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How the Light Gets In: Contemporary Understanding and Treatment of Trauma

Posted on by Melonie Bell

 A lecture-discussion by Dominique Scarfone

 Today is Saturday April, 10, 2021, and I am at the IPI Saturday morning guest lecture by Dominic Scarfone. I am sitting here in my Zoom window along with clinician colleagues from thirteen countries (Austria, Canada, India, Iran, Japan, Macao, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Panama, Phillipines, Romania, and South Africa) and twenty-five US states. The IPI Director has explained the use of technology so that we know how to introduce our questions and comments into the large group discussion of the ideas presented to us in the lecture “Trauma, Subjectivity, Subjectality.” Dominique Scarfone, a Montreal psychoanalyst, professor, and author of The Unpast and Laplanche, is talking about these ideas developed from those of the French psychoanalyst Laplanche. Since most of us are more familiar with Anglophone psychoanalysis, we’re looking to Scarfone for his translation of the French way of thinking about the impact of trauma upon the infant’s developing body and mind and subjectivity. Later we’ll hear about subjectality.

Scarfone tells us that, when trauma is the focus, psychoanalysts tend to see it as an exceptional problem as if it calls for something other than the foundational method of psychoanalysis. This is not justified. In his view, trauma is a general part of the impact of the other on the self and falls along a continuum. To him, trauma is normally, inextricably entwined in psychic life, as the infant subject confronts the other, and in particular has to deal with the impact of the care-giving adult’s infantile unconscious sexuality.  The theories of attachment or mentalization do not take sufficient account of the enigma that the adult’s infantile unconscious sexuality poses for the infant mind.  When the infant mind cannot articulate what is going on but can only register it, the experience creates a primordial split between what can be held in mind and what cannot.  This is due to implantation of the traumatic sexual enigma stuck in the infant mind like a foreign body, an experience the infant has to decode or translate — an effort which will be only partially successful.   When the sexual enigma is accompanied by violent passion, the translation effort is compromised and impeded what Laplanche calls intromission, and Scarfone calls intrusion.  The balance between implantation and intromission, is determined by the context of relationship with the other.

The mother who provides sensitive care for her baby always shows some deviation from the provision of care into the realm of sexuality. Lest this sound too abstract, Scarfone gives us an example.  Imagine the parent at bath-time, pretending to be a monster coming to eat the child up.  The parent communicates intense oral desires, but this is play, the infant enjoys the pretense, and the cannibalism doesn’t happen.  The mother who puts the baby to the breast may have sexual feelings and responses from the nipple stimulation.  All this is in the realm of ordinary parenting behavior.  In Scarfone’s view, unlike Freud’s view of psychosexual development, the infant is not sexually endowed at birth.  (I would put more value on the infant’s active pleasure-seeking, sucking and caressing, but that is not Scarfone’s focus).  He redefines infantile sexuality as being evoked in a libidinal and inviting interaction with the other. The child registers the various forays from the other, and stores them for future understanding.

The human context that the various others caring for the child provide is unpredictable. Attempts at consistency and reliability are never perfect – which is a challenge for the infant, but has an upside, since surprise and novelty stimulate adaptation and growth of individuality.  Scarfone agrees that the infant and mother work together to create a symmetrical attachment relationship, but believes that, since the powerful adult is endowed with sexual desire and the infant is not, this part of the mother-infant relationship is asymmetrical.  When an adult’s caring for an infant is infused with the exertion of power and mastery, the child, who thereby is required to submit to the desires of the other, suffers a greater amount of trauma than usual from the encounter with the other. The trauma is compounded because the infant (and later the child in that situation) is in a helpless state of mind, unable to put words to events and symbolize what has happened.

The normal development of our subjectivity is subject to the history that came before us, our sexual drive, unconscious elements all around us, our suffering, and the estrangement we have experienced.   The subject should be the center of action. But when treated as a thing, the person loses the sense of subjectivity. The child may be diminished by the shame of her helplessness or may respond by imagining she is special in order to preserve her dignity and elevate her helpless masochistic surrender to a triumph. Traumatized people who were so objectified may join others with similar feelings to form a compact mass for support, but are then subjected to the common opinion, and find themselves again victims of abuse of their own making.  It is difficult for them to recover their subjectivity.  Now we find out the meaning of subjectality – the taking back of one’s subjectivity and having one’s own opinions, desires and choices.

