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This paper starts from the thought that we cannot take for granted that a society's highest values will survive in the long term as effective motivators within that society. By 'highest values' I mean values such as justice, concern for members of weak and minority groups, and respect for promises and for the attempt to speak truthfully - values that apply at the highest level of generality. If they are to survive and to be effective, two things may be necessary: firstly, unpredictable 'epiphanic' moments in which the power of these values is emotionally experienced by individuals, and secondly, institutions and a vocabulary in which these values can be remembered, discussed and affirmed in emotionally and imaginatively impactful ways. I shall suggest, with reference in particular to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Ronald Dworkin, that the second of these factors, the remembering and affirmation of values, marks out the crucial, perhaps even the irreplaceable, contribution of a 'religion' to a society. The failure, within psychoanalysis and also more widely, to appreciate the working of this function in a society over generations may mean that the consequences of 'growing out of religion' (Winnicott) have not yet been adequately recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My intervention briefly addresses the long, complex debate on technical and educational issues within British psychoanalysis during the late 1930s and 1940s. I hope to show that some of the problems discussed and the resolutions proposed by the Training Committee of the British Society during the years of the Controversies which we are commemorating are still a source of food for thought today, in spite of the fact that they belong to a specific past. I stress the importance of Strachey's ideas about an open psychoanalytic forum. This would not be the solution to all our problems, as crises and dissent are an inevitable part of the development of our discipline. However, the more transparent and the more informed we are about our past, and about the whole internal history of our discipline, including the wider cultural, scientific and socio-political context within which psychoanalysis developed and is developing, the better chance we have of understanding our present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author looks at some central psychoanalytic themes through the lens of literature. In literary criticism, it is clear that we construct a meaning with the help of certain formal principles. In literature, we also know that fiction differs from documentary or scientific prose. The literary critic thinks that, specifically in fiction, one may find new formal principles and, through that, new perspectives on reality. With the help of these literary constructs, the author looks at character, transference, therapeutic change and truth/reality in psychoanalysis. The argument is elaborated in relation to a clinical example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

abstract Isabel Menzies Lyth's seminal paper on social systems as a defence against anxiety is so well known and frequently cited that it risks acquiring mythic or legendary status. But what explains its phenomenal influence? In this contribution I suggest that it is a model example of the psychoanalytic case study, deriving its power from a deep engagement with organizational particularities as a basis for general theorizing. Its continued influence depends upon the way in which it is used to conceptualize new organizational experiences. An example from an institutional observation undertaken as part of an advanced social work training at the Tavistock illustrates this. Institutional observation is one of a range of non-clinical psychoanalytically informed methods of training at the Tavistock, and in the final part of the paper I discuss new applications of Menzies Lyth's work that aim to illuminate the irrational forces shaping modern social policy. Death and anxieties about death emerge as a subtext of the present paper, perhaps reflecting the fact that it was prepared as part of a memorial conference to Menzies Lyth herself, and also that the paper taught us to think better about death as an aspect of organizational experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can psychoanalysis learn from literary fiction? In this paper, I suggest that Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day sheds light on what Freud (1900), in The Interpretation of Dreams, calls the 'day‐residues'; those unnoticed memories and fragments of experience that in the dream come to be imbued with psychic significance. Ishiguro's unreliable narrator is the butler Stevens, whose desire for 'dignity' and 'greatness' ensures he has carefully erased any trace of feeling from the account he offers of his life and relationship with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper with whom he once worked. But what readers eventually come to know of Stevens, and what Stevens comes to know about himself, is gleaned less from what he says than from what he does not say. Drawing on Freud, Laplanche, Bollas and Barthes as well as a brief clinical example, I explore parallels between the inarticulate nature of the knowledge embodied in Ishiguro's novel and the tacit kind of knowing exemplified within the psychoanalytic transference. I conclude that literary fiction has the capacity to illuminate how psychoanalysis can accommodate and expand the borders of knowledge that is unspoken or inaccessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychedelic state can be thought about as an interdependent intrapsychic, somatic, interpersonal and spiritual happening which encourages, perhaps both to the relief and dismay of those participating in the experience, the shocking and impressive emergence of one's unconscious desires and traumata's; a state which may be experienced as cathartic or healing, and as anxiety‐provoking and confusing. Often, in clinical trials investigating psychedelics in mental health conditions, these go hand in hand. Amid a renewed, at times hyperbolic, interest in psychedelics as a potential treatment for mental ill health, significant