Psychoanalytic Community Research Articles

Psychoanalysis and psychedelics: The censored story in Argentina

This essay examines the combination of psychoanalytic therapy and psychedelic substances in mid-20th century Argentina. Through document analysis, it examines the intersection of psychedelics and psychoanalysis, drawing from historical texts and writings by local psychoanalysts to develop a comprehensive understanding of the distinctive clinical practices and therapeutic approaches in the Argentine context. It details the experimental use of these substances, the clinical practices developed, and the professional and societal challenges encountered. Notably, psychoanalysts Luisa de Álvarez de Toledo, Alberto Tallaferro, and Alberto Fontana conducted pioneering research, exploring the therapeutic potential of these substances and publishing their findings in academic papers and books. According to these psychoanalysts, the use of psychedelic drugs in therapy could enhance transference, catalyze catharsis, and circumvent unconscious defenses, allowing for a vivid exploration of the patient's psyche that necessitated interpretation. Despite the innovative nature of this work, resistance from within the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association led to the eventual cessation of psychedelic research in this country. The essay calls for a reconsideration of the psychoanalytic community's relationship with psychedelics, emphasizing the potential for renewed dialogue and incorporation of these substances in contemporary therapeutic practices. In conclusion, this article sheds light on an overlooked chapter of psychoanalysis in a local setting and serves as a call for future explorations in broader scenarios. The resurgence of interest in psychedelics for mental health treatment presents an opportunity for psychoanalysts to engage with emerging research, enriching both theory and practice.

Psychoanalyst attitudes towards psychedelic-assisted therapy

Background Numerous clinical trials have supported psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) as a treatment for psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and substance use. While empirical evidence indicates PAT’s benefits, the perspectives of mental health practitioners on this topic remain unclear. Methods This quantitative study attempted to capture psychoanalyst practitioners’ attitudes toward PAT. A sample of 130 graduate-level trained psychoanalysts in at least part-time clinical practice was recruited to participate in an online survey. Results The study found that psychoanalysts were cautiously supportive of PAT, open to their clients engaging in PAT, and optimistic about PAT’s potential in treating mental disorders. Additionally, they reported that PAT would be ineffective in treating substance use disorders (SUDs). Lastly, participants who reported a history of psychedelic use were significantly more likely to have greater positive attitudes toward PAT than those who had not. Conclusion Results indicate the potential for misinformation about psychedelics and a lingering cultural stigma regarding the utility of psychedelics in the therapeutic environment among psychoanalysts. Therefore, education on the risks, potential benefits, and limitations of the evidence base of psychedelics and their effectiveness across psychiatric disorders appears warranted in the psychoanalytic community.

Unhinged: A Prospective Perspective on Being Unsafe1.

Given the unprecedented events unfolding around the globe over the past four years, psychoanalytic communities near and far have sought to ask and ventured to answer the question: What does psychoanalysis have to offer individuals, and the collective, as a way of seeing and being with the reality of what is? Taking up these questions in such a time as this, feels, perhaps inevitably, unsafe. Sometimes it can feel as if there is a silent and unspoken mandate to ensure safety at all costs when we seek to find a spirit of the depth's response to the spirit of the times. I propose that the work of psychoanalysis is grounded in nothing but the journey through that which is unsafe. This article will take up Ann Ulanov's notion that one's own evil is the hinge door into collective and archetypal evil. To become unhinged means to risk well-formulated understandings, theories, and modalities about being and becoming for the other and instead to allow the other to penetrate that which is unknown in ourselves, upending our well-formed theories and pressing us to take up our own lives in new and unpredictable ways.

Psychoanalysis-More Than a Profession: Presidential Address, American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, February 3, 2023.

This plenary address was delivered just before learning the successful outcome of a bylaw amendment extending full American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) membership to psychoanalytic psychotherapists, researchers, scholars, and all who share a commitment to psychoanalysis. This historic change culminated efforts over the previous four decades to rectify exclusionary harms and revitalize psychoanalysis in the United States as a clinical practice and a cultural force. Membership expansion is discussed in the historical and sociological context of psychoanalysis as a profession with a focus on organizational resistance to change. Professionalization established and legitimized psychoanalysis but also contained the seeds of gradual decline as monopoly over training and practice distanced APsA from the wider psychoanalytic community. Expanding membership beyond the profession is a step toward uniting the community and strengthening all applications of psychoanalysis, including the traditional form. These developments at APsA reflect changes in other disciplines that feature inclusion, generosity, situated learning, and distributed subjectivity in epistemic communities of practice.

