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As Freud remarked in his letter to Einstein, "so long as there exist countries and nations that are prepared for the ruthless destruction of others, those others must be armed for war" (Freud [7], p.213). Referring to Freud's essay "Thoughts for the times on war and death" (Freud, [5]), Bell describes the translation of "Enttäuschung" as "disillusionment." I greatly appreciate David Bell's recent article; it is full of good points and typically deeply insightful. [Extracted from the article]

This brief introduction summarizes and gives the biographical context of Roger Money-Kyrle's 1934 paper "A psychological analysis of the causes of war". It also contextualizes his interest in the interplay between the psychological mechanisms operating within the individual, the society and groups and his personal experience with Germany in between and after two catastrophic wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper gives a survey of the origin of the concept of the super-ego in Freud's work and its further elaboration within the different psychoanalytic traditions. It introduces three papers on the perverse and psychotic super-ego, the development of the concept in Bion's work and its significance for psychoanalytic social psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution is a personal reflection on the papers presented at the New York and London anniversary conferences, in which the author takes stock to consider what they might tell us about where the discipline is now, where it has come from and where it might go. Taking the clinical contributions as evidence of the way many leading analysts in the field now proceed, it is suggested that there is an increasing and more and more subtle use of the analyst's behaviour, thoughts, fantasies, feelings and experiences, inside and outside the session, as core sources for constructing the patient's unconscious. Placing this observation in the context of issues of evidence raised in the 50th and 75th anniversary volumes, the author argues that a possible future agenda for the field may be to think more plainly about the basis of an analyst's knowledge claims, whether made implicitly or explicitly to patients in sessions. The author wonders if more disciplined understanding of transference consistent with neuroscientific findings of the last few years may be one factor that could prove useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the capacity to mourn is ubiquitously acknowledged as critical for individual psychic functioning, the impact of this capacity on a collective social level has been examined to a very limited extent in the psychoanalytic literature to date. The two papers that take up this this topic thus bring various critical and complex issues to our attention. After reviewing and commenting on these papers, I discuss how these issues are particularly relevant today to society in general and psychoanalysis in particular. I believe that the ability to mourn is under siege in the Western world at present, with respect to both "macro" mourning that is, mourning for significant losses such as a beloved person, ideal, or country, and "micro" mourning or mourning for losses inherently and unavoidably implicated in choices we make in everyday life. These mourning processes are undermined by the impact of complex socioeconomic parameters on psychic functioning, as evidenced by various internal problems and symptomatology characteristic of our times. In turn, difficulties in mourning contribute to social problems including social injustice, wars and the climate crisis. As psychoanalysts we are called upon to address these issues in our clinical work as well as in our global community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of gratitude as a fundamental concept in psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein’s classic article “Envy and Gratitude” (1957) named gratitude at one pole on an axis of human suffering and flourishing, but with a few notable exceptions, the article stimulated research into envy. This paper explores the historical and philosophical traditions that have, to some extent unconsciously, influenced our contemporary understandings of gratitude. The paper also works to explore the social and ethical meanings of gratitude as well as gratitude’s psychoanalytic significance. The aim is to uncover the overall psychic significance of gratitude and its place in human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper hopes to enhance understanding about entrenched grievance in a couple of ways: (a) Initially, the paper reviews how entrenched grievance reflects melancholic states of mind in terms of its avoidance of the pain of loss and change. But the main contribution of the paper is likely to be found in (b), that is, via detailed clinical material, the paper illustrates how earnest efforts on the part of the analyst to bring understanding may lead to cognitive entrapments such as the convictions incumbent in the “knowing” analyst. Further, that this knowing analyst may need to become aggrieved, that is, narrow, impatient and concrete towards her patient’s entrenchment, and then to recogize this plight in herself before she can genuinely hear her patient’s grievance about her from a wider view, that is as a complaint from the “lively self”, deserving recognition. The clinical detail demonstrates that such recognition softened the patient’s grievance, allowing both members of the dyad to become more collaborative and open to the pains and growth available from mourning states of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author focuses on the German psychoanalyst Wolfgang Loch's paper "Drives and objects – observations on the origins of the emotional object world." It mentions that the paper offers information about the theory of the establishment of the psychical reality of internal objects and the psychical space. It also mentions that emotional theory was also appeared in the book "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."

