The diverse and intriguing articles in this issue of Psychodynamic Practice articulate the authors’ unique accumulated clinical experiences and theoretical understanding from a specific historical perspective. This perspective shapes the sensibilities, perceptions, and beliefs of therapists and counsellors who are emotionally involved in their professional work and rooted in their social, cultural, and political environments. In their writings, the authors openly and courageously share their challenges, emotional responsiveness, doubts, reflections, and hopes regarding their clinical work in a way that resonates with the reader’s experiences. Moreover, while contributing theoretical knowledge derived from clinical experience to the existing literature, the authors seem to welcome the reader’s critical observation of their theoretical conclusions.
I suggest that despite the variety of their topics, theoretical approaches, and writing styles, a common thread runs through these articles. Directly or indirectly, concretely or symbolically, and in different degrees, these articles deal with a common theme: the experience of being at home or, conversely, the experience of being not at home and yearning for it. Being at home is such a fundamental self-experience interwoven into our ongoing living that it becomes self-evident, and we alienate it from the centre of our awareness. Like breathing and other automatic actions, it surfaces awareness and shapes our personal and interpersonal struggles only after experiencing what the literature describes as uncanniness or not being at home.
After briefly describing the articles published in this issue, I will examine the existential and analytic understandings of the experience of being at home and how it is represented in the issue’s published articles.
The articles published in this issue
One of the main papers is A Dog Called Chaos: What’s the Use of In-House Psychodynamic Consultation to Think About the Unhoused Mind?, by Jonathan Day. This article studies the personal and social experiences of hostel residents who are homeless. The author implements analytic thinking to understand the internal and environmental factors that create the psychological state of homelessness. To this end, the author examines the residents’ personal and intersubjective struggles within the surrogate home in the form of a hostel. The author describes the residents’ emotional responses to daily challenges, which often include confusion, frustration, and a strong sense of isolation. These responses might be exacerbated by unintentional offensive or confusing communications made by the hostel caretakers and might drive the residents to violent actions that endanger others. The author suggests that when the unconscious motivations and vulnerabilities of the caretakers are contained, these disruptive events can be either avoided or mitigated.
Another article in this section is Future Developments in Psychoanalytic Supervision” by me, Hanoch Yerushalmi. A previous version of this article was presented at the Birkbeck Counseling Association Autumn Conference on 11 November 2023, in London. Drawing on recent changes in the theory and practice of analytic therapy induced by historical and cultural vicissitudes, I describe possible transformations in psychoanalytic supervision. I suggest three major future alterations in the practice of supervision: setting experiential instead of educational goals, highlighting future orientation instead of past experiences and memories, and employing prereflective instead of logical thinking. These developments manifest a greater cultural and philosophical emphasis on subjective, contextual, and spontaneous understanding instead of logical interpretation of complex and multi-faceted reality. They also embody the significance of becoming who we are and of our personal projects that inspire meaning and purpose in our lives. I suggest incorporating these new foci into the existing analytic understanding of therapeutic processes and developmental principles accumulated over decades.
The third main paper is This article describes qualitative research that can potentially help construct a theory about learning to practice psychodynamic therapy to maximise the trainees’ competencies and therapeutic effectiveness. The research includes interviews with supervisors and teachers of the psychodynamic How Psychologists Learn to Practise Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, written by Russel Ayling and Anna Butcher approach who openly disclose their experiences as trainees and trainers. The authors suggest that a series of transitions mark the learning process, as one of the interviewees describes: ’ … but then seeing just within a few sessions how easy it is to get embroiled into some of those relational patterns that being a nice person won’t really solve’. Each transition presents the trainees with unique challenges on their road to independence, knowledge, and self-safety as therapists. The authors conclude that significant learning occurs only within a facilitating and nurturing environment where the trainees can present their failures and vulnerabilities while working with the psychodynamic model. The authors highly recommend that trainees undergo personal therapy while training in this model.
In the Open Space Section, the article Ethical Challenges in Psychoanalytic Practice in Wartime: Conference Report, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2023, written by Velykodna et al. This article describes the authors’ experiences from a conference that debated new ethical challenges presented by the harsh reality and the survival mode characterising life in the ferocious Russia-Ukraine war. The conference examined the unique ethical dilemmas emerging from this horrible reality and struggled to assimilate them into the pre-war ethical principles and rules. Thus, for example, two presentations were named ‘Ethical problems of publishing children’s psychotherapy cases in the media’, and ’“You won’t leave me, will you?” A clinical case of therapy termination with a patient from an aggressor country’. The authors report that the conference enabled the participants to share and discuss traumatic experiences from their clinical work and to plan steps for collective action in the midst of war horrors. Disclaimer: As an Israel-based psychologist, I am all too familiar with similar traumatic experiences.
