International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies最新文献

Western societies exact a tall order on women who choose to have children. Western norms include an unspoken critique of working women: Are you someone who prioritizes paid work over child caregiving, or do you prioritize child caregiving over work? This double objectification of women who are mothers is their double jeopardy. Although there are multiple jeopardies for those who are not of the dominant caste, for women, the greatest second jeopardy is that of a mother. I outline the jeopardy of being a woman in Western societies, focusing on the history of demonization, including a brief discourse on how psychiatry has perpetuated this demonization. I give historical reference to exceptional women of courage and strength, women who have not yet reached the public imagination. I outline the history of the idealization and vilification of mothers and its reach into the practices of parenting. I propose some solutions to resolve the problem of double jeopardy.

Psychoanalytic discourse in relation to the situation in historic Palestine is subject to both ideologically-based and anxiety-driven inhibitions and restrictions that conflict with the discipline’s claim to be able to “stay with” difficult issues, to “think the unthinkable”. This situation is understood as a social pathology, and its impacts are explored through a literature review (explaining the paper’s length). It considers works that directly seek to protect Zionism from its critics, and texts whose purpose is to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic concepts to the study of social injustice. The qualities of this contemporary discourse are considered alongside Freud’s comments on the conditions for freedom of thought within psychoanalysis, and the example he provided in his comments on politics and society. Rather than a psychoanalytic contribution to understanding an issue of public concern, the paper attempts to describe aspects of psychoanalytic culture itself. It aims to facilitate deeper reflection amongst clinicians, on both an individual and collective level, regarding their contemporary engagement with coloniality and the social responsibilities of the psychoanalytic community.

Antisemitism has been a persistent and growing prejudice for millenniums against the Jewish people. This paper offers a general theory of group hatred appliable to antisemitism and other religious or racial prejudices. Theories of prejudice tend either to postulate an internal psychic template of hatred that is projected or postulate a social origin of hatred that is internalized. Rather there is a dialectic where there is a reciprocal movement between internal and external. The tendency to hate and project is a part of the human psyche, here called internal racism. Anxieties which cannot be contained internally can be stabilized by large-group identity. When internal racism cannot be contained or the external social groups are weak, the result is pathological large-group formations. A distinction can be made between personal antisemitism in which the hatred is projected onto a known person and impersonal antisemitism in which hatred is projected into groups. A fairy tale by the brother's Grimm, “The Jew among Thorns” is used to illustrate a number of personal antisemitic attitudes. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged document that appeared in pre-revolutionary Russia, is used to illustrate impersonal antisemitism.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is one of the world's most persistent and intractable conflicts. Despite extensive and in-depth analyses to help understand and transform it, the parties have failed to reach sustainable peace. In this article, I extend group and family psychoanalytic theories to analyze the unconscious dynamics that potentially underlie this relationship, interpreting it in light of the biblical narrative of Abraham, his wives—Sarah and Hagar, and sons—Isaac and Ishmael. Using the above-mentioned framework, I interpret the Israeli–Palestinian conflict over land as an enactment of the archaic fraternal complex, whereby each sibling unconsciously entertains the fantasy of returning to the maternal womb and aspires to be the exclusive owner of maternal space and the mother's phallus. Consideration of the archaic fraternal complex dynamics offers psychoanalytically oriented mediators an additional tool to understand conflicts, especially land-related disputes. To work through intractable conflict, these mediators can help the belligerent parties perform the psychic work of trauma and primal mourning to stop enacting the fantasy of returning to the maternal womb and to accept symbolic castration. This work could contribute to the warring parties' ability to renounce their rigid ideological positions and seal new fraternal pacts under the aegis of the law of reason. Their fraternal complex would thus be transformed from archaic and talionic to symbolic and Oedipal.

