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"The Analyst's Vulnerability: Impact on Theory and Practice" by Karen J. Maroda is a book that presents the author's vision of psychoanalysis, specifically relational psychoanalysis, which emphasizes the importance of the analyst's vulnerability and personal experiences in the therapeutic process. The book explores the limitations of traditional psychoanalytic approaches, such as neutrality and anonymity, and argues for a more humanistic and interactive approach to therapy. While the author's perspective may not resonate with everyone, the book offers valuable insights and prompts readers to reflect on the role of the analyst in the therapeutic relationship. [Extracted from the article]

What if the author were to position herself as a liar? Not of conscious lying, but an ignorance of what is so close to our collective noses that as psychoanalysts we miss it. Drawing on Harari's (2011) description of liberal ideology, the author suggests that our contemporary psychoanalytic focus on feelings, countertransference, and intuition is more determined by our cultural era than generally recognized. It is suggested that prevailing ideology may at times serve a defensive function. The author discusses a 1970s clinical seminar in which Bion observes that the presenting analyst's attention to feelings is "excusing" the patient (and himself). A second example, from Bion's Cogitations (1991), underscores the complexity of being sensitive to a patient's feelings without gratifying narcissistic demands. A final example is taken from the author's work in which there was a pressure to allow the patient's infantile feelings to determine the analysis. It was subsequently recognized that neither the patient's feelings nor the analyst's understanding were the site of authority in the analysis. Rather, authority lies in the analytic process itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By its title, Dr. Waska's latest book indicates that it is a primer on Kleinian thinking. If one had a professional education in psychotherapy (as many therapists do nowadays) or even in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a therapist will welcome its refreshing creativity in doing Kleinian work as well as the easy language and brevity used to describe Kleinian theory. Waska, using a similar framework, suggests that the therapist listens to two types of wishes patients have in using PI. [Extracted from the article]

In fact, the author observes, "just as any other couple immersed in long-term and emotionally intense social interaction, a psychoanalyst and a patient can end up locked in a profound, or total, silence for long periods of time. Slowly the analyst came to interpret how her experience of helplessness and painful frustration had reflected reversed roles the traumatic-dissociated experience of Susan as a child "in relationship to her critical aggressive mother and to her distant but idealized father" (p. 117). Silence and Silencing in Psychoanalysis: Cultural, Clinical, and Research Perspectives, edited by Aleksandar Dimitrijevi'c and Michael B. Buchholz, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2021, 386 pp. [Extracted from the article]

Did Caldwell's physical reactions reflect aspects of the patient's mother's experience, her response to becoming pregnant with the patient so soon after the birth of her first child? By sensing and gathering bits and pieces of the patient's wordless experience, the analyst supports the patient's inchoate sense of I-ness. I Body as psychoanalytic object: Clinical applications from Winnicott to Bion and beyond i explores the role of the body in analysis from an object relations perspective. [Extracted from the article]

At the same time, Levine puts the responsibility for confronting possible compliant patient behavior firmly in the hands of the analyst. Levine acknowledges that such a mind body activity requires a great deal of the analyst. Levine speaks about a transformational analysis that results in an increased ability for the patient to be emotional, to represent that emotional experience and to put it into language. The book - I Affect, Representation and Language; Between the Silence and the Cry - i by Howard B. Levine provides an original and creative synthesis of psychoanalytic theory from Freud onward. [Extracted from the article]

Given some of the challenges beginning therapists experience in the development of their new roles, they may be more susceptible to becoming overwhelmed by their countertransference, lack the awareness to track all of the processes taking place in the therapy room (e.g., projective identification, transference/countertransference dynamics, etc.), and have a propensity to be pulled into enactments. This paper explores how therapy processes, client trauma, and clinician levels of experience intersect therapeutically with the dyad's identity features and may impact the therapist's ego functions. A case is discussed that explicates how racial identities in a dyad can create enactments resembling those of marked historic and cultural imbalances in Western society, taking away the minority therapist's ability to think and speak in English due to the intense