Editor's note: Albert Mason discovered an unpublished paper by Donald Meltzer dating from around 1968 and has made the text available to the IJP. He writes 'my best guess is that Meltzer gave me the paper to read/approve about the time I was preparing to move to Los Angeles (1968-69) and that I hastily packed it away with other papers. It got buried, and only came to light recently, kind of like a lost score that turns up in someone's attic!' The patient Meltzer discusses in his paper is a patient who Dr Mason treated for approximately 11 years, and about whom Dr Mason consulted with Dr Meltzer early in the treatment. Dr Mason has also provided the original report he wrote about the patient in the 1960s. Following an introduction by Dr Abbot Bronstein, we have published extracts from Dr Mason's report, including the following: details about the case, the two dreams which Dr Mason believes were 'turning point dreams', and a third dream called the 'hula hula dream', as well as the clinical material leading up to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Failure to deal with the issue of collective and social loss increases the risk of extreme nationalism. When taken too far, a repetition of manic defence can arise that manifests itself in the form of war. In this paper, the notion of the "inability to mourn" by the German Psychoanalysts A. and M. Mitshcerlich (1967) is discussed in relation to the problem of Japan's post World War II nationalism, and its silence on social matters. The process of confronting past atrocities committed by the state is then discussed from the perspective of structural theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irma Brenman Pick, a highly respected British psychoanalyst, has passed away at the age of 89. Originally from South Africa, she moved to the UK in 1955 and received training in child psychotherapy and analytic training. She was known for her clinical work, teaching, and supervision, and was a Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Brenman Pick believed that the analyst's emotional openness to the patient was crucial in therapy, contrary to traditional views that see countertransference as a problem. Her influential paper, "Working Through in the Countertransference," explored how the analyst's work with their own countertransference feelings can deepen the analytic process. [Extracted from the article]

This paper discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic perspectives may have been limited by the Western cultural context in which they originated and explores the potential of the Indian cultural imagination to broaden psychoanalytic thinking about ego formation, the nature of Eros, bisexuality, and individuation. The case is made for the need to retain the diverse perspectives offered by the cultural imaginations of different civilisations despite the globalization of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article present an introduction to the report "Language, life praxis and scenic understanding in psychoanalytic therapy' by Alfred Lorenzer. Topics include Lorenzer's contribution to traumatic neurosis, trauma in concentration camp survivors, and war traumatization; relation among natural science and a hermeneutics, and psycholoanalysis; and psychological aspects of the acquisition of language, which is supposed to be a child's sensorimotor experience.

In this commentary on Paul Denis's paper 'The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction', the author defends the idea of a plurality of metapsychologies that must be contrasted with and distinguished from each other while avoiding incompatible translations between models. In this connection he presents various theoretical approaches to aggression and the death drive, and demonstrates the differences between the drive model and the model underlying the theory of internalized object relations. The author holds that the concept of the internal object differs from Freud's notion of the representation (Vorstellung). He also considers that the imago as defined by Paul Denis in fact corresponds to the concept of the internal object. Lastly, he addresses the complex issue of listening to archaic forms of psychic functioning and their non-discursive presentation within the analytic process, which affects the transference-countertransference link. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that, despite its title, "The Ego and the Id" can be seen as the book of the superego, and although it is a metapsychological work, Freud's introduction of the new conceptual tools provided by the structural model was a response to the clinical problems he faced. The implications of Freud's introduction of the superego for the analytic relationship are discussed, with an attempt to deepen our understanding of what he had in mind by reading "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" alongside "The Ego and the Id". Finally, the paper draws on Bion to consider the implications of this remodelling of the analytic scene for listening and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights elements of Peirce's philosophy used by four well-known psychoanalytic authors, Ricardo Steiner, André Green, Bjorn Salomonsson and Dominique Scarfone, showing how contributions from Peirce's ideas could clarify psychoanalytic matters. The subject of Steiner's paper is how Peirce's semiotic could help to fulfill a conceptual gap mainly in Kleinian tradition in relation to phenomena that occur between what are called "symbolic equations" (representations lived as facts, by psychotic patients) and symbolization. Green's writings question Lacan's conception that the unconscious is structured like a language, suggesting that Peirce's signs, particularly the icons and indices, would be more appropriate to think about the unconscious than the linguistics used by Lacan. One of the Salomonsson's papers gives a good example of how Peirce's philosophic notions can be enlightening in the clinical area, as they are used to answer the criticism that words could not be understood by a baby in a "mother-infant" treatment; the other uses Peirce's conceptions to give interesting suggestions about Bion's beta-elements. The last paper, from Scarfone, broadly address the constitution of significations in psychoanalysis, but we will limit ourselves to consider how Peirce's concepts are used in the model proposed by Scarfone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses three papers on splitting behaviror in human beings. Splitting meant the dissociation of different states of mind, which are kept apart by unknown motives. Psychoanalyst Rachel Blass has notion of the splitting of the mind to examine the relationship between the processes in individual, society and economy.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Unconscious Phantasy: An Attempt at Conceptual Integration," by W. Bohleber and colleagues, published in a 2015 issue.

