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The MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) sponsored MDMA-assisted therapy protocol has had greater success in treating trauma in preliminary clinical trials than any prior psychotherapeutic, pharmacologic, or combined approach. It is predicated on a synergy between drug action and the participant's inner healing intelligence. The latter is described mainly by analogy with the body's capacity to heal itself, and the treatment is characterized as a means of activating or accessing this capacity. How is this rather mysterious-sounding process so effective? I suggest that the therapist's full commitment to, and trust in this treatment framework, along with the medication's subjective enhancement of trust, encourages individuals who have suffered trauma and have difficulty trusting others to engage the therapist as a kind of witness. I discuss parallels between the therapeutic attitude implied in the inner healing intelligence model and the way a therapist can act as witness in the resolution of dissociative enactment in relational psychoanalysis. Trusting the healing capacity of one's inner healing intelligence is dynamically equivalent to trusting the relational process. This makes trusting one's inner healing intelligence a process of feeling witnessed. In both settings, the therapist's willingness to acknowledge her technical limitations or failings, coupled with a conviction that the participant/patient's primary need in processing trauma is to feel witnessed, facilitates the integration of dissociated experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction provides an overview to this special issue honoring the work and legacy of Jeremy D. Safran. Born of the Jeremy Safran Memorial Conference, held on April 2nd, 2023, this issue features a wide range of contributions from leaders in the field, former students, and early career professionals whose work engages and develops central ideas from Safran's work and reflects on his impact on their own clinical work and scholarship. Themes center around the three domains of Safran's major contributions: pedagogy; psychotherapy integration; and Buddhism, spirituality, and psychoanalysis. We observe among the contributions an experiential reconnecting with the deeply relational commitments of our friend and colleague. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper honors Jeremy Safran's legacy of scholarship and pedagogy through the lens of his emphasis on rupture and repair. Challenging a Freudian rendering of mourning as ultimately giving up a lost object, the author draws on Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's application of Sandor Ferenczi's concept of introjection to offer a relational rendering of the grieving process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins with an overview of the historical treatment of maternal subjectivity within psychology, psychoanalysis, and feminism, discussing the inroads that have been made to support the subject status of mothers themselves, as well as where these improvements are incomplete. Also considered are the invited papers appearing in this special issue of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and the ways in which they unfold new iterations of theorizing maternal subjectivity. Particularly, this paper introduces the concept of matrescence—the developmental process of becoming a mother—into the psychoanalytic lexicon. Doing so allows further discussion of how the mother's subject status can elaborate the lineage of the feminine and co-created, relational, and social aspects of identity. Recognizing the mother is not an individualistic pursuit, a competition between mother and baby for whose experience gets to matter; rather, recognizing maternal subjectivity is inherently a recognition of linking. It is essential to the development of relational psychoanalysis and, this paper argues, an essential link in considering the oft-neglected socio-cultural aspects of the psyche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirty years ago, we proposed the similarity between the functioning of artificial intelligence and the human psyche, suggesting multiple parallels between the Freudian model proposed in the "Project for Psychology for Neurologists" and the connectionist theories applied in the generation of parallel distributed processing systems (PDP), also known as connectionist models. These models have been and continue to be the foundation of general artificial intelligences like ChatGPT, evolving and gaining prominence in everyday life. From the earliest applications in psychiatry, recreating computationally simulated modes of illnesses, to the use of deep learning models, especially in the field of computer vision for tasks such as image recognition, segmentation, and classification. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are employed for tasks involving sequences of data, such as natural language processing, or models based on the Transformer architecture, like BERT and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which have revolutionized natural language processing. In this present work, we analyze the significance of the emergence and exponential growth of these types of tools in the field of healthcare, from medical diagnosis and patient care to psychological attention and psychotherapeutic treatment, exploring the changes and transformations in the forms of subjective expression that are arising. We also examine and argue for the importance and validity of the relational dimension proposed by our psychoanalytic approach in contrast to the potential use of these tools as treatment models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalysis