A golden solution to the problem of psychoanalytic training has yet to be found. Most psychoanalytic institutes are continously critically reflecting on their psychoanalytic training structures and trying to improve them. In this article, we report on our experiences over the last 12 semesters in which we tried to supplement the well-established modules of psychoanalytic training at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute with seminars that used the Three-Level Model of Clinical Observation (3LM) to intensively discuss one candidate's training case each in five evening seminars. The 3LM was developed primarily in the Clinical Research Committee of the IPA and has since been presented in a variety of publications. This paper uses a concrete example to illustrate that the distinction between the three levels of clinical judgment has proven helpful for candidates to systematically reflect on clinical psychoanalytic processes, their possible transformations and to deal with the plurality of contemporary psychoanalytic theories. Therefore, selected feedback from candidates in one specific 3LM seminar is presented and used as a starting point for critical reflection.
The aim pursued by Freud and Ferenczi in 1910, when they founded the International Psychoanalytical Association-to establish a regulatory body for the safeguarding of psychoanalysis-was supported by the international 'Guidelines for Psychoanalytic Training' developed by Max Eitingon and adopted in 1925. However, resistance to this centralised conception of psychoanalytic training soon emerged. This resistance grew as psychoanalysis spread worldwide across different cultures. The fact that differing approaches and regional autonomy in psychoanalytic training were able to gain a foothold under the umbrella of the IPA was demonstrated by the 2007 decision-still in force today-to grant equal recognition to the three training models: the Eitingon model, the French model and the Uruguayan model. A tension has arisen between central and local authorities regarding the organisation of psychoanalytic training within the IPA, which, depending on its intensity, can be either paralysing or creative for the further development of psychoanalysis. In the author's view, different translations into English of the German term 'Gleichgesinnte' used by Ferenczi highlight these contrasts. "Gleichgesinnte", who form the IPA as "people who think in the same way" (Haynal's translation), may leave less room for cultural differences than "Gleichgesinnte", who form the IPA as "like-minded people" (the author's translation). The author emphasises the value of a democratically legitimised, central authority, which must, however, remain in dialogue with local authorities within the IPA.
This study examines the reception and eventual decline of psychoanalysis, which remained outside the psychiatric mainstream in prewar Japan, in the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keijo Imperial University. It traces the scholarly formation of Kubo Kiyoji, who led the department, and the development of psychoanalytic research within the department. It focuses on the personal and intellectual networks of Japanese psychiatry and on Keijo Imperial University's position within the academic hierarchy. Kubo encountered psychoanalysis through Eugen Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, while studying in Zurich. This exposure provided him with an intellectual framework distinct from the German psychiatry tradition that was dominant in Japanese psychiatry. Consequently, the research output of the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Keijo Imperial University reflected Kubo's interests. The department produced articles introducing psychoanalytic theory and clinical case reports through the early 1930s. At the same time, Kubo adopted psychoanalytic theory eclectically rather than embracing it in its entirety, similar to Bleuler, who had maintained a cautious distance from Freud since the mid-1910s. Furthermore, Japanese psychiatry was shaped by a hierarchical structure centered on Kure Shuzo, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, within which psychoanalysis remained non-mainstream. Under these conditions, psychoanalytic research at Keijo Imperial University did not become a sustained departmental program and did not develop into sustained collaboration with Tohoku Imperial University, where psychoanalysis was actively pursued. Instead, the department's research gradually shifted toward somatic therapies and other fields with more visible findings, a shift better suited to the department's academic position. Consequently, the discontinuation of psychoanalytic research at Keijo Imperial University was not simply the result of a change in Kubo's personal interests. Rather, it reflected the structural conditions under which Keijo, as a peripheral imperial university, had to concentrate its resources on research fields more favorable to securing academic prestige. By tracing this case, this study suggests that research in the medical faculty of Keijo Imperial University was affected not only by the personal and intellectual networks of medicine in the Japanese Empire, but also by Keijo's position as a peripheral imperial university.
The paper makes a detailed argument for retaining as central the importance of intensive immersive in-person analysis for personal analysis and for control cases in psychoanalytic training. Fundamental is personal analysis and evaluation of the capacities of the analyst-in-training including, importantly, a capacity for analytic listening and intervention. A concern is discussed that recent International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) rule changes to propose a less intensive and immersive training may undermine this foundational base. In-person analysis allows simultaneous different perspectives, the rawness of immediate experience including the bodily, the sexual or the aggressive to emerge and be felt, and for the emergence of different types of transference that may include enactments by the patient or by the analyst. These lead to a fuller psychoanalytic understanding and are intrinsic to a capacity for growth needed to become a psychoanalyst. Brief vignettes from complex cases of adult, adolescent and child analysis illustrate this view of the centrality of in-person psychoanalysis.