projective identification and countertransference experience of inferiority and incompetence in the presence of a patient with various identities of privilege. The role of internalized racism within the minority therapist is also explored in rendering them unable to process the deeper dynamics evoked in the therapeutic and supervisory dyad with the patient when the patient used racially charged language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courage requires us to persist and persevere despite fear. We make choices everyday—some are courageous, and some are not courageous at all. This dimension of psychoanalytic work is significant, yet relatively neglected in the psychoanalytic literature. Maintaining a courageous stance as an analyst can be challenging and threatening. Often, the therapist faces deeply rooted fears about abandonment, envy, competition, anger, or other forms of intense emotional arousal. This requires us to confront ourselves but also, at times, confront our patient's behaviors. It is crucial to think and act independently, and deal with their disapproval and opposition, despite the risks challenging patients present. Ultimately, we need to manage our vulnerable feelings while remaining authentic, rather than hiding behind an overly clinical stance. The author presents two patients who required and inspired the courage to face her own anxieties, ultimately contributing to the treatments' progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas the Viennese School adhered to a more masculine positivist and objective approach maintaining a rigid standard technique in practice, in contrast, the Budapest School propounded a more feminine style of technique with more activity, elasticity, relaxation where appropriate, intersubjectivity, and object relatedness. Kovács' central position in the Budapest School was underscored by the fact that she was designated as the manager of Ferenczi's scientific legacy after his untimely death. Anna Borgos introduces the reader to the burgeoning psychoanalytic scene in Budapest in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement. At that time the Budapest School was one of the most active psychoanalytic research and training centers along with Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich. [Extracted from the article]

Nonetheless, Eekhoff's book is a gift for Bion followers as well as both beginning practitioners and experienced analysts. Eekhoff beautifully describes the nearly unbearable pain that the analyst must absorb from the patient, if and until the patient's experience can be mentalized and put into words. In her latest book, Judy Eekhoff takes the reader to the terrifying depths of unmentalized states of mind in certain patients that have suffered childhood abuse or neglect. [Extracted from the article]

One of the crucial differences between Ettinger and Butler is that for Ettinger the individual subject, male or female, of any gender, is informed by the feminine-maternal via its matrixial subjectivity. Furthermore, to foreground Ettinger's implicit contribution to queer theory, for instance, I shall focus on the productive tensions between Ettingerian psychoanalysis and Judith Butler's social ontology, precisely to underline the critical, ontological, and epistemological questions that are at stake in Ettinger's theoretical and artistic practice. Keywords: Com-passion; Feminism; Lacan; Levinas; Aesthetics; Ethics; Matrixial; Bracha L. Ettinger EN Com-passion Feminism Lacan Levinas Aesthetics Ethics Matrixial Bracha L. Ettinger 466 484 19 12/09/22 20221201 NES 221201 Copyright comment Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. [Extracted from the article]

The use of the empathic mode for engaging and communicating with patients has become widely accepted by many psychoanalytic psychotherapists since Kohut's early formulations (Kohut, 1971; Atwood & Stolorow, 2014). However, diagnostic understanding based on ongoing empathic immersion with our patients is often complicated because it is continually being modified as we know them more deeply and as transference and countertransference factors influence our perceptions. To illustrate the complexity of diagnosis when it is grounded in ongoing empathic engagement with our patients, I describe in detail my treatment of an elderly woman who initially presented with severe and acute symptoms of psychological, cognitive, and physical impairment. As the treatment has progressed, my diagnostic understanding has been continually modified to include a combination of psychodynamic and organic factors including PTSD, intense unresolved grief, and extreme feelings of guilt and need for punishment. Adding further to this conundrum, I have been frequently challenged by my own responses to the fluctuations in her progress, especially to periods of hopefulness followed by periods of despair and regression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Ferenczi's views about the need for an adaptation of the analyst to the patient through a flexible management of time during some periods of the treatment and compares his ideas to the ones put forward by Bollas regarding day-long sessions that provide a new experience of care to the patient. The