gaps of knowledge remain. Additional studies exploring the impact of the extra‐pharmacological factors and adjunct therapeutic models on treatment outcomes are needed. Drawing from psychoanalytic perspectives, this paper explores points of intersectionality between psychedelic therapy under investigation and psychoanalysis in the context of traumatic stress. To that end, the psychedelic state will be considered an attempt to make the unconscious conscious by immersing self in a bewildering waking‐dream to better tolerate reality; immersing self in a wilful state of vulnerability, to develop trust in one's agency and capacity to trust others; immersing self in an indescribable experience to learn how to redescribe, to self and to others the traumatic past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes an analysis with a very difficult, emotionally inaccessible patient who, after more than a year, unexpectedly terminated the analysis, leaving the analyst with a sense of frustration due to incomplete and interrupted analysis. In the theoretical section of the paper, the author presents his understanding of the creation of such a pathological organization, starting with Freud's concept of death drive, then going on to Melanie Klein's and her successor's discoveries. John Steiner's concept of 'psychic retreat' helps us to understand the process of development of a pathological organization of personality. In the last part, the author describes how he works through mourning and prompts reflection on the reasons for the premature termination of the treatment by the patient. He indicates the causes in both the patient and the analyst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 7, on the patients apparent deadness and obsessionality, takes further Bergstein's conviction that nameless experiences, those that should have been registered and represented by the primary object, can still be registered (adequately for the first time) through the countertransference - thereby becoming tangible to the patient. One of the strengths of the book is how it combines a good balance of theoretical discussion with detailed work from Bergstein's encounters with his patients, which he uses to illustrate his argument. Bergstein also draws our attention to an important paper by Jim Rose ([8], p. 113), which is still under-recognized, and under-appreciated, but very relevant to the case Bergstein is making. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores psychoanalytic definitions of creativity and presents a creatively relational approach working with clients presenting with cultural issues and illustrates this with a clinical example. The author explores her personal and historical contribution to the countertransferential elements of this article using the autobiographical and ethnographical to examine the emergence of and dependence on creativity. Linking the arts and psychoanalysis, she elucidates the relationship between what is personal and what is political and asks the audience as they read to keep considering what might be personal for them. She reviews concepts of Winnicott and Klein's creative in psychological terms; that of an active demonstration of the ego being different from the creative as the production of an object, the commonality being the creation of a new stimulus. She considers a case example from a socio‐genetic perspective to demonstrate the creative as a response to trauma. Holding the view that an urgent need and therapeutic responsibility exists for new creative measures she concludes that it is in the articulation of the therapist's unconscious psychic reality where the potential lies to actively acknowledge and avoid the deepening of existing societal fissures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution is written in response to Helen Morgan's paper 'Whiteness: A problem for our times'. A distinctive feature of her writing and thinking in this essay, and her new book, is how she moves easily and freely between psychoanalytic, sociological, political and psychological frameworks of understanding. In doing so her work exemplifies something that the psychoanalytic community has mostly been poor at achieving – a recognition of both its distinctive and unique potential to illuminate social and political processes, and a parallel acknowledgement of its need to enter into equilateral dialogue with other intellectual paradigms. Social and political life is historical, specific, local and complex, and not amenable to reductionist or universalizing modes of analysis and engagement. Through some examples I aim to add to Helen's very thoughtful and well researched paper, to show how psychoanalysis needs to respect other languages and methodologies for engaging with the world, render its own more accessible to non‐specialists, and relinquish its tendency to assume the status of a 'master discourse'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author has researched the Zilboorg papers, the dialogued conversations, and made an excellent attempt to clear Zilboorg's name and bolster his place in psychoanalytic history. Zilboorg's daughter offers an intimate commentary of life in the Zilboorg households, both in Europe and in the United States, Mexico and South America. America became the refuge for European analysts who had been disinherited and exiled by the Nazis. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the three versions of Winnicott's most well known paper 'Transitional objects and transitional phenomena' published in the Collected Works of Donald Winnicott (2016) and traces the development of his ideas over a 20‐year period. It describes the changes in emphasis, the early inclusion and later exclusion of references from child therapy, and notes other omissions that contribute to a change of emphasis. It discusses the addition of two clinical cases in the text of the final version, which together with the introduction of the notion of 'paradox', demonstrate the shifts in Winnicott's own thinking following on extensive clinical experience and lively debate. The article argues for a different assessment of the meanings of the transitional object and the much more extended interest in transitional phenomena that emerges in line with Winnicott's own claim that Playing and Reality, his last book published posthumously, taken as a whole, constitutes a discussion of the significant theoretical and clinical implications of attention to transitionality and transitional phenomena as proposing a shift in the understanding of the analytic session, the analytic process and what analysis does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authors aiming to conceptualize a 'cognitive countertransference' continue to search for the most effective way to integrate psychoanalytic theory, and a coherent definition for such a concept. This paper first argues that authentic attempts at integration of the concept of transference into cognitive‐behaviourism require a return to seminal work on Übertragung (transference) and Gegenübertragung (countertransference). References to these terms throughout the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are discussed in the context of the overall progression in the work of both theorists. With regard to two fundamental psychoanalytic concepts that underlie a Freudo‐Lacanian understanding of transference – the unconscious and repetition – this paper subsequently explores how a Lacanian logic may inform the emerging 'cognitive countertransference' literature. This paper contextualizes such thinking within the ongoing psychoanalytic debate regarding the utility of the analyst's participation in the transference relation. Ultimately, this paper argues that a cognitive countertransference may be redundant in favour of an understanding of shared cotransference, or transference relation, which begets simple theoretical conclusions, and technical recommendations. Implications for cognitive‐behavioural theory and practice are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows my previous paper in the Journal in 2018, which examined Hanna Segal's theory of symbol‐formation and the various modifications she made to it. In this paper it is argued that the specific functions involved in symbol‐formation need to be examined for which fails. To use one thing (a symbol) to represent another requires a kind of suspension of reality; to take one thing as if it were really another underpins the capacity to represent. And yet it does not invalidate the knowledge that the symbol has a separate existence of its own. There is a double relation to the symbol – which is a mark on a piece of paper, and is also the thing it represents. I have termed this the 'as‐if' function that is needed in order to use symbols and representations. It is also the precise location of failure in symbolic equations, where the as‐if quality breaks down into a simple mistaken identity of the symbol with its referent. This addition to Freud's list of ego‐function involved in the reality principle is crucial to the development of representation, and ultimately of the capacity for civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colm Tóibín's novella The Testament of Mary (2013) offers a provocative re‐imagining of the Virgin Mary's life 20 years after the crucifixion of her son Jesus. Drawing on Richard Kearney's notion of anatheism or a 'return to God after God', I use the fictive space opened up in Tóibín's version of the Gospel as a spur to understanding the way in which faith may be conceived of as wager within both fiction and psychoanalysis. Discussing how the reception of the artistic message requires the same spirit of hospitality as does the encounter with alterity within the psychoanalytic relationship, I argue that in both cases we are faced with an existential moment of choice that requires a whole‐hearted willingness to engage with otherness. The implications of Tóibín's story for psychoanalytic work are then explored with reference to developmental processes outlined by Winnicott (1971) in his paper 'The use of an object'. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the significance of testimony within psychoanalytic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume, the 11th in the series "The Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis" (begun in 2009), is different because it specifically focuses on interpretation in couple and family psychoanalysis from a cross-cultural clinical perspective. Couple and family psychoanalysis, however, enlarges psychoanalysis's perspective by virtue of its focus on the intersubjective social world. Many books and papers have been written on the subject of interpretation, widely regarded among psychoanalytic practitioners as a principal (but not sole) agent of therapeutic change. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the issue of assisted suicide in relation to disabled people from a psychosocial perspective. The implications, particularly the unconscious implications, for disabled people and for the psychosocial dynamics around disability if assisted suicide was made lawful in the UK are explored. Assisted suicide is the subject of persistent attempts at legal change and while not, in theory, specific to disabled people, the issue brings some of the psychosocial dynamics around impairment and disability into focus, illuminating the attitudes and emotions with which disabled people must try to live. Psychoanalytic ideas in relation to trauma, loss, mourning and containment are drawn upon with particular reference to the work of Freud, Klein, Bion and more contemporary thinkers such as Garland, Sinason and Rustin. The paper draws on three texts by disabled people in order to explore emotional responses to profound impairment. Attachment theory helps in considering varying narrative styles. Disability studies literature and legal, social and political contextual issues inform the psychosocial perspective applied in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I reflect on and argue for the importance for our profession of the issues I address in the book I wrote on clinical research, Research on the Couch: Subjectivity, Single Case Studies and Psychoanalytic Knowledge. Psychoanalytic theories, often dismissed when first proposed, have been subjected to more serious critical attack for several decades, and thoughtful responses need to be given. This paper summarizes some of my thinking (and that of