We are fascinated by Scarfone’s way of thinking, puzzled, intrigued, struggling a bit, and inspired.  We listen; we compare and contrast the French ideas to those of Freud and Winnicott; and we debate with him directly.  The fabric of our thinking has been torn by our contact with the other.  In the ensuing small affective learning groups, the translation and integration continue letting the light in through the cracks.

Jill Scharff

 

 

The Boulder Tragedy

Posted on by Melonie Bell

Karen Mohatt, March 24, 2021

A day after the latest shooting and tragedy in Boulder, CO I was thankful to still be home-officing because my office is only 4 blocks from that King Sooper’s Store.  I used to go to the Starbucks located inside for coffee or tea.  Boulder does have a small town feel to it, much like Lincoln did as well.  Boulderites think of themselves as living in a bubble of peace, love, care of the environment, conscientiousness of health, and are very forward thinking.  But Monday, the bubble burst as unbelievable horror visited the city of 100,000.

All day Tuesday, my patients spoke of shock, profound grief, sadness and deep fear.  But most troubling was how they didn’t speak of disbelief.  Rather, they spoke of the violence in our country becoming as prevalent as Covid-19.  Most everyone follows the public health guidelines, with the exception of some, and are now grateful they’ve received or will receive the vaccine.  But yesterday they kept talking about fears of violence and being unable to inoculate themselves against it.  I’m sure I will hear much the same from my patients today and tomorrow.  They fear violence from external sources and we will at some point have to talk about the violence they feel internally as well, as their own peace and safety has been stripped away in one horrific act.  Those with a history of significant trauma who work so hard on a daily basis to feel some semblance of safety, have once again been activated by this tragedy.

By the time I finished with my patients last night, I found myself literally sick to my stomach.  Though working through Zoom, every emotion my patients felt was just so palpable, and I could feel the pain they experienced in the wake of such trauma, and my own vulnerability in the aftermath of such senseless tragedy.

Karen Sharer-Mohatt, PsyD Psychoanalyst

Recent IPI Faculty Publications

Posted on by Melonie Bell

Change across a completed analysis assessed using a modified Three-Level Model

Jill Savege Scharff & Pat Hedegard

The authors present their design for a clinical teaching exercise to study transformation in psychoanalysis. They chose a completed analysis from which to select the sessions retrospectively so that the clinical review exercise would not influence ongoing analytic process. The co-authors selected three tranches of clinical material, a few years apart, to be presented by the analyst. They studied the material with colleagues in the impressionistic manner of traditional clinical review, and then subjected it to more systematic examination, using a modified application of the Three-Level Model (3-LM) for assessing change. Their prediction was that the use of the 3-LM model could amplify the clinical impressions of the individual analyst and provide a way of being more specific about the changes, if any, that had occurred, and arrive at which theories best explained those changes.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the participation of colleagues who engaged in the exercise, the generosity of Paul Koehler, MSW, Charles Ashbach, PhD, and David Scharff, MD, who shared their responses to the three tranches of case material, and the analysand who gave permission for the use of her clinical material.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2020.1743879

The use of a simple writing task to enhance psychoanalytic education

Jill Savege Scharff & Caroline M. Sehon

The authors describe a simple recurrent writing task called the “Two Page Paper Exercise,” designed to enhance candidates’ learning of analytic theory and technique. They set this task in the context of other analytic institutes’ writing programs and show that this exercise is unique. Their educational philosophy is that, as candidates confront multiple perspectives in contemporary psychoanalysis, this writing task develops their ability to conceptualize, reflect on their learning, integrate affect and cognition, and express their ideas to others in written form and in discussion with peers. The candidate group develops cohesion that reduces writing anxiety. As individuals they develop a writing habit that supports the eventual duty to develop the field of psychoanalysis through publishing. The authors present raw data from candidates’ writing for readers to make their own assessment of the usefulness of the task as a measure of candidates’ integration of learning, development of analytic sensibility and synthetic capacity, and communication of experience and ideas to others.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous contributions of Flora Barragan, Ryan Garcia, Stefanie Minen, Andi Pilecki, Matthew Rosa, and Karen Sherwood of the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2020.1718751

Changes in Frames: COVID-19 and Teleanalysis

Posted on by Melonie Bell

 April 2020

 

Yolanda Varela, PhD, President, IPA Panamanian Association of Psychoanalysis (Provisional Society); supervising analyst, IPA; supervising analyst and graduate, APsaA International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training.