Death and mourning are being shaped by posthumous opportunities for the dead to affect current life in ways not possible in pre-digital generations. The psychological and sociological impact of the dead “online” and of “grief tech” is only beginning to be understood. It has not yet been explored psychoanalytically until this paper that examines one type of grief tech, namely the griefbot. This development is critically explored through a psychoanalytic reading of an episode of Black Mirror. I suggest that a psychoanalytic model of mourning provides an invaluable perspective to help us to think about this technology’s potential as well as the psychological and ethical risks it poses. I argue that the immortalization of the dead through digital permanence works against facing the painful reality of loss and the recognition of otherness, which is fundamental to psychic growth and to the integrity of our relationships with others. Drawing on Derrida’s conceptualization of “originary mourning”, I suggest that mourning is an interminable process that challenges us to preserve within the self the otherness of the lost object. The tools we use for mourning need to be assessed first and foremost against this psychological and fundamentally ethical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

José Bleger’s paper on the setting (encuadre) is integral to his 1967 book Symbiosis and Ambiguity. Relevant concepts from the book are summarised before examining his view of the setting as a “non-process” consisting of “constants”, complementing the “variables” of the analytic process. Process and setting are related as figure and ground in Gestalt psychology. The ideally maintained setting is studied as a thought experiment, uniting the categories of institution, personality, body schema, and body. Deposited in the setting, the psychotic part of the personality, or “agglutinated nucleus”, is a remnant of early symbiosis with the mother. Bleger distinguishes two settings: the analyst’s and the patient’s. The latter can only be analysed by strictly maintaining the former. Ritualisation of the setting denies temporal reality. De-symbiotisation is not always possible. A concept of “internal” setting is suggested, but Bleger nowhere mentions this and the concept is problematic, leaving open the question of how to listen to the silence of the setting. Bleger’s concept of encuadre can be applied to constants (invariants) in the wider world, the psychotic part of the personality being deposited in everything that is familiar and felt to be constant, including technology, which creates a “platform” for human activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis as representing in microcosm the developmental trajectory from late adolescence towards adulthood for the title character. This entails negotiating the problems of unconscious guilt, failure to mourn and an awareness of time in order to effect a movement from masochistic melancholy and hidden grandiosity to being able to relinquish omnipotent phantasies, say au revoir to internal persecutors and achieve a degree of self-possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to expand José Bleger’s classic, metapsychological descriptions of the psychoanalytic frame to formulate and emphasize the role of the analyst’s internal frame in establishing a psychoanalytic observational perspective in the analytic situation. The rationale for doing so follows from clinical necessity, especially when working with patients and psychic organizations that are ‘beyond neurosis’ and in non-traditional settings such as distance and telemetric analyses. Clinically speaking, in its most effective state, the analyst’s internal frame can inform the possibility of an observational vertex aimed at the intuitive grasp of psychic reality rather than a sense-based, empirical observation of parameters denoted by the elements of a consensually validatable social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud’s very brief 1922 paper on the beheading of Medusa by Perseus wisely concludes with a call for a further examination of the sources of the legend. A now widespread interpretation of this legend is based (often without acknowledgement) on an addition to traditions concerning Medusa made in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is argued here that this Ovidian innovation has often been misinterpreted, and that a more careful reading of Metamorphoses supports neither a widely alleged exclusively vengeful portrayal of Medusa, nor Freud’s portrayal of Medusa’s decapitation as solely a pitiable and terrible symbol of castration. Instead, Ovid’s complex treatments of myths involving Medusa, Minerva and Perseus present parallels with Kleinian insights into phantasy attacks on fecundity, and into imagined revivals of dead or damaged inside babies. Thus the “displacement upwards” of the fearful castrated maternal genital envisioned in Freud’s “Medusa’s Head” must stand beside a quite different “displacement upwards” of the life-giving maternal genital. Indeed, tradition holds that Medusa’s beheading gives rise to the birth of vigorous twins. Together with allied details, this aligns Ovid’s masterwork with theories that modify or displace the so called “sexual phallic monism” that some believe taints Freud’s theories of gender development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (Freud [14]), Freud only explicitly mentions the term "passivity" once - with respect to what he terms "feminine masochism" - a derivative of primary masochism, and a form that he had already discussed at length in "A Child is Being Beaten" (Freud [11]). One of the complications with discussing Freud's terminology is that there isn't masculine or feminine passivity as such in Freud, but "activity" and "passivity", and then Freud slides "masculine" and "feminine" over those terms, sometime equating them, and sometimes not. Whereas in this paper, Freud falls back on anatomical explanations of sexual difference ("the repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex" (Freud [19], p. 253), only two years before he eschewed biological determinism: "I would only like to emphasize that we must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology just as we have kept it separate from anatomy and physiology" (Freud [18]/Steiner [35] p.380). (Freud [14], p. 163) As he did in 'A Child is Being Beaten" (Freud [11]), so in the 1924 paper Freud explains the genesis of "feminine masochism" in terms of Oedipal conflicts, specifically the repressed guilt and thrill of incestual Oedipal wishes. [Extracted from the article]

