Fifty Years On: Founding Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Fifty years after Freud’s death we feel the time has come to revisit epistemic assumptions and Freudian theory. The Italian Society of Relationship Psychoanalysis (S.I.P.Re) is about to launch a new psychoanalytic journal, open to all, as a space for discussion, exchange, and research. It is generally known that Freud was the greatest contributor to the study of psychic distress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is appropriate to look to Freud, then, for the theoretical and technical basis for psychoanalytic psychotherapy with the aim of making psychoanalysis practicable for neuroses and psychoses, in the private and public sectors. Our study and research efforts are channeled towards Ricerca Psicoanalitica as the tangible result of the project.

Black Skin, White Masks

This chapter argues that Frantz Fanon’s first book Black Skin, White Masks is unified by a profoundly existentialist conception of human being and psychological functioning. It argues against the prevailing reading of the book as a conceptually and methodologically eclectic analysis of various problems of colonialism that offers no prospect of a solution. Rather, the underlying argument of the book is that people become racialized through the collective sedimentation of a colonial value system. The shared culture is suffused with the classification of people into superior and inferior groups and the internalization of this classification causes both social discrimination and psychic distress. This is an existentialist theory because it denies that there is any human nature, any inbuilt traits of groups of people, or any innate traits of individuals. Racialization can be overcome by changing the shared culture that encodes and transmits it.

Master plots: Psychoanalysis and Catholicism

This chapter explores the two main interpretative frameworks White adopted to conceptualise a sense of self in the face of her recurrent psychic distress and inexplicable behaviour. White’s entrance into psychoanalytic treatment coincided with a moment in psychoanalytic history in which the thinking about female sexuality centred upon the ‘female castration complex’. White’s diary provides unmistakeable evidence that she developed an explanation for her illness that was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Abraham, who initiated this line of psychoanalytic theorising and who profoundly shaped British psychoanalysis. The recurrence of symptoms following her supposed ‘cure’ impelled White to reconvert to Catholicism at the end of 1940. White’s letters and diary show how she superimposes Catholic doctrine on that of psychoanalysis. Together these interpretative frameworks worked to affirm the centrality of father-daughter eroticism in White’s identity narrative.

Colonial Walls: Psychic Strategies in Contemporary Mining-Related Displacement

In May 2011, African Barrick Gold, owner of the North Mara Gold Mine in northern Tanzania, announced a plan to erect a three-metre-high concrete wall to enhance security against incursions from local (displaced) populations. Taking this wall as both metaphorical and material, this paper questions the psychological impact of displacement on “displacers.” How does this subject avoid psychic implosion? My review identifies legal infrastructure, mythologies of Canadian benevolence, CSR discourses, and community consultations as operating to provide psychic scaffolding for this dominant subject, who is thus inured against psychic distress and implosion in response to conditions of what can be deemed routine structural violence.

The passion of the country: bearing the burdens of traumatic histories, personal and collective

Jonathan Lear, inRadical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation,movingly writes: ‘We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name … It is as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse’. It is this ‘vulnerability’ and ‘anxiety of collapse’ that has led to what has been called in Australia the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ and the ‘terror of history’ which refers to the silence that surrounded the Stolen Generations and still surrounds the psychic distress of our indigenous first peoples. This article explores Lear's statement in terms of the psychic pain of a culture founded upon waves of migration and traumatic dispossession to think about the question ‘What does it mean to live here?’ And what can that teach us about the formation of identity and cultural identity?