On Being Angry with Psychoanalysis Forever

ABSTRACT Building upon the work of Agnes Callard on the moral philosophy and psychology of anger, I attempt to critically reframe the ways in which the anger of internal critics and dissidents within psychoanalysis is understood. Through a consideration of the literature, and of my own intergenerational family history (with psychoanalysis and otherwise), I offer a challenge to a common (and, I argue, often bigoted) framing of such anger as wantonly rageful and indicative of a desire to destroy psychoanalysis. Rather, I propose we should understand and engage with this anger as provoked by a failure of white-, straight-, and male-dominated institutions and communities to join with and share psychoanalysis with people not from those groups. In this light, the anger of internal critics of psychoanalysis should properly be understood as both a protest and an invitation into a process of contrition and repair that can return all parties to a state of co-valuation of, and cohabitation in, the psychoanalytic community.

A new deal for dynamic psychotherapies: The psychoanalyst as street‐level bureaucrat

AbstractIn the UK in 2007 a national experiment was initiated with the aim of tackling “Britain's Biggest Social Problem”—Depression. Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) was devised as the solution. A universal free‐to‐access talking therapies program would make available evidence‐based treatment to all adults with depression. NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), the body that decides on what is cost‐effective, said CBT, not antidepressants, should be its first line offer. The starting gun was fired. The promise from IAPT was 3‐fold: to scale up access to CBT rapidly; to achieve recovery targets that would reduce the prevalence of depression over time; and—most ambitious of all—to ensure the Treasury would see a return on its investment by reducing the economic burden from depression. People who were on invalidity benefits due to depression would be supported back into employment. It was a New Deal for depression. As well as for CBT. But did it work? A decade and a half on with IAPT, are we in any position to give an answer? This paper will seek to draw lessons about “What Worked”, and what didn't, to ask ourselves a question: are we—those of us in the applied psychoanalytic community—willing to garner what can be learned from IAPT to advocate a new deal for evidence‐based psychoanalysis? Faced with challenges from unemployment and widening inequalities, against a backdrop where global economic recovery must heed the existential threats from climate change and ongoing warfare, to say nothing of the scale of loss and grief for those already impacted by bereavement due to the pandemic, the need for some such deal could not be more urgent.

The Role of Shame in Cults, from Recruitment to Recovery

ABSTRACT Understanding the traumatizing narcissist’s relational system of subjugation is an important aspect of cult recovery work, for both the therapist and the cult survivor. The author describes the role of shame in the psychology of the traumatizing narcissist, and explains how shame is implicated in cult recruitment, in maintaining cult loyalty, and in the challenges of cult recovery. Cult survivors often resist self-referring for psychotherapy for fear they will not be understood. This paper seeks to raise awareness within the psychoanalytic community of the relational dynamics between cult leaders and followers, and of some of the central struggles for those recovering from cult-related trauma.

Психоаналитический случай как нарратив и текстовая репрезентация пациента

In the article a special type (form) of clinical history – a psychoanalytic case is considered as a narrative genre that has developed in the discursive practice of psychoanalysis at the intersection of medicine and literature under the influence of S. Freud’s classical works. According to the narrative approach, author of the article discusses, how the narration is constructed within the framework of psychoanalytic cases; the functions of case-narratives are clarified. It is noted, that in practice these forms of narration serve as models for understanding and structuring the experience of dialogic interaction between the analyst and his patient (analysand). At the same time, a case narrative is a means of professional self-identification, self-presentation and positioning of a practicing specialist in his collegial environment, a way to maintain and strengthen a sense of belonging to the psychoanalytic community. Apart from this, a psychoanalytic theory also has a narrative basis, which is extremely heterogeneous. Behind any theoretical construct of classical psychoanalysis there are one key (basic) narrative and series of additional ones. These are not only clinical stories, but also myths, literary works, psychobiographies of outstanding personalities. In content, a psychoanalytic case is always an epistemological narrative, a story about self-knowledge and knowledge of each other; struc-turally, it is a double narrative that unites two stories correlated with each other: “raw” or primary, compiled from the words of the analysand and his / her relatives, and processed or secondary, formed as a result of the analysis and including the dynamics of the transformative psychotherapeutic relationships. It is also stressed, that a distinctive feature of the narration in the case is the use of embedded narratives, in particular, analysand’s dreams or fantasies. Two questions are discussed: what happens when analysand becomes the personage of his psychoanalyst, and how we can characterize the representation of patient’s personality in the text of a psychoanalytic case.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives: A Love Story

On the 20th anniversary of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, we celebrate its achievements. Perspectives has been a leader in developing psychoanalytic writing that crosses over between creativity, the capacity for multiplicity, and strong analytic writing. Encouraging play in the third space of psychoanalytic writing, Perspectives captures and sculpts the multiplicity and free associative creativity of our variegated clinical experiences into scholarly stories that speak to the psychoanalytic community.

