The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

08/07/2024

On This Day in Psychoanalysis: Didier Anzieu was born, 1923.

---

Didier Anzieu (1923-1999) was a prominent French psychoanalyst and psychologist known for his extensive work in psychoanalysis and group dynamics. Initially studying philosophy and literature, Anzieu later shifted his focus to psychology and psychoanalysis, influenced by his mentor Daniel Lagache.

He is best known for developing the concept of the “Skin Ego,” which explores the relationship between the physical skin and the psychic boundary of the self.

Anzieu’s work in group dynamics was influenced by Wilfred Bion, and he co-founded the CEFFRAP (Cercle d’études françaises pour la formation et la recherche active en psychologie) in 1962 with René Kaës and other colleagues. Anzieu also conducted in-depth analyses of the creative process, influenced by the theories of Melanie Klein and Heinz Kohut.

---

You can read the English translation of Anzieu's paper, "La psychanalyse encore" (1975) in the Key Papers section, Issue 1, Volume 102 (2021) of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

pep-web.org/search/document/IJP.102.0109A

25/06/2024

In Issue 2, Volume 105 (2024) of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

In her 1957 book, Envy and Gratitude, Klein placed gratitude at one end of the spectrum from human flourishing to the suffering caused by envy. The monograph has become a classic, sparking much discussion on the theme of envy, while ‘gratitude’ has remained relatively unexamined.

Opening Issue 2 of the International Journal, Jonathan Lear’s paper, ‘Gratitude, freedom and refusal,’ brings philosophical notions of gratitude into conversation with Klein. What is the psychic significance of gratitude, Lear asks. What is its place in human flourishing?

Speaking of Klein’s notion of infantile gratitude, he writes:

"...when things are going well, the upshot of me, in my infantile way, recognizing that this giving of the “good breast” is all done lovingly, for my sake, with no expectation of return, is that I become myself. But, in emphasizing gratitude, Klein adds another layer of insight: that when things are going well, I become myself gratefully. That is, gratitude is the manner of me becoming myself."

---

Follow the link in our bio to read the full paper, or visit www.theijp.org to find out how to subscribe to The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

19/06/2024

For the very first in our series of International Journal of Psychoanalysis Reading Lists, we honour the life and work of Dana Birksted-Breen, Editor-in-Chief of the IJP (2007 – 2022), who sadly passed away June 1st, 2024.

While firmly within the British psychoanalytic tradition, Birksted-Breen did not align herself with any one group, instead ranging across theories that stimulated her thinking and contributed to her particular lines of enquiry.

The selection included in the Reading List covers themes of temporality, corporality and sexuality, along with her reflections on the legacy of the IJP on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, and the process of writing psychoanalytically itself.

All the papers included in the list are free-to-access (via Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP-Web)), and have been selected from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis archives, spanning a period of more than 30 years, between 1989 - 2020.

---

You can access the papers for free at www.theijp.org/reading-lists

For more information on registering for a PEP-Web account, visit support.pep-web.org/subscribe

14/06/2024

It is with great sorrow that we mourn the loss of Dana Birksted-Breen, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2007 – 2022), who passed away on 1 June 2024.

Colleagues of the Journal are deeply saddened by the death of Dana, who was Editor of the IJP for 15 years. Dana was a pioneering psychoanalyst, writing ground-breaking papers on temporality, sexuality, symbolization, Bion, and the analyst’s attunement. Her recent book, Translation/Transformation, along with her book of collected papers, The Work of Psychoanalysis: Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind, are highly influential works, frequently cited across contemporary analytic writing. Prior to her role at the IJP, Dana was Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, where she published many celebrated books.

As Editor-in-Chief of the IJP, it’s no understatement to say that Dana was devoted to the Journal. She worked enormously hard, and her commitment to enhancing authors’ papers was felt by anyone who worked with her. As a colleague, she was warm and thoughtful, always respectful of other’s views – a quality that comes out in her own writing, in her openness to different analytic perspectives, in her non-partisanship. Coming from a mixed cultural background, Dana was international in her bones, on the page, and certainly in her editing – always keen to forge cross-cultural dialogues.

Dana was a brilliant and sensitive thinker, a major figure in contemporary psychoanalysis, and a good friend. We at the Journal will miss her very much.

12/06/2024

Thank you to all who joined us on Saturday for the IJP's Summer Study Meeting!

We are very grateful to have been joined by John Steiner, as well as Rachel Blass and Bruce Reis, who discussed the topic of mourning in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Join us for our next Study Meeting in October, where Kristin White will discuss her paper, Migration and integration in the internal and external community, which featured in Issue 1, Volume 103 (2022) of the IJP.

