This article proposes an interdisciplinary model for analyzing human interaction with large language models (LLMs), combining psychoanalytic theory, psychometrics, and contemporary approaches to language model evaluation. Theoretically, the LLM is conceptualized as a non-desiring Other: unlike the human Other in the logic of Freud and Lacan, the model does not introduce into interaction its own desire, lack, or structural resistance. As a result, the subject’s projection may return not in a transformed but in a stabilized form. To describe this mode, the concept of “frozen projection” is introduced. The article argues that this is not merely a psychoanalytic metaphor. Within the PersonaMatrix research framework, this phenomenon can be partially operationalized through psychoactive triggers and the metrics Response Stability Index (RSI), Internal Divergence Score (IDS), and Response Coherence/Structure Score (RCS) (Drobakha et al., 2026). This approach fits within the broader movement toward reproducible and standardized LLM evaluation, as emphasized by Biderman et al. (2024) in their work on lm-eval, as well as within contemporary psychometric approaches to measuring personality-like patterns in language models, proposed by Serapio-García et al. (2025). Drawing on PersonaMatrix research materials and three measurement waves, T1–T3, the article shows that within this protocol models exhibit a high level of typological return stability, a low level of internal divergence, and a sufficiently high level of response form coherence. This makes it possible to interpret “frozen projection” as a behavioral pattern with measurable correlates. At the same time, following Zhou et al. (2024) and Moore et al. (2025), the article emphasizes that stability and persuasiveness are not equivalent to reliability or safety: in psychologically sensitive contexts, LLMs may produce a pseudo-therapeutic effect, blur the boundaries of responsibility, and generate risky responses.

ABSTRACT As a deluge of anti-trans legislation surges across the United States, trans and queer subjects are left uniquely and unevenly haunted by the afterlives of assigning sex. Drawing upon the insights of psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy, and trans and queer studies, this essay develops a reading of how anti-trans lawmaking generates a repetition of the assignment's mark upon the body that, I suggest, threatens the subject's very relation to meaning and the future. In doing so, I argue that the assignment of sex circulates as an undead letter across the landscape of administrative law, repeatedly tethering trans and queer lives to an unchosen and ostensibly immutable past. Attending to the conceptual framework of necropolitics, this essay argues that anti-trans legislation enacts a phenomenon that I describe, in the end, as administrative maiming, a concept which specifies how anti-trans laws leave trans and queer lives purposefully inhibited – indeed wounded – in their efforts to rewrite their relation to the signifiers inscribed at birth.

ABSTRACT The history of psychoanalysis since Freud has been marked by fragmentation into multiple theoretical schools, often with limited dialogue across them. This article examines the deeper reasons for such failures of communication, proposing that they cannot be explained solely in terms of intellectual divergence, but must also be understood in relation to internalized psychoanalytic cultures—the nonconscious cultural value systems of different cultures that shape the development, reception, and practice of analytic theories in that culture. Focusing on the reception of D. W. Winnicott’s “The Use of an Object” at the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1968, I illustrate how lack of awareness of differing underlying cultural frameworks and implicit worldviews, especially between British object belations theory and American ego psychology, obstructed meaningful dialogue despite shared professional language at the surface. Whereas British approaches emphasize the preverbal mind, unconscious phantasy, and early object relations, American ego psychology privileged adaptation, verbal processes, and later developmental stages. These divergences, rooted partly in regional epistemologies and implicit cultural values, demonstrate that theories in psychoanalysis migrate unevenly across cultural contexts, often undergoing unconscious transformations. Although recognizing the influence of such internalized cultures—rather than assuming universal agreement on psychoanalytic concepts—may create anxieties that our theories are not free of local values, and thus not totally objectively scientific, nevertheless. it offers a way forward for a more genuine dialogue across schools and geographies and differentiating what is regional versus universal in our theories. The article argues that without acknowledging the cultural and nonconscious foundations of theoretical orientations, psychoanalysis risks perpetuating confusion, false consensus, and seriously missed opportunities for growth and for creating a more global relevance for itself.