 

Thoughts arising at Town Hall Meeting:

Changes in Frames: COVID-19 and Teleanalysis

 

With so many countries under lockdown to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic, the frame of life and work has completely changed.  Analysts who always conducted analysis in their private office, now are forbidden from traveling, and must stop practice or continue to see their patients in virtual space, each connecting from their own home. As always, crises bring opportunities for new experiences for us and for our patients.  I would like to address my experience under three headings: the use of teleanalysis, the early anxieties that are stirred in the patient, and early anxieties that are stirred in the analyst.

 

The use of teleanalysis

Unlike some of my colleagues who had never engaged in technology mediated treatment, I had experience to draw on.  I had already completed a personal analysis with an ApsaA certified analyst, and much of it was necessarily conducted using the telephone at first, and later using Voice over Internet Protocol with web camera.  I had had a full analytic training too — but not one that was approved by ApsaA.  Then FEPAL (Psychoanalytic Federation of of Latin America) authorized ILAP (Latin-American Institute of Psychoanalysis) to offer psychoanalytic training in Central America, as a global outreach project of the International Psychoanalytic Association.  When ILAP arrived in Panama, one of its requirements was that analytic graduates like me who had already completed a personal analysis would have to do an extra 200 hours of condensed analysis “in-person”  that is, traveling to the city where our analysts lived, or meeting in Panama with an IPA authorized analyst newly immigrated to Panama.

 

In order to meet the new requirement, I would do the extra hours.  I decided to travel to the United States to resume with my analyst, but what I chose to do with the extra time in analysis was to focus on what is not represented in me, on my early anxieties.  To address these effectively, I decided to continue my required in-person analysis with four-times-a week videoconference technology mediated sessions between trips to the United States.  For me, analysis “in-person” continues to be the preferable one, but at no time were transference and countertransference aspects lacking in the technology-mediated portions of the treatment.  In fact, it was the change in the frame that evoked the very early anxieties and enabled me to analyze them.  This experience gave me confidence in the use of teleanalysis.

 

Now I am analyzing my own patients in Panama in traditional, in-office analysis.  Occasionally I am asked to do teleanalysis.   For this, I establish new rules.  First, I use the most secure and stable platform (in my case ZOOM) and I don’t let the patient decide the platform.  Before each session, the patient receives a link to access the session with a password that only the patient knows.  I explain to analysands that they should look for a private place, where they can recline, similar to the office couch, with the camera on one side and behind them, simulating my position inside the office.  I greet them with the usual greeting, they recline and lose eye contact with me, but if they turn their head back, they will be able to see me.  I think we should stick to rules for technology mediated treatment that are similar to those in use for treatment in the office.  Beyond these arrangements to secure the external frame, I also shift my internal frame.  It was José Bleger’s article on the psychoanalysis of the frame that helped me to develop my technique in teleanalysis, and so help my patients. Bleger asks us to analyze what lies hidden behind the traditional, well-established frame.

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Early anxieties of the patient

During the past three weeks in quarantine because of COVID-19, I have been transitioning my in-office patients to technology mediated psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  Because of social distancing to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, analysands usually treated in the office must now set up a private treatment space of their own choosing.  At first, the sessions are dominated by worries about getting sick, the loss of social contact, and being trapped at home with children while trying to work. Behind the emphasis on COVID-19 lies the loss of the analyst’s physical presence and the loss of a safe office, which now seems like a uterus from which the patients were extruded.  Having to see the analyst on the screen, and put up with the times that the image freezes as well, the analysand feels as if the analyst is removing affection.  These fears of loss of response and loss of love result from early fears related to the dead mother.  Fears of viral invasion echo fears of the mother’s death drive, drowning the patient’s desire for life.  Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and lack of trust in agencies that are supposed to protect us (hospitals, government, Ministry of Health) reflect early attachment insecurities, and convey transference to the analyst as an unreliable object.  With the change in frame from in-office analysis to teleanalysis, I have been able to observe the expression of very early anxieties in analysands who were previously seen only in the office.