You can read Kristin's paper in full online via Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP-Web): pep-web.org/search/document/IJP.103.0174A

---

Visit http://www.theijp.org/study-meetings to learn more about our Study Meetings.

For more information on using PaDS, visit support.pep-web.org/register-for-ijp-zoom-study-meetings/

05/06/2024

In Issue 2, Volume 105 (2024) of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

This issue’s Education Section offers different perspectives on the ‘analytic situation’, otherwise known as the ‘frame’ or ‘setting’. In one of his last papers, Freud wrote that “this ‘pact’ between analysand and analyst constitutes the ‘analytic situation,’” a pact that Ellen Sparer describes as an agreement between patient and analyst on the conditions of the analysis.

Opening the section with a re-reading of Bleger’s paper on the “encuadre,” John Churcher considers the setting with respect to the tricky task of translation. Howard Levine explores the analyst’s internal frame as an extension of the external. And José Carlos Calich distinguishes between the frame and the setting, understood as functions of the analytic process. In her Introduction to the section, Ellen Sparer writes:

"Thus the analytic situation is not only the clinical work but also the physical space, and the objects that are informed bythe introduction of the fundamental rule. The enclosed space is one of “contenance,” said Laplanche (1987b) – that is, holding, but especially of attention: the analyst holds and attends to the powerful impulses inevitably set off within the analytic situation with the introduction of the fundamental rule and the subsequently unleashed transference movements."

---

Read the full Education section online at pep-web.org/browse/IJP/volumes/105, or alternatively, visit theijp.org for more on how to subscribe to International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

30/05/2024

We are pleased to announce that the latest volume of
the French Annual of - L’Année psychanalytique internationale - is now available online!

---

Nous sommes heureux de vous présenter le volume 2024 de L’Année psychanalytique internationale!

Les 15 articles de psychanalyse les plus novateurs parus dans l’année. Une sélection traduite en français d’une dizaine articles du très prestigieux International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

---

En 1920, Freud et Ernest Jones fondent The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP), une prestigieuse r***e mensuelle de psychanalyse. Cet ouvrage reprend les articles de l’IJP les plus intéressants pour le lectorat français parus au cours de l’année. La sélection est effectuée par un comité de rédaction composé de neuf psychanalystes de l’Association Internationale de Psychanalyse.

Son ambition : permettre aux psychanalystes du monde entier de confronter leurs pratiques et leurs modèles et ouvrir de nouvelles voies de réflexion. Le débat clinique et théorique entre psychanalystes est, en effet, l’instrument majeur de recherche dans cette discipline.

Sortir de son environnement linguistique et culturel pour mettre au travail ces différences, tel est l’objectif de cette prestigieuse collection. Elle est tout à la fois, une fenêtre ouverte sur le monde de la psychanalyse et sur la psychanalyse dans le monde.

---

En savoir plus à http://www.pep-web.org/annuals

Visitez le site de l'éditeur à http://www.inpress.fr

28/05/2024

In Issue 2, Volume 105 (2024) of :

In our Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique Section, Maxine Anderson reflects on how entrenched grievance, often trauma-based, reflects melancholic states of mind in terms of avoidance of aspects of reality that include the pain of loss, which can lead to change and growth.

Detailed clinical material also illustrates how earnest efforts on the part of the analyst to bring understanding may actually lead to cognitive entrapments such as the convictions incumbent in the ‘knowing’ analyst.

In these circumstances, then both the analyst and the patient are shown to be narrow and fixed in their certain views about the other.

For this impasse to shift it is suggested that the so-called knowing analyst must recognize her own entrenchment (shaped by her theory or clothed as good technique) in order to genuinely alter her view of her patient’s fixed certainty about her superior stance.

Such a shift allows the analyst to view the patient’s complaint as a reasonable request, deserving her empathic recognition.

---

In a recent discussion, Anderson reflects:

"One intriguing aspect from this clinical experience which lingers for me is the intensity of the repetitively violent experience I encountered when my patient would suddenly ‘disappear’ from our mutual work into the hardened, cynical bastion of entrenched grievance, becoming then instantly dismissive of all we had achieved.

Only when I could emerge from my narrow view of knowing could I appreciate the communicative aspects of that jarring experience as the recreation, now lodged in me, of the sudden, violent abandonment my patient had felt at the death of his mother. It felt astonishing, once again, to witness how communicative traumatic recreation may be when it can be decoded and transformed by a receptive, empathic mind."