ABSTRACT Chronic depression associated with early trauma remains one of the most treatment-resistant conditions in mental health care. Clinical and empirical findings increasingly suggest that patients with histories of early trauma may benefit differentially from intensive psychoanalytic treatments compared to symptom-focused or short-term psychotherapies. This conceptual analysis aims to elucidate the mechanisms underlying sustained therapeutic change in psychoanalysis with chronically depressed, early traumatized patients by integrating clinical psychoanalytic theory, contemporary dream research, and interdisciplinary models of memory reconsolidation. Drawing on a detailed longitudinal case from the LAC Depression Study, the paper examines a patient who underwent high-frequency psychoanalysis and demonstrated enduring structural change that remained accessible more than a decade after treatment termination. Clinical material from the original analysis and from a later crisis intervention illustrates how early traumatic experiences – encoded as embodied, dissociated memory traces – can be reactivated within the transference relationship and gradually transformed through repeated analytic working-through. Particular emphasis is placed on changes in dream processes as indicators of deep psychic reorganization. Using psychoanalytically informed dream research, including the Zurich Dream Process Coding System (ZDPCS), the analysis demonstrates a shift from early trauma-dominated nightmares characterized by helplessness and absence of a helping object toward a later dream reflecting increased affect regulation, symbolic capacity, involvement, and self-agency. These transformations are conceptualized as markers of structural change rather than mere symptom reduction. The paper further argues that psychoanalytic processes resonate with contemporary neurobiological models of memory reconsolidation. When traumatic memories are reactivated within a safe and emotionally attuned analytic relationship, they may enter a labile state that allows for enduring modification and re-integration. From this interdisciplinary perspective, psychoanalysis is uniquely positioned to foster sustained change in patients with chronic depression and early trauma by enabling the re-transcription and reconsolidation of traumatic embodied memories within the analytic relationship. This conceptual integration contributes to a deeper understanding of why psychoanalysis can produce lasting therapeutic effects in a patient population traditionally considered difficult to treat.

Recent clinical trials have suggested the safety and efficacy of psychedelic therapy for treatment-resistant depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, addiction, and end-of-life distress. While neurobiological mechanisms such as 5-HT2A receptor activation, increased neural entropy, and default mode network modulation have been well-characterized, significantly less attention has been given to the emergence of unconscious material within psychedelic states. This article introduces a psychodynamically informed framework for understanding and working with such material in clinical contexts. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, we explore how psychedelic compounds may facilitate access to preverbal, dissociated, and developmentally embedded psychic content, often expressed through somatic experience, symbolic imagery, and unconstrained affect. Using the four standard phases of psychedelic screening, preparation, psychedelic treatment session, and follow-up or integration, we present a structured psychodynamic lens, integrating conceptual theory with illustrative clinical vignettes. These fictional composites, informed by publicly funded clinical research programs, highlight how unspoken experience, affective intensity, and shifts in psychic structure may unfold within the psychedelic experience. We argue that consideration of unconscious communication, symbolic processes, and defensive functioning can foster greater clinical depth. This article advances the position that psychoanalytic models, though underrepresented in current psychedelic research, offer valuable tools for conceptualizing mechanisms of change beyond symptom reduction. As psychedelic treatments approach regulatory approval and broader clinical use, such perspectives may play an important role in future research, training, supervision, and individualized care models.