Starting from Edmund Husserl's last book Experience and Judgement, this paper explores the notions of "passivity" and "receptivity" in phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Both sciences agree that receptivity differs from passivity, but they have developed different conceptualizations about the very nature of the rudimentary "ego-activity" which is the source of receptivity. In phenomenological terms, "pre-predicative" experience roots in a primary presence and openness of the ego towards the world, whilst psychoanalysis has emphasized the role of projective and introjective processes which are close to bodily experiences and unconscious phantasy. The second part of the paper draws some conclusions concerning the analytic situation, in particular the shift among receptivity, empathy, curiosity and creative imagination as central features of the analytic attitude from a mainly Kleinian point of view. The paper argues that receptivity is a field where phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches can mutually enrich and learn from each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the translated 1970 paper of doctor Hermann Argelander regarding American ego psychology. The author believes that Argelander's paper has depicted the development of postwar German psychoanalysis. The author also mentions that the paper has opened inquiries on two related subjects such as the formation of symptom and character, which were both rejected in psychoanalysis.

An introduction is presented to the paper "The Analytic Situation as a Dynamic Field," by Madeleine and Willy Baranger.

A critique is offered of the paper on non-interpretive mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy by the Process of Change Study Group (Stern et al., 1998a). The attention paid to procedural learning and to the need to attend to implicit relational knowledge is welcomed but a number of the group's assumptions are questioned. In particular, it is argued that the differences between motherinfant and therapistpatient relationships are inadequately considered, that the polarisation of non-symbolic and verbal memory is unhelpful and that the separation of the therapy relationship into three strands is problematic. The assumption that pursuing the goal of intersubjective understanding is in itself therapeutic is questioned. It is suggested that the recognition of the importance of implicit relational knowledge calls for a wider reappraisal of important aspects of theory and practice and that direct means of making such knowledge explicit should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the version of doctor Hermann Argelander on the hermeneutic foundation of psychoanalysis. It says that the communication processes between psychoanalyst and its patient take place in the preconscious level which can be apprehended by situational and subjective perception. It also mentions that scenic understanding as the essential tool of perception.