is often viewed as a practice relevant only to educated people of means. This article describes a project that matches psychoanalytically trained clinicians with unhoused and formerly unhoused adults in a large urban community. D. W. Winnicott's ideas about impingement, the holding environment, fear of breakdown, and careful monitoring of the analyst's interiority have proven to be most valuable theoretical and clinical tools. A decade-long case example demonstrates the challenges and healing potentials of the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reciprocal relationship between cultural trauma studies and psychoanalytic discourse on the one hand, and trauma studies and fictional representations of trauma on the other, has been commented on by scholars within the field of literary studies. What connects the representation of trauma in cultural trauma theory, trauma fiction, and psychoanalysis is that it is regarded as something that overwhelms an individual's capacities for processing and functioning. However, while cultural trauma theory has come under scrutiny for prioritizing too narrow a view of trauma and its representations, the considerable critiques of and revisions to Freud's theories, developed in the 1980/90s, have been mostly ignored by cultural trauma theorists. In this interdisciplinary article, we draw on relational psychoanalytic perspectives to demonstrate how relational revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, as well as views on dissociation, can offer new perspectives for approaching literary works of fiction, such as the realist novel, which engage with the subject of trauma outside of established trauma conventions. We demonstrate that trauma novels by Lisa Appignanesi and Aminatta Forna parallel these revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, allowing for a more pluralistic and nuanced representation of responses to trauma and suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relational theorists have long recognized Hans Loewald as an important ancestor whose insights continue to yield value to current psychoanalytic issues. This paper locates Loewald in the historical context of psychoanalysis with particular attention to the Relational school and goes further in finding his predictive theorizing in the context of gender studies and gender transition. In detail, I discuss two core theoretical Loewaldian insights—ego and temporality—and apply them to both gender and sexuality, using clinical vignettes to highlight their value in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractVirginia is a White trans lesbian woman in her late 30s living in a rural environment in the United States. She is a long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy patient in a community mental health center. She has a significant trauma history from childhood. Harnessing Avgi Saketopoulou’s concept of traumatophilia, this article analyzes Virginia’s intra and inter-psychic dynamics that result from her material experience in the world. Under a ubiquitous threat of politicized violence within her community, she experiences a constant fear for her and her family’s safety. At the same time, Virginia experiences a sexual attraction for women who have voiced anti-trans bias. In conjunction with her trauma history, this dynamic illustrates Virginia’s traumatophilia forming a tension between her experience of terror in the face of bigotry and her fantasy of inclusion. Detailing the political implications of trans experience as connected to the psychic conflicts manifested within a traumatophilia, the article concludes that trans experience is both implicitly and explicitly political. As such, psychoanalytic practitioners working with trans patients should focus on the ways in which psychic suffering is shaped and conditioned by the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homework assignments, or specific tasks patients are asked to engage in or complete between sessions, are a controversial topic among psychoanalysts. While many argue these interventions contradict psychoanalytic principles, others believe they can help address problems and promote coping skills. We propose that homework can be a legitimate aspect of relational psychoanalysis when used in a way that is attuned to the patient's experience and that homework may be an important component of treating personality disorders (PD). We present the case of a man diagnosed with narcissistic PD. He often felt superior to and reported that he despised others, though the core self‐image was of fragile. He embraced the role of the omnipotent caregiver, which came with boredom and anger and lack of satisfaction in his social life. The patient tried to control therapy, asserting that he could psychoanalyze himself. As a result, therapy was stalled and progress was limited. At this point, the therapist asked him to complete homework assignments that encouraged him to refrain from his compulsive caregiving to better understand what motivated this behavior. Through this process, the patient came to realize he acted out of avoidance, as he did not want to disclose his own vulnerabilities and flaws. At that point he was able to experience relationships while adopting different stances and finding new meanings. We argue that homework can be fully integrated into the relational psychoanalytic repertoire to improve self‐reflection and foster change in patients with PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experience and effects of a trauma-responsive program that uses creative methods to address the ongoing psychosocial impacts of transgenerational trauma and youth suicide, which disproportionately affect First Nations people in Australia. Our aim is to