this paper I would like to show that a line of thought from the beginnings of Field Theory in physics, philosophy and psychology leads to the conception of the field of Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese. The assumption of a continuous dynamic and a direct relationship between all parts of the field is fundamental for the conception of the analytic field. These parts have a field-dependent identity and are different in sum than when the parts are taken on their own. To trace the evolution of field-theoretical psychoanalysis, I describe the epistemological context in which Kurt Lewin developed Field Theory. I will add selected theoretical elements from works by Georges Politzer and José Bleger.

This article describes and substantiates some of the requirements for how a psychoanalyst should respond to the demands of an educational institution in order to constitute best practices. It considers the following requirements: the need to renounce the position of assigned expert (paradox of an expert/ignorant), the position of outsider that must be held, the specificity of the principle of abstention, and the benefits of appealing to a second look. This second look includes an analysis of the analyst's involvement, while the analyst is inserted in a society whose discourses could parasitise their thinking. These four requirements are illustrated in an experience carried out in public schools in a context of social vulnerability. The clinical device created and applied in these settings is a narrative workshop that uses children's literature as linking objects. The example described here is limited to one instance of the use of the device and, in particular, to the process and the difficulties of working with a six-year-old girl who participated in one of the workshops. The changes she experienced are revealed through an analysis of an observed phoric function and its vicissitudes. This case allows us to note the complexity of the transference dynamics that must be sustained.

Part of an ongoing political and scholarly effort to move the psychoanalytic project towards greater cohesiveness, the author proposes a standard method, borrowing the phrase from physics, for a structured, eclectic clinical pluralism. She [or he] uses psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments, as well as considerations of patients' personal idiosyncrasies, to conclude that achieving one, over-arching metapsychology will prove impossible. In other words, and despite their ardent efforts, psychoanalytic theorists, including Freud (1895/1991), Rangell (1975, 2006), Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), Wallerstein (1988, 1990, 2002, 2005, 2013), and others, failed to create models accounting for the dynamically interacting variables creating human subjectivity. Their struggles to bridge psychoanalytic theories of mind and method also fell short. As a result, the author suggests, clinical psychoanalysis' ultimate fate lies in organizing what Wallerstein (2005) called the "common ground" (p. 626) into methodology which invites psychoanalytic practitioners to mine the psychoanalytic opus for its "plethora of theoretical metaphors" (Wallerstein, 2013, p. 36), "controlling fictions" (Greenberg, 2015, p. 17), "useful untruths" (Lament,020, p. 196), or "regional dialects" (Fulgencio, 2020, p. 15). Cohesively applying a pluralistically based metapsychology to guide clinical processes, rather than provide maps of the mind, offers much-needed unity to psychoanalysis' applied wing.

The author describes the differences between standard psychoanalysis and transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) and reviews particular difficulties that psychodynamically trained clinicians have in learning TFP. In delineating differences between standard psychoanalysis and TFP, the author discusses mutual influences between standard psychoanalytic techniques and techniques of TFP. TFP is an extension and modification of standard psychoanalysis, but with quantitative modifications geared to the treatment of the most severe segment of personality disorders that tend not to be treatable by standard analysis. TFP includes some features that are directly facilitated by psychoanalytic education, such as the importance of free association and the organization of interpretations in terms of the analysis of defense, motivation, and impulse. On the other hand, TFP provides new strategies, enhancing standard psychoanalytic treatment, when it modifies technical neutrality under certain circumstances, allows for the analysis of “incompatible realities,” and accelerates interventions under conditions of severe acting out when technical neutrality is not possible to maintain. The author demonstrates the advantages of systematic training in TFP within psychoanalytic institutes as a true enrichment of technical training. He proposes that psychoanalysis as a profession consists of a broad spectrum of treatment approaches based upon the combined utilization of psychoanalytic techniques, with specific modifications to be organized in specific forms of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. TFP may be the closest modification to standard psychoanalysis proper and is clearly defined and manualized. This has permitted empirical research that has already demonstrated the effectiveness of TFP.

The author focuses on the workings of the female analyst-male pair in the consulting room when sexual feelings emerge as part of the adolescent storm. The need for

Beyond revealing unconscious pathological identifications and traits-including their past usefulness but current toxicity-what techniques in our psychoanalytic practice can lead to change? Radically different from mainstream philosophical views advocating that such undesirable self-aspects should not be endorsed as Self, psychoanalysts hold that these negative traits must instead be understood as part of one's Self. But then what? Investigating concepts from classical conditioning, neuroscience, the philosophy of mind and action, and psychoanalytic practice itself, this article will suggest a preliminary account of the mechanism of action of psychoanalytic work after insight.

Our clinical practice is contextualized by a co-participant trauma constituted by a confluence of upheavals-pandemic, politics, an epistemological crisis, pervasive distrust of expertise and evidence. Psychoanalytic work, parallel to the external world, has become defamiliarized, if not, at sometimes unrecognizable. The affect on the frame and the boundaries of the therapeutic frame and of the psychoanalytic institution are explored with an awareness of the uncertainty of the future. The experience of the onset of the pandemic is discussed with awareness of an unknown future.

OBJECTIVE Metacognitive oriented treatments are novel therapies designed to address metacognition deficits in schizophrenia, defined as the set of mental activities that allows reflection on oneself and others, and the integration of this knowledge into sophisticated mental representations that guide adaptive responses to life's demands and to the challenges imposed by psychiatric illness. However, little is known about the first-person experiences of engaging in this treatment. Hence, the purpose of this qualitative study was to characterize first-person experiences of recovery outcomes among people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders who take part in metacognitively oriented psychotherapy. METHOD A sample of 13 adult veterans with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder in an outpatient setting who were receiving one form of individual metacognitively oriented therapy, Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy, for a minimum of 12 months participated in an open-ended interview; 27 questions probed their experiences with therapy and the outcomes and changes they have observed within themselves as a result. Interviews were analyzed using an inductive consensus based approach. RESULTS Findings indicate that participants observed changes in their lives in five recovery domains: improvements in real world functioning, increased formation of life pursuits, enhanced interpersonal connections, emergence of self compassion, and improved quality of life and wellness. CONCLUSIONS This study sheds further light on first person experiences of people with schizophrenia and adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the use of this form of metacognitively oriented psychotherapy to promote recovery in important life domains.

Since 1958, the Japanese public health insurance system has covered psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Although it is called ‘standard-type psychoanalytic therapy’, it is essentially psychoanalytic psyc...