Voices of psychoanalytic education

It is difficult to start writing anything these days without referencing the COVID-19 pandemic. The same goes for this Editorial. The way to the intermediate area of psychoanalytic writing is never a given, and now it has to pass from this new inexorable experience that involves loss. I do not mean only the huge loss of human lives – already a catastrophe. I am also referring to a large part to what in our relation to everyday life seemed a constant certainty. One could say that the bond with the environment-mother that represents our everyday experience now seems to a large extent dominated by uncertainty, if not fear, concerning fundamental aspects of it – health, even life itself, financial survival for many. This also holds for the now potentially dangerous link to others. In a message addressed to the members of the IFPS Juan Flores notes: “We can perceive the pandemic as something that attacks all that sustains and unites us with others” (Flores 2020). Psychoanalysts of course are also affected by this situation, as they not only have to deal with traumatic loss and fear in themselves, but also have to contain patients’ pain in an ad hoc frame striving to hold the multifaceted aspects of deep paranoid and depressive anxieties that are at work.

Yet psychoanalysis seems familiar with the pain and anxiety connected with plague and with the potential meanings of experience related to it. Wasn’t Freud himself deeply affected by the loss of his daughter Sophie, who died from complications of the Spanish flu epidemic on January 25, 1920? (Freud, Freud, & Grubrich-Simitis, 1985). In a letter to Sophie’s husband Max Halberstadt, Freud wrote on the same day:

You know how deep is our sorrow and we know how much you suffer … I will not try to console you … I am writing to you because we are not together and on this deplorable day of captivity we cannot meet and thus I cannot tell you what I keep repeating to her mother and her siblings – that it was an irrational, brutal blow of Fate that seized our Sophie, a blow in the face of which accusations and wallowing into bad thoughts have no place. We can only bow our heads under the blow, as poor, feeble creatures, mere toys of superior forces. (p. 230, my translation)

On the other hand, was not psychoanalysis itself labeled as a potential metaphorical plague by Freud himself, who, on his visit to the USA in 1909 supposedly remarked to Carl Jung, who accompanied him: “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague” (Jacoby, 2009)? One can suppose he meant that bringing the knowledge that drives related to sexuality are, so to say, superior forces that to a large extent govern the human mind, and that mental processes are mainly unconscious, would be a terrible blow to the narcissism of men, to their sense of omnipotence (Freud, 1917).

These seemingly contrasting, yet complementary, conceptions of plague bring us to the multitude of seemingly incompatible or opposite elements that form the internal world but also shape the unconscious network of human relations and social phenomena, as psychoanalytic thought attempts to grasp them. Writing on Guernica, the famous Picasso painting that depicts the bombing of a Basque country town by German Nazi forces and Italian Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, Hanna Segal observes that the agonizing horse’s head (the horse a victim of violence) has big teeth and a pointed tongue – depictions of the horse’s own violence (Segal, 1991).

From this point of view, an issue with articles on aspects of psychoanalytic education and culture is not incompatible with the experience of these COVID days, if we conceive of the introduction in such an integrative perception of psychic reality, be it intrapsychic, intersubjective, or collective, as a pivotal trait of psychoanalytic culture.

In this issue, in his erudite article “Spinoza: Multiple identities at the origins of psychoanalytic psychology,” Ian Miller fathoms the “parallels between psychoanalytic conceptions and the psychological considerations of the seventeenth-century Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza” (the founder of modern scientific psychology, according to Fromm). He also attempts to link these considerations, which comprise a “conception of mind as the containing, processing center of conflicting, deformed ideas, arising from the body” to Spinoza’s lived experience of persecution by the Inquisition, as well as of constraints imposed by the Jewish Synagogue, which led him through rebellion to a recognition of an individual identity, expressed in the “understanding of the self-determined, immanent acts of daily life.” According to the author, “Spinoza’s radical affirmation of individual identity” emerged “from within the psychosocial tensions of group membership.”