understand how the aesthetic (sensory-affective) dimensions of such a program serve to promote experiences of growth after trauma, manifesting in a sense of connection to both self and community. The paper focuses on the second of two immersive, experiential workshops delivered seven months apart in the regional town of Warwick in Queensland, Australia. In the light of self-reports of growth and personal transformation following the initial workshop, the paper examines the key drivers of such growth, focusing in particular on how trauma-related experience is metabolised through cultural containment. It builds on Bion's concept of container/contained, combining analysis of the affordances of immersion. Framed in cultural rather than medical terms, the larger goal of the paper is to establish how cultural programs fill a gap in trauma informed support, facilitating the processing of trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers theoretical formulations and technical considerations in the hope of facilitating a "group turn" in the relational psychoanalytic field. My approach, respecting relational foundations, extends them through the group lens. More specifically, I view relational psychoanalytic sessions as a "large group" process with two multi-objectified/subjectified representatives, the analyst and the analysand, interacting in a multilayered world of group attachments. I suggest that the dynamics and difficulties of certain types of patients can be understood further and more fully as multiple objects/subjects in this expanded model. In particular, patients with intergenerational traumas and/or accumulated traumatic attachments, patients who come from extended families, and patients with multiethnic identities can be helped with a "large group" perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersubjective process of mutual recognition, drawing on a narrative-hermeneutic elaboration of Kelly's personal construct theory. Kelly's notions of dependency and role, Honneth's and Ricoeur's philosophical reflections on mutual recognition and intersubjective relationships, and Ricoeur's understanding of narrative identity are considered, with a reference also to Benjamin's relational psychoanalytic insight on the role of intersubjectivity in therapeutic relationships. Building on these contributions, the author proposes a differentiation between developmental trajectories—called "uncompleted paths of mutual recognition"—that supposedly derive from specific conditions of intersubjective imbalance. Such an imbalance is considered to be implicated in the majority of clinically significant cases of personal distress, in which the person suffers from a perceived lack of recognition from others. In doing so, the relational patterns relevant to such trajectories and the principal construct dimensions—often preverbalized constructions—that make up the narrative identities are tentatively outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In hopes of contributing to the developing self-critique of relational analysis, I offer a case that illustrates a modified approach, one informed by current dialogue. The patient described had considerable unmet selfobject needs and a schizoid sensitivity to intrusion, engendering the question explored: How do two minds meet if one is largely relationally dissociated and acutely vulnerable when integrated? A premature emphasis on intersubjectivity would have obscured the patient's narcissistic needs and reinforced her tendency to retreat. Suspending the goal of intersubjectivity allowed for a regressive process to occur, and for contact to become safe before analyst and patient paved the way for future mutual relatedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this reflective piece, the author looks back on a decade of work on Global Perspectives, the annual section of Psychoanalytic Perspectives in which she publishes in-depth interviews with psychoanalysts from around the world in an effort to explore the influence of culture, politics, and socio-economic aspects of a country and their effects on training, theory development, clinical technique and psychoanalytic practice in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives during the Covid era reflects on her time in the world of analytic journals as the outside world was changing, noticing an editorial tendency to retract and become more insular during traumatic times. She urges psychoanalysts and others among us who are involved in the vital task of curating what psychoanalytic literature is ultimately published to intentionally move past the bounds of their inner circles to engage more fully with those outside, to move past known worlds, and to take up the mantle of engagement with grand themes of history and trauma in expanded psychoanalytic communities and with the world at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This written exchange is between a senior and a younger Jungian analyst on issues relevant to the development of analytical psychology throughout the world today. The younger analyst, Stefano Carpani, considers himself a neo‐Jungian. He explains to John Beebe, known for post‐Jungian contributions to the study of typology, integrity, and gender, how important it is to include sociological perspectives alongside those that stem from the Jungian practice of relational psychoanalysis. The degree to which analysis has become an extended meditation on the relation of individual self‐exploration to supra‐personal Self‐realization is emphasized by both authors, who envision this introspection leading to an expanded inner openness that Carpani has called "absolute freedom." The authors conclude that absolute freedom is a space of engaged reflection that can permit