The first paper of this issue, “The early unrepressed unconscious in relation to Matte-Blanco's thought,” is one of the last papers written by Mauro Mancia (1929–2007), a training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, professor emeritus of human physiology at the University of Milan, and of one of the pioneers of the most fascinating new frontiers of our field, the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. A few months before his death (the day before the inauguration of the International Psychoanalytical Association [IPA] Berlin Congress), I was again able to experience his passion for interdisciplinary research at the workshop on “mirror neurons” and their implications for psychoanalysis, which he had organised with the Italian neurophysiologist Vittorio Gallese at the annual congress of the European Psychoanalysis Federation held in Barcelona.
He had published a paper with the title “On the beginning of the mental life in the foetus” as far back as 1981, and the same volume of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis also featured a paper on the ego-ideal that he had written together with Donald Meltzer. The important role he played in building bridges between English and Italian psychoanalysis materialised also in his promotion of and introduction to the Italian edition of the Collected papers of another colleague of wide interests, Roger Money-Kyrle (1898–1980). His scientific openness had also allowed him to review in 1996 Stephen Mitchell's Hope and dread in psychoanalysis for the Italian Rivista di psicoanalisi and to conclude qualifying him as “a maître à penser of contemporary psychoanalysis.” Very curious and extremely productive, he kept being very creative all along: in 2006, he was the editor of the important volume Psychoanalysis and neuroscience (Springer), and shortly before his death, Feeling the words. Neuropsychoanalytic understanding of memory and the unconscious (Italian edition, 2004) came out in the prestigious New Library of Psychoanalysis.
It is no wonder that, in the paper opening this issue, Mauro Mancia tries to operate a new connection, to revisit the early unrepressed unconscious in terms of Ignacio Matte-Blanco's (1908–1995) concept of symmetry and asymmetry, that is, his bi-logical perspective – which he had articulated in his 1975 book The unconscious as infinite sets and further refined in 1988 in Thinking, feeling and being. Having emigrated from Santiago de Chile to Italy in 1966 (after training as a psychoanalyst in London), Matte-Blanco also played a significant role in bridging the gap between Italian and international psychoanalysis (one of the themes of my editorial of No. 2/2008) and gathered around himself a group of students, to whom we for example owe the anthology L'emozione come esperienza infinita. Matte Blanco e la psicoanalisi contemporanea [Emotion as infinite experience. Matte Blanco and contemporary psychoanalysis], edited in 2007 by Alessandra Ginzburg and Riccardo Lombardi.
A new frontier of our field is also what Franco Borgogno touches upon in the next paper, “The relevance of ‘role reversal’ in today's psychoanalysis,” which he presented at the IPA Berlin Congress and in which he revisits one of his most significant treatments (which he had already dealt with in several publications, including, in 2004, Psychoanalytic Dialogues) in the light of the interview that Christopher Fortune conducted with him (see Zvi Lothane's review of the latter in No. 2/2008), recently published with the title “The Vancouver interview” in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. This is what allows him to tell us for the first time that his treatment of the very difficult woman patient at the center of the paper could be successful also because “I was one of these children: a child partly unseen in my specificity (I had to be different and change for my parents’ benefit and renounce being myself) and partly not listened to in my particular needs (my mother was often psychically absent and my father cared only for his family of origin).” This is what allowed him to share her “nonexistence” in such an authentic and profound way as to produce the kind of “interpsychic acting cure,” which he calls – working as he does in Ferenczi's footsteps – “role reversal;” that is, “For this kind of patient … the analyst's ‘mutative’ interpretation is not the classical one, but rather the whole action of literally interpreting and living ‘in the patient's place’ a part of psychic life that is simply unknown to them or which has been expelled by them because of the pain connected to it.”
Since not only Ferenczi, but also Bion played a central role in Borgogno's professional development (which the reader can find articulated in the volume Psychoanalysis as a journey), here is how a fascinating quote from Bion's posthumous book Cogitations illuminates his technical stance: “I do not think such a patient will ever accept an interpretation, however correct, unless he feels that the analyst has passed through this emotional crisis as a part of the act of giving the interpretation.” It is through such a process that “the analyst [in Borgognos's words] is in the end a new object (it would be more correct to say a new subject), because he puts himself at the patient's disposal, ‘donating his soul’ to slowly become the various characters involved in the infantile history of the patient,” and to whom “he offers a ‘figurability’ (Botella & Botella, 2004) and a name, after having acted and concretely incarnated all the patient's ‘presentations’ first ‘into and with his body’ and then ‘into and with his mind’.” I must confess that only after having repeatedly read this very dense and fascinating paper did the threads I just spelled out become clear enough to me – and hopefully will be to readers, whom I can now invite to immerse themselves in the author's concrete clinical work.
