Psychoanalytic Inquiry

Nathan, Deborah

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2676526pmid: N/A

This article provides an overview of the methodology utilized in the Artsbridge Institute, which has worked with Israeli and Palestinian teens through a unique approach that utilizes Transformative Reflecting Dialogue, artistic modalities, and collaborative art to help students learn how to have difficult conversations, work constructively through conflict, and develop relational resilience. The Artsbridge Model of Relational Resilience (AMRR) will also be described and explored. Through generations of violence and separation, the narratives of Israelis and Palestinians have become negatively interdependent and mutually exclusive. Artsbridge, through its methodology, helps participants develop more inclusive narratives that may allow them to move forward more constructively. Through quotes from alumni from 2008 to 2019, this article will illustrate some of the impact that the program has had on participants, as well as how the impact has been sustained over the years. All names attributed to quotes are pseudonyms.

Korson, Michael

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2676521pmid: N/A

While keeping in mind those struggling to survive in war zones today, I contend that all humans are living with war – a culture extending across borders and shores, reinforcing division, eroding trust, uprooting people from their homes, and sowing fear and devastation. Tracing psychoanalytic thinking about the causes of war, I begin with the Freud – Einstein correspondence and then consider Fromm’s shift from biological drives to social dimensions. Contemporary thinking about the social unconscious brings the internal and external together: groups reside inside the individual as much as individuals make up groups. Rozmarin focuses on belonging, the identities groups provide and the demands (sometimes of violence) they make. I consider Sen’s analysis of how singular identity categories foment sectarian violence. At the core of violence and war is the dehumanization of the other. Through projection of unwanted aspects of the self (or of groups), we create the denigrated other to hate or kill. I suggest another kind of othering, generative othering, which recognizes our need for the Other. Following Levinas, consideration of the Other forms our basic humanness. I propose a consciousness – the borderless subject – that sees the self in multiple identities and belonging to multiple groups. We all contain multitudes; our shared humanity is found through our differences, not despite them. Psychoanalysis not only helps develop this perspective but also offers the experience of it. I offer two vignettes from an international psychoanalytic conference to illustrate living with war and what is needed to interrupt, not merely interpret, dehumanization that leads to violence and war.

Wolfe, Harriet

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2676518pmid: N/A

The author discusses the intense conflicts and the developmental opportunities that have emerged within the profession of psychoanalysis in relation to the recent highly disrupted state of the world. Experiences of existential anxiety have created intractable conflict on both the individual and the institutional level, but psychoanalytic values have become clarified as polarized opinions regarding institutional responses to geopolitical issues and the use of technology in clinical training have increasingly become the foci of dialogue. Reflective listening – personal and organizational – and the psychoanalytic capacity to think before acting have become central to differentiating between internal and external sources of threat. A psychoanalytic sensibility that includes careful listening, trust, empathy, curiosity, courage to disagree, respect for cultural and personal difference, the ability to remain connected while separate, and the ability to mourn protects against acting on the capacity to hate that resides in each of us. That sensibility supports effective approaches to the question of how psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic groups and institutions can help our troubled world.

Oppenheim, Josie

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2619397pmid: N/A

The author situates the article itself as “other,” highlighting the struggle to bring the spatially imagined depth of experience into the linear procession of language. Within this dynamic, she introduces subliminal shapes and images as she coaxes into relief various bits of psychoanalytic life. Among these fragments, we find Stanislavski’s magic gift to actors, the mystery of the human olfactory function, and the mother chimpanzee’s mind within us, demanding to be heard, all signposts in a quest to find an alive and encompassing metaphor for what it is the analyst wants.

Sánchez, María Cecilia

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2676528pmid: N/A

This paper raises, within a research context of intercultural mental health, analytical questions relevant to the knowledge emanating from cultural diversity. It postulates hypotheses having to do with the disparity of losses, objectives and thought structures and questions the status of transfer in what has to do with the creation of public policies.

Gutiérrez Cardoso, Camila

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2676530pmid: N/A

Colombia has faced internal conflict for several years. This paper addresses the experiences of a psychoanalyst working and traveling in a conflict zone in the Amazon basin in Colombia. The horrors of war are located in the landscape, but also, following the peace process, the rain forest is seen differently and other meanings emerge. While working, psychoanalysts witness and learn from the community.

Diatkine, Gilbert

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2670986pmid: N/A

French analysts are supposed to be more intolerant than their English-speaking colleagues. This bad reputation is, in part, justified. A possible explanation of this French arrogance could be the long-term violent polemic which goes on till now, inside the French psychoanalyst movement, between lacanians and non-lacanians. Intolerance is common to all psychoanalytic trends at their beginning. Freud himself formulated Schibboleths to decide what is psychoanalysis, and what is not. Exclusions and scissions were frequent in the psychoanalytic movement at the beginning. However, Freud’s intolerance came only later, after careful inquiry. In many ways, he was extraordinarily open to new ideas, and never excluded anybody without a careful examination of their ideas.