---

Read the full paper online at: https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.105.0153A

Visit www.theijp.org to find out how to subscribe to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis - the Journal founded by Ernest Jones & Sigmund Freud in 1920.

06/05/2024

🎂 Happy 168th Birthday to Sigmund Freud, founder of (and ), born on this day, 1856.

—-

Video excerpt from home movie filmed in Freud’s Bergasse apartment by Princess Marie Bonaparte - “La Bergasse. Vienne, Hiver 1937.” (Sigmund Freud Archives Collection, Library of Congress)

06/05/2024

🎂 Happy 168th Birthday to Sigmund Freud, founder of (and also ), born on this day in 1856 🎂

—-

Video excerpt from a home movie taken by Princess Marie Bonaparte in Freud’s Bergasse apartment - “La Bergasse, Vienne. Hiver 1937.” Sigmund Freud Archives Collection, Library of Congress.

02/05/2024

We are very excited to announce that the April issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis is now available online!

You can read the full issue online at www.pep-web.org, or alternatively, follow visit http://www.theijp.org to find out how to subscribe.

23/04/2024

In Issue 1, Volume 105 (2024) of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

Solange Carton explores the notion of inhibition in psychoanalysis at both a theoretical and clinical level.

The first part follows the development of the notion in Freud’s work, from the “Project” (1950a [1895]) to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d). It identifies the two approaches to inhibition, the first from an energetic point of view, the second from the angle of its relations to anxiety.

The second part of the article is devoted to the links between inhibition and Freud’s thoughts about death, in particular in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and the links to the . It draws on some of Jones’ notes and presents a brief clinical illustration.

The third part focuses more particularly on general inhibition, especially in and .

Based on the treatment of one patient, Carton shows how the slow process of overcoming general inhibition is achieved through the gradual use of negation. From an economic point of view, it is suggested that psychoanalytic treatment, through the transference and associative speech, has an effect on the depletion of energy by diverting the “suction” of stimuli, paving the way for the formation of drive representatives, or inhibitions as symptoms, which will need to be dissected.

Translated (from French) by Andrew Weller

---

Read the full paper online at
https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.105.0040A?page=P0040

07/04/2024

"The natural thing is playing …

It is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health: playing facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group relationships; playing can be a form of communication in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others."

- Donald Winnicott

Happy Birthday! Born today in 1896!🎉

"Playing: A Theoretical Statement" (p.41): ▶️ https://pep-web.org/browse/document/ZBK.017.0038A

27/03/2024

In Issue 1 (2024) of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

We were lucky enough to be in Florence this past weekend, where we came to meet with fellow Editors and Board Members for our biannual IJP meetings. Analysts from across the globe gathered in this beautiful city for the 2024 European Psychoanalytic Federation Conference on the theme of 'Identifications'.

Responding to the conference, this issue of the IJP opens with a ‘Letter From Florence’, by Benedetta Guerrini Degl’Innocentia and Chiara Matteini, who trace the long and at times conflicted history of Italian psychoanalysis, which can be summed up by both isolation and openness.

"Psychoanalysis in Italy has not taken on “unitary” characteristics but has developed various orientations depending on the contacts developed over time, becoming a multicultural context in itself."

---

Read the full issue online at http://www.pep-web.org, and follow the link in our bio to find out how to subscribe to .

---

https://www.facebook.com/epf.fep.eu
https://www.epf-fep.eu/en/

21/03/2024

Our first issue of 2024 is here!

Featuring original contributions from Giuseppe Civitarese, Solange Carton, Michael Feldman, Charles Baekeland and more.

---

For this year's cover of the International Journal, we continue with the theme of portrayals from Greek myth on vases, this time showing Achilles binding the wounds of Patroclus. At this time of extreme violence in various wars, old and new, it's as though the terrible figure of Achilles is reborn in our times.

But this softness evaporates when his hatred is inflamed, and the entire story of the Trojan War crescendos to the point where, in response to Hector's killing of Patroclus, Achilles fights Hector in a state of incandescent rage, not only killing him but mutilating his body and pouring insult upon insult upon Hector's family and people through the intensity of his cruelty.

Finally, Troy itself is destroyed and sacked, its people ruined through r**e and pillage. Once again, one is astonished by the capacity of the ancient Greeks to reflect so truthfully both the love and the hatred in human nature. When so many are tortured and killed in our day, this particular moment of men engaging in love and healing rather than in horrible destruction seems important to remember, to bear at the front of our minds, and of course to hope that this current of love can somehow become stronger than the alternating current of hatred.

---

Read the full issue online at www.pep-web.org, or find out more about the journal and how to subscribe at www.theijp.org.