Eystein Victor Våpenstad's paper “‘Can you whistle?’: The grammar of ‘living through’ in psychoanalytic child psychotherapy” also deserves a very careful reading. Having trained (in Oslo) in both adult and child psychoanalysis, and being well read in both the English (Kleinian and independent) and the American relational traditions, the author presents his treatment (more than four years, three times a week) of a seven-year-old (borderline) girl, whose projective activity challenged so much his capacity of containment and metabolisation as to allow him to develop a whole series of considerations on both his own subjective contribution to the treatment and the (relatively new) theme of self-disclosure in the work with children. Making reference to the point of view developed by Anna Alvarez, starting with Live company from 1992 (and including her suggestion “to move from a grammar of explanation to a grammar of description” and her concept of “overcoming”), and to Antonino Ferro's very respectful listening and “unsaturated” style, Våpenstad makes a step forward in the same direction taken by Borgogno in the previous paper, and talks of how his subjective participation in and sharing of his patient's states of mind shaped the treatment in terms of what he calls “living (and doing) through”:
By this I mean that the therapeutic work with borderline children … must be done jointly by the therapist and the patient. They must both carry out the work of development and change. … This process goes back and forth … as a joint venture where the therapeutic development lies in the experience of doing it live or together living it through.”
It is in such a context that not only may the self-disclosure of the therapist's countertransference be “for many of these children be the first time they experience a genuine human relationship,” but also that for them to see and experience the trials and tribulations of our work of containment and metabolisation can have a therapeutic value. This point of view reminded me of Stephen Mitchell's (1997) concept of the analyst's intentions: “What is done in psychoanalysis is ultimately less important than the effort made and the intentions expressed in that effort” (see Influence and autonomy in psychoanalysis, p.170), that is, his emphasis on the dialectical interaction between the person we are and the technique we use. As an aside, a very interesting aspect of Våpenstad's paper going in the same direction has to do with his candid and courageous report on how much he had to struggle with his severe therapeutic super-ego (typical of the young candidate he then was) to be able to admit to his young patient that … yes, he could whistle! And this is what also convinced him of the fact that (as many famous senior colleagues have kept reminding us) “the analytic treatment depends upon the analyst getting emotionally involved in a manner that he had not intended”, that is, something which “can only be done [continues the author] by an emergent third, a living through of patient and analyst together.”
This character, of an “emergent third,” can be ascribed also to the humoristic dimension with which Zvi Lothane deals – in the fourth paper of this issue – with his usual scientific competence and clinical freshness, starting from Freud's 1905 Jokes and their relations to the unconscious, and reviewing the contributions of a whole series of authors, as for example Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Reich, Martin Grotjahn, and his “first analytic teacher” Sandor Feldman. Given his unusual humanistic background and his passion for the history of psychoanalysis, Lothane does of course not miss mentioning the Greek concepts of tragedy (providing catharsis) and comedy (relief), masters like Shakespeare, Molière and Schiller, and Daniel Paul Schreber – one of the patients from whom, I know, he learned the most. How humor “is at its best in treating character neuroses” is what he shows us in the clinical case of a woman patient whose “character armor” (mannerisms, stereotypical performances, mechanical repetitions, and indirectness) he was eventually able to undo with his very respectful and, at the same time, ironically detached therapeutic attitude, a therapeutic attitude informed by what Lothane calls the method of “reciprocal free association” (on which he held a very well attended panel at the IPA Berlin Congress), and by the wisdom reflected in his statement that “it is not possible to conduct an analytic treatment without offering a measure of gratification to the analysand.”
One of the themes of the above-quoted 1995 book by Stephen Mitchell (whose work I know well for having contributed to its introduction into Italy), Hope and dread in psychoanalysis, is the complex dialectic between the patient's need of “reconciliation” with specific aspects of his identity and the therapist's capacity of “negotiation.” The fifth paper of this issue, “The romantic fantasy and its vicissitudes,” by our Japanese colleague Koichi Togashi, is a very good example of such a dialectical stance. It centers around the challenging treatment, conducted from a self-psychological perspective, of a woman patient in her forties, whose romantic fantasies about the therapist on the one hand stabilized her identity and provided a new space for her growth, but on the other, kept producing an eroticized transference, which Togashi shows he was able successfully to deal with. This is the second paper by Togashi to come out in our journal, and he is also the first Japanese author (trained in New York, but practicing in Hiroshima) whose work we have the chance to publish; and this of course also represents “a new frontier in psychoanalysis.” In the very informative presentation of the reception and development of psychoanalysis in Japan written for their Dictionnaire de la psychoanalyse [Dictionary of psychoanalysis], Elisabeth Roudinesco and Michael Plon write that the psychoanalytic pioneer Doï Takeo explained the relative failure encountered by psychoanalysis in his country through the relative lack of a culture of subjective emancipation (cf. 1997, pp. 541–2). Since the case presented by Togashi also includes evidence of a change in this direction, I and the editorial board of this journal are curious to know more about psychoanalysis in Japan.
