New faces of fear: Papers from the XXth IFPS Forum, October 2018, Florence

The papers we have put together in this issue represent the selection that our Editorial Board chose out of the many papers presented at the XXth IFPS Forum held in Florence on October 17–20, 2018. As one of us wrote in the Forum Report (Conci, 2109), the Forum comprised 7 central panels, 6 special activities, 1 group supervision, 16 parallel panels, and 58 individual papers, with altogether 54 speakers – and almost 300 participants from a wide variety of countries. We will present the papers we selected, dividing them into the following four groups: Buechler, Jaenicke, and Loiacono; Terranova, Weber, and Gondar; Vanni, Leskauskas, and Morra; Albertini and Panero, Grasso, and Rossi and Ferro – in as much as they can be assigned to a series of categories or topics. At the end of the sequence of papers, and as an example of the good synthesis of the clinical debate that took place in several sessions of the Forum, we are adding Michael Ermann’s paper “Dealing with ‘new fears.’”

We start with the paper “Fear in the transference and countertransference: An interpersonal perspective” by our New York City colleague Sandra Buechler. We greatly appreciate Sandra not only for her many precious books (the latest one being Psychoanalytic approaches to problems in living; Beuchler, 2019), but also for the passion, openness, and curiosity that have characterized her participation in our events for many years. In her paper she shows very clearly how “everything that happens in treatment is the product of two histories,” and how this represents the key message of the interpersonal analytic tradition. The key role played by Angst in her daseinsanalytic work with her patients is what Uta Jaenicke (Zurich) shows us in her paper “Angst as the essential element of concern in all our dreaming,” referring to the way in which Alice Holzhey-Kunz (e.g. Holzhey-Kunz, 2014) integrated Heidegger’s existential philosophy into her analytic approach. The concept of Angst is also central to the ideas of the Forum’s chair, Annamaria Loiacono (Florence), as she shows in her paper “Integrating the dissociated: From the dominance of fear to the power of angst – Angst as a “presence of feeling,” in which she assigns a prominent role to the way in which (as Philip Bromberg [1931–2020] has taught us) various forms of dissociation protect our patients from their angst-producing emotions.

With the paper from Rita Terranova (Florence), “Integrating the stranger: Traveling across identity boundaries,” we come to the second group of papers, more specifically centered around “the new faces of fear” that characterize our present time. It centers around the author’s therapeutic work with Abdel, a 19-year-old refugee whose parents had brought him to Italy to save him from trauma and death, and around the many obstacles that he had to overcome on his way to a new integration and identity. Carla Weber (Trento) deals with the challenges of social media and how they have been shaping our interpersonal relationships (and our inner world) in her rich interdisciplinary paper “The unknown and the horrific in the appearance of evil: On the borderline of presence and absence in transference and countertransference relationships,” which is accompanied by a very eloquent clinical vignette. Very inspiring and touching is also the paper by Jô Gondar (Rio de Janeiro), “The disavowal of racism in Brazil,” in which she clearly shows how the majority immigrant group, African individuals, usually does not appear on the list of population groups that have made a large contribution to the present Brazilian identity.

With Fabio Vanni’s paper “The labor of fragility: Malaise in the natives of the new millennium” we come to the third group of papers, centered around the new psychological challenges confronting us in the treatment of today’s adolescents – and them in their own life, of course. Grappling with a largely unpredictable future, today’s adolescents suffer from an internal instability that, to a greater degree than ever before, generates states of self-closure and anorexiform eating disorders, expressing the malaise they encounter in today’s world. In his paper “Generation Z – everyday (living with an) auxiliary ego,” Darius Leskauskas (Kaunas, Lithuania) considers the very interesting topic of how the new information technologies – smartphones and mobile Internet access – are taking the role of an ever-present auxiliary ego for the generations born in the twenty-first century. Also in this paper, as in the paper by Vanni, we find a clinical vignette, stimulating us to keep trying to understand better the problems and potentialities of the new generations. A similar orientation informs the paper by our Milan colleague Paola Morra, “Some thoughts on the ‘new’ latency age: Normality and psychopathology,” a paper centered on her treatment of a violent, self-harming child from a disturbed family, whose psychological improvement allowed him to express his anxiety about mortality as a general human condition.

As the first paper of our fourth group, we propose the paper by our Milan colleagues Egidia Albertini and Marcello Panero, with the title “Hopes and fears in a sample of trainees: Considerations and perspectives.” This paper was the result of an investigation into the quality of training of the candidates at their training institute, involving a questionnaire that was completed by 65 of the candidates. Most of the candidates seem to be satisfied enough with the personal growth and professional development experienced during the four-year training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy offered by the Milan Scuola di Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica (SPP), the training institute of the Associazione di Studi Psicoanalitici (ASP), an IFPS member society since 1989. The next two papers come from candidates who trained at the Milan Branch of the Società Italiana Psicoanali della Relazione (SIPRe). Alessandro Grasso’s paper “The fear of staging: Considerations of the fears of a young psychoanalyst” is very fresh and original. In this the analytic theater evokes characters that desire to be brought to the stage, and gives life to a drama that demands to be represented through the characters themselves, as happens in Pirandello’s (1867–1936) play Six characters in search of an author (1925; Pirandello, 1921). Both analyst and patient can find such a representation not only rewarding, but also uncomfortable, if not so hard and challenging as to be almost impossible. In their paper “Skype as a protected means to live a relationship,” Rebecca Silvia Rossi and Matteo Ferro show how working via Skype can represent the kind of distance that some specific groups of today’s patients might need and/or find favorable in order to embark on a psychotherapeutic journey.

A member of the Executive Committee of the IFPS from 1982 to 2016, a former president of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG; 1987–1995), and a former regional editor of this journal, Michael Ermann (Berlin) also participated in the Florence Forum, giving the paper “Dealing with ‘new fears’. Psychoanalysis facing social threats and terrorism” – which is also being published in German in the Forum der Psychoanalyse, the journal he cofounded in 1985 and of which he is still coeditor-in-chief. The two clinical vignettes around which his paper is centered allow him to conclude that only when sufficiently involved with the patient can the analyst be used as a container for the new fears and thus separate the real threat from the projected idea. In other words, any disclosure of the analyst’s own involvement in life and in the new fears accompanying it does not endanger analytic space but, on the contrary, will create the space in which mental life becomes real.