The current crisis confronting psychoanalytic education is described. Essentially, there is little agreement about the definitions of psychoanalysis. Traditionally, the training analyst system has been blamed for all the ills that confront contemporary psychoanalytic education. In contrast, it is suggested that the lack of consensus extends far beyond that one educational standard. The problem involves psychoanalysts' lack of agreement over virtually anything. The main disagreements are seen in debates about curricula, the goals of psychoanalytic education, and even the definition of a competent psychoanalyst. Various solutions to the problem are suggested.
In this manuscript, I describe my experience of the evolving place of teleanalysis in psychoanalytic practice and education, focusing on the central role of the analyst's internal frame in sustaining analytic work across settings. Drawing on clinical, supervisory, teaching, and personal analytic experience, I argue that the usefulness of psychoanalysis depends less on the external setting than on the analyst's capacity to function analytically in the face of absence, uncertainty, and loss. I suggest that a priori views of teleanalysis as "less real" or "less effective" often reflect defensive efforts to avoid these anxieties, foreclosing analytic inquiry. Rather than treating differences between in-office and teleanalytic work as indicators of equivalence or inferiority, I propose that we view each setting as mobilising distinct transference-countertransference configurations that require symbolic elaboration. I consider the educational implications of these observations, arguing that teleanalytic treatment and supervision during training can provide a vital context for engaging, testing, and strengthening candidates' internal analytic frame and psychoanalytic identity. I contend that given the worldwide and widespread adoption of the teleanalytic frame, teaching candidates how to practise analysis while working teleanalytically during their training has become an existential issue for psychoanalysis.
The author describes current tensions within the international psychoanalytic collective regarding changes in training standards that reflect a long history of professional conflict about the aims of training. Conflicts are reflected in issues of power and authority that tend to usurp collaborative definition of the essentials of analytic formation. The importance of moving away from polarization and both recognizing and respecting the inevitable differences of opinion that characterize educational discord is emphasized as vital to the future of the profession in a sociopolitical era in which psychoanalytic values of humane interpersonal relationships and dialogic problem-solving are increasingly threatened and sorely needed.
This essay argues that psychoanalytic practice rests on a humanistic foundation irreducible to, and of a different order from, artificial intelligence. While large language models can simulate dynamic formulations, interpretations, and even therapeutic personas, such outputs are imitative; they retrieve and recombine rather than remember or desire. Drawing on three pivotal moments in history-Plato's Phaedrus, the Catholic confessional, and Walter Benjamin's concepts of aura and mechanical reproduction-the essay contends that genuine psychoanalytic work emerges from embodied, mortal, desiring persons in dialogue. The soul-to-soul encounter, grounded in singularity, history, and the ever present horizon of death, cannot be reproduced or replaced by any AI system.
This paper offers a psychoanalytic reflection on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, prompted by Shmuel Erlich's recent contribution to The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. While Erlich argues that psychoanalysis is relevant only to the study of contemporary antisemitism and not to the conflict itself, the author contends that psychoanalytic thought remains essential for understanding the unconscious group dynamics that sustain war and collective violence. Drawing on Klein, Bion, Segal and Fornari, the paper explores the oscillation between paranoid-schizoid and depressive modes of functioning, the activation of psychotic defences in situations of catastrophe, and the failure to contain guilt and mourning. These dynamics, although shared by both sides of the conflict, have produced tragically disproportionate consequences, particularly for the Palestinian population. The paper also reconsiders Erlich's reading of antisemitism, its moral implications, and the ethical responsibility of psychoanalysts to resist collective denial and illuminate the unconscious forces that underpin violence and silence. In the spirit of Hanna Segal's call to speak out, it argues that silence in the face of human suffering constitutes a moral failure that psychoanalysis cannot afford.
This paper considers the relevance of personal names and the process of naming in relation to unconscious dynamics, implicit associations, cultural influences, and our relationships with our parents. Particular attention is paid to our associations with certain names, names in relation to the structure of the ego, and the use of names in clinical practice, with references drawn from current and historical psychoanalytic literature.
This article argues that the question of whether we are alone in the universe is a symptom of Western apparatuses that produce an ontological rift between human beings and other species. This rift comprises instrumental, ruling epistemologies that depersonalize other species, thus legitimating our indifference to their manifold intelligences and communications. The Western apparatuses that produce the rift can be understood in terms of a normative and historical unconscious, as well as the defenses of weak dissociation and projection. These defenses operate to secure a conscious and preconscious sense of existential significance while rendering unconscious the terrifying reality of existential insignificance. This analysis also provides a partial explanation for the sources of the climate polycrisis and the strong resistance to effective climate action. That is, dissonant subjects have an antagonistic relation to "nature," deeming all that falls under this abstraction mute and dumb (unintelligent).
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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.
