SPPA Journal of Psychoanalysis

The (un)thinkable and anachronic time

Thomas H. Ogden — 2025-03-19

In this essay, the authors present a sequence in three parts regarding humane thinking and evasion of thinking under extreme circumstances. In the first part, thinking stems from the emotional impact, raw feelings and impressions owing to a natural disaster in south Brazil. The second part of the essay is Analytic thinking, a brief comment written by Thomas H. Ogden, where he shares five of his major principles in psychoanalysis, and arguments that psychoanalytic thinking underlies all creative thinking. And third, the authors offer thoughts concerning the concept of analytic times, proposed by Ogden (2024) in recent publication and describe a complementary mode of experience of time, which commonly takes place in the face of extreme circumstances. This is seen as reflecting the stagnation of both diachronic and synchronic time, involving active and massive avoidance of the experience of the passage of time. For this experience of dead, anti-thinking time, the authors propose the name of anachronic time.

The vulnerability of the psychoanalyst and the setting in the face of environmental catastrophe

Laura Ravaioli — 2025-03-07

The flood that hit the city where the author lives and works led her to reflect on the consequences of environmental disasters on the work of the psychoanalyst who, together with his/her patients, lives the actuality of a shared trauma. The article narrates the vulnerability of the analyst and narrows the field of observation to her attempts to maintain the stability of the analytic setting and ensure the continuity of treatment through reconsiderations and interpretations of the fee and payment agreements in a destroyed environment.

Catastrophe and creativity: from fragmentation to emergence

Judy K. Eekhoff — 2025-03-11

This paper follows Ferenczi’s lead into the primordial, exploring a search for truth, that if it is successful will result in both a catastrophic loss and a creative gain. In entering the primordial, Ferenczi takes us into experiences of undifferentiation that bring us to the very origins of a self. According to Ferenczi, familiarity with the primordial never leaves us, but rests silently in our bodies, as background to the truth. We access it in moments of beauty discovered in art, poetry, music or sexuality. Truth and beauty go together and cannot be separated. We also access truth in moments of loss. Unfortunately, truth can be attacked and with disastrous consequences as we know from the years when Ferenczi’s ideas were banned from psychoanalytic discussion. Attacks on truth are as catastrophic as is truth itself. Clinical examples are given.

Trauma and psychic survival

Anette Blaya Luz — 2025-03-13

Starting from Freud's conceptions about the origins of emotional trauma, we present the metapsychology of trauma proposed by Sándor Ferenczi in 1932. In this work, the author describes the importance of the external object as a traumatizing element, leaving the child helpless in the face of his perception of the maltreatment suffered, and highlights denial as a fundamental element in damaging the child's healthy psychic survival. The reality of the traumatic fact, from the child's perspective, is altered due to the defense that he uses which is the narcissistic self-cleavage, with consequent identification with the aggressor.
Understanding trauma through this theory implies significant technical changes, such as incorporating elasticity and relaxation to restore healthy psychic survival.
This process allows the cleaved parts of the personality to be reintegrated into the whole. A brief presentation of Winnicott's ideas about trauma is provided, as they
represent the contemporary development of Ferenczi's theories. Three clinical vignettes illustrate these concepts.

Between mud and floods:

Bruna Mello da Fonseca — 2025-03-14

This work aims to reverberate the effects produced by the flood, real and psychic, which occurred due to the floods in Rio Grande do Sul in May 2024. The effects observed on the street, in the city, in the clinic, on analysands and analysts they ask for subjective and collective elaborations. In this way, this work reflects one of the many necessary narrative initiatives that make it possible to look at trauma. In the same vein, elaboration allows not to repeat, understanding that in addition to the rain, this unpretentious and non-lethal, necropolitical and disaster capitalism strategies need to be confronted, this being an event in a sociopolitical field. For genuine elaboration, we will share testimonies of the experience lived in the clinic and outside it.

Psychoanalysis

Elaine Izildinha Saccochi Cardin — 2025-03-07

This article is based on the experience of supervision and psychotherapeutic care provided to institutionalized children in foster care facilities. In this way, the importance and applicability of the psychoanalytic method in adverse and inhospitable social situations is demonstrated.