an informed but individualized approach to the complexities of the world soul today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integral Relational listening and theorizing is presented by two images, organized into two complementary formulations - an Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and Integral Psychodynamic Orbits. A defining feature of Integral Relational listening is opening an ear for the co-emergence of four primary developmental stages (psychotic, borderline, neurotic, and postconventional) and four foundational psychological positions (autistic-contiguous, paranoid-schizoid, depressive, and transcendent) that necessarily occupy any such developmental stage. This foundational intrapsychic formulation is advanced as the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere. Constant conjunctions among the four primary developmental stages and the foundational psychological positions constitute Psyche's Score, the music of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere. Through the example of love at the postconventional level of ego development, the interplay of all four psychological positions at this level of development is fleshed out. Then, through applying Wilber's (2007) eight zone Integral Methodological Pluralism to this expanded view of contemporary psychoanalytic listening, these combined understandings represent and also construct a formulation of Integral Psychodynamic Orbits - the fluid image of an intrapsychically, culturally, somatically, and socially situated self-in-relation that is always in flux. A clinical example illustrates this theory at work. Through this advent of the Integral Psychodynamic Sphere and its Orbits, Integral Relational Psychotherapy thus recognizes, embraces, and engages a full range of being, including psyche's most primitive modes and psyche's ultimate transcendent modes of generating experience, across all levels of ego development and without excluding the postconventional levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion I compare the accounts of the three writers, and consider the future they face as clinicians and human beings. I explore the shifts in clinical work, understanding, and self-definition that they have each experienced, both personally and in their work with Ukrainian soldiers. I also look at early psychoanalytic approaches to war trauma and the expanded understanding that has emerged from work with veterans of the Vietnam War I briefly explore my own family history of war and consider important shifts in psychoanalytic work that are necessary when working with combat soldiers. These include a shift to a contemporary understanding of neutrality, the importance of witnessing and community, widening the availability of the therapist, and integrating more active approaches. I also reflect on the shifts in national identity that have been fueled by the invasion of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of De Familias y Terapias is the property of Instituto Chileno de Terapia Familiar and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The reciprocal relationship between cultural trauma studies and psychoanalytic discourse on the one hand, and trauma studies and fictional representations of trauma on the other, has been commented on by scholars within the field of literary studies. What connects the representation of trauma in cultural trauma theory, trauma fiction, and psychoanalysis is that it is regarded as something that overwhelms an individual’s capacities for processing and functioning. However, while cultural trauma theory has come under scrutiny for prioritizing too narrow a view of trauma and its representations, the considerable critiques of and revisions to Freud’s theories, developed in the 1980/90s, have been mostly ignored by cultural trauma theorists. In this interdisciplinary article, we draw on relational psychoanalytic perspectives to demonstrate how relational revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, as well as views on dissociation, can offer new perspectives for approaching literary works of fiction, such as the realist novel, which engage with the subject of trauma outside of established trauma conventions. We demonstrate that trauma novels by Lisa Appignanesi and Aminatta Forna parallel these revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, allowing for a more pluralistic and nuanced representation of responses to trauma and suffering.

Punk is a music genre and counter-culture that has provided community and empowerment to generations of traumatized youth. This article is a case study on the use of punk rock counterculture through the expression of music as a critical social work practice within a psychiatric outpatient clinic. The clinic, Lane County Behavioral Health, was founded during the deinstitutionalization era of psychiatric care for the treatment of “severe and persistent mental illness.” The article describes the formation of the group, the shared personal and cultural history of the therapist with group members, and the critical engagement with psychiatric violence generated through the composition of punk music. In this, the process of composition and the lyrical content of four songs are provided. Each of these four songs demonstrate a connection of the personal experiences of psychiatric violence to a political protest against psychiatric violence. While the article focuses on the experience of punks in the psychiatric clinic, the implementation of relationality and personal-political experience are applicable beyond the punk counter-culture. The article concludes with discussion elaborating ways in which a relational analytic group can be implemented within tight knit counter-cultural communities.

