On the opening and closing of possible worlds

Freud once described himself as “a conquistador,” and this can obviously be linked with the “New World” he discovered, the world of the Unconscious, ruler of an internal reality. The concept of an internal world is not new, but it remains fundamental to psychoanalytic thought.

Equally fundamental is the concept of its relation to an external world. But, psychoanalytically speaking, in what does the external world consist? From the point of view of the internal world, it consists of what is perceived as external. This, according to Freud, is partly linked to a process of splitting off “of a part of [the] self which [is] project[ed] into the external world” (p. 136). This projected part is the one coinciding with unpleasure. Freud writes further that “at the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects and what is hated are identical” (Freud, 1915, p. 136). So if the external world is identical with the object, the question of meeting of the two worlds is identical to the question of meeting with the object.

Bion conceived of a possible first meeting of these two worlds that he describes in terms of the mother–baby interaction. If the mother’s internal world is open and receptive enough to the baby’s projected unpleasure, distress, or hatred, she can give back to the baby as a bearable portion of the external world the unpleasure she metabolizes to empathic thought and meaning. In this way, the baby’s immature world can be gradually opened to external and internal reality, through interaction with the mother’s internal world (Bion, 1959).

This asymmetrical meeting process, the container–contained interaction (Bion 1959; Lopez-Corvo, 2003), can be the model of the specific meeting of two internal worlds – the patient’s and the analyst’s. Of course, each of them brings within him part of the internal world of his own objects. Most articles in this issue of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis fathom aspects of this meeting, in the particular space and time of the analytic encounter.

The attainment of mentalization that is “the capacity to attribute mental states such as desires and beliefs to others and to understand that these can differ from our own” can obviously be a goal of this encounter. In their article “Mentalization as alphabetization of the emotions: On the opening and closing of possible worlds,” Valeria Blasi, Michela Zanette, and Antonino Ferro give an account of a meeting of worlds aiming at mentalization. According to the authors, “alphabetization,” defined as “the transformation of unknown sensations that cannot be thought as such, into thinkable elements, through the possibility of narrating the ‘dream’ of the emotional experience,” is crucial to the achievement of mentalization, and takes place in the analytic field (as conceived by the Barangers and extended by Bezoari and Ferro) as a co-creation of the analytic couple. The authors consider the analyst’s receptivity – “that [he] is not scared to stop in uncertainty” – as a prerequisite of this process.

In the meeting of the two worlds, containing and understanding are not a given for the analyst exposed to the re-creation by the patient of an internal relational situation (technically called enactment or actualization). In her article “Reflections and relative examples, regarding countertransference, empathy and observation,” Marinella Lia ponders on the above problem. According to her, the disturbance that is sparked in the analyst by his interaction with the patient is unavoidable. Receptivity on the part of the analyst may thus have the meaning of fathoming the feelings caused in him by the patient with regard to his capacity to understand. In this context, understanding is, as the author puts it, “a form of retroactive illumination on something that has been happening for a while.”

The concept of retroactivity leads to a consideration of the time dimension in the internal world and in the meeting of the analyst’s and the patient’s worlds. In their article “Psychic rigidity, therapeutic response and time: Black holes, white holes, ’D’ and ‘d’,” Ian Miller and Alistair Sweet make use of Bion’s PS↔D↔ PS (n+1) ↔D(n+1) algorithm to provide a picture of the meeting as an itinerary in spacetime, from paranoid rigidity to temporal approximations of the depressive position. The authors stress the weaving of “white holes,” which are conceived as a containing structure co-constructed by analyst and patient, in juxtaposition to “black holes,” which attack reality and time.

One could say that, in any case, analyst and patient are engaged on a journey that somehow will captivate them both. In his article “On the need to be beguiled,” Christo Joannides endeavors to identify an aspect of the internal world, a need acting as the corollary of “repudiation of the feminine” in both sexes and felt, as the author claims, from the first mother–infant interaction – and of course in the analytic condition. It is to be understood as passive receptivity, linked to infant helpessness, to primary identification, and to the presence of the maternal unconscious. To the author, it is indispensible for the building of object relationships. The need to be beguiled can be expressed as “creative acceptance, receptivity, and surrender at one end of the spectrum, all the way to abusive masochism at the other.” This other end can of course constitute a form of rigidity acting as an obstacle to receptivity, which is felt in the analyst–patient interaction.

There is also a particular area in the analytic universe, that of training analysis, that we must consider. Every analyst must, for obvious reasons, be aware of the risk of putting his narcissistic needs ahead of those of his patient. According to Ruth Imber, author of the article “The training analyst’s self-enhancement,” narcissistic self-indulgence on the part of the training analyst may be more disastrous in a training analysis than in any other analytic treatment, in that it can create analysts who fail to examine and monitor their own narcissistic needs. The author underlines that, by being coerced or seduced into becoming an idealizing follower of the training analyst, the candidate-patient is prevented from claiming his position in the next generation.

The alienating power of previous generations whose memory can maintain descendants in a labyrinth closed to change is one of the themes that Luis Kancyper identifies in the work of Borges. In his article “Four kinds of memory in the works of Jorge Luis Borges,” the author examines the Borgean psychodynamics of memory and oblivion. He discerns four kinds of memories – the memory of rancor, the memory of horror, the memory of pain, and the memory of splendor – and reflects on their relation to oblivion, forgiveness, and mourning.

Memories of splendor and pain, together with the wisdom of Judith Dupont, editor of Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary and a true “heir of a psychoanalytic dynasty” that began in the times of Ferenczi, form the content of the book Au fil du temps … Un itinéraire analytique [In the course of time … A psychoanalytic itinerary]. This “splendid book on psychoanalysis, history and life” is reviewed by Carlo Bonomi. Carlo Bonomi also reviews Psychoanalytic filiations: Mapping the psychoanalytic movement, by Ernst Falzeder, a renowned psychoanalysis historian, chief editor of the Ferenczi–Freud correspondence – and an editorial reader of this journal. This book is a collection of 16 articles covering an area from the Ferenczi Freud dialogue to the thread of psychoanalytic filiations, and from there to the repercussions of Bleuler’s separation from the psychoanalytic movement – a close look at the Big Bang of psychoanalysis.