19th IARPP Conference – Valencia 2023

Closing Thoughts

Susanna Federici, Ph.D.

This 19th Conference aimed to broaden our horizons of psychoanalytic research with respect to the perspectives of as many disciplinary fields as possible: artistic, scientific, social, historical, cultural, etc. We have lived these days in a large kaleidoscope which, in combining the colors of the various perspectives on the world, has helped us to feed our curiosity, the desire to continue exploring various possibilities of constructing meanings and activating generative resonances.

Being here, being in the present time, together, feeling connected, experiencing belonging to a large living and thinking group: this is the most powerful experience that we can bring home, a feeling that we can return to in our minds and hearts when we will be back in our different emotional and professional realities and contexts.

In the last 40 years, the relational movement has done a lot to help therapists to recognize the otherness that inhabits us and challenges us. Meeting the other inside and outside of us is the uncomfortable and often very difficult side of our activity, but at the same time it is the source of the unsaturated vital movement of psychic life. Seeking, valuing, trying to understand otherness is the “main road” of contemporary psychoanalysis, a non-linear, complex, paradoxical way that multiplies questions and, while appreciating answers that emerge from time to time, doesn’t stop at those.

Various nuances and accents were presented in the dialogue between tradition and innovation of current psychoanalysis and each of us is able to modulate her/his belonging to this discipline. The relational approach – which today is increasingly widely recognized as valid – emerged from its karst path thanks to some psychoanalysts who were able to meet clinical experience with courage, authenticity and great humility: this is why they are our masters. Our memory goes to Mitchell, Bromberg, Aron. In my opinion, cultivating these human qualities is what can make the difference in ensuring that the relational perspective is not a cultural ‘trend’, but continues to represent a powerful theoretical-clinical paradigm shift that promotes a culture of clinical encounter based on mutual recognition and on the desire to co-construct ways of being more deeply human.

The beautiful dialogue between generations that Raimundo Guerra has proposed shows us the difficult process to reach a meaningful meeting. From the hyper-individualism of Y to the hope of X and Y as an experience that gives an agenda and “an immense capacity to negotiate with oneself and with others”.

I very much agree with Steve Kuchuck who concludes his clinical illustration by noting that “if hope is always born at the same time as love”, then what follows is change; not always, not fast. But I would add that sensing these potentials and committing ourselves to them is enough to make us feel better as people, as well as therapists.

Andrew Samuels told us about “eternal youth”; I would add the “eternal vitality” that is in all of us, young and old, the vitality for which we are responsible. (A powerful example that I can suggest is the ending of Sorrentino’s film “Youth” in which a composer and conductor – now old – passionately performs his “simple songs” composed fifty years earlier for love, but which had never wanted to perform before). I agree that today’s psychoanalysis cannot remain safe in choosing the middle path, which basically proposes a new sort of neutrality. We are with Marx: “It is not enough to interpret the world, we must all commit ourselves to changing it”.

I believe that psychoanalytic thinking is ‘political’ because of its specific anti-normative quality and because of the commitment to liberate/foster people’s new or unexpressed potentials. Today psychoanalysis – as Aron said – is in itself counter-cultural with respect to a hyper-liberal and hyper-individualistic society. Even more, the relational approach gives us the tools to encounter reality without forgetting the possibilities.

So yes, reality concerns us as psychoanalysts, as Eyal Rozmarin reminds us. Above all, it matters to us who feel belonging to this community that has become deeply aware of the fact that otherness is the foundation of identity itself. The “ongoing negotiation on the terms of our belonging together, and our search to find ourselves in the territory, to which we go on bonding with passion and disgust” is what we spend our daily energy on. Our job is to inhabit these thresholds and feel their beauty and discomfort.

Carlos Sutil reminded us of the importance of considering the relational approach as a new paradigm. I thank him for his way of describing “truth as discovery,” as something that emerges in the relational context of therapy, and is revealed in the encounter itself. I found his conclusions provocative and enlightening: leaving aside the absolutism of “radical ethics”, “it seems preferable to search for a relational home in which we all save ourselves together or, at least, alleviate our suffering together”. I would add: with patience, humility and determination.

Rachel Peltz notes that it can’t be a coincidence that as we increasingly grapple with uncertainties about the future, our theories question vitality and hope, and how to bring our patients back to life. Once again psychoanalysis proves to be a “practice of otherness” that cultivates the wisdom of opening ourselves to the differences between us.

Sandra Buechler and Shlomit Gadot answered the question of the third plenary: “Dreaming the Other: holding possibility or fostering delusion?” focusing on disillusionment. Sandra notices how difficult it is to conclude one’s professional activity when it has been so much an integral part of one’s identity and vitality. Putting so much passion into our ‘strange’ work, so personal and idiosyncratic, also implies this risk: suffering when the clinical activity closes. However, while admitting the loss, I will try to be grateful that I had the possibility to do such meaningful work on a daily basis.

