A Primer on Human Birth Theory.

In the 1970s Massimo Fagioli (1931-2017) proposed a new theory of mind that he called the Human Birth Theory, based on a healthy conception of the baby and of the nonconscious mind. Fagioli made significant contributions to the understanding of mental dynamics at birth, the pathophysiology of mental illness, and the nonconscious identity of psychiatrists and psychotherapists. His original contributions to psychodynamic psychotherapy included variations on the setting and understanding of transference and dream interpretations that deviated from classical psychoanalytic techniques. This article introduces the basic tenets of Human Birth Theory, its neuropsychiatric correlates, and clinical applications.

Embodied intersubjectivity: Forms of psyche-soma structuring in the encounter between self and other-than-self.

This paper explores the mechanisms that lead to a destructive tendency in the formation and functioning of the psychic apparatus, to the characteristic states of subjects who are drawn to non-life. The dynamics of the primary mother-child relationship involve a structural interaction between mind and body, subject and object. The dialectic between the life drive and the death drive is conceptualized as the structuring of homeostatic dynamic equilibria, in which both drives belong to the living, provided they are kept in a non-isolated system. This conception has analogies with other disciplines that have changed their paradigms, such as neurobiology, which, for living beings in open systems, hypothesises a continuous interconnected Becoming of undivided separation and of discontinuity. In unitary psyche-soma functioning, a dynamic homoeostatic balance marks the state of health of the relating subject; or if, instead, the system is isolated, a pathological dysregulation depending on the emotional-affective vicissitudes it undergoes. Two clinical cases illustrate these dynamics. For this tendency on the level of the somatopsychic unit, the name alloiosis has been put forward, in analogy with cellular apoptosis.

EMBRACING DISAPPOINTMENT AS PSYCHOANALYTIC PRAXIS.

Psychoanalysis involves studying how people maintain not knowing what they "know." As a result, how psychoanalytic psychotherapists orient toward what their patients may be experiencing but cannot say is at the core of psychoanalytic praxis. Jeremy Safran's unique psychoanalytic sensibilities were a model for how to yield to feeling states and relational dynamics that are at the heart of therapeutic action, but which all too frequently get bypassed. This brief recollection highlights how Safran's commitment to open inquiry and mutuality-not just with his patients but also with his students-continues to impact the field.

The enchanted unconscious, impasses, negotiation and surrender: Jeremy Safran in dialogue with the Rebbes of Ishbitz/Radzin.

Dr. Jeremy Safran had a unique talent to seamlessly weave together clinical work with his broad knowledge of philosophy, history, and theology. Alongside his commitment to researching the minutest clinical interactions, he was conscious of the broad values of the nature of the good life that underpinned his analytic approach. This paper will explore the concepts of the enchanted unconscious, clinical impasses, negotiation, and surrender, suggesting that these concepts together provide insight into Safran's larger philosophy of life. It will then provide the approach to these concepts of the Rebbes of Ishbitz/Radzin, a school of Polish Hasidic thought. It will conclude with an exploration of how both Safran's psychoanalytic approach and the Ishbitz/Radzin Rebbes' Hasidic approach to the Torah provide distinct insights and applications of these concepts, which can be mutually enriching for both disciplines.

Finding one's way.

The following is a meditative reflection on an anecdote from Jeremy Safran's Psychoanalysis and Buddhism. Moving through Safran's description of an important moment in his development as a student of Buddhism, the author weaves images, practices, and ways of being and feeling into an homage to Safran's legacy integrating psychoanalytic and Buddhist praxis and epistemology.

The heart of healing: Echoes of Sándor Ferenczi's legacy in Jeremy Safran's relational commitments.