The second article in this section, Implicit Bias: Repression, Denial, or What?, by Sheldon Siporin, examines the cognitive concept of implicit bias that hurts specific groups of people from a psychoanalytic perspective. The author describes implicit bias as the unintentional and predominately unconscious definition and discrimination of groups based on shared characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. This definition marks the groups as ‘they’ in contrast with ‘us’, and emotionally alienates them. Siporin suggests that this concept can be explained by several analytic mechanisms: manifestations of infantile emotional needs, past traumas, or internalised early parental figures and their positions, social and cultural influences, and ego defence against anxiety such as denial or repression. Unawareness of these mechanisms might affect therapists and bias their professional judgements.
In the following section, I will discuss the self-experience of ‘at-home-ness’ or being at home from the analytic and the existentialist perspectives.
The experience of being at home
In a broad sense, home is not just a concrete place to inhabit but an existential state of being in the world. It defines our sense of self, belonging, and purpose and shapes how we attribute meanings to objects and phenomena and cope with internal and external challenges. Moreover, the internalised home nourishes the self-experiences of safety, continuity, and rootedness in a familiar, constant, warm, and tangible environment. Like the air we breathe, the experience of being at home is so fundamental that we view it as obvious and integral to living within our skin and exclude it from awareness. However, at-home-ness or being at home is not an experience we are born with but a developmental achievement that might be lost momentarily or permanently (Durban, Citation2017). On such occasions, we feel uprooted, displaced, and lost and develop longings for a safe haven that contains touch and warmth and secures our physical and psychological survival. Since home signifies a place where things are orderly, whole, clear, and constant, losing it arouses our ‘longing for the world to be set right’ (Margulies, Citation2020, p. 1127) and for nourishing parental objects and childhood scents, sights, and bodily experiences (Akhtar, Citation2018).
The experience of not being at home or homelessness, Unheimlichkeit in German, is unsettling. Since childhood home is identified with familiarity, comfort, and security, the collapse of the sense of familiarity leads to the disruptive experience of Unheimlichkeit or homelessness. The English translation of Unheimlichkeit, which is uncanniness or weirdness, fails to fully capture the meaning of metaphoric homelessness in the German word. Analytic and philosophical theorists agree on the biographical origins and manifestations of homelessness but differ in describing its catalysts. Freud (Citation1919) suggests that the act of bringing repressed memories and ideas closer to consciousness precipitates the experience of Unheimlichkeit. While allowing the repressed traumatic experiences, ideas, and fantasies to enter consciousness, we are overwhelmed with a strange mixture of emotional at-home-ness and homelessness, strangeness and familiarity, and the ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ (Freud, Citation1919, p. 234). From a philosophical perspective, Heidegger (Citation1927/1962 suggests that Unheimlichkeit emerges when we are immersed in everydayness or routine life and oblivious to the meaning of our actions and involvement in the world. This odd and unsettling experience awakens the longing for a meaningful and purposeful life and urges us to engage in fundamental personal projects (Michelman, Citation2010).
Beyond the different catalysts of the undermining experience of uncanniness or Unheimlichkeit described by Freud and Heidegger, the absence of a physical and symbolic home is painful and life-disrupting. We need the experience of home to live in our body and the world and face daily and developmental challenges courageously and creatively. Moreover, whereas the physical home might look similar in each geographical zone, the internalised or symbolic home appears in numerous forms. Thus, for example, a symbolic home can be a stable workplace, a professional community with members who identify with each other and have common goals, and even a continuous and constant set of intersubjective encounters. In the following section, I will examine how the articles in this issue represent several forms of a symbolic home.
At-home-ness representation in the published articles
The articles published in this issue of Psychodynamic Practice are varied in their clinical and theoretical foci and their reasonings. Yet, in different forms, the papers represent the theme of being at home, or the opposite, uncanniness or being not at home. Thus, the article A Dog Called Chaos: What’s the Use of In-House Psychodynamic Consultation to Think About the Unhoused Mind? deals directly with at-home-ness by describing the psychological state of homelessness of a hostel’s residents. The author describes the serious mental and social consequences of physical and symbolic homelessness that disrupt their personal and intersubjective life, exacerbated by others’ misunderstanding.
In the article Ethical Challenges in Psychoanalytic Practice in Wartime: Conference Report, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2023, symbolic homelessness originates from direct physical and psychological violent war events. For clinicians in Ukraine, the professional community symbolises the safety and identity provided by a childhood home. For the clinicians’ patients, the therapeutic space symbolises a childhood home that provides psychological nutrients and enables personal development. Physical and emotional factors threaten both types of metaphoric homes, and the existential need for at-home-ness is brutally disrupted in times of war. The continuous raging war arouses the citizens’ feelings of hostility and suspicion that invades and undermines the safe havens of the therapists and the patients.