To Face the World and to Face Each Other: A Tribute to Psychoanalytic Perspectives

The Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives during the Covid era reflects on her time in the world of analytic journals as the outside world was changing, noticing an editorial tendency to retract and become more insular during traumatic times. She urges psychoanalysts and others among us who are involved in the vital task of curating what psychoanalytic literature is ultimately published to intentionally move past the bounds of their inner circles to engage more fully with those outside, to move past known worlds, and to take up the mantle of engagement with grand themes of history and trauma in expanded psychoanalytic communities and with the world at large.

What would Freud have made of it? Notes on a “normal pathological organization” within contemporary psychoanalysis

AbstractPsychoanalytic 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.

Dialogue with Gaea Logan: “The whole world needs to hear these stories”

ABSTRACT In this reflective, compassionate interview, Gaea Logan discusses her work in supporting Ukrainian therapists amidst unthinkably traumatic circumstances, our need to stay aware of the long-term psychological impact of Putin’s invasion, and the importance of our continued support of our Ukrainian colleagues now, no matter how small the gesture. Logan contextualizes her view of the current onslaught within a career of recognizing and mitigating traumatic suffering around the world, motivated in part by her own family’s history of surviving Nazi violence. She also addresses today’s need for (and her efforts to co-create) a global, multi-disciplinary psychoanalytic community.

OKness Revised: Analysis and Evolution of Berne’s Concept of OKness, the Basic Positions, and the Related Reenactments of Berne’s Internal World in the Transactional Analysis Community

Ever since Eric Berne conceptualized basic positions, the concept of OKness has almost incomprehensibly changed. Considering each individual as inherently OK, the so-called moral OKness that today is one of the cornerstone principles of transactional analysis (TA), has little in common with Berne’s initial psychodynamic conceptualization. Adding to the confusion, yet another form, what could be referred to as social OKness, emerged. It has become a standard of interpersonal relating within the TA community and has since been institutionalized as one of the formal standards in the TA qualification process. This article revises Berne’s original basic positions and analyzes the related theory. Parallels with Fairbairn’s object relations theory are made. The author touches on potential causes for the theoretical vagueness of the concept of OKness. He questions Berne’s motivation and approach to some of his theory development, which appears to have been substantially influenced by Berne’s internal conflicts. The author argues that conflicts stimulated through Berne’s relationship with psychoanalysis added to his obsession with the development of TA—a theory that would derive its superiority from its differentiation from psychoanalysis and, as such, help Berne mediate his own sense of OKness. Berne’s internal conflicts have since been reenacted within the TA community. A substantial part of post-Bernean theory development reflects Berne’s tendencies toward oversimplification of what are innately complex concepts. This threatens TA’s wider recognition as epistemologically grounded theory, which can also be seen as a reenactment of Berne’s lack of recognition from the psychoanalytic community.

The Psychological Impact of Sending Children Away to Boarding Schools in Britain: Is there Cause for Concern?

This paper aims to consolidate existing literature on the psychological impact of sending children away to boarding schools in Britain. A scarcity of literature pertaining specifically to independent boarding schools leads the author to examine child developmental theory, peer victimization in the British Army, trauma within captivity and adaptive behaviours. In conclusion, it is clear from this research that more time and effort is needed to understand the psychological impact of sending children away from home to be schooled, socialized and parented institutionally. In particular, the ethos and traditions associated with British and colonial schools, and the way in which these things are preserved warrants further study as it appears to be a significant source of the attitude toward children in boarding schools. The psychoanalytic community may be best placed to understand, and make understood, the positive or negative impact on children attending boarding schools in Britain.

The Therapist’s Struggle to Hold Hope When All Seems Lost

ABSTRACT In our paper we discuss the therapeutic dilemma that arises when relational patterns and attachment bonding are based exclusively on positive transference. When the harmful absence of negative transference is overlooked, rage and aggression become sequestered in the unconscious field. It is also well understood in the broader psychoanalytic community that conflict and aggression, when experienced, acknowledged, and processed inside a safe therapeutic relationship, is a powerful antidote to helplessness and hopelessness. We also suggest that an overemphasis on the impact of trauma may run the risk of making it the “essence” of the therapy, unconsciously encouraging clients to feel nailed to their wounds, as if they have completely lost their capacity for self-agency. This is the story of Claire, a young woman with severe and chronic relational trauma with whom Adriano worked for six years. When both Adriano and Claire suffered a loss of faith and the therapy became stymied by its limitations in providing an answer to this dilemma, Adriano called upon the philosophy of Hegel, whose valuing of the restorative power of “tarrying” with despair gave him support and comfort as he struggled with his own helplessness and fear in the face of Claire’s abject darkness. As a footnote, we are happy to report that at the time of this paper’s publication, Claire is now a practising psychologist and has been married to her husband for three years.

