Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited provides an in-depth discussion of José Bleger’s work, broadening current knowledge and focusing on his significant contribution to psychoanalytic thinking. This work should prove especially relevant in considering the implications of changes in the treatment setting forced by the Covid pandemic. This edited collection proposes a current debate on José Bleger's ideas on the psychoanalytic setting. The contributors here provide a broad overview of current discussions about the analytic setting, its clinical expressions and its technical management, engaging and transforming the concept of "encuadre" (frame). The book covers topics including early experiences, the psychoanalytic setting, symbiosis and applications in a pandemic. A common thread, Bleger's brilliant intuition, runs through the book, and the tense relationship between the frame and the figure maintains its dynamics throughout. Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as anyone seeking to understand the work of José Bleger.

Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited provides an in-depth discussion of José Bleger's work, broadening current knowledge and focusing on his significant contribution to psychoanalytic thinking. This work should prove especially relevant in considering the implications of changes in the treatment setting forced by the Covid pandemic. This edited collection proposes a current debate on José Bleger's ideas on the psychoanalytic setting. The contributors here provide a broad overview of current discussions about the analytic setting, its clinical expressions and its technical management, engaging and transforming the concept of "encuadre" (frame). The book covers topics including early experiences, the psychoanalytic setting, symbiosis and applications in a pandemic. A common thread, Bleger's brilliant intuition, runs through the book, and the tense relationship between the frame and the figure maintains its dynamics throughout. Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as anyone seeking to understand the work of José Bleger.

Symbiosis and Ambiguity is the first English edition of the classic study of early object relations by influential Argentinian psychoanalyst José Bleger (1922-1972). It is rooted in Kleinian thinking and rich in clinical material. Bleger's thesis is that starting from primitive undifferentiation, prior to the paranoid-schizoid position described by Klein, autism and symbiosis co-exist as narcissistic relations in a syncretic ‘agglutinated’ nucleus. In symbiosis part of the mind is deposited in an external person or situation; in autism it is deposited in the patient's own mind or body. The nucleus is ambiguous and persists in adults as the psychotic part of the personality. Symbiosis tends to immobilise the analytic process, so the analyst must mobilise, fragment and discriminate the agglutinated nucleus, whose ambiguity tends to ‘blunt’ persecutory situations. The psychoanalytic setting functions as a silent refuge for the psychotic part of the personality, where it creates a ‘phantom world’. At some point, therefore, the setting itself has to be analysed and the analytic relationship de-symbiotised, as Bleger observes in a celebrated chapter on the setting. José Bleger’s work demonstrates the need to analyse early narcissistic object relations as they arise clinically, especially in the setting. More widely, he regards undifferentiation and participation as operating throughout life: in groups, institutions, and society as a whole.

The Work of Donald Meltzer Revisited: 100 Years After His Birth returns to and reassesses the contributions of Donald Meltzer, one of the most significant disciples of Melanie Klein and who was deeply inspired by Wilfred Bion.

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis explores the idea of ‘the frame’ at a time when this concept is undergoing both systematic revival and widespread transformation. It has always been tempting to see the frame as a relatively static, finite and definable feature of psychoanalytic work. At its most basic, the frame establishes agreed upon conditions of undertaking psychoanalytic work. But as this book shows, the frame has taken on a protean quality. It is sometimes a source of stability and sometimes a site of ethical regulation or discipline. It can be a place of imaginative mobility, and in certain analytic hands, a device for psychic work on projections and disavowals. Beginning with a seminal essay on the frame by José Bleger, this book includes commentary on that work and proceeds to explorations of the frame across different psychoanalytic theories. The frame is perhaps one of the spots in psychoanalysis where psyche and world come into contact, a place where the psychoanalytic project is both protected and challenged. Inevitably, extra-transferential forces intrude onto the psychoanalytic frame, rendering it flexible and fluid. Psychoanalysts and analysands, supervisors and candidates are relying increasingly on virtual communication, a development that has effected significant revisions of the classical psychoanalytic frame. This book presents a dialogue among distinct and different voices. It re-examines the state and status of the frame, searching for its limits and sifting through its unexpected contents whilst expanding upon the meaning, purview and state of the frame. Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in how best to understand the frame and to use it most effectively in their clinical practice.