The articles Future Developments in Psychoanalytic Supervision, and How Psychologists Learn to Practise Psychodynamic Psychotherapy? present the supervisory environment as a symbolic home that provides safety, clear boundaries, identity, and solidarity to the supervisee and the supervisor. In this symbolic home, the supervisory dyad can process and contain overwhelming therapeutic experiences, assimilate them into their professional selves, and develop further. Moreover, such a reassuring and growth-promoting metaphoric home enables the participants to play with ideas and perceptions and formulate creative understandings of the supervisee’s therapeutic experiences. This metaphoric home can psychologically nourish and strengthen them despite disruptive social, cultural, and political circumstances that infiltrate and undermine the supervisory dyad’s clinical work and wellbeing.
The article Implicit Bias: Repression, Denial, or What? describes symbolic homelessness and the yearning for the safety and constancy of the internalised home of people who belong to discriminated groups. Being alienated, excluded, and unconsciously hated seriously undermines the wellbeing of people who belong to minority ethnic, national, and religious minority groups. This metaphoric homelessness deprives them of yearned-for psychological nutrients and opportunities to actualise their human potentialities.
Concluding remarks
Like parents who nurture their children’s existential experience of being at home only if they own cohesive internal homes, therapists should nourish and connect with their inner home representations to nourish their patients’ experience of being at home. With consolidated internal home representations, therapists and patients construct a shared symbolic home within the therapeutic space. This symbolic home can inspire a sense of continuity and belonging and promote the creation of shared interests, beliefs, and values. Such a symbolic home forms a safe haven and a departing base to explore and find one’s place in the world. Gradually, the durability of the symbolic home helps the patient internalise it. Furthermore, LaMothe (Citation2020) suggests that the parent’s ministrations help the child create a stable home representation by providing the child with significant embodied hospitality experiences. These self-experiences make the child immune to confusion and abandonment and help the child dwell in his or her ‘body-with-the-other’ (LaMothe, Citation2020, p. 131). In parallel, by attending to the patient’s fundamental needs, vulnerabilities, and self-experiences in an environment of solidarity and universality, the therapist can help the patient develop the self-experience of being at home.
The Psychodynamic Practice journal struggles to be a symbolic home for clinicians who seek answers to their own and patients’ questions of identity, relationships, and the meaning of their suffering. This ideational professional home aspires to host and find universal understandings of human experiences and development despite the multitude of perspectives and theoretical psychodynamic approaches. While the fundamental psychoanalytic principles form a common ground for the authors and readers, new ways of understanding and approaching clinical issues are welcome in this symbolic home.
The book review section
In the Book Reviews section of the Journal, there are two book review essays: Maria Campo Redondo on ‘Women sexuality and modern India: In a rapture of distress’, and Mariana Velykonda on ‘Uprooted minds. A social psychoanalysis for precarious times’. There are five further book reviews: Jenny Hogan on ‘Spiritually sensitive psychoanalysis: A contemporary introduction’, by Gideon Lev, Laila Al-Attar on ‘Psychoanalysis under occupation, Practicing resistance in Palestine’, by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Martin Weegman on ‘Freud’s patients: A book of lives’, by Borch-Jacobsen, Nicole Godwin on ‘The Kleinian tradition for psychotherapists and counsellors’, by David Smart and Toby Ingham on ‘Blake’s Job, adventures in becoming’, by Jason Wright.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hanoch Yerushalmi
Prof. Hanoch Yerushalmi, Department of Community Mental Health, University of Haifa, Israel, is a Submissions Editor in Psychodynamic Practice, UK, and a Consulting Editor in Psychoanalytic Social Work, USA. Prof. Yerushalmi served as the Director of the Student Counseling Center at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, and a consultant to psychotherapy centers in Israel, the USA, and Central America. He published numerous articles on supervision, therapists’ development, relational psychoanalytic therapy, crisis and growth, and psychiatric rehabilitation.
References
- Akhtar, S. (2018). The trauma of geographical dislocation: Leaving, arriving, mourning, and becoming. In S. Akhtar (Ed.), The geography of meanings: Psychoanalytic perspectives on place, space, land, and dislocation (pp. 165–190). Routledge.
- Freud, S. (1919). The “uncanny”. Standard Edition, 17, 219–256.
- Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and time. Harper & Row.
- LaMothe, R. (2020). On being at home in the world: A psychoanalytic-political perspective on dwelling in the anthropocene era. The Psychoanalytic Review, 107(2), 123–151. https://doi.org/10.1521/prev.2020.107.2.123
- Margulies, A. (2020). Falling out of the world—and the longing for home. Journal Of The American Psychoanalytic Association, 68(6), 1127–1136. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003065120981823
- Michelman, S. (2010). The a to Z of existentialism. Scarecrow Press.
- Durban, J. (2017). From the Scream to the Pieta: Murderous mourning and evil. In R. Lazar (Ed.), Talking about evil: Psychoanalytic, social, and cultural perspectives (pp. 87–105). Routledge.