The text is an introduction to the journal issue devoted to the changes and metamorphoses of doctrines formed in the field of psychoanalytic thought. The authors point out the polyphonic nature of psychoanalysis and emphasize the special value of its susceptibility to transformation. In this introductory essay, emphasis is placed on both psychoanalytic theory and practice. The authors try to prove that the methods of interpreting literary works emerging from psychoanalysis today should take into account perspectives derived directly from analytical practices. The authors aim to prove that among the most important of these is a relational understanding of humanistic work (based on reading and writing practices), as well as a pluralistic account of the constantly renewed acts of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to receive and promote in Italy the important work of a foreign psychoanalyst? The author deals with this issue with regard to S.A. Mitchell (1946-2000), having he devoted himself to the promotion of his work in Italy in the years 1988-1996, with the result of its greater reception in Italy than in any other European country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers two of the most discussed concepts within the relational perspective in psychoanalysis: dissociation and trauma. Placed within the Italian relational tradition and reflection for over 25 years, the authors propose a model of trauma, dissociation and borderline organisation to highlight their clinical perspective on these phenomena and on the fundamental function of the dissociating mind in a specific psychopathological perspective. Starting with clinical observation of descriptive and phenomenological levels and a model of the psychic processes involved, this contribution aims to reflect on the traumatic experience and how dissociation articulates a possibility of psychic life and residual vitality. Considering the functioning of the individual and his relationships, the paper also focuses on the outcome that dissociation has on the existential aspects of the subjectively and/or objectively traumatic experience. The aim was to provide the clinician with an observational, conceptual and operational perspective that allows for a diagnostic grasp of the different levels of functioning of the patient's mind. The paper in particular focuses on the level of borderline organisation and the specific related psychopathology. Reflection on borderline organisation invites us to connect mind, body, relationships and affections in a systemic manner, from the perspective of attachment and the multiplicity of subjective experience, trying to give maximum emphasis to the specificity of the person in front of us, to his or her subjective resources and multiple levels of functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June, 2018, along with several of her colleagues from Chile, Barbara Ortuzar sat down for an interview with Lewis (Lew) Aron at the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) conference in New York City. What follows is a transcribed account of that lively discussion. Following the interview, Steven Kuchuck was asked by Ortuzar and her colleagues to help with this project, particularly with regard to the translation, writing, and certain theoretical and biographical questions that arose in reviewing the recording and transcription. As it turned out, this would be the last conference that Lew would be able to attend, and as far as we know, the last interview he could grant. Lew's long battle with cancer came to an end just 8 months after the conversation that follows below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The belligerent patient poses a challenge to psychoanalysts. In working with an aggressive young man, I describe how I use rough-and-tumble play to meet his verbal assaults, downregulate his emotions, and create space for mentalization. Directing and redirecting his hostility led to new relational possibilities and his enhanced capacity for self-reflection. I discuss the implications for the use of rough-and-tumble play with certain patients to develop mutuality, deepen interpretive work, and enhance their reflective functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donnel Stern and I met in the spring of 2016, when I was a fourth year candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He had begun teaching a new course there in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis. I soon became fascinated with the contrast between the relational perspective and the classical one; the latter was more familiar to me from my education and training. In the years since, Don served as discussant in a clinical case presentation, and I have participated in a weekly study group he leads. More importantly, he functioned as one of several, crucial interlocutors that helped shape my development as a psychoanalyst. I came to understand his perspective further through an in-depth, critical study and consideration of his own work, mine, and that of others and came to count on him as a friend and colleague. What follows is a rather wide-ranging discussion between Don and me about his views and experiences as a psychoanalyst. It begins with an exploration of aspects of his life that affected his outlook on the profession of psychoanalysis, and then moves into a discussion about the nature of the practice itself. In the process, I expressed my own related but somewhat distinct views. Our conversation ventured freely into the meaning of each of our own experiences as psychoanalysts, with the hope that this may be of interest in thinking about psychoanalysis more generally. No part of the discussion is prescriptive regarding what psychoanalysis or a psychoanalyst should be. Our hope is that the interview provides an important articulation of Don's unique theoretical perspective, but in a fashion that remains approachable. What follows is simply a discussion between two people from different backgrounds who found a way to explore a variety of significant ideas with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is the first of two parts of my response to the Editors’ invitation to write a paper on ›distance‹ (to be defined however I wished) for this special issue of the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse. Inspired by an essay by Buber (1950) that I read long ago, I describe in psychoanalytic terms the role of separateness (distance) in the perception and appreciation of otherness. I find particular relevance in Schachtel’s (1959) work on ›embeddedness‹ and emergence from it, and then in the interpersonal/relational theory of dissociation and enactment. The essay ends with a long clinical illustration, which appears in a later issue of this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initially informed by concepts related to dissociative experience via the notion of Sullivan's 'not-me' (1953), Philip Bromberg went on to craft a relational psychoanalysis built upon the foundation of a multiple self-state theory of mind that grew from his discussions with Stephen Mitchell and also from his attention to the literature and treatment of dissociative identity disorder (DID). Although he never claimed to be treating DID, the reader is invited to form their own opinion about the reach of Bromberg's work. Additional concepts related to Bromberg's perspectives, such as "relational traumatology" and the notion of the "participant-witness," are briefly explored. Clinical vignettes illustrate these concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion re-visits Hartmann's classic treatise, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, to consider its implications for the role of ego functions and affect, signal anxiety, affect tolerance and the pleasure principle in effecting adaptation. These include relationships with objects, their affective internalization, representation and the role that these internalized objects play in the process of adaptation regulated by the ego in regard to relationships as part of external reality. Hartmann did not address these issues either at all or only by way of a nodding acknowledgment. His later work is similarly silent. This is, therefore, a road largely unexplored in the evolution of ego psychology, conflict theory and relational psychoanalysis, and their interconnections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Psicoterapia is the property of Revista de Psiquiatria y Psicologia Humanista, S.L. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Anxiety theory is very important in Freudian psychoanalysis, particulary the concept of signal anxiety which is central to unconscious conflict. According to the relational paradigm, anxiety is an interpersonal and affect regulation problem. Through affective neuroscience, Sullivan's interpersonal theory and Fonagy's mentalization theory, it is possible to develop a relational theory of anxiety. The amygdala plays an important role in implicit learning of relational representations characterized by anxiety, which inhibit affective regulation. Finally, some limits relating to the integration of psychoanalysis and neuroscientific research are presented.

