Introduction Number 20

Introduction to the issue

“History and stories  in couple and family psychoanalysis“

Daniela Lucarelli^[1], Massimiliano Sommantico^[2]

This issue of the Review 1-2019 is dedicated to presentations made at the 2018 Congress of the IACFP which took place in Lyon on July 26-28.

As the rationale for the Congress stated, the focus in this issue will be on the confrontation of couples and families with the comparison between history (whether social, cultural, and/or political) and their individual stories. The authors whose articles have been contributed to this issue reflect on contemporary approaches to psychoanalytic couples and family psychotherapies, admittedly different according to their respective culture, training, and frames of reference of the authors, but all are characterised by their attention to transference, countertransference, and indeed, inter-transference dynamics aroused in the analytic process. Sometimes, they are concerned with accentuating the subjectivation of the stories, favouring the ending of the processes of repetition, or rather the here and now of the session. But they also deal with trauma from family histories, as well as from historical events, and their impact on each family romances. Finally, it will be important to understand how all this is revealed in the processes of inter and transgenerational transmission.

Accordingly, several focuses will be presented, including: the internal positioning of the analyst, or analysts, psychic temporalities, adjustments in the setting, techniques of mediation, creativity.

Janine Puget, with her article Que faire de l’histoire et des histoires dans la vie quotidienne?, wonders about the place, role and effect that everyone’s history and stories have in and on the lives of families and couples. She also questions, in particular, the question of the temporality of these stories.

In their article Le lien de couple et l’usage idéologique et partagé d’aspects culturels, Daniela Lucarelli and Gabriela Tavazza, through the analysis of clinical material relating to the treatment of a couple, propose to show how the cultural and intersubjective conditions of psychic life intermingle with intrapsychic conditions and how the failure of extra-subjective symbolising functions may favour specific psychopathological configurations.

Rosa Jaitin, in her article Amistad, filiación y migración. El trabajo del psicoanalista familiar, discusses her reflection on the work of analysts from different cultures who work together in a training institution and in a liberal setting, focusing on the issue of cotherapy. From clinical cases of psychoanalytic family psychotherapy, the author analyses the different levels of friendship in transference fields, consisting of transferences, counter-transferences, as well as inter-transferences.

In her article, Object relations and mentalization in couple psychotherapy, Perrine Moran, drawing on the analysis of a clinical case of psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy, shows how much combination of mentalization and object relations theory can help the analyst in working with highly conflicted couples. The author sets out her reflections on the analytic process from transference and counter-transference dynamics.

The article by Irma Morosini, El secreto en la narrativa de la historia familiar. La “segunda escena”, focuses on the processes involved in family narrative in relation to the question of the pathogenicity of secrecy. The author, from the analysis of an episode of her own life, shows the function of truth that can arise with the use of mediation techniques in the transference field of psychoanalytic family psychotherapy.

In her article, La narration dans la séance familiale: comment construire l’histoire, Anna Maria Nicolò, starting from therapeutic work with adolescents or young adults who have experienced a psychotic decompensation or a severe rupture of development of the self, considers the effectiveness of working with their memories which date from before or from the beginning of the crisis, and of restoring, if possible, a sense of the continuity of their history during their lives. With the presentation of a clinical case of a family psychoanalysis, the author explains how the storytelling of family history, as told by each family member during the session and reconstructed in the presence of the analyst, can become a powerful diagnostic and therapeutic tool.

Pierre Benghozi, in his article Le remaillage narratif: néocontenant narratif néomythique et résilience narrative en thérapie familiale psychanalytique, reflects on pathologies of  psychic containers, in particular, those that are genealogical. The author, based on a psychoanalytic family psychotherapy sequence, discusses the concepts of the narrative repair of containers and of narrative resilience.

The article by David Scharff, Brief intensive intervention in a marital crisis, describes the brief intervention with a highly problematic marital situation. Focusing on the theory of object relations, the author details the evaluation, as well as a turning point in the process of this brief intervention which developed for almost a month, with a specific focus on dynamic transference.

In the article El tiempo en movimiento. Historia familiar. Acontecimiento, Sonia Kleiman offers her reflection on temporality, starting from the disciplinary transformations that made the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tremble. Her interrogation focuses, in particular, on the way in which being, history, causality and determination challenge the field of psychoanalytic work.

In her article The “couple analytic setting” and the psychic development of the couple, Mary Morgan offers thoughts about the internal setting of the analyst working with couples, in using the concept of a “couple state of mind”. Through the analysis of a process of psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy, the author especially emphasises notions of meaning, perspective, and continuity.

Finally, Lucia Balello, Raffaele Fischetti and Fiorenza Milano, in their article Cinco personajes en busca de una familia, drawing on a clinical case of psychoanalytic family psychotherapy, describe the process of family subjectivisation. The authors refer, in particular, to the concept of groupality, as developed by Armando Bauleo.

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[1] Psychologist, psychoanalyst, full member at the IPA/SPI, member of IACFP Board (International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis), Editor in Chief of the IACFP Review, teacher and supervisor at PCF (Corso Postspecialistico di Psicoanalisi della Coppia e della Famiglia) in Rome, teacher and supervisor at Istituto Winnicott iW in Rome, member of the editorial board of Interazioni (FrancoAngeli, Milan, Italy). daniela.lucarelli@gmail.com

[2] Psychologist, psychoanalyst SPI (IPA), couple and family psychoanalytic psychotherapist, researcher at the University of Naples “Federico II”, member of the BD and of the SC of the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. sommanti@unina.it