This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on compulsive consumption by integrating psychoanalytic theory with behavioural economics. Building on Freudian concepts of repression and sublimation, we develop a theoretical model in which unresolved psychological conflict generates inner tension, leading individuals to seek relief through substitute forms of consumption. Empirical support is drawn from a structured survey of 264 French adults with binge-eating behaviour. Findings indicate that emotional triggers such as anxiety, guilt, and shame are closely linked to harmful consumption patterns, particularly when repression mechanisms fail. The model formalises the interplay between unconscious drives, consumption choices, and economic constraints, offering a new lens for understanding self-regulation failure. By bridging economics, psychology, and clinical theory, this study contributes to current debates on mental health, consumer behaviour, and behavioural policy. It provides conceptual tools for scholars and practitioners seeking to address the psychological dimensions of harmful consumption and its broader societal impacts. • Develops a psychoeconomic model of compulsive consumption. • Integrates Freudian repression with economic decision-making theory. • Formalises psychological tension as a driver of substitution in consumption. • Explains harmful overconsumption under internal and budget constraints. • Provides survey evidence linking emotional triggers to binge-eating behaviour.

This paper seeks to convey the spirit that guided the 14th International Sándor Ferenczi Conference. It does not aim to place Ferenczi in a position of mastery, nor to encourage an uncritical adherence to his concepts, but rather to value his openness to mixture and impurity in both theory and the psychoanalytic relationship. It introduces the notion of decoloniality, critiques the colonial legacy in the construction of psychoanalytic theory, and discusses how Ferenczi's ideas can help us to think about and practice a form of psychoanalysis attuned to our time and to our own way of working.

The relationship between mental health disorders and LUTS.

The African society has always been projected as one where there is a visible distinction between the male and female gender, especially as it concerns privileges and opportunities. This has formed a basis for African female writers to, not only contemplate, but also interrogate. African female writing has, therefore, constantly demonstrated the inequality and lack of democracy in the consideration of the African woman in the scheme of things. This study focuses on the struggles and resistance that characterise the way of life of the woman in her bid to extricate and reinvent herself from the harsh realities of life. Using Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, the study explores the theory of psychoanalysis to interrogate the society’s exposure of the woman to situations that ultimately conquer and dehumanize her; thereby distorting her identity. Accordingly, findings from the study reveal that due to societal pressure and patriarchal resistance, the woman has devised other ways to hide her pains, inner frustrations and scars under the pretext of her smiles and physical appearance.

ABSTRACT I describe that pluralism exists not only in our theoretical and clinical approaches, but also in the field of different psychoanalytic research activities. I plead for constant “comparative discussions” to be held, analogous to the famous “controversial discussions” in psychoanalysis in the 1940s. Such debating should, at first, elucidate which scientific pre-assumptions and worldviews are at play when negotiating subject, method, and goal of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and research. The procedure is illustrated with individual examples of basic methodological-epistemological questions and is discussed with possible answers resp. possible positioning. Once these scientific preconditions—the plausible justification for different preassumptions and positions—have been clarified, the advantages are obvious: Communication is facilitated by accepting and acknowledging other approaches and claims to sole representation are (at best in a scientific endeavor) reduced. Conclusion: There is no anything goes, but rather a difficult but continuous and systematic search for intersubjective consensus.

ABSTRACT This paper conceptualizes gender as both a stabilizing psychic organization and a fluid relational process. Drawing on clinical material and psychoanalytic theory, it understands gender as emerging within the analytic field through shifts in self-states, defenses, and relational positions. The paper argues that gender signifies not only identity but also the capacity to tolerate uncertainty, relinquish defensive consolidation, and remain open to transformation within the analytic couple.

ABSTRACT This autoethnographic study explores my experiences as a transgender man in China, examining how the specific sociocultural context shapes the formation and expression of gender identity. By integrating personal narrative with psychoanalytic theory and cultural critique, I reveal how family dynamics, collectivist values, and rapid social transformation collectively influence transgender self-perception and social positioning. In a cultural environment lacking transgender visibility, gender identity development undergoes a complex process from nameless confusion to reinterpretation through limited cultural resources. I particularly emphasize the positive psychological impact of social transition rather than medical intervention and reveal the interdependence between understanding gender identity and sexual orientation. Through this case study, I challenge Western-centric narratives of gender identity formation and provide new perspectives for cross-cultural transgender research.