author argues that changes regarding the expansion of the analytic hour, adapting it to patients' needs, is an old but still valuable theme for experiencing the boundaries of clinical practice that also brings countertransference aspects into play. Clinical material is used to illustrate the discussion in a contemporary encounter with Ferenczi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors present transference-countertransference manifestations in these analytic environments and describe the patients' and therapists' struggles with their external and internal realities. Harris et al. highlight contemporary therapists' need to include the patient's and the therapist's mental, social, and natural ecology contexts in their basic analytic consideration of clinical issues. Contrarily, when sharing such experiences with the therapists, the patients experience what Stolorow ([17]) describes as self-validating "existential kinship-in-the-same darkness" (p. 50). According to these theoretical contributions, the patient and the therapist can achieve these analytic goals if they develop the capacity to tolerate the unknown and the uncertain, become receptive to each other's emotional states, and engage in a joint reflective process on their shared lived transference-countertransference experiences. [Extracted from the article]

Eekhoff clarifies that the narrative is "not the real story...because... What we say we cannot say without our own view of it....[It is] a story that approximates and contains and symbolizes the patient's experience" (Eekhoff, [7]). Eekhoff's persistent and containing presence, and Elizabeth's courage and resilience, helped to keep them on their often-painful journey, which ultimately led Elizabeth to find a life worth living (Winnicott, [15]). Eekhoff, keenly aware of how the patient's affective discharge can overwhelm the analyst triggering untimely interventions, cautions the analyst to avoid prematurely naming things so as not to "inihibit the transformational process of figurability (Botella & Botella, 2005) and impede Tranformations in O (Bion, 1965, 1970)" (Eekhoff, [7]). [Extracted from the article]

Scarfone considers how self development is deviated by the seduction of the enigmatic signifier implanted as a foreign body into the child's psyche representing an irritative spine that initiates a process of differentiation and structuring of libidinal and aggressive drive. Along the lines of Winnicott's ([32]) conception of the self being divided into true and false expressions of going on being, Scarfone suggests that along with the self's ongoing subjective experiencing, an aspect of the self is engaged in moments of going on becoming which he calls subjectality. In a Cartesian manner, we might consider that forced intromission presents the immature self with overwhelming trauma that is managed by ego defenses such as dissociation, negation, denial, and disavowal, while the trauma of the implantation is managed by more mature defenses, and more readily available for representation. The 2020 Vancouver Conference: I The Aftermath of Trauma i , brought into focus for discussion, the nature of the trauma and its impact on the developing self. [Extracted from the article]

This paper highlights the role of music in psychic change through a clinical case. A patient, who was initially distant and cold, started to talk about music. An enactment around the analyst's comment about a famous conductor, started an exchange of music "notes" that changed the course of treatment. For the analyst, it brought old memories and musical reveries. For the patient, music allowed him to be in touch with undiscovered parts of himself and losses that had not been mourned. There was a mutual personal transformation and expanding awareness of self and other for both participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we know, Sándor Ferenczi compared the analytic and adoptive relationships as the psychoanalyst exercises a parental role to some extent. The author notes that a commonality between the adoptive relationship and the analytic one is that if the parental couple is burdened with painful counter-transferential experiences and feelings that have not been worked through, these can pose a danger for the strength of the newly developing parental relationship. In the analytic situation the analyst's position implies the risk of conflict with the parental internal objects resulting from the primary introjections, especially if the original environment was abusive or severely neglectful. Similarly, the adoptive family is often burdened with revengeful and competitive aggressiveness of their own introjected parental objects, having as a main task to keep unified the pre-adoptive autobiographical memories that were dissociated and interrupted. In such cases it is very important to give the adoptive parents help so as to cope with their difficult "countertransference," supporting them to reduce their sense of guilt and unsuitability to nurse their children, especially if the adoptive parents feel guilty because of their own infertility. In this paper the author describes two cases concerning both situations, emphasising the clinical risks and the evolutionary potentialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vera, a middle-aged, bright and skillful mental health professional, consistently maintained throughout the first years of her analysis that she had no imagination and, indeed, exhibited during the early years of work a limited, stunted capacity for truly abstract symbolic thinking, emotional expression and playfulness. I report developments within the fourth year of Vera's psychoanalysis, currently in its eighth year, during which Vera spontaneously began to draw objects, at first copying and eventually drawing from imagination. For a time, Vera was critical of her work, which was actually quite good, and experienced great difficulty acknowledging and appreciating the many internal dimensions and interests that her work revealed. This watershed development required an equally gradual "interpretive welcoming" on the analyst's part so as to contain Vera's transition from preoccupation with concrete, technical aspects of her drawings toward a more mature thirst for the aesthetic, symbolism and play. At some point, analysand and analyst began to play with cognate associations surrounding the Hebrew word for art—o'ma'nut—combined with the image of the nursing mother (o'me'net), and fidelity, trust and faith (e'mu'nah). This creative countertransference enactment eloquently reflected the spectrum of shared transformative aesthetic-imaginative processes within both analytic partners, or the emergence of the dyadic psychoanalytic artist. Discussion elucidates what has been achieved and what remains to be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous work I tried to show how a parent's traumatic experiences can weigh on the following generations, approaching these phenomena in terms of introjection and incorporation. Traumatized patients who inherited such burdens suffered a block of their vital abilities, and are then challenged to later acquire the ability to symbolize what had remained unelaborated by previous generations. Accidental impressions, foreign to the patient's story, possibly a result of a certain pre-understanding of the patient's unconscious communications, emerge in countertransference and may reveal hitherto unexpressed dimensions, dissociated psychic areas of the patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borgogno ([1]) revisits the Freud/Ferenczi duality, which, after Ferenczi's death in [9], resulted in the fifty-year-silencing of Ferenczian thought. Ferenczi had already formulated his own original theory of psychopathology prior to his meeting Freud, as is evident in his discussion in "The Effect on Women of Premature Ejaculation in Men" (Ferenczi, [5]). Like Lamarck before him, Ferenczi considered that environmental pressures impact the development of the individual's characteristics (see Correspondence of Freud-Ferenczi, [11]-1919). Ferenczi was swayed by Freud's elegant theorizing and his metapsychogical model of the mind, and experimented with active technique, collaborating with Freud in a fruitful interchange of correspondence, which fueled their mutual creative geniuses. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper I ask what an investigation of the Budapest model of supervision may add to our psychoanalytic imagination. The Budapest model confronts us with a number of crucial questions for contemporary psychoanalysis, including the question of envisioning ways of working on the countertransference of the analyst. I discuss the lack of memory that surrounds the Budapest model, and I read it in relation to the unsettling issues it stirs up, including those of authority, horizontality, and the ethics of psychoanalysis. In the Budapest model, supervision can be seen as a form of "double dreaming" or of "dreaming up of a dream". In particular, in drawing on the writings of Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint, I point to some principles behind the Budapest model and to the epistemic, technical, and ethical implications of their ideas. I also work toward a Ferenczian "translation" of the idea of "parallel process". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a treatment relationship that tests the analyst's capacity for empathy within an impinging political context. It involves a Ferenczian "relaxation of technique" within the analytic frame, while the analytic couple attempts to negotiate a polarized transference and countertransference. Specifically, within a long-term treatment imbued with positive transference, my patient becomes openly outraged by my insensitive anti-Trump remarks. Increasing confrontations around the expression of political views illuminate our otherness. He complains of psychic ostracism within a liberal cultural context, which tolerates no divergence from mainstream liberal ideas or discourse. I come to embody the oppressive other: the liberal "thought police", "silencing" him for his perspective. Empathic breaches between us take center stage: how I don't see the world as he does, and don't see or hear him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on the works of psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi on topics including transference and introjection, mutuality, and primary maternal preoccupation.