 

Anxiety of the analyst

Freud’s warnings about the dangers of changing the frame of analysis are echoed by our own psychoanalysts, supervisors and colleagues, especially when confronting any change from the traditional in-office setting to the teleanalytic setting. Teleanalysis is frequently regarded as a transgression. The transgenerationally transmitted superego will have to be somewhat pacified to understand the current situation as a necessary and effective adaptation that brings us the possibility of continuing to work and of countering the guilt of not being able to do more for our patients, a problema that Eizirik pointed out in a recent IPA webinar.  Patients come to us with a fear of death and we receive them with our life drive.  To support our life drive, we need to pursue our own pleasure and part of that  is our work. We will have to continue to be linked to life, taling with colleagues in Town Hall meetings like this, keeping in touch  with friends and family, accepting and not denying reality, but without being suffocated by it.

In Remembrance: Alice Brand Bartlett, Ph.D.

Posted on by Melonie Bell

 

Alice Brand Bartlett, PhD

1950-2019

 

 

Dear Faculty, Students, & Friends of IPI,

Alice Brand Bartlett was a beloved adjunct faculty in the International Institute of Analytic Training, a sensitive and thoughtful supervisor, a supportive mentor, and a valuable friend to many of us at IPI. She died on July 13, 2019 from ovarian cancer. Those of you who knew Alice can rightly imagine that she was lively until the very end, fighting to survive and to continue in a profession she loved so passionately.

Alice was born on October 27, 1950 in Carrollton, Missouri. She pursued an MS in Library Science and became Chief Librarian of the Menninger Professional Library. At Menninger, she held many prestigious posts, including Associate Dean in the Menninger School of Psychiatry. She went on to pursue training as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, at the Fielding Graduate School and Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute, respectively. The American Psychoanalytic Association affirmed her status as a Training and Supervising Analyst in 1996. We all benefitted from her library science expertise, as she became Board Director for the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing database (PEPWEB), awarded the Sigourney Award in 2018. Just before her death, she served as Director of the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute.

While all these accomplishments speak to her intelligence, generative contributions, and respected place in the field of psychoanalysis, most of us knew Alice as kind, compassionate, humorous, spunky, and a bit irreverent. She was devoted to her patients and mentees, as is evident in the way she approached the end of her work with them, conveying genuine care and respect and regretting the loss her death would impose. For IIPT, she was one of our most active adjuncts, facilitating clinical case consultation, providing supervision and analysis, and serving on the ethics committee.   We miss her already!

Alice leaves behind her husband Tom and many friends and family. A public memorial service will be held on Saturday, August 17th at 11:00am at the Chapel in Mount Hope Cemetery (17th and Fairlawn). In lieu of flowers, please make memorial contributions to The Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Foundation, Greater Kansas City-Topeka Psychoanalytic Center, 1000 E. 24th St., 4E-53, Kansas City Missouri or Col. Potter Cairn Terrier Rescue.

Homage for Asbed Aryan

Posted on by Melonie Bell

The members of the International Working Group on Teleanalysis hosted at the International Psychotherapy Institute were sad to learn that Asbed Aryan, who seemed to be getting better, had suddenly lost his fight with cancer. Asbed was such a kind, generous man, which came through so clearly in his clinical work.  He was a devoted training and supervising analyst who pioneered the use of technology in distance analysis with a candidate in Armenia, and the author of books on adolescence such as Clínica de Adolescentes co-written with Carlos Moguillansky. We knew Asbed as a committed participant of our International Working Group in Teleanalysis since its inception many years ago, enthusiastically participating from Buenos Aires with his dear colleague Liliana Manguel in our monthly online meeting, faithfully contributing to our meetings even amid treatments for his illness.

Asbed with teleanalysis groups
Asbed with Teleanalysis groups

 

We first met Asbed in Chicago when separate interests in teleanalysis brought us together for an IPA Congress panel on teleanalysis. Our separate proposals were joined, continents were bridged, and the resulting panel was presented with simultaneous translation and chaired by Charles Hanly. Since then we’ve collaborated successfully on shared proposals for IPA precongress workshops held in Mexico, Boston, and Buenos Aires, research panels, and book chapters, the latest of which “Psychoanalytic Process in Cyber-technology” will be published posthumously in Psychoanalysis Online 4: Teleanalytic Practice, Teaching, and Clinical Research, edited by Jill Savege Scharff (Routledge, October 2018).

We will always remember Asbed’s intensely intelligent contributions from his great experience in this field. What good work he did for psychoanalysis, with great sympathy and devotion for those at a distance from major centers: What fun we had talking half in Spanish, half in English with Asbed at Congress banquets! We remember how much he enjoyed coming with us for dinner at the Cosmos Club in Washington DC. We will miss our loyal friend, and will be holding his family and his colleagues in Argentina and Armenia in our minds and in our hearts in the days and months to come.