ABSTRACT This discussion of Chanda Griffin’s, The White Supremacist Within: Dissociated Anti-Blackness and Racial Multiplicity is from the perspective of a senior Black American psychoanalyst, a woman whose formative years were shaped by the realities of intense racial, economic, social, and legal segregation in the United States. Griffin, also a Black American psychoanalyst, brings a unique and lyrical voice to the field, illuminating both the internal and external psychodynamics present in the treatment situation when the analyst is a Black woman. Her later experiences in the United States further inform her perspective and enrich her contributions to psychoanalytic discourse. This discussion centers on the experiences of a psychoanalytic reader engaging the author’s clinical writings that place racialization at the forefront. By honoring Griffin’s distinctive style and the significance of her work, this discussion aims to facilitate deeper thinking about anti-Blackness and racialization in psychoanalytic practice and theory. The nuanced exploration of race, identity, and multiplicity in Griffin’s writing challenges readers and practitioners alike to confront and integrate these complexities within their own clinical work.

ABSTRACT This article pursues Winnicott’s admonition, “If the patient cannot play, he must be taught, and if the analyst cannot play, no psychotherapy can occur.” Its objective is to build on what has remained incomplete in Winnicott’s bold argument. In doing so, it introduces the idea that psychoanalytic play is at the center of both the theory and clinical practice of psychoanalysis through a) updating psychoanalytic metapsychology, b) reflecting upon multiple field theories, and c) creating a theory of therapeutic action and change premised on the phenomena of drama, narration, and improvisation. This approach conceives of play as the process by which therapy crisscrosses primary and secondary processes of communication, allowing for “possibilities” in the face of “constraints” in a therapy that shifts from being “stuck” (1st Order Change) to moments of an unpredictable, unknown, and spontaneous world that is less familiar to analyst and patient who improvise off-of-and-with their dramatically unfolding co-created narratives.

Some veterans are haunted by memories of action they have taken or betrayals they have experienced that violated deeply held moral beliefs; these experiences can lead to moral injury. We have developed a depth-oriented group psychotherapy for U.S. combat veterans, to address moral injury. Depth psychotherapy is an evidence-based form of psychoanalysis; the treatment we have developed is based on Relational psychoanalysis. The aim is for the group members to each develop an organized narrative about morally injurious events and their impact on their current lives to facilitate psychosocial recovery. The hypothesized change agents of this treatment are, in order of their use in the sessions: (1) warm-up team-building activities such as exercises from the improv and psychodrama/sociometry traditions; (2) reflective listening and speaking; (3) sharing moral injury event narratives with trusted others. The clinical model we have developed for treating moral injury emphasizes that veterans will be asked to describe, to the extent that they are able, the feelings, sensations, and fragmentary thoughts that are initially hard to articulate and sometimes difficult to recall. The goal of this article is to describe relevant depth psychology theory, its application to the moral injury context, the relevance of depth-oriented group psychotherapy for moral injury and, further, the depth-oriented group psychotherapy approach we have derived from these ideas.

The psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud provides a fundamental foundation for understanding the structure of personality and human psychosexual development. This article aims to analyze, in depth, the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, the mechanisms of ego defense, as well as their clinical application in the counseling process. The method used is a literature review, comparing various reference sources related to the implementation of psychoanalysis. The results of the study show that the success of counseling is highly dependent on the ego’s ability to balance conflicts between the id and the superego through specific techniques such as free association and transference analysis. The findings also suggest that psychoanalysis remains relevant in contemporary counseling due to its capacity to explore the depth of personality and the symbolic meaning of behavior. The implications of this study are that counselors need to integrate an understanding of unconscious dynamics with appropriate therapeutic techniques to enhance the effectiveness of interventions, particularly in cases involving trauma and long-standing psychological conflict. The conclusions of this study confirm that, although it is a classical theory, psychoanalysis remains relevant for examining the roots of psychological problems stemming from past experiences.

