Psychoanalytic encounter: Conflict and change – Papers from the XXIst IFPS Forum, February 2020, Lisbon

The papers we have put together in this issue represent the selection that our Editorial Board made of the many papers presented at the XXIst IFPS Forum held in Lisbon on February 5–8, 2020, about which one of us wrote the report published in No. 2 of Vol. 29 of this journal (Conci, 2020). Writing now, with the pandemics not fully behind us and the war in the Ukraine accompanying our daily life, we can only hope to be lucky enough to be able to meet next October 19–22 in Madrid, for the XXIInd IFPS Forum, organized by the Centro Psicoanalìtico de Madrid under the title “Psychoanalytic Theories and Techniques: Dialogue, Difficulties and Future. 60^th Anniversary of the IFPS.” Of the eight papers of this issue, three come from Portugal, three from the USA, Brazil and Italy, and the last two – which were not presented in Lisbon – from Iran and from Israel.

One of the best and most appreciated papers given in Lisbon was Sandra Buechler’s paper “King Lear and the challenge of retirement,” dealing as it does with a question that most of us experience as rather embarrassing, problematic, if not wholly impossible to deal with. But Sandra was courageous enough to be able to draw a line and retire from working with patients, on May 31, 2019 – the day before she turned 73. This allowed her to formulate a series of thoughtful considerations on how such a decision impacts our personal identity, and on how we can survive living without the structuring – and reassuring – routine of our analytic work. Of course, Sandra was helped in such a difficult transition by her passion for writing, which allowed her to publish her seventh book, Poetic dialogues, in the fall of 2021 (Buechler, 2021). Her first book, Clinical values: Emotions that guide psychoanalytic treatment (Buechler, 2004), was reviewed by one of us in this journal (Conci, 2006). Sandra Buechler is not only one of the most productive colleagues of the W.A. White Institute of her generation, but also the one who has most actively participated in the life of our Federation since the time in which Gerard Chrzanowski and Buechler’s own analyst, Rose Spiegel, contributed so greatly in linking their society to the IFPS (see Conci, 2021).

A similar function has also been played by Jô Gondar, a Brazilian colleague and a member of the Circulo Psicoanalitico de Rio de Janeiro, a member society of the IFPS since 1980; for many years it was represented on the Executive Committee by Edson Lannes – who had trained in the 1960s with Katrin Kemper, a German pioneer of the Brazilian IPA and IFPS psychoanalysis. In her paper “‘To hear with eyes’: Gestures, expressions, rhythms,” the author borrows a Shakespearean expression used by Masud Kahn in The privacy of the self (1974), to show how his eyes could detect inscribed in the body of a patient lying on his couch different things from the ones he was hearing from the patient. Referring also to Sándor Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (Ferenczi, 1988), Jô Gondar shows how important it is to pay attention to the nonverbal aspects and to the rhythm of each patient, a dimension of our work that becomes particularly important when we work with patients suffering from traumatic experiences beyond verbal formulation. In such a case – and here the author refers also to Haag, Maiello, and Roussilion – we can even speak of psychic suffering as “a rhythmic disturbance, a dysrhythmia.”

The chair of the organizing committee of the 2018 IFPS Forum, Anna Maria Loiacono, presented in Lisbon her own clinical work with a female patient through the paper “Countertransference and Oedipal love.” This is centered around the famous paper that Harold Searles wrote on this subject (Searles, 1959) and around Thomas Ogden’s revisitation of it (Ogden, 2007). The “mature relatedness” that Searles offers as a model of treatment consists in accepting the paradoxical character of the Oedipal dimension in the treatment, that is, its being at the same time both real and imaginary. In the light of her treatment of Mrs. K., the author shows how “there exists a direct proportional relationship between the affective intensity with which the analyst experiences the recognition of their Oedipal feelings towards the patient and the impossibility of acting upon them, and the depth of maturation that the patient achieves in the analysis.”

Very interesting and even touching is the way in which our Portuguese colleague Alexandra Medeiros presents her analytic work with a boy named Pedro, between the ages of 12 and 16 years, in her paper “Sanity and madness within the therapeutic setting: A case study.” She was able to help him move from the schizoid-paranoid to the depressive position, and to learn to handle himself well enough to say, at the end of the treatment, “I don’t speak alone with myself anymore, it’s very hard but I can control it, I think I’m much better now.” The psychotherapeutic path was marked by a set of characters – real and fictional – that revealed Pedro’s split way of functioning, and at the same time allowed him to express himself, and fortunately to be contained and understood by his analyst. In the pursuit of such a goal Medeiros was guided by Winnicott’s theory of the maturational process and the facilitating environment making it possible, and by Bion’s concept of containing as a way to help our patients mentalize their undigested emotions. Referring to the work of Franco De Masi (2006), Alexandra Medeiros could also better understand and accept the limitations of her work with a patient whose treatment had to be interrupted because of the psychotic way of functioning of his own family.