Transference interpretation has always been regarded as very important to psychoanalytic practice. However, analysts differ on its centrality relative to other forms of intervention. This paper argues that transference interpretation as introduced by Freud and then taken up and developed by Klein ("transference interpretation proper") is, in fact, the only form of intervention that could bring about essentially analytic change. To understand why, a taxonomy of different forms of intervention commonly practiced within the analytic situation is presented, including interventions that relate to transference, but do not constitute transference interpretation proper. The latter kind is then described in detail. Next, the paper defines analytic change. It relies on a particular perspective on what it is to come to know psychic truth; one that sees such knowing as a lived state of mind, rather than a state of having knowledge about one's dynamics. This foundational Freudian perspective has been especially advanced through Klein's notion of phantasy. Given this view of analytic change it becomes clear that it can only be brought about through transference interpretation proper. The paper also addresses reasons why it seems especially difficult to embrace this view in contemporary psychoanalytic culture, while stressing how crucial it is to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the work of a psychoanalyst working within NHS mental health services in the UK. The central contribution of a psychoanalytic approach within psychiatric care in offering a committed attempt towards understanding the patients' presentation, rather than treatment primarily aimed at symptom control, is described. Beyond this, the specific contribution of psychoanalytic ideas in establishing a containing framework for staff, and how this strengthens the capacity of the organisation as a whole to contain anxiety and to metabolize complex projective processes is outlined. Examples are given with clinical illustrations of activities which enhance this capacity in ordinary times. The author then turns to the impact of the covid-19 pandemic upon staff and patients, describing how fear, threat and experiences of multiple losses have permeated all areas of our lives and activated primitive defences. The pandemic starkly revealed profoundly disturbing questions about our assumptions and habits, adding to the intensity and multi-layered quality of the anxieties evoked. Urgent attention has been drawn to our deeply problematic relationship with the natural world, our own habitat, and indefensible social inequities have been crudely exposed. Staff have been caught between their own fear, the need to contain increased disturbance in their patients, already struggling with fragmented and disordered states of mind, and pressures from an organisation under intense strain. The capacity of mental health staff to act as containers for their patient's distress has been profoundly challenged and compromised. This paper outlines how the pandemic has highlighted the crucial role of the organisation as a container for anxiety and in supporting staff to do their work in mental health care. In order to strengthen this capacity during the crisis, the author describes how ideas derived from psychoanalytic principles were developed into guidance for NHS Mental Health Trusts during the early days of the pandemic. This guidance was adopted nationally by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and is summarised in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author offers a new reading of Freud's "Remembering, Repeating and Working-through", examining the complex nature of central concepts that Freud presents within it. She demonstrates the text's special role in an ongoing effort of Freud's to articulate and ground the heart of his analytic insight that knowledge cures. While the insight itself is very well-known, the fact that Freud struggled throughout his life with its articulation and grounding is not. The struggle centered on questions pertaining to how analytic knowing could, not only enlighten the patient, but actually change his unconscious dynamics, and why the patient, having already "opted" for pathology in place of knowing would come to accept it; and ultimately, what was the nature of the knowledge offered in analysis and the individual's relationship to it that allowed for such dramatic changes to occur. The author briefly presents some of her earlier work on Freud's struggle with these issues and how Melanie Klein resolved them. It is in this context that she demonstrates how in Remembering, Repeating and Working-through" Freud may be seen to be taking important steps towards developing his ideas on analytic knowing and in ways that anticipate Klein's resolutions. This points to the close tie between Klein's and Freud's thinking on the nature of the analytic process and the person's desire for self-knowledge on which it relies, brings out the richness of this thinking and grounds its value to contemporary psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author commenting on the Psychiatre Maurizio Balsamo's description of Sabina's analysis. He states about his expreience of analytical session with Balsmo for accompanying him in the work of transforming his countertransference feelings. He discuses about the interesting thoughts shared by Balsamo on encapsulated nucleus of a failed primary relationship.

In this article the author commenting on the Psychiatre Maurizio Balsamo's report on his depressed patient Sabina. He discussed about the analytical task performed by Balsamo with his patient who have evoked feelings of deadness. He discuses about the nature of Sabina which includes consistent, emptiness and lack of thinking.

An introduction to the article "The narcissistic difficulties presented to the observer by the psychosomatic problem," is presented which was published in the French journal, "La Revue Française de Psychanalyse," in the year 1952 issue.