Group membership is an ever-present element in psychoanalytic training. In their article “The use of a simple writing task to enhance psychoanalytic education,” Jill Savege Scharff and Caroline M. Sehon display the integrative aspects of a writing task for psychoanalytic candidates faced with “multiple perspectives in contemporary psychoanalysis” and also with conflicting psychic experiences of “engagement, commitment, disappointment, and recovery.” According to the authors, the presence and participation of the peer and faculty groups to the presentation of the texts produced in the frame of this task seems to validate different forms of expressing experience and attempts at self-knowledge and to foster group cohesion.

The acknowledgment, validation, and formulation of knowledge achieved from experience constitutes an important need of supervisees, according to Hanoch Yerushalmi. In his article “Supervisees’ paradoxical need for knowledge,” the author juxtaposes the above need to supervisees’, more obvious, need for assimilating new knowledge. The tension between these two poles can be resolved in the frame of the change of role of the supervisor: from in the past being a “instructor”, the supervisor is now conceived more in “a reciprocal and experiential growing process.” In this way, “supervisor and supervisee jointly create a safe space for reflecting on therapeutic and supervisory experiences, and for tolerating lack of knowledge and incomprehension.”

The juxtaposition (and complementarity) between the depressive and the paranoid-schizoid position as distinct attitudes towards reality and its relation with closures, and their dismantling in the therapeutic situation, is the starting point of the article “Achieving and dissolving closures in supervision,” again by Hanoch Yerushalmi. Leaving “the security of depressive position coherence for a new round of fragmented, persecuting uncertainties” (Britton, 1998, p. 73) is not always easy. Here the author attempts to fathom the countertransferentially nourished reluctance of therapists in supervision to dissolve closures, as this may trigger their own conflicts. Hanoch Yerushalmi underlines the importance of the supervisor’s self-reflecting capacities in the slow, yet eventually transformative process of the supervisee internalizing the supervisor’s open attitude towards dissolving closures in psychoanalytic therapy.

Transformation in psychoanalysis is the object of study in a clinic teaching exercise presented in the article “Changes across a completed analysis assessed using a modified three level model,” by Jill Savege Scharff and Pat Hedegard. The authors selected tranches of retrospective clinical material and studied it with a group of colleagues in two distinct ways: the traditional clinical review and a modified application of the Three-Level Model for assessing change. The authors found that the use of the model acted as an amplifier of clinical impressions and a facilitating agent in the group discussion of transformative processes, although it did interfere with free-form, spontaneous clinical discussion.

The transformative dimension of psychoanalysis is obvious in many aspects of Marco Conci’s book Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis. This book is much more than a compilation of concentric texts that aim to bring together the multitude of voices that shaped and still shape international psychoanalysis. Carlo Bonomi, reviewing it, sees in it an example of “comparative psychoanalysis,” consisting of a “deep understanding of the different models based on all the biographical, professional, and contextual variables involved in the creation of a specific perspective.” Moreover, in the autobiographical Afterword of his book, Marco Conci, co-editor in chief of this journal, states psychoanalysis as a “new home” for him. We could conceive this new home as a container whose width is reflected in the adjective “international” that appears in the title and seems to permeate the whole of the book; one could see the book itself as a detailed mapping of this container, weaved into the interplay of the autobiographical, historical, documentary, theoretical, and formal threads that traverse it.

Threads linking psychoanalysis and philosophy have already been mentioned above. The power of phenomenology: Psychoanalytic and philosophical perspectives, co-authored by R.D. Stolorow and G.E. Atwood, consists of eight articles published between 2015 and 2018, plus items of dialogue between the authors. It is, according to its review by August Baker, typical of the co-authors’ joint work, that is, a combination of impressive intellectual work and “personal honesty towards the anonymous reader,” a highly conceptual work with its clinical focus on issues of suffering and “the possibility of redemption,” and its theoretical revolving around themes of isolation and aggression.