others) around two issues which constrain the parameters of psychoanalytic research and on which some believe psychoanalytic research has foundered. The first is the problem of subjectivity in contrast to the bedrock of objectivity in the natural sciences; and the second is the inappropriateness of large sample research (as used by many experimental psychologists) for the task of investigating the nature and effectiveness of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts have to rely instead on single cases. Brief accounts are given here of research paradigms appropriate to the investigation and validation of psychoanalytic theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking up Bion's idea of a continuum between the psychotic and non‐psychotic parts of the mind, this paper looks at clinical moments where the primitive part – psychotic and 'autistic‐contiguous' – mimes language and takes over the analytic field. The patients discussed seem to intuit the analyst's blind spots and a pseudo‐language takes over as primitive parts of the patient collude with those of the analyst. The three patients discussed here use registers of speech which vary from over‐abundant to quicksilver and dried. However, it is not as much a communicative use as it is evacuative and adhesive. Verbal language offers familiar moulds in terms of unfree associations, pre‐existing narrative structures, syntax, figures of speech (symbols, metaphors, paradoxes) and common psychoanalytic tropes (dreams, primal scenes). Primitive parts of the mind nestle in these moulds rather than disturb them. It is only through examining the countertransference and abjuring collusions that the analyst may be able to contact the terrifying or enclosed parts in the field. 'Death', for instance, represents the limits of language and as it is unpacked, it comes to acquire a range of meanings which allow the recovery of thinking. I have tried to demonstrate the experience of verbal language as a seductive screen that analyst and analysand collaboratively create to make bearable the incomprehensibility of the encounter. In doing this what emerges is a 'thick description' that helped and reflects on different kinds of collusion. The paper tries to capture the experience of collusion as well as a return from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hikikomori is a child, an adolescent or a young adult who voluntarily retreats into his own home for long periods, not showing evident signs of psychological distress or overt mental disorder. This phenomenon was first described in Japan, but several research studies show that it is spreading in many countries around the world. The author hypothesizes that the decision to become a hikikomori is made by the person in an attempt to find a solution to difficulties in relationships with himself and with others. The choice of reclusion rapidly becomes a trap: in this condition the individual is imprisoned in complex functions of the mind which curb and restrict independence and personal autonomy. This is owing to the fact that, with the withdrawal, a pathological personality organization, formed during the years of early infancy, gradually takes control of the internal world, pushing towards anti‐developmental mental states and behaviours. The paper continues with some reflections on individual treatment with psychoanalytic psychotherapy of adolescents and young adults in a state of acute social withdrawal. The reference model used is John Steiner's notion of 'psychic retreat'. A description of a four‐year treatment completes the paper, allowing for further clinical reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired in part by a paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy by the psychoanalyst Malcolm Pines, describing the Cambridge and Bloomsbury background of the psychoanalyst, Adrian Stephen, in this paper I draw on the writings of his older sister, Virginia Woolf, and on other data as means of highlighting and explaining aspects of his life and work. In particular, I discuss his rebellion against their father, Leslie Stephen; his subsequent rebellion against authority before and during the First World War; and his involvement in psychoanalysis and politics during his medical and psychoanalytic training in the 1920s. I go on to explain how his opposition to tyranny informed his approach to psychoanalysis as means of freeing patients from the control exerted over them by their phantasies. And I show how, during the Second World War, he resisted dominance by Ernest Jones and Edward Glover of the British Psycho‐Analytical Society, and how in his post‐war clinical work he extended Freud's moral version of the super‐ego into an account of it as a wish‐fulfilling agency of the mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hanna Segal's original paper in 1957 on symbol‐formation is a classic. It makes clinical observations of concrete symbolic equation and theorized the contrast with normal representation. In the process of developing the most accurate and most useful theory of symbol‐formation that psychoanalysis possesses, Segal brought the psychoanalytic symbol into connection with the wider meaning of symbols in linguistics and other academic disciplines. It is less well known that she modified the theoretical conceptualization of her observations in the light of Bion's development of the theory of container‐contained. Perhaps because of the clinical usefulness, little serious criticism has been made of either the original theory or its modification. In this paper, an appraisal will be made of these major conceptualizations. This paper looks again at the theory she used to make the distinction between normal symbols ‘proper’, or representations, and the concrete symbolic equation associated with the primitive or psychotic defences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has been five years in the making, since I have run a series of seminars about poetry and psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic for non‐clinical students. The title comes from a poem by John Berryman (1914–72), ‘Dream Song 29’ ( , p. 77), and it sums up how in this seminar we have tried both to feel what we feel in an authentic way when