Benedict came for treatment because he experienced severe self-deprecating feelings that tortured him. He felt commanded—by what he characterized as internal demons—to kill himself. When he did not do so, he felt humiliated for having been a coward. Simultaneously, he reckoned that if he died his demons would be killed off, but that he would arise brand new. Because Benedict had already "killed off" several earlier therapists, he needed someone who could feel his pain, but would neither die from his emotional storms, nor give up on him. With considerable mutual work, he began to identify with my dogged determination to both survive his fierce attacks and to locate the source of the introjected demons that viciously attacked him (and others). When his emotionally-driven storms finally ebbed, he combined forces with me and began the ordeal of overcoming his fears and relinquishing his delusional system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ferenczi's appreciation of the inherently mutual nature of the analytic encounter led him, and many who followed, to explore the value of mutual openness between patient and analyst. Specifically, Ferenczi saw the analyst's openness as an antidote to his earlier defensive denial of his failings and ambivalence toward the patient, which had undermined his patient's trust. My own view is that, while the analyst's openness with the patient can indeed help reestablish trust and restore a productive analytic process in the short term, it also poses long-term dangers. In certain treatments it may encourage "malignant regression", where the patient primarily seeks gratification from the analyst, resulting in an unmanageable "unending spiral of demands or needs" (Balint, 1968, p. 146). I suggest that an analyst's "confessions", in response to the patient's demand for accountability, can sometimes reinforce the patient's fantasy that healing comes from what the analyst gives or from turning the tables on his own sense of helplessness and shame by punishing or dominating the analyst. In such situations, the patient's fantasy may dovetail with the analyst's implicit theory that healing includes absorbing the patient's pain and even accepting his hostility, thus confirming the patient's fantasies, intensifying his malignant regression and dooming the treatment to failure. When malignant regression threatens, the analyst must set firmer boundaries, including limits on her openness, in order to help the patient shift his focus away from expectations of the analyst and toward greater self-reflection. This requires the analyst to resist the roles of rescuer, failure, or victim—roles rooted in the analyst's own unconscious fantasies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ferenczi's striving for mutuality, a call which Freud didn't take up, let him explore this concept with his analysands. He thus became the originator of mutual analysis, although with caveats, and of the concept of introjection, another important Ferenczian notion. The analyst's attitude of knowing the 'objective' and independent Truth is changing its orientation into that of a co-construction in the analytic work; here the analyst and the analysand build a third internal world, which they share and which remains their own. Clinical vignettes illustrate the implications of these views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ferenczi (1929) writes about the unwelcome child who is not ushered into this world with care and grows up in the grip of the death instinct, with a depressive streak and a weakness in the capacity for life. Andre Green's (1986) concept of the dead mother describes a similar phenomenon, by which the image of a loving mother is transformed into an inanimate, dead parent. The absent mother becomes the negative, which will then take up a central position in the child's psyche. Winnicott (1956) describes a different maternal participation, and proposes that towards the end of her pregnancy the ordinary devoted mother develops a psychological condition which he calls primary maternal preoccupation, the main feature of which is the mother's heightened attunement to her baby at the expense of all else. I suggest that there is a potent and clinically relevant connection among these concepts: a depressed or damaged mother can still provide temporary devotion before reverting back to a state of depressive absence and that, conversely, even the devoted mother will eventually recover from the state of primary maternal preoccupation and begin to tend to other matters, and the mother's reclaiming herself can be traumatic for the child even under the best of circumstances. The connection among these concepts is illustrated with clinical material, including transference and countertransference implications, from the treatment of a young woman who grew up as an unwelcome child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author, who is of Palestinian heritage, revisits her treatment with a Jewish analyst, who is the offspring of Holocaust survivors. She demonstrates how the transference-countertransference matrix was both constructed and compromised by politics and intergenerational trauma, some aspects of which remained unconscious, others conscious; some of which were enacted, others analyzed. The analytic scene was a