INTRODUCTION

Introduction to the issue “Advances in Couple  and Family Psychoanalysis in Today’s World”
Raffaelle Fischetti^[*], Rosa Jaitin^[**] , Irma Morosini^[***]

Since its foundation as a practice and theory, couple and family psychoanalysis has continually sought to build on the Freudian and post-Freudian corpus to produce advances in deepening its tools and extending its field.

In recent years, couples and families, like psychoanalytic therapists, have also been confronted in the contemporary world with changes which affect the main categories of our understanding of the world: time, space, and causality, as well as family structure. The accelerated pace of change disturbs the foundations of attunement between subjective, personal, and collective temporalities. Spaces and their boundaries seem to be shrinking, extending, and thus exacerbating territorial rivalries. Unforeseen changes and catastrophic situations increase the requirement for causality, resulting in disconcerting but important announcements having to be taken into account in clinical sessions. As for couple and family structures, their rapid evolution and profound restructuring disrupts our original relationship with them and reconfigures our treatment systems. The contemporary world is thus overflowing with hopes, but also with threats, with the risk of intensifying trauma.

In this sociocultural, sometimes hypercritical, context, the relevance of the basis of our profession, the Unconscious, is confirmed and enriched by couple and family psychoanalysis, which articulates the three dimensions of the psyche; the subject, the link, and the group. The many challenges of all kinds which currently abound and that seek to invalidate our corpus are also incentives to deepen our commitment to analytical work with the subject; the couple, the family, and the institution. Our accumulated professional experience allows us today to face the new challenge of the global pandemic-syndemic. This increases the potential for inequalities between and within countries, the effects of the mistreatment that man has been inflicting on nature for decades, and where the closing of borders causes not only exclusion, but also the death of thousands of people fleeing for their survival from war and misery,

This issue of the review takes up some of the lectures from the e. IACFP 2020 Congress in three respects:

– The first concerns the course of psychoanalysis and the unconscious as they are manifested in the realm of the couple and the family.

Three authors represent three different schools, René Kaës for the French, Janine Puget for the Argentinian, and Anna Nicolò for the Italian school. These three schools have points of convergence and divergence which the reader will be pleased to discuss. The Italian school has an integrative position of the first two, to which it adds the contributions of the English school. Anna Nicolò’s clinical finesse is well represented in this article.

René Kaës takes up his research again on different spaces in their temporal relationships where the unconscious lies. For this, he resorts to the techniques which allow the unconscious to emerge. His paper focuses on the plurality and heterogeneity of plural spatio-temporal variables, in situations of crisis and collective catastrophe, taking the example of the pandemic.

Janine Puget’s posthumous work is a poem that sings of life and leads her to revise the categories of truth, the singular, and the predictive. Her position of radical difference calls us to welcome the otherness of the other, the unpredictable, and the future. She invites psychoanalysts to “break down walls” in order to stop holding a position of neutrality towards social subjectivity. She supports an openness to the overhauling of understanding and of the multiplicity of origins, as conditions for listening to relational suffering.

Anna Nicolò illustrates the use of metaphor which the analyst can use, so permitting mobilisation of the frozen levels of the links with more agility. The therapeutic space would thus be an intermediate link between representation and what is ‘thinkable’. She considers that the symptom or the dream would be metaphors of mental functioning and conflicts. The analyst’s metaphors in the session would also facilitate access to metaphorisation.

• The second series of articles deals with the structure of the family and the couple in today’s hypermodern world.

First of all, Maria Inês Assumpção Fernandes describes the social changes, which show a transformation in the values of intimacy, privacy, and catastrophe, as an effect of the assertion of singularities. The result of this problem would be a state of blockage and asynchrony in the different family configurations, shown not only in the change in their structures, but also by the global diaspora of migratory processes. André Carel introduces temporality into the therapeutic process, considering that the timespan of a couple and family psychoanalytic treatment varies according to the form taken by the family crisis, differentiating it on three levels: the experience, the trauma, and the catastrophe. Non-directive clinical supervision assists him in making his case. His article describes aspects of the psychopathology of relationships, which require technical modifications depending on the nature of the defences raised against the crises.

Ezequiel A. Jaroslavsky relates the culture of excess with the ephemeral nature of bonds due to the lack of metapsychic and metasocial guarantors. This weakening of bonds alters boundaries in today’s world. The psychopathological understanding of current bond structures is the strong point of this author, one which is remarkably highlighted in this presentation.