reading a poem, and think about the links it may have with the central core of the students’ study, which is psychoanalysis. Are the two disciplines in any way complementary? Can unconscious phantasy be tapped into via the medium of poetry? In this paper I hope to show that while there are profound differences between poetry and psychoanalysis there are also similarities, as the work with students has highlighted. I also include three brief clinical vignettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Anglo‐American group of analysts recently dialogued on the theoretical differences in the work of W.R. Bion and D.W. Winnicott. This group heard keynote papers (Hinshelwood and Caldwell) that surveyed the work of Bion and Winnicott, which were commented upon (Oelsner and Goldberg). Preceding this event was an all‐day, Tavistock Group Relations Conference, in which half of the attendees (N=35) participated in varying group experiences that focused on the analysts’ ‘group selves’ as a needed fourth leg to their traditional tri‐partite training. In this regard, the implicit authority structure of having British analysts give keynote papers to a group of American analysts came under examination. The organizers of the Regional Bion Symposium (Aguayo and Lundgren) both introduced this work, then compared some of Bion and Winnicott's key differences: these findings both verged towards and away from each other. While both theorists moved the psychoanalytic ‘internal world’ paradigms of Freud and Klein in an intersubjective direction, each did so in a distinctive way. Lastly, the conference organizers comment on how the structure underlied the freedom of attendees to articulate diverse views in the context of the analyst's individual and group identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a brief résumé of Winnicott's approach to psychoanalysis through a reading that emphasizes his interest in the capacity to be as a fundamental acquisition of human subjectivity. This interest continued throughout his life. The paper argues that it is closely related to his interest in analytic communication and the emphasis in his paper ‘Communicating and not‐communicating leading to a study of certain opposites’ of the importance clinically of the patient's right not to communicate and the analyst's acceptance of it. It refers briefly to the richness of the arena opened up by his idea of the incommunicado self and its implications for both theory and practice. Three clinical vignettes are included to demonstrate Winnicott's way of working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Marie Cardinal's autobiographical novel The Words to Say It (1975), I explore how a somatic disturbance mysteriously located in utero represents an ‘après‐coup’, a second time experience of ‘what is already there’. The titles of both the book and this paper suggest that words hold a transformative power – an emotional re‐education for the fragmented subject. The ‘Thing’ refers on the one hand to the author's distressing illness: her continuous menstrual bleeding, for which there is no medical explanation. In order not to succumb to her ‘madness’, Marie decides to start psychoanalysis. From being utterly prostrated in darkness, Marie painfully remembers, repeats and reconstructs a piece of her early history (a ‘truth’) she had forgotten. Eventually, as the flow of words replaces the flow of blood, Marie ‘learns to name her ghost’ and is rewarded with a new sense of ‘self’. On the other hand, the ‘thing’ refers to the Freudian concept of thing‐presentation and word‐presentation. It concerns the processes by which an unconscious ‘thing’ which couldn't be symbolized becomes conscious once represented in words. The paper is inspired by French psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper constructs a practical conceptual bridge between reading and psychoanalysis across the divide of one- and two-person psychologies. Using literary examples from the writings of Samuel Beckett that correspond to the working through of internalized traumatic experience, the paper links contemporary psychoanalytic concepts including Bion's container<>contained and Bollas' evocative object, with the small grained 'd' arrivals embedded within the larger movements of the psychological shuttle between P/S<>D. These clarifications of meaning are discernible both within psychoanalysis and in evocative reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current age of social media, the boundaries between the online and the offline, the personal and the professional, have become blurred and ambiguous. This poses significant challenges to the practice of psychoanalysis, which for a long time has been thought of as a technology‐free and private space. This paper compares how social media impacts therapeutic relationships in the broader field of psychotherapy and in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in particular. Direct breaches in therapist privacy were found to be more frequent with non‐psychoanalytic psychotherapists due to therapists' higher online presence. Psychoanalytic psychotherapists, on the other hand, generally have a lesser online presence because of different views on therapeutic anonymity from other clinical orientations. The author suggests that this leads to different forms of virtual impingements: due to the absence of psychoanalytic therapists' online presence, patients seek to re‐create therapists (and, by extension, therapeutic situations) on a virtual level rather than discover something that was already 'put out there' by therapists. Virtual manifestations of anonymity, splitting, and solipsistic introjection processes are discussed with reference to John Suler's concept of the online disinhibition effect. Further recommendations for research on social media impact are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 2013 paper, Udo Hock (p. 942) attempted to give a balanced synthesis of the current state of a major French debate - with Laurence Kahn as one of the key participants - for an international audience. Since we are then all set to flounder in relativity, this, Kahn suspects, will be well suited to an approach in which the psychoanalyst and the patient are co-equals in a shared postmodern quest for meaning (p. 9). Kahn is not slow to indict this development as a betrayal of psychoanalysis as conceived by Freud, and applies herself to trace the various historical waves of rendering psychoanalysis more consonant with contemporary thinking styles. [Extracted from the article]