microcosm of world events in which "radioactive identifications" (Gampel, 1993, 1998; Gampel and Mazor, 2004) with political and historical issues affected the psychoanalytic situation, resulting in repeated enactments and, finally, an impasse that led to the premature termination of the treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author asks, “How long is the life of an intersubjective field?” She proposes that it is possible for the field to remain active and instructive even after formal sessions have ended: This occurs in her case of Carla, a young woman who terminates prematurely. Carla enters treatment in a downward spiral of severe trauma symptoms that began subsequent to her rape, a decade earlier. Although Carla’s symptoms diminish and the analysis continues to be productive, it suddenly ends in an impasse, leaving the analyst perplexed and feeling professionally insufficient. Months later, she has three dreams pertaining to Carla and her rape. Largely employing Jessica Benjamin’s recognition theory and her representation of the intersubjective third, as well as contemporary Bionian thinking, the paper depicts how countertransference dreaming is one example of how the intersubjective field can carry on the psychoanalytic function—even outside of formal treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harold F. Searles was one of the most gifted and innovative clinicians of psychoanalysis. His clinical work arouses interest on its own merit, as well as for the ways in which it shaped his highly innovative thinking. We can only imagine what special processes were developing in Searles’s inner world under the everlasting impact of his experience with psychotic patients and from his life in general. Searles focused extensively on how the psychotic individuals’ mental distortions impacted their capacity to form personal relationships in general, and the role of the analyst and countertransference in treatment. This unique viewpoint helped him sustain a creative commitment to psychotic patients, regarded by many as unsuitable for psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of somatic countertransference as a means of learning about the patient, about projective and adhesive identification and about the object relating nature of the most traumatized and withdrawn part of the personality. It assumes an elemental knowledge of British Object Relations and uses clinical material to illustrate the hypotheses that somatic countertransference is an indicator of a very elemental communication occurring from the aspect of the psyche that is united in a body mind or mind body. The paper assumes that this body mind was object seeking at birth and perhaps before. Because these early aspects of the personality are non verbal and non conceptual, the analyst must rely not only on the verbal material in a session but on the emotional and sensual experiences within the transference and the countertransference. Such reliance requires a faith in one’s own intuition without a certainty that one is “right.” Because speaking of such early experience is difficult, often writers and analysts appear more certain than they are. This is a hazard of this type of analytic work. What I am writing about is conjecture or imagination or dream, but I am suggesting that such dream work is a valuable tool for analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an intriguing topic for psychoanalysis: the concept of unconscious communication. Beginning with the concept of unconscious perception, it moves on to figurability and culminates with reverie. Auxiliary concepts, such as receptive unconscious, intersubjectivtiy, countertransferrence and empathy, are discussed in order to articulate the conceptual network on which theoretical arguments are based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are least two different but interrelated motivational systems in human beings both of which begin in infancy: the attachment system and the separate, but interacting, psychodynamic system. Each of these systems is the basis of transference. A major focus of the paper is the affect-regulating feature of the attachment system. Infants' emotional states can be well-regulated or dysregulated as they emerge in interactions with their primary caregiver. Aberrant interactions of dysregulation typically lead to the development of insecure or disorganized attachments. Rudimentary transference fantasies initially emerge as the child makes sense or meaning about such maladaptive interactions. Our complex minds comprise multi-determined, personally organized fantasies which include those derived from both the attachment system and the psychodynamic one. I present a clinical description of how these two transference fantasies intersect in the mental life of a patient. A clinical case is offered whose focus is on enactments, transferences, and countertransference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Songs that interrupt the psychoanalytic psychotherapist's countertransference reverie are invariably relevant and potentially useful. Like any other countertransference 'presence,' songs accompanying the narrative may contribute to understanding both patient and analytic process. Taking their intrusive, fecund, pesky presence one step further, song lyrics may