In this duet of two voices honoring Jeremy Safran's legacy, the authors celebrate some points of resonance between Sándor Ferenczi's groundbreaking relational interventions and Safran's approach to the therapeutic relationship as the heart of healing. Karen Starr first highlights Ferenczi's now well-known creative experimentation with technique and his emphasis on and care for the relational dimension of psychoanalytic treatment. Jill Bresler then links Safran's career-long dedication to the therapeutic alliance to Starr's introductory remarks, honoring Safran and Ferenczi's shared dedication to expanding options in clinical practice through focus on the relationship. Recalling Safran's naming Ferenczi as a key figure in psychotherapy integration's origin story, Bresler reflects on her own learning from Safran's groundbreaking transtheoretical research into the mutative aspects of psychotherapy and his translating a psychoanalytic focus on the therapeutic relationship to CBT researchers and practitioners.

Grace, too: the sense of agency and Jeremy Safran's relational vision.

The sense of agency, our felt sense of authorship for our actions, is a difficult concept to define, yet its faltering stands at the heart of psychopathology. Historically undertheorized by psychoanalysis and typically positioned opposite relatedness by clinical psychology, Jeremy Safran conceived of agency and relatedness as paradoxically related. This paper pays tribute to Safran's ideas by taking his writings on agency as a starting point to elaborate how agency forms, and goes awry, in the relational crucible of early life. In doing so, the paper draws on the developmental theory of Winnicott, empirical research on embodied agency from adjacent fields of study, and Safran's clinical phenomenology.

Letting go to let be: Psychoanalysis as creative flow.

This paper explores experiences of surrender to an aspect of mind that is unconfined, empty of dualistic concepts, and lucidly aware. Ghent's concept of surrender, Farber's unconscious will, and Buddhist philosophers' essence of mind all link to creative processes described by Poincaré and Mozart. This impressionistic collage points to the spaciousness to know beyond our usual stories. From this essential mind more wholesome actions proceed.

Psychoanalysis of the unspectacular.

From the perspective of a poet and first-year psychoanalytic training candidate, this paper develops Jeremy Safran's ideas about the dialectic between psychoanalysis and Buddhism by drawing an analogy between their processes and those of a poetry practice to define an alternative to pathological dissociation under capitalist systems of value. The paper details the writer's experience of working a day job in an office and the pathological dissociation which she subsequently attempts to overcome and critique through writing poetry. Various poems written at work are shared and analyzed as evidence. Drawing from Safran's edited volume, Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, the author then identifies aspects of Zen Buddhist meditation practice and the psychoanalytic process that focus on connecting with reality, however conflicted, as opposed to escaping it. This paper was written under the mentorship of the psychoanalyst and Zen teacher Barry Magid.

Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Homelessness.

Psychoanalysis is often viewed as a practice relevant only to educated people of means. This article describes a project that matches psychoanalytically trained clinicians with unhoused and formerly unhoused adults in a large urban community. D. W. Winnicott's ideas about impingement, the holding environment, fear of breakdown, and careful monitoring of the analyst's interiority have proven to be most valuable theoretical and clinical tools. A decade-long case example demonstrates the challenges and healing potentials of the work.

On Natality: Beginning to Be Limited.

Through the personal reflection on chronic pain, the author engages the question of how clinicians and their patients manage various forms of loss within the clinical encounter. The notion of developmental grief is introduced as a stepping-stone from phallicism to genitality, whereby the capacity to grieve and thus tolerate limitedness enables growth. Hannah Arendt's concept of natality is offered as a hopeful corrective to the resistance to accepting limitations.

Transacting in Objectification: Racism, Psychoanalysis, and the Temptations of Empiricism.

This article examines five contributions published in the early volumes (1913-1917) of The Psychoanalytic Review, written by John E. Lind and Arrah B. Evarts. It reflects on how they address the topic of race and its relation to psychoanalytic theory, highlighting the ways of purported neutrality of empirical research and how it serves a fantasy through which racism is enacted and sustained.

Wondering and Wandering: In Defense of Free Association and the Fundamental Rule.