Encompassing diverse perspectives on the psychoanalyst as individual, social being, and member of psychoanalytic institutions, this book provides practical and informed answers to the question of how psychoanalysts can take care of their psychoanalytic institutions. The book draws urgent attention to concerns about how the field of psychoanalysis can be sustained into the future, and sets out several studies in institutional dynamics as a form of provocation for psychoanalysts to reflect on their position as members of the institution and to act courageously in their collective efforts. Correlations between institutional dynamics and familial relationships are emphasized, alongside varied and detailed accounts of the styles of leadership required to facilitate improved cooperation in psychoanalytic institutions. The authors draw on their experiences as group participants, leaders and observers at both local and supranational levels, to investigate the historical context underpinning the disillusion among psychoanalysts, offering readers richly informed perspectives on how to nurture collegial ethics. With an emphasis on a shared ethics of responsibility, and the work involved in building secure professional relationships among psychoanalytic groups of all kinds, this book will prove essential to those engaged in understanding the work involved in psychoanalysis, whether in training or in practice.

The authors show how their ego-psychological object relations theory integrates drive theory and object relations theory and does justice to recent findings regarding the vicissitudes of transference and countertransference interactions in the psychoanalytic situation. 'A significant shift has taken place in the last few decades in the way in which psychoanalytic theory has developed and in its application to psychoanalytic technique. This development has, in essence, consisted in the ascendance of object relations theory as an overall integrating frame of reference linking psychoanalytic metapsychology closer to the vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic process. This has facilitated the formulation of unconscious intrapsychic conflict in more clinically helpful ways than has the traditional frame of reference exclusively based on the conflict between drives and defensive operations. 'The great interest of the Sandler's approach resides in their careful and systematic elaboration of what might be called the various "building blocks" of a contemporary ego psychological object relations theory, carefully exploring each areas on its own merits before gradually taking them into an overall theoretical approach.

The Clinical Thinking of W. R. Bion in Brazil is comprised of thirteen transcriptions of supervisions Wilfred Bion conducted during his three teaching and speaking tours of Brazil. During these tours, Bion conducted over 130 public supervisions of analytic cases in English in which he explained his theories and illustrated their clinical application. Following on from the first volume, Bion in Brazil: Supervisions and Commentaries (2017), this book presents each supervision in full, with an accompanying commentary written by a senior Brazilian psychoanalyst and Bionian scholar. Arguably, no psychoanalyst has had as much impact on psychoanalytic development in Brazil than Bion, and this collection of his seminars, presented here for the first time, acts as a historical document and testament to his legacy in contemporary analysis. The Clinical Thinking of W. R. Bion in Brazil provides a unique opportunity for contemporary psychoanalysts, candidates, and students to hear the distinctive ‘voice’ of Bion, observe how he listens in conversation, and learn how he would intervene in and interpret a clinical situation.

The Bion Seminars at the A-Santamaria Association offers readers insightful analyses and commentaries on Bion’s key papers and books, as well as providing a unique set of discussions and explorations of many of Bion’s central concepts and foundational texts. This diverse collection of essays brings together contributions from internationally renowned Bionian scholars and analysts, including Annie Reiner, Nicola Abel-Hirsch, Antònia Grimalt, Avner Bergstein, Afsaneh Kiany Alisobhani, João Carlos Braga, Tom Helscher, Tim Smith and Peter Goldberg. Readers will encounter expansions and extensions of contemporary and timeless themes and discover the originality with which psychoanalysts from different geographical regions take ownership of the ideas discussed. Chapters cover the early and late work of Bion, spanning topics such as arrogance, the theory of thinking, memory and desire, and the clinical importance of frustration. The authors reveal to us the elements of continuity and discontinuity in Bion's work, sharing open conjectures to allow new developments to evolve. This volume is essential reading for practicing psychoanalysts, analysts-in-training, analytic psychotherapists, and anyone interested in exploring Bion's work.