The influence of trauma on parenting behavior and "sensitive responsiveness" is well documented. However, these trauma experiences are often conceptualized on an individual, historical and intergenerational level, rather than a systemic level. In this study, eight South African mothers, who were residing in a Johannesburg Township and raising at least one child under the age of six, were interviewed about their parenting practices. The interviews were analyzed using a combination of a psychoanalytically informed interpretive analysis and a social constructionist analysis. Using this approach, the author attempted to develop a contextually-based understanding of current parenting practices within this setting. Across the interviews, three prominent contextual factors were seen to consciously and unconsciously impact parenting practices, namely threats to safety, poverty, and loss or absent parents. These contextual factors were found to play a role in hypervigilance, maternal control and intrusiveness, and dismissiveness in parent-infant interactions. On the back of these findings, the importance of considering contextual trauma when engaging in infant mental health theory, research, and interventions with similar populations, is briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have the white, middle‐class, Eurocentric ideologies and practices of the Western psychoanalytic canon prepared us to make meaning of the complexities of our pluralistic world? Psychoanalysis has been criticized for its predominantly decontextualized and depoliticized perspectives that emphasize universal intrapsychic unconscious dynamics. In the context of a sociopolitically critical view of psychoanalytic theory and practice, I will reflect on what it means to keep conducting 'business as usual' in an era where movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, as well as the health inequities that became apparent due to the Covid‐19 pandemic are clear warning signs that our world is deeply troubled by injustice. I will argue that psychoanalytic theory and practice is not immune from this injustice. I will also contemplate aspects of a socially just psychoanalytic vision that may reverse decontextualizing, depoliticizing, and prejudicial trends using the principle of social thirdness, which expands traditional views of thirdness to include the patient's and therapist's embeddedness in the larger sociopolitical currents that inform and shape their engagement with each other. Reflecting on themes such as race, sexuality, gender, and sex/gender nonconformity, both the collapse and repair of social thirdness will be described and illustrated with relevant clinical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Psicoterapia is the property of Revista de Psiquiatria y Psicologia Humanista, S.L. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Steven Kuchuck and Bárbara Ortúzar introduce the transcription of Ortuzar's interview with Lewis Aron at the 2018 Annual IARPP Conference in New York City, Aron's last before his untimely death eight months later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I have set out to draw an ethnographically inflected, composite scene of what I would loosely term 'Sinopsy' today, drawing on a series of explorative conversations on 'psychoanalysis in China' and the questionnaire-based interviews I undertook (between 2015 and 2020) with 18 psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychological counselors and engaged academics in or from mainland China, ranging from seasoned professionals to new-generation trainees. My ongoing, modest hope is to get to see a bigger and 'democalligraphically' evolving picture of a kind of praxis-oriented community-serving minjian psychoanalysis on the ground. As I turn to this understudied, cartographically complex, porously open-ended zone of Sinopsychoanalysis in the making, a silhouette seems to be emerging on the horizon, itself a question in motion: What is (in) it for people in China, and across and beyond its great walls? Focusing on its transitional specificity, its active indeterminacy and eclectic adaptivity exemplified by Sino-Lacanian analysts' practices among others, I also try to contextualize its deeper and broader psychocultural dimensions, especially given the turbulent (post)modernity of China, where its ongoing epochal traumas are inextricably private and public, familial, national and diasporic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that self-disclosure is intimately related to traumatic experience and the pressures on the analyst not to re-traumatize the patient or repeat traumatic dynamics. The paper gives a number of examples of such pressures and outlines the difficulties the analyst may experience in adopting an analytic attitude -- attempting to stay as closely as possible with what the patient brings. It suggests that self-disclosure may be used to try to disconfirm the patient's negative sense of themselves or the analyst, or to try to induce a positive sense of self or of the analyst which, whilst well-meaning, may be missing the point and may be prolonging the patient's distress. Examples are given of staying with the co-construction of the