be used as metaphor-saturated interventions, helping reach the well-defended patient. Five brief vignettes illustrate the process. Because we must learn to tolerate ordinary unhappiness, Blues music, a carrier of preconscious mythic themes (love and work), may prove especially useful, helping the patient indirectly embrace everyday wisdom, endure hard times, universalize misery, and see ourselves in the roomy mirror of metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working to establish analytic contact (Waska, 2007) with a patient involves the verbal act of interpretation. But, how one interprets and what we try to hold in words is not the same with each patient. Each patient requires, invites, provokes and responds to a unique mixture of interpretive elements or approaches. The projective identification process that is so often the bedrock of the transference, and therefore the catalyst of the counter-transference, forms the psychological climate between patient and analyst. Case material is used to explore a Modern Kleinian interpretive approach with both a very entrenched depressive position (Klein, 1935, 1940) patient and a very primitive paranoid-schizoid (Klein, 1946) patient. Both these individuals desired relief from their symptoms of anxiety, anger, emptiness, and guilt. But, their unbearable unconscious phantasies offered pathological security that they were familiar with and therefore they preferred the known internal trauma and chaos to facing the unknown and undefined reality of self and other that change, grief, and growth would bring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon his description of the early phases of the analysis of the second case of official supervision, the author illustrates in his work why this experience became a foundational moment in his formative trajectory as a psychoanalyst. Three important aspects are discussed: (1) the significant role his supervisor played in helping to manage and to confront the difficult dynamics of transference and countertransference that characterized the author's early years of analytic work with patients; (2) the transformative factors that opened up new avenues in the repetition and the original traumatic pathology put forward at great length by the patient; and (3) the making contact for the first time with that area of inter/intrapsychic phenomena that the author has since then explored widely and theorized about, under the name of relational dynamics governed by role-reversal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors, a Palestinian psychiatrist working in the West Bank and a Jewish American child psychiatrist in New York, report on varieties of problematic transference and countertransference phenomena observed among mental health clinicians and patients across the Israeli/Palestinian divide. Reciprocal transference and countertransference anxieties were asymmetrical, reflecting the broader power relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israeli clinicians' need to regulate and to silence Palestinian 'aggression'-either real or presumed-interfered with empathy, trust, genuine dialogue, and learning. The authors suggest that, to account for these findings, the psychoanalytic model of collective trauma must be integrated with motivational models from other disciplines in order to capture the roles played by social forces such as political propaganda, the silencing of social dissent, and longstanding historical agendas of military and economic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his contribution to the 1956 Roundtable, Leslie H. Farber asserts that what lies beyond theory and training is the ability of the therapist to know the patient, not just know about the person. This provides the possibility of meeting, the mutual encounter, which Buber calls the l-Thou relationship. Farber also explores the relationship of meeting to transference and talks about the importance of both speaking truthfully and the mutuality of the relationship to be defined in terms of human experience [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his contribution to the 1956 Round Table Discussion, Silvano Arieti outlines some ideas that he considers effective in working with psychically fragmented patients. He speculates that the most effective tool in such a treatment is the creation of a certain atmosphere, based on the transference-countertransference relationship. In the spirit of this atmosphere, communication can be reestablished, genetic interpretations are linked together and the patient has the potential to recover his social self by rebuilding trust in the l-Thou relationship. Arieti also addresses the importance of the analyst's faith in the actualization of the potentialities of the patient who is struggling with primitive mental processes [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the transfer and circulation of affects in Freud's first clinical case, 'Emmy Von N.' We are especially concerned to tease out the unconscious communication of affects within Freud's case study. In part, this is to contribute to an understanding of the relationship between affect and its representative, passionate, forms. In part, our close reading of the case study is also designed to contribute the recent debates about 'the problem of