The exceptional clinical quality of Irma Morosini’s writing allows us to understand the process of family filiation that establishes the early identifying markers which are blurred in present parental functions which the author presents. The therapeutic process that she describes shows how the transitional spaces which open the way to the transformation of bonds emerge.

• The third axis of reflection is constituted by a series of articles which work around the clinical effects of the spatio-temporal changes in current family and couple psychoanalysis that enrich this issue of the Journal.

Here the contributions of the French-Argentine school represented by Rosa Jaitin, of the Italian school led by Daniela Lucarelli, of the English school led by Mary Morgan, and of the French school led by Philippe Robert, bring us face to face with the alterations of time and space in our daily work as couple and family psychoanalysts.

Rosa Jaitin deepens her notion of “proto rhythm”, differentiating three types in the seismicity of the therapeutic process. The primary proto rhythm organises the genealogical rhythmic envelope of the family, registering itself as a family audiogram which manifests itself particularly in family therapy with migrant, adoptive, and new families. The secondary proto rhythm of modernity is dominated by the anguish of success, immediacy, and what is called “freedom”, with no emotional ties. Contemporary tertiary proto rhythms are heterochronous, inconstant, variable, and unpredictable and require contextual adaptability. These three types of proto rhythms require us to consider different approaches in technique in the duration and frequency of therapies.

Daniela Lucarelli discusses the conceptual and therapeutic tools open to the questioning of current psychoanalytic models which are that are urged to change. The sense of urgency, uncertainties in identity, the crisis in authority, changes in family structures, and the mix of cultures, lead us to seek new clinical approaches. She defines these approaches so as to put them into the framework of the therapeutic process of couple psychotherapy.

Mary Morgan questions the regularity and continuity of the therapeutic container provided by the analyst over time, which allows the couple to inhabit the therapeutic space differently, expanding their own psychic space. It is then that associations and dreams emerge, transforming feelings of hatred into a creative process. For this, the negative aspects of the resisting temporality must be borne by the partner and the analyst.

Philippe Robert introduces technical problems where, induced by clinical practice, couple and family analysts have introduced modifications in interventions, in terms of frequency of weekly, fortnightly, or monthly sessions. There are few works, however, that introduce reflections on these variants in our field. The question is often avoided or reduced to strictly organisational aspects. The elements of reality, which exist, of course, should not obscure the real technical and clinical issues. In particular, this raises the question of time and temporality, as well as the question of elaboration and ‘perlaboration’ (working through) in the therapeutic process.

To close this issue we have paid tribute to our beloved Janine Puget (1926-2020), a founding member of the AIPPF, on the first anniversary of her death.

Christiane Joubert also reviews Janine Puget’s latest book translated into French.

                                                   

^[*] Psychoanalyst and Gripo President, trainer and supervisor in psychiatric services, at Ser.T and Rems, member of the editorial committee of the IACFP Review. raffaelefischetti@libero.it

^[**] Group, couple and family psychoanalyst, Professor at the University of Buenos Aires associated with the University of Paris Descartes, Former President; Director of the Study Centre, Secretary of International Relations of the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis (IACFP), Member of the French Society of Psychoanalytical Family Therapy (SFTFP), Director of APSYLIEN and full member of the French Society of Group Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy (SFPPG) and of the Argentine Association of Group Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy (AAPPG) (Lyon, France). jaitin@icloud.com

^[***] Degree in Psychology (UBA). Director of Psychodrama. Specialist in Family and Couple Psychoanalysis. Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Catholic University of Argentina at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Member and Founder of the Psychodrama section of the IAGP. Member and Founder of the IACFP. Founding Member of the Argentine Association of Family and Couple Psychoanalysts. Member of the Editorial Committee and the Editorial Secretariat of the online journal “Psychoanalysis & Intersubjectivity”. Member of the Board of Directors of the IACFP. Member of the Editorial Committee of the IACFP Journal. Author of publications in books and specialised journals. Family, couple, child and adolescent therapist. Supervisions. In charge of the General Secretariat of IACFP from 2016 -2020. Vice-President of the IACFP (for the Spanish language) 2020 and continues. Author of the book “Clinica de la Terapéutica Familiar” EAE. Berlin. 2020. irmamorosini@hotmail.com