This paper discusses the benefits and the challenges of running a specialist psychoanalytic project in the community in the current economic and political climate. As the founder and clinical lead of the Psychosis Therapy Project, an Inner London service for people who experience psychosis, the author reflects on the pitfalls currently facing the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis and exposes the ideological violence underlying the dominant model of recovery and rehabilitation in mental health care. From her frontline perspective, she recounts the devastating impact of social exclusion and discrimination on the welfare of those living with severe mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a return to a key moment in the development of Kleinian psychoanalysis in post-war Britain, focusing on the Kleinian clinic of psychosis during the period. Through a reconsideration of a seminal paper by Hanna Segal, it seeks to address the following question: given the originality of Klein and her colleagues at that time, why did they adopt such a rigid approach to innovation in the clinical treatment, if not the theorization, of the psychoses? By focusing on some of the ways in which extra-clinical factors, especially the institutional politics from within which the Kleinian clinical orientation was forged, this paper hopes to contribute to a broader understanding of certain factors influencing the emergence of distinctive theoretical and clinical cultures. Making use of insights from philosopher of science Ian Hacking in conjunction with Segal's own notion of 'symbolic equations', it is argued that there is a 'symbolic equation' in the Kleinian failure, at the time, to metaphorize or interpret Freud's technical prescriptions for psychoanalysis, resulting in a symbolic equation between their clinical technique and the hypothesized symbolic equations of their patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esther Bick introduced psychoanalytic infant observation courses at the Tavistock Clinic in London in 1948 as part of the training for child psychotherapists in order to facilitate clinical training. She thought that being able to observe infantile processes as they developed was a good grounding for psychoanalytic practice, and noted that it was helpful for mothers to have someone visiting who could admire and appreciate their baby. Since then, there has been considerable writing and some research about the value of infant observation to trainee psychotherapists (Sternberg, ), but relatively little has been written about the effect of being observed in this way. Watillon-Naveau () wrote about the families she visited after they had been observed; Bekos () did an MA study of three observed mothers. Both concluded that it was an important experience for the observed. This paper endeavours to understand more about what exactly can be perceived in the interrelated and intersubjective communication and feedback loops between the infant, their primary carers and the observer. The author argues for the theoretical possibility of healthy narcissism and for projective identification being a reactive process. The paper considers what learning from infant observation can offer psychoanalytic theory and what clinical implications could be drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to present Jean Laplanche's interpretation of the Freudian field as one that is driven and shaped by opposing gravitational pulls. These he represents by developing Freud's analogy of the Copernican and psychoanalytic revolutions to demonstrate the successive decentrings and recentrings of the human subject in relation to a primal and formative other at the level of a psychoanalytic theory that is itself alternately both 'Copernican' and 'Ptolemaic'. In doing so, he replicates those movements at work at the level of the formation of human subjectivity. Focusing on Freud's shifting conceptions of the unconscious, the drive and the id, this paper seeks to show how Laplanche radicalizes certain 'Copernican' elements of Freud's metapsychology to establish the primacy of the other and the dimension of 'primal seduction' in concepts intended by Freud to decentre the narcissistic illusions of the ego, but which are captured by regressive movements of thought, retreating to 'Ptolemaic' conceptions of an endogenous, biologically grounded development of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (WT) as foundation narrative for attachment‐informed psychotherapy, and a counterpart to Oedipus Rex (OR), covering similar psychological territory but in a strikingly different way. Both start with a father's rejection of a baby and its rescue and adoption by distant shepherds. Both revolve around murderousness and desire in a mother–father–child triangle, but in WT the prime mover is filicide rather than parricide. WT points to the positive aspects of the care‐giving dynamic. The main characters of WT, in contrast to OR's phallocentrism, are the rejected Queen Hermione, her handmaiden Paulina and Perdita herself. Their relationships are characterized by attachment security: this gives Paulina the courage to confront and instigate mentalizing in Leontes, the psychotic king, and for Perdita to find her sexuality through her transgressive love for Florizel. The environmental benefits of adoption are highlighted as WT's tragi‐comic dynamic moves from chaos to renewal and rebirth: Hermione survives the 'attack on the good object'; Leontes recovers from his jealous hatred and subsequent depression; ruptures are repaired. WT depicts secure attachments as bulwarks against loss, and the key to resilience in the face of trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now an extensive and highly developed literature within psychoanalysis on how best to understand the patients we work with, and their impact on the analyst or therapist, but far less on the mind of the