11/01/2024

📆 ONLY 2 DAYS LEFT!

Join us this Saturday for our one day, online conference - 'Celebrating the Work of Dana Birksted-Breen'

⭕️ Discounted rates for IJP Subscribers!

For more information, and to register your place, visit https://psychoanalysis.org.uk

08/01/2024

Only one week left to book your ticket to our upcoming virtual conference: ‘Celebrating the Work of Dana Birksted-Breen’!

With papers by:

Catalina Bronstein (London), Patrick Miller (Paris), Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros (São Paulo), and Lucy LaFarge (New York).

Francis Grier, Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, will introduce the event.

—

Dana Birksted-Breen is a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She was the General Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis (2000-2010), initiating the New Library Teaching Series in 2005, and she was the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2007-2022). Dana was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 2022.

Dana Birksted-Breen is interested in the points of connection and disconnection between theory and practice, and the creative spaces between the two. Over many years she has investigated ideas of identity, sexuality, symbolization, temporality, and the psychoanalyst’s mode of attention in the session, publishing books and papers on these areas.

—

To book your ticket, and for more information, visit www.psychoanalysis.org

03/01/2024

In Steven Groarke’s account of working with a difficult to reach patient, he describes how the intolerable absence of an early object is experienced as “blank pain” – an unthinkable anxiety, which the patient defends against through “pathological mourning”. Failing to make sense of his “inner wreckage,” the patient forms an “insincere-self”, a psychic façade, which obstructs the analysis. How can meaning be reclaimed in the face of a psychic void?

---

Read the full paper online at www.pep-web.org or visit www.theijp.org to learn more about subscribing to the IJP.

28/12/2023

Our December issue is here and available to read on PEP-Web! ▶ https://pep-web.org/browse/IJP/volumes/104

Issue 6 features original contributions from Francis Grier, Steven Groarke, John Steiner, and Rosemary Claire Davies.

In our Education section, we reflect on 100 years since the publication of Freud’s 'The Ego and the Id' (1923), with papers from - Howard B. Levine, Elizabeth Allison, Fred Busch, Franco De Masi, Dominique Scarfone, John Steiner, Heinz Weiss - and something from the archives by Jacques Lacan.

As well as book reviews from Reyna Cowan, Sverre Varvin, Alan Colam, John Rosegrant, and Grace Yan.

---

You can now subscribe to both PEP-Web and the IJP which allows you to seamlessly access all issues of this journal from 1920 to the current year.

Find out more here: ▶ https://support.pep-web.org/ijp-on-pep-web/

30/11/2023

Celebrating the Work of Dana Birksted-Breen
IJP Conference

Register now by going to: https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/civicrm/event/info%3Fid%3D1449%26reset%3D1

Saturday, 13th January 2024 11am to 6.30pm GMT

Online via Zoom
This event will be recorded, and the recording will be made available to those registered after the event.



With papers by:

Catalina Bronstein (London), Patrick Miller (Paris), Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros (São Paulo), and Lucy LaFarge (New York)

Francis Grier, Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, will introduce the event.

In this conference, our four speakers who have all enjoyed close working relationships with Dana Birksted-Breen, will present papers based on different aspects of her work. The papers will be followed by audience discussion.

Dana Birksted-Breen is a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She was the General Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis (2000-2010), initiating the New Library Teaching Series in 2005, and she was the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2007-2022). Dana was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 2022.

Dana Birksted-Breen is interested in the points of connection and disconnection between theory and practice, and the creative spaces between the two. Over many years she has investigated ideas of identity, sexuality, symbolization, temporality, and the psychoanalyst’s mode of attention in the session, publishing books and papers on these areas.

In 2021 she edited Translation/Transformation, 100 Years of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Her latest monograph, The Work of Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind, was published by the New Library of Psychoanalysis (2016). In celebration of the Centenary of the IJP, she convened an international conference in 2019, co-curated an exhibition at the Freud Museum, “The Enigma of the Hour,” and created a short film https://vimeo.com/383978034.

Preliminary programme

11am - 11.15 Welcome: Francis Grier

11.15am - 12.30 Paper 1: Catalina Bronstein

1pm - 2.15pm Paper 2: Patrick Miller

2.30pm - 3.45pm Paper 3: Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros

4.15pm - 5.30pm Paper 4: Lucy LaFarge

5.30pm - 6.30pm Concluding remarks

The schedule is an attempt to have times that are accessible for the greatest number of people, since we have subscribers and interested parties in all parts of the world.