subjectivity'. In our reading of the course of Emmy's treatment and Freud's therapeutic interventions, we disclose the unconscious communication between them, especially involving the transfer of affects - with Emmy insisting on their passionate nature and Freud's attempts to undermine her passions. We argue that it is precisely through appreciating the unconscious exchange of affects and their passionate forms that Freud came to understand the possibility of new forms for those passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transference/countertransference (third space) analysis is considered to be central in the therapeutic effectiveness of the analytic process. Less emphasis has been placed on the actual experiences of analyst and analysand in the conflictual reenactment of third space experience and its resolution. This paper recounts the shared experience of a patient who was silent throughout most of the analysis, and my reaction, in fantasy and enactment, to this disturbing experience-both for him and for myself. I argue that it is the affective re-experiencing of past repressed trauma in the analytic space that has a therapeutic impact, leading to growth in the patient and also the therapist. I contrast Freud's emphasis on insight, making the unconscious conscious, with Ferenczi's suggestion that the therapeutic impact lies in the repetition of past traumatic experience in the analysis but with the possibility of a different outcome with a more benign object, leading to symbolic representation of repressed trauma. Re-experiencing and symbolization, in the third space, of past traumatic experience can be an exit point from the endless repetition of trauma in internal and external object relations, leading to a new beginning in the patient's life. Immersed in the experience of deadness in the analysis, which had become a dead womb, the struggle to remain alive and thinking led to a rupture out of the dead womb, like the Caesura of birth, into aliveness and the ability to mentalize what had previously remained unmentalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silence is a key to the unspoken world of the patient. Rather than interpreting silence as a defensive maneuver, the analyst may understand this disruption as a royal road to the patient's traumatic experiences. The author proposes to recognize traumatic silences in the analytic process and the transference as a re-experiencing of past, unpredictable traumatic affective states and memories. Silences in this context are both a repeat of a disconnecting experience as well as a manifestation of a silencing identification with the original silencer. The clinical material illustrates effects of a German mother's World War II (WWII) personal traumata and collective shame-based silence on her daughter's self and good object development. In the daughter's analysis, the patient and the analyst, who herself experienced similar WWII traumata, face the pain of trauma recovery and un-silencing. The author suggests that the deadening effect of past traumata may be reversed by an analytic process of re-membering and re-speaking for both the patient and analyst. This allows for a more transparent, subjective experience in the transference and a verbal integration of ego functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalisms promote the development of certain versions of subjectivity, certain character structures, defenses, transferences, and countertransferences. Foucauldian theories go only so far in being able to account for the way neoliberal versions of subjectivity are lived. The paper elaborates on the individual, group, and relational effects of social repudiations of vulnerability and dependency needs and describes the perverse effects of the widespread disavowal of the interdependence of privileged and marginalized populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present special issue highlights the individual contributions, innovative research and therapeutic interventions outside the office of two generations of psychoanalysts. Taking testimony; interviewing; documentary film-making; social activism; and direct clinical interventions in communities suffering disaster and chronic social trauma: these are among the varied kinds of innovative work presented by the contributing authors. A main theme emerging from the articles has to do with the challenges analysts need to be prepared for in extending interventions beyond the office. Flexibility and willingness to modify technique, in conjunction with faithfulness to the core psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious, transference and countertransference, are key to non-traditional clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the late psychosocial sequelae of extreme trauma and its impact on the Second Generation in Germany. The example of the short-term analysis of a Shoah survivor and his relationship to his son conducted in his home environment shows how psychic consequences of extreme traumatization and more particularly their unconscious transgen-crational transmission to the Second Generation mainly take place as part of unconscious "scenes". The concept of "scenic memory of the Shoah" goes beyond the classical type of transference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]