In sympathy and affection,

Jill Scharff, Founder, and Caroline Sehon Chair, and members of the International Working Group on Teleanalysis hosted at the International Psychotherapy Institute www.theipi.org

IPI Program Graduates

Posted on by Melonie Bell

Congratulations to our IIPT (analytic) graduate Michele Kwintner and our Core (object relations) graduates, and our clinical consultation program graduates.

cake

 

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Suzanne St. John and Karen Fraley announce the names of the Clinical Consultation Program graduates.

 

 

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Graduation Dinner

 

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Caroline Sehon (IIPT chair) Michelle Kwintner (graduate) and Janine Wanlass (IPI Director)
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Two Year Core Students preparing for their last weekend small group as a cohort (Henriette van Eck, Kelly Seim, Steven McCowin, Christie Dietz)
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The graduates acknowledge the support given to them by their group leader (Lorrie Peters)
Core graduates present their group leader with a blanket made of patchwork saris.
Core graduates present their group leader with a blanket made of patchwork saris.

 

The Breadth and Depth of Slavery’s Wounds

Posted on by Melonie Bell
Panel for Case Presentation
Patrizia Pallaro (Conference Co-chair) and Chris Thomas (Conference co-chair and Clinical Discussant) Andrew Price (Presenter) Michael Kaufman (IPI-Metro Chair)

Imagine a young African American man raised proudly by his mother, and now the first generation to go to college. Why might he fall victim to depression and academic failure? What effect does the context of poverty, violence and drug abuse have on such a young man? Dissociating himself from the pain, he breaks from his past. As soon as he sees the possibility of success, he feels the shame of separating from his roots and hurting the loved ones from whom he is growing apart. It is hard for a man in that situation to stay true to himself and aggressively develop his potential, and hard for his mother to believe he will be safe in a world that targets and disables aggressive young Black men. The trauma of slavery generations back reaches far into future generations. How do we stop its transmission?

Featured speaker Dr. Janice Gump addressed the destruction of the attachment bond transmitted across generations and the enslavement that squashed healthy ambition and creativity in young African American men as a result of which mothers are therefore highly protective of their sons. Dr. Gump’s writings and presentation, the clinical presentation by Andrew Price, and discussion in the audience in large and small group affective learning processes alerted us to the impact of enslavement on the United States. White, Black, Hispanic and Asian therapists attending the workshop were privileged to learn from one another as we grappled with the issue of how we contribute to the problems of race. This is so important for therapists, because we have shared the position of the African American male client, all of us struggling with the issues of race, and all of us unable to freely address the obvious.

Audience engagment
Audience engagement

 

We were grateful for a meaningful experience at IPI in which we could voice our concerns and think together about race relations from an object relations perspective. Several people expressed their appreciation for the group conversation, saying they have been needing opportunities like this and had never experienced anything like it. One person said, “We need to have circles like this all over the world….it’s the only way we’re going to make progress.”

Settings and Modalities in Family and Couple Treatment

Posted on by Melonie Bell

Thursday Feb 1,2018

Panel: David Scharff, Jeanne Magagna, Caroline Sehon
Panel: David Scharff, Jeanne Magagna, Caroline Sehon

 

Jeanne Magagna is speaking about working with parents to help their difficult and unhappy children. Of course parents expect the child therapist to be trained in child development and parent effectiveness preparation. But no matter how well trained, the therapist cannot help the child without the parents. She NEEDS the parents to help her treat their child. Together they can build a thinking space where the parents can observe their child more fully, develop a shared narrative of their child and her role in the family, and make links from their experiences as children to their child’s life now. From there, parents at home create a daily routine review of their child’s day, and they can all explore the connections among the child’s experiences and the family history and social setting. In this way the parents build a sturdy emotional cradle in which they hold their child. Feeling secure in this loving, reflective parental cradle, the child grows in self regulation, curiosity and connectedness.