Chefetz, Richard A.

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2676531pmid: N/A

Racism is an acutely and chronically traumatic experience. Shame, humiliation, subjugation, contempt and other shame-spectrum emotions and experiences are implicit. The toxicity of racism and additional forms of social othering mimic the psychodynamics inherent in the generation of alternate identities in dissociative identity disorder, the not-me position. In these toxic social and intrapsychic contexts, the person who is regarded as not like me, not like us, and therefore not of value, includes the experience of being held in contempt, privately and/or publicly, e.g. the public use by a government official in describing a homogeneous group of immigrants as “garbage.” As the intensity of such a relational tyranny increases so does the conjuring of shame spectrum affects come to roost in the mind and body of the targeted person, and, simultaneously, in the body of the perpetrator, all outside awareness as sub-symbolic essence. This implicit invisibility leads unsuspecting “blue-eyed observers” to be biased by the cultural broth in which they have been steeped. Racism can be framed as a social not-me constellation that locates badness and emotional pain in dislocated and disowned individuals in a community, the Other. Toni Morrison’s anti-heroine, Pecola is the star-crossed Other, the strange attractor who holds this constellation in position as she longs to have the bluest eyes, an escape from her purgatory of both racism and sexual abuse.

Kliman, Gilbert; Kliman, Jodie

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2676524pmid: N/A

The author attributes his life-long commitment to healing, particularly of children, to the unconscious inheritance of his grandmother’s trauma, which silenced her. Unbeknownst to him, she had lost everyone in her family and village in a pogrom and lost two sons to illness, long before his birth. The author’s forensic work caused him pain over the abuse, neglect, and even murder of young children for whom he has done psychological autopsies, including three children whose deaths are discussed in this paper. He argues that such tragedies reflect a global phenomenon of “childism” – hatred of children. Childism is not only an individual problem, but a societal and even a deeply biological one. Humans today may not differ greatly from lower animals that not only kill their competitors, but eat their own young in the face of environmental impoverishment, or from earlier humans who ritually sacrificed their young. The author argues that societal childism can be at least partially countered societally by psychoanalytically-informed work protecting children in therapy offices, courtrooms, and in public health and social policies prioritizing child welfare over war and profit. Such work must be preventive, not just interventive. Several examples, including at Harlem Family Services, are provided.

Fischmann, Tamara; Ambresin, Gilles; Leuzinger-Bohleber, Marianne

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2026.2671615pmid: N/A

Chronic depression associated with early trauma remains one of the most treatment-resistant conditions in mental health care. Clinical and empirical findings increasingly suggest that patients with histories of early trauma may benefit differentially from intensive psychoanalytic treatments compared to symptom-focused or short-term psychotherapies. This conceptual analysis aims to elucidate the mechanisms underlying sustained therapeutic change in psychoanalysis with chronically depressed, early traumatized patients by integrating clinical psychoanalytic theory, contemporary dream research, and interdisciplinary models of memory reconsolidation. Drawing on a detailed longitudinal case from the LAC Depression Study, the paper examines a patient who underwent high-frequency psychoanalysis and demonstrated enduring structural change that remained accessible more than a decade after treatment termination. Clinical material from the original analysis and from a later crisis intervention illustrates how early traumatic experiences – encoded as embodied, dissociated memory traces – can be reactivated within the transference relationship and gradually transformed through repeated analytic working-through. Particular emphasis is placed on changes in dream processes as indicators of deep psychic reorganization. Using psychoanalytically informed dream research, including the Zurich Dream Process Coding System (ZDPCS), the analysis demonstrates a shift from early trauma-dominated nightmares characterized by helplessness and absence of a helping object toward a later dream reflecting increased affect regulation, symbolic capacity, involvement, and self-agency. These transformations are conceptualized as markers of structural change rather than mere symptom reduction. The paper further argues that psychoanalytic processes resonate with contemporary neurobiological models of memory reconsolidation. When traumatic memories are reactivated within a safe and emotionally attuned analytic relationship, they may enter a labile state that allows for enduring modification and re-integration. From this interdisciplinary perspective, psychoanalysis is uniquely positioned to foster sustained change in patients with chronic depression and early trauma by enabling the re-transcription and reconsolidation of traumatic embodied memories within the analytic relationship. This conceptual integration contributes to a deeper understanding of why psychoanalysis can produce lasting therapeutic effects in a patient population traditionally considered difficult to treat.