As Carlo Bonomi's interview shows, Robert Holt, who turned 91 this year and is still scientifically very active, always worked at the frontier of psychoanalysis, indeed at a whole series of new frontiers! Having myself learned much from him, not only from a book like Freud reappraised. A fresh look at psychoanalytic theory, a 1989 anthology of his main contributions (1962–1985) on Freud, but also from the personal contact established with him since our first meeting in 1990 in Stockbridge (Massachusetts) for the Rapaport-Klein Study Group, I was very happy to see how both his brilliance and his generosity clearly emerge from Bonomi's interview. Not to mention the purely historical interest of the interview, from which we learn that “Rapaport was by no means an orthodox Freudian,” and that his genius consisted in systematically connecting and comparing psychoanalysis with a whole series of other disciplines, including ethology and linguistics, as far back as 1946. No wonder that “the most valuable contribution” of the New York Research Center for Mental Health, which Holt directed between 1953 and 1963, was “its educational one, the fact that we assembled, motivated and nourished a remarkable group of people, both staff and students, who learned a great deal from one another and from the group effort,” thus establishing the example of a unique research institute, whose stimulating climate Holt seems to have been able to keep alive.
Having edited the Collected papers of his friend Benjamin Rubinstein, centered around “his constant insistence that metapsychology could not simply be abolished – it needed to be replaced” and around his advocacy of a protoneurophysiological theory, “consistent with contemporary knowledge in the brain sciences while being stated in psychological terms,” Holt worked himself for years in the same direction, in an attempt “to restate the psychoanalytic theory of thinking in testable propositions,” and his new book Primary process thinking. Theory, measurement, and research centers exactly around this. In other words, it is Holt's opinion not only that psychoanalysis can be developed into a “true scientific discipline,” but also that only by going this way, that is, by realising Rapaport's (1911–1960) above-mentioned program, can psychoanalysis have a future – as a science and as a profession.
A similar point of view – of connecting psychoanalysis with a whole series of other disciplines and of enriching it through this – has been systematically championed in Germany for the last decade by our colleague Michael Buchholz (Göttingen), who joined our editorial board two years ago, and whose “Psycho-News Letter No. 70” (with the title “Auf dem Weg zu einer psychoanalytischen Kulturtherapie” [And in which he connects psychoanalysis and culture] came out very recently. He has been writing these monthly newsletters, in charge of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie (the German Society for Psychoanalysis and Depth Psychology, which is the professional and scientific organisation for most of the psychotherapists and psychoanalysts working in Germany) since November 2002, thus contributing much to stimulate his colleagues to keep in touch with a whole series of developments and, at the same time, working at what he called “the empirical defense” (Verteidigung), “the empirical further articulation” (Erweiterung), and “the empirical refinement” (Verfeinerung) of psychoanalysis. These are the titles of the three volumes in which his publisher (Hans-Jürgen Wirth, psychoanalyst and publisher of Psychosozial-Verlag) collected the first 43 such newsletters. This worthwhile and Faustian achievement was not only preceded by important books such as Metaphern der Kur [Metaphors of cure] and Psychotherapie als Profession [Psychotherapy as profession], centered around the necessity for us to pursue an autonomous scientific and professional status, but also accompanied by the magnus opus in three volumes, edited together with Günter Gödde (Berlin) and comprising a total of about 2300 pages, Das Unbewusste – Ein Projekt in drei Bänden [The unconscious – a project in three volumes], whose synthetic review completes this issue on “New frontiers in psychoanalysis – in our international community.”
Last but not least, I would like to dedicate this issue – which contains contributions from Italy, Norway, the USA, Japan, and Germany – to the memory of our Finnish colleague Martti Siirala, a pioneer of the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, the author of Medicine in metamorphosis, th e founder of the Helsinki Therapeia Institute and one of the protagonists of the life of our Federation, who passed away last August aged 85.
Marco Conci
Joint Editor-in-Chief
Post-Scriptum: Together with my colleague Christer Sjödin, I am happy to inform the readers of this journal of the following important new frontier concerning it. The Assembly of Delegates of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, held in Santiago de Chile, in the context of the XV IFPS Forum organized by ICHPA (Sociedad Chilena de Psicoánalisis), decided with a very large majority to accept the proposal of Taylor and Francis, the publisher of the International Forum of Psychoanlysis, to provide all members of IFPS with a free online subscription of the journal.
