Do we know our place? The role of psychoanalysis in public life.

The contributions to this Psychoanalytic Controversies section explore the question of what psychoanalysis may be able to contribute to thinking about some of the challenges currently confronting humanity and how such communications can be made effectively. This introduction to the section frames the debate with some reflections on anxieties that have been expressed about the application of psychoanalytic ideas beyond the clinical context, the risks of insularity, the need for appropriate humility, and the reality of the embeddedness of analytic practice, in particular social, cultural, and historical contexts. Contributions from Claudia Frank, Sudhir Kakar, Eli Zaretsky, Michael Rustin, Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, Magda Khouri, and Sally Weintrobe are introduced.

Freud in Bulgaria: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Translation: An Experience with the Singular.

This contribution considers a monthly seminar, Literature and Psychoanalysis, that has been taking place at Sofia University (Sofia, Bulgaria) since 2017. Three of the seminar's founders reflect on the transferences between literature and psychoanalysis, and on the ways in which literature and psychoanalysis can meaningfully converse. The exchange also touches on the fate of Freud's textual legacy in communist and post-communist Bulgaria.

Transacting in Objectification: Racism, Psychoanalysis, and the Temptations of Empiricism.

This article examines five contributions published in the early volumes (1913-1917) of The Psychoanalytic Review, written by John E. Lind and Arrah B. Evarts. It reflects on how they address the topic of race and its relation to psychoanalytic theory, highlighting the ways of purported neutrality of empirical research and how it serves a fantasy through which racism is enacted and sustained.

Wondering and Wandering: In Defense of Free Association and the Fundamental Rule.

"Free association" and the "fundamental rule" are bedrock for psychoanalytic therapy and apply to what both patient and analyst should experience in the process. The article traces Sigmund Freud's revolutionary recognition of the importance of free association that began with his tribute to the works of Ludwig Börne and Friedrich Schiller. The author invokes other proposals akin to free association made by artists and scientists, including John Keats, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Thomas S. Kuhn, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Einstein. While emphasizing the importance and the liberatory potential of free association as it relates to effective treatment and discovery, the author contends that there is a "moral press" for both the patient and the analyst to permit free associative thoughts, particularly to question assumptions about how things are supposed to be.

Fabricating the Black Psyche: Saint Elizabeths Hospital and The Psychoanalytic Review.

Between 1913 and 1917, The Psychoanalytic Review published several studies that argued for a distinct Black psyche. They were edited by the journal's co-founder, William Alanson White, and conducted by the staff at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, where White served as superintendent. This article provides a brief historical context for better understanding of why and how The Review paid attention to the comparative study of race.

The inability to mourn: Past and current challenges for psychoanalysis.

Although the capacity to mourn is ubiquitously acknowledged as critical for individual psychic functioning, the impact of this capacity on a collective social level has been examined to a very limited extent in the psychoanalytic literature to date. The two papers that take up this this topic thus bring various critical and complex issues to our attention. After reviewing and commenting on these papers, I discuss how these issues are particularly relevant today to society in general and psychoanalysis in particular. I believe that the ability to mourn is under siege in the Western world at present, with respect to both "macro" mourning that is, mourning for significant losses such as a beloved person, ideal, or country, and "micro" mourning or mourning for losses inherently and unavoidably implicated in choices we make in everyday life. These mourning processes are undermined by the impact of complex socioeconomic parameters on psychic functioning, as evidenced by various internal problems and symptomatology characteristic of our times. In turn, difficulties in mourning contribute to social problems including social injustice, wars and the climate crisis. As psychoanalysts we are called upon to address these issues in our clinical work as well as in our global community.

BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH SENECA'S PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN MIND.

This paper regards Seneca's practical philosophy as ancestor to psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy and as a progenitor of ongoing contemporary praxis in applied ideas of mind. Facing forward into the Anthropocene, as psychoanalysis encounters Artificial Intelligence, the convergence with contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy of value concepts developed from Antiquity is discussed. Drawn from Seneca's Letters on Ethics, constellations of significant ideas present in ancient practical philosophy resonate with similar configurations developed two millennia later, and central to the practice of contemporary psychotherapy.

Psychological Approach in the Interpretation of 20th Century Kazakh Postmodern Literature.

The aim of the study is to analyse contemporary postmodern literary works of Kazakhstan through the conceptual prism of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. To achieve research goals, the following methods were used: axiomatic, content analysis, and comparative. The results of the study determined that contemporary Kazakh writers characterise a large field of motives and ideas that are revealed through text, symbols, and characters. Strong tools for their interpretation were the psychological approaches of Freud and Jung, which are the standards of psychoanalysis and have their own specific features of semantic content. Content analysis of postmodern materials has established that Kazakh stories trace the motives of mythology, religion, relationships and inner spiritual development, which consider the mental differences of the heroes of the storylines. During the psychoanalysis of the works, it was emphasised that postmodernism in the literature of Kazakhstan reflects the rejection of absolute truths, blurring the boundaries between genres, playing with traditional forms and content. Many of the characters in the stories are experiencing an identity crisis, which has been analysed through the Freudian triad and Jung's archetypal images. Kazakh literature, being woven into the cultural and historical heritage of the nation, reflects the features of mentality, socio-cultural transformations, identity and spiritual quest of heroes.