traumatic early relational dynamics and thus working through the traumatic complex; this attitude is compared and contrasted with some relational psychoanalytic attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies is the property of Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Miscelanea Comillas is the property of Universidad Pontificia Comillas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As of this writing, most therapists in the United States and in many places throughout the world are working exclusively via telehealth as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been excruciatingly painful for a number of patients, in some cases triggering severe separation anxiety responses and attachment-related trauma as weeks of physical separation turn into months which threaten to become a year or more—the story is still being written. One patient in particular feels that she has lost me, and in the countertransference, it feels like I've abandoned her. What follows is an exploration of this treatment as it illustrates clinician-patient collective trauma, especially in light of an enactment that forced me to confront our overlapping histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in Group Analysis/Group Psychotherapy The critical discussion about theories of group analysis and group psychotherapy has yielded some interesting new developments. These relate to the significance of social interaction and intercorporeality, the insights of relational psychoanalysis into the contribution of group leaders and their preparedness to communicate their perceptions, as well as the implementation of the concept of mentalisation into group therapy. Regarding these different concepts, a yet unanswered question remains how we can converse about them in the D3G. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article begins with an exploration of the ambivalence experienced by the author when invited to speak at a conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. This followed by introducing two notions, 'ethical distress' and 'entangled relational', both of which speak to the ambivalence. Next, it is argued that the notion of 'the relational' in psychoanalytic literature is largely apolitical, and that it has required women—who speak from the margins—to theorize and incorporate the political into the relational frame. I argue that the 'entangled relational' subsumes and politicizes 'the relational'. The notion of 'intimate others' is utilized to think about processes of Othering and the emotional consequences that follow out of it. This is followed by Nancy Chodorow and Lynne Layton's politicized feminist theorizations. Layton concludes that psycho-developmental processes taking place under conditions of patriarchy necessarily lead to men and women suffering from a form of narcissistic injury. The article then uses all these ideas to think about the psychological consequences of militarization on the male and female citizens of militarized societies, and in particular about the psychological consequences for those living in the Israeli-Palestinian context. The article concludes with some thoughts about the possible function and task of psychotherapy in militarized contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 1920, Otto Gross published his last book, Three Essays on Internal Conflict, almost at the same time as "Beyond the pleasure principle", in which Freud revised his drive theory. Gross was one of the most brilliant analysts of the "first generation", but he had spent more than 10 years outside the psychoanalytic movement, and no one showed any interest in his publications except Ferenczi, who immediately wrote a critical review that has never been translated into English. Here we present the first English translation of Ferenczi's review, "Otto Gross. Three essays on internal conflict" (1920), first published in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. In this review, Ferenczi shows a great deal of interest in the new approach proposed by Gross based on the recently discovered "hospitalism syndrome", identifying the "instinct (or drive) for contact" as the origin of infantile sexuality. This review reveals a key moment in the trajectory of Ferenczi's work, when he took a definitive turn towards investigating early relationships and towards a renewed focus on the trauma factor. This illuminates the rest of his psychoanalytic work and formed the foundations for the attachment and relational approach in psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the therapeutic process between analyst and Josh, a trans man whose life had fallen apart after transition. Repetitive enactments involving hiding, deceiving and mystification constituted a prolonged therapeutic impasse. The analyst's struggle with these binds and with countertransference confusion and anxiety, ultimately illuminated zones that had remained off-limits for a prolonged period of time. Where the couple had been snared in a bind structured by gender, they were now able to access a history of violation and to ask more profound questions about connection, aloneness, authenticity and loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]