Free-Association Session Scale: factor structure and preliminary validity test.

One of the main concepts of the psychoanalytic method postulated by Freud in 1912 is the fundamental rule, which involves asking the patient to say whatever comes to mind as the analyst follows the patient's speech with fluctuating attention. Despite different theoretical models, this concept has remained an invariant element that characterizes the psychoanalytic method. For this reason, the purpose of the current study is to present a new instrument that measures this process based on the clinician's assessment. The Free-Association Session Scale (FASS) has been designed according to the psychoanalytic framework. Study 1 presented the preliminary validation of the FASS factor structure. Experienced Italian psychoanalysts (N = 281; 196 women) completed the FASS and sociodemographic questionnaire. The following two factors were identified using exploratory factor analysis: (1) Perturbing, and (2) Associativity. Study 2 cross-validated the two factors using an independent sample (N = 259; 187 women) of experienced psychoanalysts and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The FASS has been tested for concurrent validity using the Session Evaluation Questionnaire (SEQ) and Linguistic measures of the Referential process. The two-factor model achieved a close-fit test, and the FASS items were found to measure the corresponding factors with good reliability. The Perturbing factor is negatively associated with three SEQ factors (Depth, Smoothness, and Positivity) and negatively correlated with symbolization (IWRAD and IWRAD_IWRRL), confirming a more complex and unexpected session. The Associativity factor is positively associated with all four SEQ factors (Depth, Smoothness, Positivity, and Arousal). In conclusion, the FASS is a promising new questionnaire for assessing psychoanalytic session quality processes with satisfactory validity and reliability.

Genocides and processes of subjectivation: Auschwitz as a paradigm of destructiveness towards the I-Other link.

The genocides of the previous century made it possible for a group, presenting itself as bearer of legitimacy and common interests, to organize itself in order to eliminate another group of people, regardless of their individuality, merely because they belonged to another group. This is a violation of the basic I-Other bond, which enables identification, communication, psychic life itself. This violation is described in literature on the individual level, from the victims' viewpoints, and socially, from the viewpoints of the perpetrators and unconcerned spectators. The author analyses how the destruction of this basic bond may be tackled in the analysis room, conferring on the analyst the function of participating witness, and on a social level: the collective trauma produces the collapse of the unconscious narcissistic alliances that guarantee both the individual's and the group's psychic survival. Alongside the two great differences that provide grounds for violence - the differences between the sexes and between generations - Kaës asserts that there exists another great difference that is just as significant in causing violence, that which organizes the narcissistic position of the individual with respect to the group. The work of elaboration concerns the narcissistic contracts rooted in intersubjectivity, which allow for a shared life without annihilating healthy individual narcissism in its self-referential and group aspects.

A reconsideration of Freud's essays on sexuality and their clinical implications.

This paper considers some of the concisely presented material of the second of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905a), on "Infantile Sexuality." The author puts forward the view that infantile sexuality may be thought of not simply as an immature stage that must be passed through, but also as a pool of psychic experiences upon which mature personality organization can continually draw, in dynamic oscillation among different mental positions. The link between infantile sexuality and the structuring of the psychic apparatus, discussed in the first and third of the Three Essays ("The Sexual Aberrations" and "The Transformations of Puberty"), raises questions that are still open to further research.

The reality of the other: dreaming of the analyst.

The author discusses the obstacles to symbolization encountered when the analyst appears in the first dream of an analysis: the reality of the other is represented through the seeming recognition of the person of the analyst, who is portrayed in undisguised form. The interpretation of this first dream gives rise to reflections on the meaning of the other's reality in analysis: precisely this realistic representation indicates that the function of the other in the construction of the psychic world has been abolished. An analogous phenomenon is observed in the countertransference, as the analyst's mental processes are occluded by an exclusively self-generated interpretation of the patient's psychic world. For the analyst too, the reality of the other proves not to play a significant part in the construction of her interpretation. A 'turning-point' dream after five years bears witness to the power of the transforming function performed by the other throughout the analysis, by way of the representation of characters who stand for the necessary presence of a third party in the construction of a personal psychic reality. The author examines the mutual denial of the other's otherness, as expressed by the vicissitudes of the transference and countertransference between analyst and patient, otherness being experienced as a disturbance of self-sufficient narcissistic functioning. The paper ends with an analysis of the transformations that took place in the analytic relationship.