clinician and how he or she thinks while working with the patient. One method for studying this, the Comparative Clinical Method developed by a group of European psychoanalysts, consists of a two‐step model: after a careful description of the interventions made by the analyst, an attempt is made to construct what is taken to be the analyst's implicit working model, the internal template which he or she tacitly employs to conduct the analysis. In this paper I describe this model, which I then illustrate by taking a piece of published clinical material to show what an approach based on the Comparative Clinical Method might look like. Finally I make some comments on applying this model to the work of psychoanalytic psychotherapists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing studies in psychoanalysis have been broad and progressive, and have dealt with a number of different phenomena. Many thus foster the identification of intersubjective aspects that characterize therapeutic relationships today, including enactments. The concept of enactment first appeared in the literature in the mid‐1980s and was defined as a manifestation where, in the analytic situation, both analyst and patient unconsciously 'play out' psychic conflicts that must be worked out therapeutically. Resulting from unconscious forces activated mutually by the members of a therapeutic dyad, enactments are characterized by transferential and countertransferential dynamics. They are based on the mechanism of projective identification, which is interpersonal and intersubjective. In preparing the present systematic review, PUBMED, PsycINFO and LILACS databases were consulted, a process that generated a total of 59 articles. This paper gives an account of articles published on enactment, including authors, journals, year, type of study and diagnoses, as well as the gender and age bracket of patients mentioned in the literature investigated. We specifically describe how the authors of the respective articles understand and identify the concept of enactment and how they deal with this phenomenon in their clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a condensed version of psychodynamic interpersonal therapy (PIT), Psychodynamic Interpersonal Empathy (PI‐E), which consists of the first level of competencies of the PIT model. The intention is to use basic psychodynamic principles and skills to enhance delivery of manualized, cognitive therapy based treatments. The intervention is designed to improve two common factors of therapy: the bond between client and therapist, and the ability of the therapist to create positive expectations through an explanation and understanding of the person's problems. Both of these so‐called common factors are consistently associated with clinical outcomes. Training has been developed specifically for low‐intensity therapists who are employed in the Improving Access to Psychological Treatment programme. Training focuses upon five basic components of PI: negotiation; picking up cues; using statements rather than questions; focusing on feelings; and understanding hypotheses. When used skilfully together, these simple components offer a powerful way of empathizing and deepening the collaborative work with the client. They all help the therapist to focus upon how the client is feeling ‘here and now’ in the session. Training in the model has the potential to improve outcomes and reduce dropout rates by enabling therapists to manage problem scenarios in an empathic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using material from clinical practice and social research, this paper examines the many connections between the analysis of ressentiment provided by Nietzsche and Scheler and recent psychoanalytic analyses of grievance. Psychoanalysis has been particularly insightful regarding the process of ‘nursing’ grievance, something which illuminates both the righteousness of the anger involved and the yearning for an idealized past. It is argued that in their different ways both analyses explore blocked responses to perceived injustice and, whilst the emphasis in both cases is essentially upon how existential reality itself can be experienced as an injustice, Scheler's analysis also provides us with a way of understanding how ressentiment can be a response to real social injustices. Indeed social ressentiment is now widely regarded as the affective foundation of reactionary forms of populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will identify why and how Bion's ideas about dream-work and alpha-function evolved, and the profound implications of this development for what he calls 'practical psychoanalysis'. Andre Green interestingly comments that for Bion the 'model of the dream' was unusually more important than the 'model of the baby'; and I will consider in particular the question of 'models', and their relation to the making of the accurate observations of unconscious functioning we need to underpin our analytic work. It is hoped the paper will contribute to the clinically relevant question of whether there is an important link between Bion's 'alpha-function' and mentalization theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to summarize the evolution of interest in the concept of mentalization which has been researched and enriched by the linking of many disciplines alongside that of psychoanalysis and attachment theory. Taking into account the work of Professors Fonagy and Target and many others, the paper describes factors that enable the development of the capacity to mentalize and those that interfere. It will consider how the quality of attachment affects the transformation of pre-mentalized modes of experience to the recognition of psychic reality of self and other. While mentalizing is part and parcel of all therapies, a mentalization-based therapy was developed in the context of treatment of borderline personality disorder patients by Professors Bateman and Fonagy. The paper will illustrate key concepts in the theory of mentalization with the vignette taken from clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every psychotherapist working in the challenging field of the addictions is familiar with patients who yo-yo between extended periods