Ontological Psychoanalysis in Clinical Practice.

The author describes and then clinically illustrates what he terms the ontological dimension of psychoanalysis (having to do with coming into being) and the epistemological dimension of psychoanalysis (having to do with coming to know and understand). Neither of these dimensions of psychoanalysis exists in pure form; they are inextricably intertwined. Epistemological psychoanalysis, for which Freud and Klein are the principal architects, involves the work of arriving at understandings of play, dreams, and associations; while ontological psychoanalysis, for which Winnicott and Bion are the principal architects, involves creating conditions in which the patient might become more fully alive and real to him- or herself. The author provides clinical illustrations of the ontological dimension of psychoanalysis in which the process of the patient's coming more fully into being is facilitated by the experiences in which the patient feels recognized for the individual he is and is becoming. This occurs in an analysis in which the analyst and patient invent a form of psychoanalysis that is uniquely their own.

The psychoanalytic setting: José Bleger's encuadre.

José Bleger's paper on the setting (encuadre) is integral to his 1967 book Symbiosis and Ambiguity. Relevant concepts from the book are summarised before examining his view of the setting as a "non-process" consisting of "constants", complementing the "variables" of the analytic process. Process and setting are related as figure and ground in Gestalt psychology. The ideally maintained setting is studied as a thought experiment, uniting the categories of institution, personality, body schema, and body. Deposited in the setting, the psychotic part of the personality, or "agglutinated nucleus", is a remnant of early symbiosis with the mother. Bleger distinguishes two settings: the analyst's and the patient's. The latter can only be analysed by strictly maintaining the former. Ritualisation of the setting denies temporal reality. De-symbiotisation is not always possible. A concept of "internal" setting is suggested, but Bleger nowhere mentions this and the concept is problematic, leaving open the question of how to listen to the silence of the setting. Bleger's concept of encuadre can be applied to constants (invariants) in the wider world, the psychotic part of the personality being deposited in everything that is familiar and felt to be constant, including technology, which creates a "platform" for human activity.

On the question of the internal frame.

This paper attempts to expand José Bleger's classic, metapsychological descriptions of the psychoanalytic frame to formulate and emphasize the role of the analyst's internal frame in establishing a psychoanalytic observational perspective in the analytic situation. The rationale for doing so follows from clinical necessity, especially when working with patients and psychic organizations that are 'beyond neurosis' and in non-traditional settings such as distance and telemetric analyses. Clinically speaking, in its most effective state, the analyst's internal frame can inform the possibility of an observational vertex aimed at the intuitive grasp of psychic reality rather than a sense-based, empirical observation of parameters denoted by the elements of a consensually validatable social reality.

Freud's interpretation in "Medusa's Head" and some alternative psychoanalytic implications of Ovid's Medusa.

Freud's very brief 1922 paper on the beheading of Medusa by Perseus wisely concludes with a call for a further examination of the sources of the legend. A now widespread interpretation of this legend is based (often without acknowledgement) on an addition to traditions concerning Medusa made in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is argued here that this Ovidian innovation has often been misinterpreted, and that a more careful reading of Metamorphoses supports neither a widely alleged exclusively vengeful portrayal of Medusa, nor Freud's portrayal of Medusa's decapitation as solely a pitiable and terrible symbol of castration. Instead, Ovid's complex treatments of myths involving Medusa, Minerva and Perseus present parallels with Kleinian insights into phantasy attacks on fecundity, and into imagined revivals of dead or damaged inside babies. Thus the "displacement upwards" of the fearful castrated maternal genital envisioned in Freud's "Medusa's Head" must stand beside a quite different "displacement upwards" of the life-giving maternal genital. Indeed, tradition holds that Medusa's beheading gives rise to the birth of vigorous twins. Together with allied details, this aligns Ovid's masterwork with theories that modify or displace the so-called "sexual phallic monism" that some believe taints Freud's theories of gender development.

Engaging with the unknown: How Judaism enabled Freud's psychological discoveries.

A large literature has formed around the question of how Freud's Jewishness and/or Judaism influenced his psychological discoveries and development of psychoanalytic theory and methods. The article organizes the literature into several core theses but brings new clarity and insight by applying two essential criteria to demonstrate an impact of Judaism on Freud's thinking: direct content and historical timing. First, there should be evidence that Freud incorporated actual content from Jewish sources, and second, this incorporation must have occurred during the most crucial period of Freud's early discovery, conceptualization, and development of psychoanalysis, roughly 1893-1910. Thus, for example, Bakan's well-known theory that Freud studied Kabbala is completely negated by the absence of any evidence in the required time period. Part I reviews the literature on the influence of Freud's ethnic/cultural Jewish identity. Part II introduces the Judaic sacred literature, explores Freud's education in Judaism and Hebrew, and presents evidence that Freud had the motive, means, and resources to discover and draw from the "Dream Segment" of the Talmud-along with the traditional Judaic methods and techniques of textual exegesis. Freud then applied these same Judaic word-centered interpretive methods-used for revealing an invisible God-to revealing an invisible Unconscious in four successive books in 1900, 1901, and 1905.