This paper applies principles and perspectives emerging from free energy neuroscience to the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. The aim is to offer a contemporary reappraisal of this controversial aspect of psychoanalytic theory and its link to psychosis. The paper begins with a review of the death drive as proposed by Sigmund Freud, before proceeding to briefly outline Karl Friston's free energy principle. Building on proposals from Gustaw Sikora and Bernard Penot, it then explores how the combined and coordinating processes of minimising [binding] free energy and dismantling [unbinding] inexpedient generative models of reality may be understood as essential to life, growth, and adaptation. The question is thus raised: if a periodic unbinding-even destruction and demise-of generative models is vital to adaptive living, how might the death drive be conceptualised? The paper then proceeds to develop the notion that what Freud identified as the (defused) death drive may reflect a critical breakdown in the reciprocal ebb and flow of binding free energy/unbinding generative models of reality. Two illustrations-both of which concern psychotic phenomena-are given in an attempt to depict how the death drive in defused form may be recognised as manifesting both as arrested unbinding and/or interminable binding. The discussion explores how such a breakdown in the vital rhythms of life and self-organisation can sabotage the ability to think, compromise the mind's capacity to function as a container, and produce a boundless infinitisation of experience therein.

Recent discussions on the integration of psychology and Christian theology have highlighted the need for contextual specificity with regards to how one talks about integration and for what purpose. Using descriptors such as domains or waves of integration, different authors have attempted to clarify how meanings and processes of integration may shift depending on the setting and circumstance. Using a psychoanalytic clinical case this article engages the activity of clinical integration by exploring the notion of perfection as understood in the normative experience of evangelical Christian life, particularly in relation to guilt, shame, and trying hard. Musing through clinical material from a more traditional psychoanalytic lens, we shift to a critique and an expanded perspective of perfection considering Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. We end with psychoanalytically informed reflections on how perfection as a theological construct may impact everyday Christian experience.

This study aims to examine the structure of desire of the main character in the short story "Tiurmaida" by Hasan Al-Banna using Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. The analysis focuses on narcissistic desire that emerge in Tiurmaida, a loyal and strong wife. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method with a literary psychology approach. The results of the study indicate that Tiurmaida has active and passive narcissistic desire. Active narcissistic desire is seen in her efforts to show herself as a loyal wife and a strong woman, while passive narcissistic desire is seen in her dependence on recognition from others. This study shows that human desire always has a paradoxical nature and is closely related to the social, symbolic, and psychic structures that surround it

This research paper investigates the influence of myths in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne, the protagonist, whose life is forced and shaped by the society where she lives. The society is a puritan society which gives important to the moral and religious values. The people in the society live obeying what Bible say and shape their lives based on the Biblical myths. Utilizing psychoanalytical theory, the paper delves into the society’s force on Hester Prynne, emphasizing how the biblical stories kept as the standards for the people to live. The novel has no explicit mention of myths but they are understood through the characters’ actions and words. The novel has the custom-House (introductory to “The Scarlet Letter”), twenty three chapters and conclusion. It is set in a pre-independent America. It tells the story of a young mother and her illegitimate child. Hester Prynne, the protagonist, is trapped first into a loveless marriage and then into adultery. Brought out of the prison with the scarlet letter ‘A’ fixed on her bosom, she is publicly disgraced. She refuses to disclose the identity of her daughter’s father. Hyster Prynne becomes the first real heroine of American fiction. It is easy to say she is the real heroine but it is very difficult to live each day bearing the letter ‘A’ and the shame. The society where she lives only brought such a shame on her life. This is because the society’s norms are based on the Bible and its stories, which we call Biblical myths. The myths only shaped the lives of men in that society. They want everyone to be puritan and to be true Christian and so not to commit any sin. Because to obey them Hester Prynne keeps herself quiet not revealing the name of the man who made her to bear the letter ‘A’. If she has revealed him, there won’t be such shame in her life. The analysis thus highlights the ramifications of myths in the society and the individuals.