Collective traumas, personal overcoming: In memory of Tatyana Nikolaevna Pushkareva

In this article, prior to introducing the work of Tatyana Pushkareva and Paolo Fonda, I would like to share some personal memories of Tatyana and thoughts on the topics that she touches on in her article “Ruined lives: Repressions in the Soviet Union” (2020). Her tragic death in July 2020 left a gaping wound in the Ukrainian psychoanalytic community and in the hearts of all who knew her. I hope this article will be a modest tribute to her memory.

Racial Justice in Psychoanalytic Communities: Translating Antiracist Dialogues into Racial Equity

ABSTRACT This essay examines contemporary antiracist discourse in psychoanalytic communities, in particular its emphasis on challenging whiteness and implicit bias among analysts primarily through education, such as holding study groups and workshops on racism and changing curricula. The author explores the ways in which anti-black racism has been approached and challenged in these conversations and offers her own thoughts while keeping in mind the question: how can we challenge whiteness without using the tools of whiteness (e.g., coercion, disparaging vulnerability)? The author argues that while challenging white privilege through dialogues and education is necessary and useful, it is not sufficient to achieve cultural diversity and racial equity in psychoanalytic communities. An alternative vision for psychoanalytic racial justice is proposed. This vision, informed by works in moral and political philosophy, social psychology and anthropology, entails a two-pronged approach to racial justice based on both mutual recognition – through dialogue and education—and equitable distribution of resources. While the former approach highlights the role of the individual in challenging anti-black racism, the latter addresses its more insidious, systemic, structural nature. This paper explores how we might apply the concept of distribution to psychoanalytic communities.

The Challenges Before Us: A Response to Noha Sadek’s Paper “Racial Justice in Psychoanalytic Communities”

ABSTRACT This is an attempt to respond to Sadek’s efforts to examine psychoanalytic training institutions’ efforts to diversify its candidate pools while leaving intact their traditional social, economic, and political structures that are foundationally based on a privileging of whiteness and the lack of recognition of the diversity within not-white populations that the institutes wishes to bring into their training environments.

What Do We Want to Build Together? Discussion of Sadek

ABSTRACT In calling for both honest, engaged conversation and structural, material change, including redistribution of power and resources, Sadek offers an orienting vision for racial justice within psychoanalytic communities. Engaging with these ideas, this paper considers how dialogue and structural change, as well as integration in both an intrapsychic and a social, structural sense, might be linked with, and build on, each other. Drawing in part from personal experience, I also reflect on the role that sustained, collaborative work across racial difference – with a pragmatic focus on building something new together at an institutional level, as well as an attentiveness to process at an internal and interpersonal level – might play in fostering the kinds of integration and change Sadek advocates.

Непредставительная институция: к вопросу о положении анализантов в психоаналитических сообществах

Ever since Sigmund Freud decided on the necessity of establishing a psychoanalytic institution as a representative body of psychoanalytic theory and clinic, psychoanalysis has generally not undertaken an examination of its own institutionality and has not thought of its very existence in the forms of a “psychoanalytic community” as a problematic point. One of the reasons for avoiding this question is the historical position of those who receive analysis, since, as the article shows, a double institutional definition procedure is carried out regarding the latter. By identifying themselves as “analysts” and acting as “partners” of analysts in the realization of the analysis, they are thereby seen as an element of the analytic process. Nevertheless, they are not recognized as part of psychoanalytic communities. This non-recognition is justified by psychoanalysis itself as a measure to ensure the preservation of analysis as an exclusive professional practice. At the same time, a specific psychodynamic factor underlies the formation of psychoanalytic communities: Freud’s anxiety that psychoanalysis could preserve its existence only through permanent measures to cleanse the psychoanalytic professional field and to remove any extraneous components to the analysis. Freud is shown to undertake the establishment of a psychoanalytic community, not sure about the benignity of this form, but expecting that it would prove capable of maintaining the necessary disciplinary dissociation. However, the continued existence of psychoanalysis in the form of communities reveals that external dissociation procedures generate a series of processes within the communities themselves, causing their constant destabilization and their members’ susceptibility to various forms of collegiality violation. In drawing open attention to these violations for the first time, the Gabriel Tupinambá’s Desire of Psychoanalysis raises the question of the position of the didactic analyst (as potential member of the community as future psychoanalyst), which we consider incomplete and in need of radicalization through a different question about the degree to which analysts belong to the psychoanalytic community in principle.