In the following paper from Portugal, “The psychoanalytic process and self-transcendence,” Isabel Mesquita and Carolina Franco da Silva present their clinical work as inspired by the research work on infant development of Beebe and Lachmann, by Sullivan’s interpersonal psychoanalysis, and by Mitchell’s relational psychoanalysis. This allows them to help their patients come in contact with the self-representations generated by their early relationships, and create with them a new relationship aimed at producing the kind of growth and self-expansion that they name “self-transcendence.” In the clinical vignette aimed at demonstrating such a way of working, we see how it makes it possible for the patient Mary to start changing the way in which she sees herself, to develop new ways of being and of placing herself in relational contexts, and thus to transcend her old way of being and move in the direction of developing a new version of herself.

With his paper “Psychoanalytic views of ‘writer’s block’: Artistic creation and its discontents,” the Portuguese candidate Nuno Amado won the Benedetti-Conci Candidates Award, organized and financed by one of us (M.C.), which began at the 2014 IFPS Forum held in Kaunas (Lithuania). The winning candidate has his paper published in this journal, as was the case in 2014 with Portuguese colleague Antonio Alvim (2016), and in 2016 with Italian colleague Fabiana Manco (2019). Unfortunately, we were not able to publish the paper by the Brazilian candidate nominated in 2018 in Florence by the commission composed by the authors of this Editorial, and by Valerie Tate Angel (New York), and Christer Sjödin (Stockholm). A good writer of novels himself, Nuno Amado includes in his paper a brief narration of his own experience with “writer’s block,” a term coined by Viennese-American colleague Edmund Bergler in 1950. He then illuminates the problem from various theoretical perspectives, that is, Freud, ego psychology, and object relations theory, including Bollas, Milner, and Rycroft. A good proof of the quality of this paper can also be found in the following concluding remarks:

If this text had been written as the final word on the subject, it would never have been written at all and its author would be complaining of the thing he wrote about. So it was written as many psychoanalytic papers are, as a continuing conversation with other authors and an invitation for readers to join in. If you are able to remain in mysteries, as Keats poetically put it, and allow yourself to think freely, as Börne suggested almost 200 years ago, new and unthought thoughts will follow.

Through the publication of the paper “The riddle of time and space” by Ali Pajoohandeh (Mashhad, Iran), we also want to encourage Iranian colleagues to write and publish in our field, as we have already done in the past with the paper by Siamak Movahedi and Nahaleh Moshtagh, “Persian tales on the couch: Notes on folktales as the mirror of the contemporary cultural struggles with gender and sexuality” (Movahedi & Moshtagh, 2019), and with the paper by Mir Mohammad Khademnabi & Ali Khazaee-Farid “The Persian Freud: Freud’s early reception through translation between the 1930s and the 1970s in Iran” (Khademnabi & Khazaee-Farid, 2021). The seven-year-long research work of Ali Pajoohandeh on such a complex topic started at the time of his military service in the deserts of Sirja, in which he had for some time so little to do that time would never go by. This is how, after having gone through the limited analytic literature on the topic of time (see, for example, Sabbadini, 2018), and after having written about his work with a series of patients, the author revisits Freud’s metapsychology by connecting the sense of time to libidinal cathexis. In other words, the more our ego invests libido in the objects and the faster we sense the passage of time – and the more it withdraws libido from the objects into itself – the slower time passes.

In the last article of this issue, “On the strengthening and enlivening influence of being with patients and supervisees,” Israeli colleague Hanoch Yerushalmi offers a further point of view based on his experience as a supervisor of analytic candidates, out of which came also his article “Supervisees’ professional development and the analytic community,” also published in this journal (Yerushalmi, 2022). The focus of the author is represented by those situations in which therapists are faced with a chaotic analytic reality that arouses in them such an existential anxiety that they need to share it with their supervisors. According to Yerushalmi, the best way for supervisors to deal with such a challenge is to experience parallel regressive states, identify with their supervisees, and thus grasp their experience from the inside, as opposed to reacting mainly intellectually to such a situation, with the risk of strengthening the supervisees’ defensive operations and disrupting their development as therapists.

Introducing our readers to the articles of this issue has enriched us as much as we hope will be the case with them, and we look forward to receiving their comments and feedback on this issue.