 

Saturday Feb 3, 2018

 

part0 3

 

 

We heard from the Scharffs about a brief encounter with a Chinese family. The index patient was a boy who could not make any decision or speak up for his own choices, caught between the unresolved differences of his parents. We heard the therapists describe working with them in an academic setting with a translator and a large audience. They spoke about the boy’s symptom as a distillation of family dynamics and they showed how playing spontaneously with him and his sister could help the boy to find a voice. Then Li Zhen and Mary Morgan discussed the cultural context and the treatment/teaching setting. We usually think of treatment as an intensely private matter but even in this strange setting a therapeutic exchange could occur. Mary Morgan pointed to the importance of the therapists’ internal setting enabling them to relax, engage in word and play, and make a safe, containing therapy space. Li Zhen viewed this family as one that represents not just the parents’ internal conflict but also the generational conflict between grandparents who live by Confucian principles of filial piety and young people who are looking for a way to live in the new China.

 

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Sunday Feb 4, 2018

As the discussion on settings and modalities continues, differences among various approaches are becoming clear. The therapist of an under-5 year old may usefully also do parent counseling or couple therapy with her parents. Others see this as a distortion of the frame. Some of us who begin work with a couple will see only the couple. Others will see whichever part of the couple shows up for the appointment. Those couple therapists with a family orientation may include the children (or even a newborn) for some sessions to explore the couple-as-parents, work on coalitions that replace the vital marital bond, and relive childhood experience that can inform current couple relating. Those with a couple orientation would never break the couple frame like that.

 

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Today Rich Zeitner showed that even though we hold a firm frame for meeting with a couple, we may find ourselves doing individual therapy in the presence of the partner, a difficulty encountered when one partner is identified as mentally ill. It is as though two people are living in one person, said Leora Benioff, and Mariangela Mendes de Almeida advised attending to the theme and the affect that connects them rather than to the projections of internal object relations. Mary Morgan reminded us that a projective identification system like this exists to protect the couple from aspects of themselves that they are frightened of. Mary Morgan reminds us that therapist needs to be patient in allowing the defensive process to continue until it is no longer needed. Damian McCann responded that the modifications in the frame can be an acting out, an acting-in of the transference for subsequent analysis, or a spontaneous or surprising intervention that reflects a shift in the therapist that could release the couple from their entrapment in paranoid-schizoid functioning to depressive concern.

The take away message is that various ways of maintaining and modifying the frame can be helpful or destructive, but the main point is that the therapist needs to examine the impact of any shifts in the frame and use it for therapeutic understanding.

 

Final Thoughts

Another way to think about the value and meaning of a change in modality or setting is to consider it in terms of whether the therapist is expressing a defensively caretaking function or a truly adaptive containing function. We might also ask if the change made is an innovative movement forward or a regression to a traditional modality out of guilt.
There are individual, couple and family levels of organization. We can intervene at any level but we need to keep in mind what we are doing and where we are going. We want to keep a multiocular vision on individual, couple and family in any of these treatment settings.

 

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And technical considerations aside, within the secure setting we create we are subject to unexpected external forces, liable to error, but willing to acknowledge mistakes and make reparation. We identify with our preferred settings, work from an internal setting that is firm but flexible when deviations are called for, and feel free to engage as a thinking, feeling human being.

 

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Enrique Pichon-Rivière and his theory of the link

Posted on by Melonie Bell

IPI faculty members presented a number of panels, presentations, and precongress workshops at the International Psychoanalytical Congress in Buenos Aires in July 2017. At one of those panels, David Scharff and Lea Setton invited Roberto Losso, Juan Tubert-Oklander and Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, to join them in presenting the ideas and applications of the late Enrique Pichon-Rivière (photo 1 and 2).

During the panel: Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, Juan Tubert-Oklander, Lea Setton, Roberto Losso, David Scharff
During the panel: Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, Juan Tubert-Oklander,
Lea Setton, Roberto Losso, David Scharff

 

After the panel: Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, Juan Tubert-Oklander, Lea Setton, Roberto Losso, David Scharff
After the panel: Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, Juan Tubert-Oklander,
Lea Setton, Roberto Losso, David Scharff

Later they gathered to celebrate the launch of their edited book The Linked Self in Psychoanalysis: The Pioneering Work of Enrique Pichon-Rivière edited by Roberto Losso, Lea Setton, and David Scharff, in English for the first time. (London: Karnac 2017) (Photo 3).

The book launch: Roberto Losso, David Scharff, Jill Scharff. Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, Lea Setton.
The book launch: Roberto Losso, David Scharff, Jill Scharff.
Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, Lea Setton.