Several Norwegian analysts trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute established a Norwegian psychoanalytic society (IPA-membership 1934). Due to the emergence of Nazism, Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel ended up in Oslo in 1933/4. Their importance for the development of Norwegian psychoanalysis became immense and dramatic. The IPA Congress in 1949 was a disaster for Norwegian psychoanalysis: exclusion from the IPA. Only after many years did the Norwegian society regain its IPA membership in 1975. Norway's first Professor of psychology, Harald Schjelderup, entering his professorship in 1928, was a psychoanalyst, trained in Vienna. Establishing the depth psychological method as a specific scientific method, Schjelderup's main academic project was the integration of psychoanalysis with general psychological science. Ever since, the Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society has maintained a close relationship with the university. During the last twenty years, Norwegian analysts have developed a most successful programme for psychoanalytic psychotherapy in China and participated in training the first Chinese analysts approved by IPA. Thus, they have made a substantial contribution to the IPA-psychoanalytic training in China, resulting in the establishment of the IPA study group in 2022. The inner life of the Norwegian Society has also renewed an enthusiasm through its development of a new training analyst system.
Chronic depression associated with early trauma remains one of the most treatment-resistant conditions in mental healthcare. Clinical and empirical findings have increasingly suggested that patients with histories of early trauma may benefit differentially from intensive psychoanalytic treatments compared to symptom-focused or short-term psychotherapies. Our conceptual article 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. Taking a longitudinal case from the LAC Depression Study as an illustration, this study examines a patient who underwent high-frequency psychoanalysis and demonstrated enduring structural change, which remained accessible for more than a decade after treatment termination. Clinical material from the original analysis and from a later crisis intervention illustrates how embodied memories of early traumatic experiences can be discovered and understood 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 an absence of a helping object to 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. This article further argues that psychoanalytic processes resonate with contemporary neurobiological models of memory reconsolidation. When embodied memories of trauma are revived within a safe and emotionally attuned analytic relationship, they may enter a labile state that allows for enduring modification and reintegration. 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 more profound understanding of why psychoanalysis can produce lasting therapeutic effects in a patient population traditionally considered difficult to treat.
The institutional debates about the inclusion of teleanalysis in psychoanalytic training, as well as about session frequency in training, involve important questions grounded in psychoanalytic practice and experience. The divergent views on these matters will require close collaboration between as many members of the International Psychoanalytic Association as possible to understand their reasons. Our common ground as psychoanalysts may lie most of all in our ability to do this psychoanalytic exploratory work together. Ultimately, the authority behind institutional decisions must derive from the authority of psychoanalysis as a clinical and scientific discipline which we develop and perfect together.
This essay offers a psycho-spiritual and psychoanalytic meditation on the horse-human relationship as a nonverbal site of attunement, regulation, and meaning-making. Drawing on autobiographical clinical narrative, it explores how horseback riding became a medium for experiencing and reflecting upon embodied connection, mutual responsiveness, and contemplative presence. Encounters with horses illuminate forms of reciprocity that preceded and exceed speech, while also opening reflection on maternal attachment, separation, loss, and the emergence of selfhood. In dialogue with Freud, Winnicott, Piaget, and Buber, the essay argues that the horse-rider dyad may be understood as a lived analogue to central psychoanalytic concerns, including attunement, play, symbolization, and the I-Thou relation. The horse emerges not merely as metaphor, but as a sentient other whose responsiveness invites humility, emotional integration, and spiritual deepening. The essay ultimately suggests that sustained attention to the nonverbal-whether in relation to children with disabilities or to sentient beings-may enlarge psychoanalytic understandings of embodiment, intersubjectivity, and transcendence.
Although the approach of pluralism within psychoanalysis seemed a solution to the interminable battles over theoretical differences that preceded it, it has been far from a panacea. In fact, psychoanalysis as a field and something to be educated in has become chaotic and fragmented. The authors who contributed to this Section on Psychoanalytic Education have suggested a number of paths forward. One path involves teaching candidates to think critically. A number of ways to do so are suggested: (a) always explaining the theoretical rationale underlying analytic interventions, (b) explicitly linking theoretical constructs with the clinical phenomena to which they refer; (c) using developmental research to evaluate different theoretical "psychoanalytic babies"; and (d) disciplined examination of key theoretical differences of opinion. In addition, Freud's writings can be used to promote thinking analytically and to consolidate an analytic identity. Finally, the value of developing a unified or integrated psychoanalytic model is endorsed.
This paper explores the relational approach in psychoanalysis not merely as a theoretical model but as a clinical sensibility that has fundamentally altered therapeutic practice across theoretical boundaries. Unlike classical psychoanalytic innovations that emerged from clinical observations, the relational approach represents a new type of innovation-one that challenges epistemological assumptions rather than proposing new psychic facts. Drawing on clinical vignettes and training experiences, this paper examines how relational sensibilities have infiltrated contemporary practice, creating new therapeutic possibilities while generating novel clinical dilemmas. The paper argues that understanding innovation in terms of "sensibilities" rather than just theoretical systems provides crucial insights into how psychoanalytic knowledge develops and spreads in the contemporary era.
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.