Building Blocks (BB) is a psychoanalytically-informed mentalization-based dyadic approach addressing attachment deficits in birth parents and their children in the foster care system. Research shows that secure attachment depends on the caregiver's emotional availability and sensitivity to be a secure base for the child. Typically, different approaches are offered to improve parent behavior without focusing on building more securely attached relationships. In order to heal disrupted attachment between children in care and biological parents many didn't “know,” attention to unconscious processes and trauma was needed. I describe how BB came to be a preferred treatment by caseworkers and clinicians working in a foster care agency. Having articulated our relationship-based, non-didactic approach, and having funding for it, was not enough to bring this method into a system that focused on external behavior over internal processes. A larger systems approach was utilized including meeting with foster care personnel, providing training and supervision to clinicians, and getting parents to commit to the “new” dyadic therapy. Two cases are presented highlighting the impact that Nested Mentalization and Reflective Supervision had on the agency, the families, and its therapists and caseworkers. The BB Program has helped scores of families to better know each other, develop more secure attachments and interrupt the transmission of trauma.

In this paper five members of the “Community Psychoanalytic Track and Consortium” (CPT&C) in San Francisco, California, each holding different positionalities and functioning in different roles, come together in dialog with the shared aim to bring themselves and their readers inside the CPT&C. This writing project recapitulates principles of the CPT&C's vision itself: to form polyvocal groups with the shared task of supporting each other in our various roles, and members of community mental health organizations in their work and lives. From that effort new forms of psychoanalytic learning and work are generated; in this instance the process translates into a new writing form.

The Kedzie Center, a psychodynamically-informed community mental health center on Chicago's northwest side, was created through a truly innovative strategy for funding urban mental health services. Legislation in Illinois allows areas of the city to vote by referendum to levy a tax, calculated as 0.4% of property taxes, to support needed clinics directly, of which Kedzie is the first of (currently) four. Each of the six referenda put forward thus far under the Expanded Mental Health Services Act won a landslide endorsement from the voters in its catchment area, who feel ownership and investment in the services they have created. A small group of psychoanalytically-oriented clinicians was chosen by a governing commission made up of appointee community members to run the first EMHS clinic. Since its creation 7 years ago, the Kedzie Center has offered a test case for the success of the EMHS Act, and has been able to use the flexibility its funding model affords to provide long-term primary, ancillary and coordinated care that is tailored to the community it serves. Yet its success as a vibrant hub for this diverse and challenged urban area has not immunized it from the difficulties involved in creating an integrated community psychoanalysis. Kedzie's success has come with both tension and growth regarding its mission, its staff development and its role in the wider community.

A description of a mentalization informed home-based project, an adaptation of the ECID project (Equipo Clínico de Intervención a Domicilio), into a time-limited first aid mental health team in response to heightened mental health needs during the COVID Pandemic in Barcelona, Spain is offered. ECID is a project with a developmental psychodynamic understanding of psychopathology and relational dynamics informing a highly flexible treatment approach. This paper describes a focus on the need for clinicians to take an active role whilst adapting to the specific needs and situation of each child and family, instead of continuing to ask them to adapt to what services can or are prepared to offer. Clinical examples are given to illustrate the value of an integrative community approach informed by both systemic and psychodynamic lenses. Specifically, we reflect on the benefits of a mentalization informed approach to working with families during high levels of psychosocial stress for both families and practitioners. We illustrate how of a mentalization informed clinical service can promote and support the development of a therapeutic alliance when internal safety is impacted by a very real external threat. Finally, preliminary data is presented regarding the impact of parental stress and trauma on children and adolescents' adaptation to a potentially traumatic situation as well as their capacity for returning to a progressive development pathway.

The authors, both professors of psychiatry, trained as psychoanalysts according to the standards of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), recount 30 years of conceptual and empirical research work for the construction of a model of brief and adaptive psychodynamic psychotherapy applicable at the Primary Health Care level. The many milestones of this journey are reviewed, starting with the difficulties and obstacles encountered when pursuing this task within IPA institutions. Once the authors decided to conduct the task outside the analytic institution, they created two training programs for psychodynamic therapists and a research group in psychotherapy, all of which have attained excellence. This effort gave birth to several institutions that are still in operation, such as the Chilean and Latin American chapters of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, the Chilean Congress of Psychotherapy, the PhD Program in Psychotherapy, and finally the Millennium Institute for Research and Personality (MIDAP). In its 8 years of existence, MIDAP has become a national and Latin American reference center for research in Mental Health, aimed at implementing preventive and psychotherapeutic interventions in vulnerable populations at the primary health care and community level. The article ends with a description of the main components and the final process of the construction of the Protocol of Psychotherapeutic Competences for the Treatment of Depression in Primary Health Care level.