Special discount for subscribers to the journal! Register now by going to: https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/civicrm/event/info%3Fid%3D1449%26reset%3D1

17/11/2023

17/11/2023

Read now on Pep-web.org: https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.104.0809A

06/11/2023

06/11/2023

05/11/2023

Just released! 🎉

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol.104/5 (October 2023) is now available to read on PEP-Web! ▶ https://pep-web.org/browse/IJP/volumes/104

You can now subscribe to both PEP-Web and the IJP which allows you to seamlessly access all issues of this journal from 1920 to the current year.

Find out more here: ▶ https://support.pep-web.org/ijp-on-pep-web/

01/11/2023

“Lacan ended up giving us a valuable conception of the role of words in the interpretation of the transference,” writes Gilbert Diatkine. For Lacan, the patient speaks without knowing the unconscious meaning of their words, and the analyst, as the ‘subject supposed to know’, is none the wiser. Yet in listening to the patient’s “signifiers” (words or gestures), the analyst attempts to make links with networks of unconscious representations, which lifts repression. “French analysts owe Lacan their particular attention to the words spoken in the session.”

07/06/2023

In his Letter to the Editor, the Ukranian analyst Igor Romanov responds to David Bell’s recent paper ‘Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Conditions of Possibility of Human Destructiveness,’ writing:

“For better or worse, stepping outside their offices, psychoanalysts have various political beliefs, and some are dedicated to social problems. While some analysts were fighting against nuclear weapons in Europe, others were analysing the Soviet nuclear doctrine and the possibilities of protecting against it […] From a scientific point of view, we cannot decide whose convictions are right; however, with the emergence of the need for action in the presence of an actual menace, the issue is not a scientific one. It becomes paramount to identify the enemy and commit to opposing it.

David Bell responds, writing: “I agree with Romanov we cannot resolve political disagreements on the basis of scientific/psychoanalytic theories; that is, as individuals we have our political views and are more likely to make use of psychoanalytic understanding in developing those views as opposed to changing them. But we do not serve clarity of thought by falling into simplistic binaries of good (us) and evil (them).” For their responses in full, read their extended Letters to the Editor.

Read the letter and response here: https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.104.0384A

https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.104.0388A

A Psychoanalytic Library at your fingertips

05/06/2023

For our Psychoanalysis in the Community section, in Taking Outside in, Turning Inside Out, a group of American volunteers, therapists and scholars explore the psychotherapy of a young girl in foster care. Children in foster care have usually experienced extreme trauma, but in the underfunded public health system are deprived of much needed ther**eutic support. The volunteer organisation, A Home Within (AHW), seeks to redress this, providing pro-bono long-term psychotherapy to foster youth. The paper reflects both on the psychother**eutic work with the young foster child, and the societal conditions which make the work so necessary.

https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.104.0281A

30/05/2023

During the coronavirus lockdown, Luca Quagelli had no option but to carry out phone therapy with his patients, including with a psychotic adolescent. Yet despite much trepidation, he found that the shift in setting opened up vital opportunities. Modifications in the frames – both of our daily lives and clinical practice – can enable access to parts of the (non-verbal) personality that are usually deposited in the (concrete) frame, he claims. Speaking of his patient, he writes: “there was still an undifferentiated nucleus secretly deposited in the body of the setting which had remained inaccessible to the work we had laboriously carried out on differentiation and which probably allowed him to go on maintaining, at least partially, a symbiotic bond with his environment-mother (and with me, or rather with a part of me, in the transference)
… the elaborative work I did on the setting and on the undifferentiated part of me which had come to be deposited in it, enabled the patient to bring back into circulation his undifferentiated (autistic) nuclei and the sensations connected to them.”

https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.104.0263A

30/05/2023

During the coronavirus lockdown, Luca Quagelli had no option but to carry out phone therapy with his patients, including with a psychotic adolescent. Yet despite much trepidation, he found that the shift in setting opened up vital opportunities. Modifications in the frames – both of our daily lives and clinical practice – can enable access to parts of the (non-verbal) personality that are usually deposited in the (concrete) frame, he claims. Speaking of his patient, he writes: “there was still an undifferentiated nucleus secretly deposited in the body of the setting which had remained inaccessible to the work we had laboriously carried out on differentiation and which probably allowed him to go on maintaining, at least partially, a symbiotic bond with his environment-mother (and with me, or rather with a part of me, in the transference)
… the elaborative work I did on the setting and on the undifferentiated part of me which had come to be deposited in it, enabled the patient to bring back into circulation his undifferentiated (autistic) nuclei and the sensations connected to them.”

A Psychoanalytic Library at your fingertips