"Free association" and the "fundamental rule" are bedrock for psychoanalytic therapy and apply to what both patient and analyst should experience in the process. The article traces Sigmund Freud's revolutionary recognition of the importance of free association that began with his tribute to the works of Ludwig Börne and Friedrich Schiller. The author invokes other proposals akin to free association made by artists and scientists, including John Keats, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Thomas S. Kuhn, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Einstein. While emphasizing the importance and the liberatory potential of free association as it relates to effective treatment and discovery, the author contends that there is a "moral press" for both the patient and the analyst to permit free associative thoughts, particularly to question assumptions about how things are supposed to be.

How can psychoanalytic interpretations of political situations have effects as actions?

This article examines the difficulties of making use of psychoanalytic insights to understand and influence political events. In clinical practice, it has often been possible to bring about understanding and change in patients, and in that context, immense developments in psychoanalytic theories and techniques have taken place. But there is no parallel tradition giving rise to the interpretation of unconscious political phenomena although there have been outstanding contributions of this kind by individuals, beginning with Freud's work on group psychology. There have been valuable psychoanalytic understandings of broad social changes, but effective interventions in "here and now" political situations have been few. Some examples of these include Keynes's understanding of the economic consequences of the peace of 1918 which were seen to be relevant mainly after the later peace of 1945 and Mitscherlichs' analysis in the1970s of the German people's "inability to mourn" the catastrophes of the Nazi period. The article concludes with reflections on the conditions which might facilitate effective interpretations of political situations by psychoanalysts today.

Psychoanalysis and its discontents: A view from India.

This paper discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic perspectives may have been limited by the Western cultural context in which they originated and explores the potential of the Indian cultural imagination to broaden psychoanalytic thinking about ego formation, the nature of Eros, bisexuality, and individuation. The case is made for the need to retain the diverse perspectives offered by the cultural imaginations of different civilisations despite the globalization of ideas.

Do we know our place? The role of psychoanalysis in public life.

The contributions to this Psychoanalytic Controversies section explore the question of what psychoanalysis may be able to contribute to thinking about some of the challenges currently confronting humanity and how such communications can be made effectively. This introduction to the section frames the debate with some reflections on anxieties that have been expressed about the application of psychoanalytic ideas beyond the clinical context, the risks of insularity, the need for appropriate humility, and the reality of the embeddedness of analytic practice, in particular social, cultural, and historical contexts. Contributions from Claudia Frank, Sudhir Kakar, Eli Zaretsky, Michael Rustin, Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, Magda Khouri, and Sally Weintrobe are introduced.

In a time of theoretical expansion and change, don't throw babies out with the bath water.

Various challenges faced by the psychoanalyst when moving from "on the couch" work to "off the couch" work are raised and discussed. It is argued that the biggest challenges concern methodology: what now constitutes the analytic setting and field, and what counts as analytic data? The author describes some of the methodological challenges she has faced so far in studying climate change denial at individual, group, cultural and political levels. She raises potential pitfalls with "off the couch" work, that include overgeneralisations and assuming one can directly apply insights gained "on the couch" to wider contexts. In conclusion, she reflects that her training and practice working with individuals on the couch has proved bedrock in working "off the couch".

Transforming psychoanalysis for the public.

This essay explores the inextricable connection between the psyche and the social, and its relevance to contemporary global challenges, such as isolation and polarization. The author discusses the possibilities that psychoanalysis holds for the public good, underscoring the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to understanding the social world and creating greater access to psychoanalytic knowledge. Notably, transforming psychoanalysis to reflect multiple sociocultural subjectivities and addressing the polarization within psychoanalysis is critical for this endeavour.

The inability to mourn and nationalism in Japan after 1945.

Failure to deal with the issue of collective and social loss increases the risk of extreme nationalism. When taken too far, a repetition of manic defence can arise that manifests itself in the form of war. In this paper, the notion of the "inability to mourn" by the German Psychoanalysts A. and M. Mitshcerlich (1967) is discussed in relation to the problem of Japan's post World War II nationalism, and its silence on social matters. The process of confronting past atrocities committed by the state is then discussed from the perspective of structural theory.