In this article the author discusses his views on the article " Stumbling Towards Termination," by Mayer Subrin. He is critical of the example of an adolescent girl who is a psychoanalytic patient, as mentioned by Subrin. Also investigated is the nature of termination between a patient and an analyst. He is of the view that the feelings of the patient empowers her to gain some tolerance which she need in her maturation and growth.

This paper describes the anxiety evoked in a patient threatened by invasion or engulfment by his object on the one hand, and the fears of isolation and abandonment on the other. The author illustrates the patient's strugles to find a distance between himself and his object he can tolerate. The analyst has also to cope with the anxieties evoked by the patient's projections, and find a distance between himself and his patient that enables him to think and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's publication of The Ego and the Id sparked a diverging set of psychoanalytic models - ego psychology, structural conflict theory, Kleinianism, object relations theories, Lacanianism, etc. - each of which attempted to deal with the clinical limitations of his first topography in regard to unconscious guilt, negative therapeutic reactions and primitive character organizations. This paper attempts to look back on these developments from the perspective of contemporary, post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I divide this paper into three parts. First, I discuss Freud's ideas about repression and the unconscious sense of guilt in order to compare them with Klein's view that we disown uncomfortable facts through a process of splitting and projection, leading to a paranoid defence against guilt. Second, I describe Klein's struggle to understand the origin and the severity of the primitive super-ego which was so prominent in her child patients. She considered that an important aim of analysis was to moderate the severity of the super-ego to create a more humane inner world. Finally, I will elaborate on her view, as well as Freud's, that some of the primitive terrifying objects that lie buried deep in the unconscious are fixed and unmodifiable. I will use some ideas from Ron Britton to suggest that instead of trying to modify or get rid of these persecuting figures, it might be possible to stand up to them and to emancipate the ego from the tyranny of the super-ego. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore some similarities between experiences of music and of analytic sessions. I focus on qualities of evanescence, the way that music – in contrast to many other arts – in one perspective only lasts as long as it is actually being played. Then it's over. The analyst-patient discussion in a session is similar. Yet the psychic reverberations of some transient, fugitive moments may last a lifetime. And even when no verbally profound understanding is occurring, nevertheless the patient-analyst encounter is emotionally significant. I illustrate this with a clinical example. I explore transference as illusion, and the relationship between truth and illusion in terms of Bion's O. I end with thoughts about the paradoxical value of the illusoriness of aesthetics and nature as considered by Freud in his short paper "On Transience" (1916), and the grin of Lewis Carol's Cheshire Cat, left hanging in the air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of the psychoanalytic treatment of pathological mourning in the context of early psychic trauma. I introduce the concept of blank pain, understood as a negative of early trauma, to describe a distinct type of unthinkable anxiety. And I treat pathological mourning as a defence against the unbearable pain of the latter. Clinical observations reveal the extent to which, in a situation where the patient reacts to environmental failure by maintaining a façade (an insincere self), the construction of meaning depends on the use the patient makes of the analytic process and the setting. Considering these observations, I explore the relationship between the structural phenomenon of blank pain and defensive pathological mourning through the therapeutically mutative action of processive interventions and co-enacted scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here the author draws on Theodor Fontane's 1895 novel Effi Briest to consider the links between Freud's paper "The Uncanny" and his elaboration of the trauma of sexuality and the après-coup. Conceptualizing trauma in contemporary clinical theory inevitably draws on the theory of the après-coup: the blow that is inflicted on the psyche when the impact of the early event is retranscribed at a later date. The author considers the trauma that Effi experiences, not the catastrophic trauma of death or assault but the deceptive trauma, is disguised as an unparalleled opportunity for Effi. Her story highlights the trauma of sexuality and the incestuous Oedipal dimension. In the cruel economy of incestuous exchange across the generations Effi, in what she experiences as dreary incarceration, is left isolated with her libidinal yearnings. Arguing that Effi as a seventeen-year-old girl is drawn into the incestuous world of her parents and the mother's suitor Innstetten, the author describes how the trauma involving the denial of her sexuality leads to her being ostracized and facing psychic death. Captured in the deferred maternal desire, Effi unknowingly becomes part of a system of incestuous exchange. This is a trauma that is only known in the après-coup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented related to the article "How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining features of psychoanalytic practice" by Lucy LaFarge is presented.