Enrique’s ideas are so original, and his early development so fascinating, that I wanted to share them widely, especially with young people who haven’t a clue about what a therapist or psychoanalyst actually does, or how an analytic approach can help. So I got the idea of writing the story of Enrique as a story to read to our children and grandchildren.

 

Enrique Pichon-Rivière and his theory of the link.

By Jill Savege Scharff

 

Once upon a time, there was a little French boy called Enrique who lived in Switzerland and France. When he was four years old, his parents took him with them on a long journey. They left their high class life in Europe and went to live during his youth for the next 17 years with the Guaraní tribe in the jungle of northern Argentina. Enrique saw scary pumas, jaguars, alligators, and snakes in that rainforest, but he learned to stay still and not be frightened.

Enrique spoke French with his upper class parents, but he learned the Guaraní language too, so he got along with the local children, played ball with them, and knew their way of life. When he was eight years old he had to leave the jungle, speak Spanish all the time, and go to school in the town. But he always remembered his time in the primitive world of the jungle.

When Enrique grew up he became a doctor and a psychoanalyst. Most of his friends were psychoanalysts, even his wife. A psychoanalyst is a kind and thoughtful person who helps us put our worries and bad memories into words and doesn’t get upset by our strong feelings. After talking with the doctor for a while, we have a new experience of ourselves in this new relationship. We then feel more confident in ourselves and get along better with our friends, our family, and our teacher or boss.

Enrique noticed that psychoanalysts have problems too, and need help with how they think about things. For example, too many psychoanalysts that he met thought about only one patient at a time, and that person was usually just a grown-up. They forgot about the people we all live with, the children and families, and the world we inhabit together. But not Enrique. He saw the total picture.

Enrique thought about everyone. He helped families to be healthy, talked to boys and girls about their worries, taught other therapists, and even helped companies and their workers to be successful. He always remembered his early life in the jungle, and cared about all people, rich and poor, and every level of society.

He saw the world as being like a soccer field where everyone had an important part to play (even the ball) to make a good game. Every family is like a soccer field in which the children and the parents and the grandparents and aunts and uncles all teach the children how to play and run around with them They all take turns to kick the ball, receive a pass, defend the goal, and learn every position to play their part in the team.

Noting that we live in groups and can’t exist without others, Enrique made his theory of the link. He said that a baby is born into el vinculo, a link that is there waiting to welcome the baby to the world and deal with the impact of the new family member on that world. Our family and our community shape who we will become, and equally we shape our family and our culture. Meeting with a psychoanalyst creates a new link, which changes the original link, and lets us recover our balance.

Here is another of Enrique’s ideas about the link. The past, the present and the future are part of the link. They are in our minds all the time, even when we are not thinking about how they affect us. So it is important to remember what happened before we were born, even before our parents were born, and to look outside our own family to our place in school and wider community, if we want to know who we are. When one of us is suffering, he realized, that one is not the only one with a problem. That one is actually the spokesperson for a hidden group problem. With help from a psychoanalyst, that one can lead the way to solving an unrecognized mystery in the family or community.

Enrique was an original thinker. His ideas were ahead of his time. But he had a problem. Although he loved to teach, he didn’t take enough time to write down his ideas. So he didn’t get full credit for being such a pioneer. Although his students loved his ideas and wrote down what they remembered, they did it in Spanish only. Sadly Enrique’s ideas remained unknown to psychoanalysts in Europe and North America.

That is where The International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) enters the story. Lea Setton, IPI faculty member and IIPT supervising analyst, read all of the Spanish journal articles by and about Enrique and his theory. She consulted Roberto Losso, IIPT adjunct faculty member, and together they chose the best parts and translated them roughly into English. Then their colleague Judith Filc in New York perfected the translation. Added to that, well known psychoanalysts who had known Enrique before he died wrote in English about their memories of him and what they learned about his ideas. David Scharff, IPI Board Chair, faculty member and IIPT supervising analyst helped them put together all these papers and arranged for them to be published as a book The Linked Self in Psychoanalysis: The Pioneering Work of Enrique Pichon-Rivière edited by Roberto Losso, Lea Setton, and David Scharff (London: Karnac 2017). So now psychoanalysts who can’t speak Spanish can read the book in English and appreciate the powerful vision of this clever Argentine psychoanalyst and his theory of the link. That is the story of how Enrique Pichon-Rivière can now be known to people in Europe and North America — thanks to IPI.

 

Photos courtesy of Caroline M. Sehon
Text by Jill Savege Scharff