Shlomit Gadot brought us back to Freud about falling in love and to the “ideal ego” that projecting onto the other can only lead to disillusionment. She warned us against idealization. The illusion of fullness and perfection is risky. On the contrary, subjectivity must be conceived as always inevitably lacking and imperfect, so that instead of colonizing the other, it sets out in search of the ‘imperfect’ other with a disillusioned and generously human love.

Spyros Orfanos told us about his experience with student girls fleeing Afghanistan in August 2021. The otherness that patient and therapist had to face was prolonged and annihilating terror. But Spyros highlighted a very important and no less traumatic aspect: the moral injury, the betrayal of the trust placed in something or someone who has authority (the university). Spyros says: “psychoanalysis is a moral practice in part because it concerns such values as truthfulness, respect, empathy, freedom and autonomy which are central to the analyst-analysand relationship”. For this reason, his engagement with the Afghan girls was not only to give support for their suffering, it was also a “moral engagement”, an attempt to repair, at least in part, the wound of the betrayal of trust.

In the interdisciplinary kaleidoscope of these days, the social, geopolitical and collective dimension received great attention, as it should be given the enormous challenges of our turbulent world that changes in an impetuous and uncontrolled way. We have so much to learn from sociology, anthropology and political philosophy, but let us not forget that our greatest ‘political’ responsibility is to practice certain values in the clinical encounter. It is in the therapeutic process that we can offer a specific and decisive contribution, even if we can also do many other things as individuals.

I greatly appreciated the way in which the three colleagues engaged and practiced psychotherapy who led us into the hell of gender-based violence. Visiting that frontier every day is heroic and exhausting, but certainly also a good way to commit oneself to a better world. Violence is a dehumanizing experience. As Maria Silvia Soriato has shown us, it always concerns the dynamics of power and therefore needs to develop a complex critique of the social system. The analysis, in these cases, becomes a threshold between public and private. Without losing the power of a deep clinical engagement, and partly because of this, therapist and patient can find themselves on the street, screaming, only to return the next day to the disciplined and painful pursuit of therapy.

Let’s see how much attention to the therapist’s subjectivity proves to be useful for deepening the therapeutic process also in the case presented by Hilary Offman. Cora leads us to reflect on a further frontier that weaves multiple factors of discrimination connected to transgender and obesity. The “intersectional shame” shared between patient and therapist moves an enactment that causes a rupture, but also allows for a deeper reflection on how envy and privilege have unfolded in their relationship. As they share a commitment to embrace the “constructed” woman each of them has become, they can finally feel the richness of self-enhancement involved in embracing otherness.

Silvia Jimenez has brought us the strength and grace of the therapist who chooses to offer the patient a relationship in which she finally does not face yet another abandonment. A trench battle to stay even when you no longer want to feel the pain and despair of the patient. Silvia illustrates another important characteristic of the relational approach: authenticity. By being able to admit our mistakes, the patient can trusts us, and this is what makes the difference between the current therapeutic experience and the past traumatizing relational world. Once again the vulnerability, the imperfection of the therapist are resources of a deeper meningful encounter.

We followed Alejandro Avila Espada in his beautiful journey on the “gaze” as a possible way to “embracing the other” without invading her/him, respecting the different subjectivity and her/his autonomy. Alejandro has placed himself on the interdisciplinary border between psychoanalysis and artistic expression, a path that is very dear to me and that always opens our minds and hearts, because clinical practice is a highly creative activity. We learn to welcome each other’s gaze to keep us connected with respect and empathy. On the contrary, let’s recall Maria Silvia’s patient who questions how it was possible to have given her own eyes to the violent other/partner and find herself colonized in seeing things only from his point of view. Because, precisely, if the gaze is not reciprocal, if there is no recognition, there can be no otherness and therefore no identity either.

Sally Swartz described to us the paradoxical situation that arises when acknowledging and bearing witness to the pain of the other is not even feasible yet. The therapist has to be there, in touch with her own isolation, just staying alive and ready to seize the moments when she is needed. She – following Fanon – calls it “the hellish zone of non-being in the analytic setting”, a kind of zeroing necessary to open up to a radical form of hospitality that allows for some genuine attempt to co-create possibilities. A very difficult process when the treshold of colonialism is experienced in the reality of contextual facts and in the subjective history of patient and therapist.

In these days we have tried to keep the communication between us alive and engaging. Making words vehicles of shared experience, like small colored flowers that blossom in the gray tide of stereotyped senteces that submerge us without informing us, without really communicating anything. Many of the presentations we followed were precious examples of this communicative effort. I find the conclusion reached by my dear friend and colleague Carmine Schettini very effective: giving voice directly to the Other, to the many Others who live inside and surround us. Like Alejandro, to embrace the Other and make room, he relied on the language of creative imagination which is often more authentic than the descriptive one. Again we see how important it is to inhabit the interdisciplinary thresholds, the thresholds of communication with the more concrete intention and motivation of enlarging our common humanity.

I hope that my effort to weave a common thread through the many voices we have heard can be as useful to you as it has been for me in supporting that complexity which, while avoiding forms of reductionism, also leads to the synthesis of significant reflections for our work and for ourselves.