of abstinence from substances, or other compulsive and non-substance-based addictive behaviours, and who then lapse or relapse to compressed periods of excessive substance misuse, the so-called binge episode. In this paper we reverse the lens of theoretical focus somewhat, from its more traditional position within the clinical field of addiction. We suggest that periods of abstinence from substance misuse, or other compulsive behaviours, may also represent a type of binge-like behaviour which satisfies, for a time, core needs though which may also invariably be non-sustainable if the underlying psychodynamic processes underscoring such repetitive abstinence binges are not explored and translated, in work with the patient. Linkage will also be made between poles of experience that addicted and substance abusing patients evince, which are here termed black holes (Sweet, ) and white holes (Miller, personal communication, 2015). These proposed intra-psychic structures are, it is asserted, intimately related to the ability, or not, of the individual to bear psychological pain and distress, tolerate separation from objects at both an inter-personal and intra-psychic level and to delay gratification of instinctually grounded desires and wishes. The authors reference Hopper's () previous description of both black holes and white holes in the addictions, and Glasser's () conception of the black hole in relation to perversion and his description of the 'core complex', drawing out both similarities and differences in the viewpoints presented. Key ideas in the paper are illuminated and contextualized through the presentation of a number of illustrative clinical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores connections between psychic retreats, particularly of the kind described in Richard Carvalho's paper, and certain other defences rooted in early relational trauma (Schore ). After distinguishing between Carvalho's theory and John Steiner's () original formulation, the paper describes Schore's () work on infantile dissociation and draws attention to the pre-symbolic processes that could form the basis from which the symbolic content of the psychic retreat develops. The paper underlines the connection between psychic retreats and secondary dissociative states of which psychic retreats constitute a distinctive class. It investigates the relationship between psychic retreats and Bick's () concept of the second skin defence. The paper goes on to explore theories that suggest that understanding the level at which patients are functioning is the key to the level of work we engage in. It provides clinical examples to illustrate some of the points made.[I have rec] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of what facilitates creativity in psychoanalytic work. Although creativity may seem to imply a creatively interpreting analyst/therapist, dictionary usage of the term 'creativity' supports an alternative reading. The author finds a more apt standpoint in the theory of the analytic site that Donnet has extrapolated from Freud's papers on technique. From this viewpoint, creativity in psychoanalysis is the autonomous or spontaneously flowing analytic process, and the factor that facilitates it is the carefully constructed and maintained setting, or site, and the patient's transformational introjection of it. A comparable standpoint applies to creativity in psychotherapy and psychodynamic social work. Provided that the setting/site proper to that treatment modality is adequately constructed and maintained, the psychoanalytical psychotherapy site and the even more radically different psychodynamic social work site can both be comparably introjected, resulting in each case in a spontaneously flowing or autonomous therapeutic process that is analogous to the analytic process. The author discusses the uniqueness of each 'site', and illustrates, from a once weekly psychotherapy, the patient's gradual, created/found encounter with elements of the psychoanalytical psychotherapy site and cumulative introjection of them to a critical point of metamorphosis that ushered in an autonomous therapeutic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author has written a paper about her sense of hopelessness in working psychoanalytically with two female patients. She found that these feelings were reflected in supervision through the parallel process. She was greatly helped by Betty Joseph's paper, 'Addiction to near death', where she found many similarities between that author's patients and her own. Eventually, through consideration of other literature and reflecting on her own experiences, she reached the conclusion that until she could allow herself to be immersed in this sense of hopelessness, it was not possible to genuinely connect with her patients. Any hope to be found, had to be reached through an authentic interaction, which means that the sense of hopelessness had to be tolerated for long periods of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author is using Bion's model of the digestive process, among other models, in order to think about how teaching of theory can be approached as a task and undertaken in practice. Beginning with the ideas of Plato, she discusses how new ideas may be best conveyed, and how psychoanalytic theory teachers (using the teaching of Melanie Klein's ideas here to make her points) may make what they teach acceptable and 'digestible' to students. She uses some material from a theory group as well as a baby observation group, and concludes that in group teaching the responsibility for the taking on and elaboration of ideas - a process of digestion - is shared by the teacher and by the group. As psychoanalytic workers need to be able to 'manage uncertainty' in daily practice, this state of mind can usefully also be held by the theory teacher. The process of digestion will vary according to the composition of any group, drawing out different facets of understanding in both 'teachers' and 'learners', and may well draw on other vertices beyond that of psychoanalysis. These links will aid the process of digesting ideas, and will also be evident in the author style, structure and content of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]