International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

Demonstrating how psychoanalysts can be useful in community settings outside the conventional consulting room, this paper describes consultation and group interventions conducted at a San Francisco mental health agency serving a largely Asian community. In the traumatic context of the COVID-19 pandemic, agency staff became fragmented, due to remote working conditions and differential work assignments, including mandated deployments to emergency sites. Two psychoanalysts worked with agency leadership to devise a weekly process group held by video conferencing over 6 months, in an attempt to heal resentments and splits in the fabric of the agency. Examples of the group process, interventions, and major themes that emerged are described, as well as recommendations made, including the formation of an ongoing clinical consultation group. The paper situates these interventions in the greater context of the pandemic which exposed not only a universal threat to life and health, but also structural vulnerabilities organized along lines of (racial) difference and inequity. The dynamics at the agency are thus described as rooted within greater nested histories: of the clinic, its leadership, and their relationship with a strained public health system, and more broadly, of the tangled intersection of these histories with anti-Asian racism. These are understood as manifestations of the Social Unconscious, and the intervention as an example of Community Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and Politics argue that psychoanalysis is at its root a social or group theory, to which a theory of individual psychology is integral. This formulation follows from Freud's Group Psychology, which defines individual psychology as a derivative of group psychology, "still incomplete." The article historicizes the analytic conception of the individual in terms of the authors' conception of personalize, spelled out in Secrets of the Soul. Three versions of psychoanalytic social theory are discussed: Freudo-Marxism, the New Left and feminism and the "relational turn."

Using the example of the military regime in Argentina (1976-1983) and relevant archival materials, this article demonstrates the prerequisite of exalted language in constructing an enemy and how a discursive 'machine of the same' was put into operation. The author argues that what made this operation unique is its structure of repetition that stimulated "the tendency to merge" what is "foreigner-to-the-ego", and the "enemy outside" into a single concept in the Argentinian national psyche.As a theoretical lens, the author examines the military regime's language through Freud's understanding of groups and civilization and Laplanche's proposition that cultural narratives in the form of mytho-symbolic explanations help us translate the sexual drive and offer a "solution" to the helplessness of the infant-adult.The author further claims that at other times a cultural narration functions as an anti-translation device when set against the emergence of a new net of significations. The nation's founding narrative of an Occidental-Spanish-Catholic "being" that first effaced its indigenous origins and then its Arabic and Jewish inheritance was brought back by the military regime as a mytho-symbolic narration that formed a shield against the repressed remnants of the enigmatic message pressing for a new translation.

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

This article examines the difficulties of making use of psychoanalytic insights to understand and influence political events. In clinical practice, it has often been possible to bring about understanding and change in patients, and in that context, immense developments in psychoanalytic theories and techniques have taken place. But there is no parallel tradition giving rise to the interpretation of unconscious political phenomena although there have been outstanding contributions of this kind by individuals, beginning with Freud's work on group psychology. There have been valuable psychoanalytic understandings of broad social changes, but effective interventions in "here and now" political situations have been few. Some examples of these include Keynes's understanding of the economic consequences of the peace of 1918 which were seen to be relevant mainly after the later peace of 1945 and Mitscherlichs' analysis in the1970s of the German people's "inability to mourn" the catastrophes of the Nazi period. The article concludes with reflections on the conditions which might facilitate effective interpretations of political situations by psychoanalysts today.

Various challenges faced by the psychoanalyst when moving from "on the couch" work to "off the couch" work are raised and discussed. It is argued that the biggest challenges concern methodology: what now constitutes the analytic setting and field, and what counts as analytic data? The author describes some of the methodological challenges she has faced so far in studying climate change denial at individual, group, cultural and political levels. She raises potential pitfalls with "off the couch" work, that include overgeneralisations and assuming one can directly apply insights gained "on the couch" to wider contexts. In conclusion, she reflects that her training and practice working with individuals on the couch has proved bedrock in working "off the couch".

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