Traumas and psychoanalytic intervention

Mariangela Relvas Pinto — 2025-03-20

The article aims to present the work of COWAP Brazil’s Support and Research Group (GAC), which was created with the objective of addressing and giving voice to the psychic pain of women who are victims of intrafamilial violence, via online support and through voluntary work undertaken by psychoanalysts and psychoanalysts in training from different regions of Brazil. These are traumatized patients who experience primary anguish and display a predominance of archaic defense mechanisms such as splitting and fragmentation, serving as a means of survival against the threats of psychic destruction and death. We verify, through the presentation of a clinical case, how traumatic experiences hinder representation and the use of free association. Taking this into account, we discuss these matters through the application of concepts advanced by Sándor Ferenczi in relation to the clinic of trauma. In the conclusion, the article underscores the importance of clinical group discussion, especially in cases where access is difficult.

Adolescence in cuts:

Marcela Mello Ranier — 2025-03-14

Self-mutilation is understood, in this work, as one of the possible ways to express and also go through the elaboration of trauma. Adolescence is a critical phase that predisposes the experience of dysregulated feelings, which can lead to self-harmful behaviors as a means of alleviating unthinkable anxieties. The lack of a constitutive and integrative view in early childhood, the subsequent difficulty in differentiating otherness and accessing the symbolic and representational world, causes suffering to overflow into the body. The act of hurting oneself, on the other hand, can be a path that allows for confrontation, an appeal to life and a request for help and not exactly a desire for annihilation.

Considerations on war, women, and dehumanized bodies

Mariana Bassoi Duarte — 2025-03-20

This article aims to discuss the importance of peer support in the identity and subjective reconstruction of migrant and refugee women affected by armed conflicts. It presents an analysis, grounded in psychoanalysis, of an interview with a young woman from a Middle Eastern country. The participant, a survivor of severe burns, works as a Peer Support Worker in a project focused on welcoming migrants and refugees impacted by armed conflicts. Using the FANI method (Free Association Narrative Interview), which emphasizes subjectivities, the study highlights the perceptions of realities experienced by these groups. The analysis underscores the devastating impact of armed conflicts, illustrating how violence is normalized and contributes to the invisibility and discursive erasure of survivors. The narratives shared by the participant emphasize the gender inequalities exacerbated by war and the challenges faced by women in reclaiming their identities. As a result, the study highlights the potential of Peer Support in fostering survivors' autonomy and identity reorganization, underscoring the need for spaces for expression and listening as a means to challenge dehumanization.

Textbook of psychoanalysis

Ângela Fleck Wirth — 2025-03-20

Nessa terceira edição do Textbook of psychoanalysis (2024) (Compêndio de Psicanálise), os editores exploram como a psicanálise está evoluindo na atualidade e os múltiplos desafios encontrados pelos psicanalistas na sua clínica. Os autores integram novas perspectivas e descobertas aos conceitos clássicos estabelecidos por Freud e outros teóricos.

Notes on the soil soul in Brazil

Cristina Freire — 2025-03-18

Social, environmental and subjective ecologies affect each other. In the urgency of the climate crisis we are experiencing, soil becomes a category of analysis. Although it is in the fertile soil that life on the planet is sustained, its invisibility reveals the dynamics of social and subjective processes. The history of colonization-modernization that has trivialized environmental devastation in Brazil has produced monotonous landscapes, degraded soils, devastated forests and polluted seas. The disregard for the announced disaster remains at the basis of modern Western, anthropocentric and Cartesian thought, which separates nature and culture, mind and body, thinking and acting. The mythical duality of the earth points to other meanings for the process of destruction and for the catastrophes that follow.

Life in the Sertão and in the Couch, lived and narrated by Riobaldo Tatarana, the Urubú Branco

Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros — 2025-03-07

The author explores the impact of Grande sertão: veredas by Guimarães Rosa (2019) in his psychoanalytic reflection on life. Despite the challenges of finding a unique angle due to extensive prior psychoanalytic interpretations of the novel, the author emphasizes his intent not to psychoanalyze Guimaraes Rosa or the characters but to offer a catalyzing reading. He argues for a contemporary psychoanalytic approach that focuses on the reevaluation and reinterpretation of past and present experiences to prevent the future from being a mere repetition of the past. Barros thinks the unconscious as a field of potential experiences rather than a repository of repressed content, aligning with Rustin's perspective. He appreciates Ogden's emphasis on the therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis, its understanding of the unconscious, and the vitality of language. The text relates the narrative experience of Riobaldo to the psychoanalytic process, highlighting the role of symbolic representation in organizing and giving meaning to life's emotional experiences. Through Riobaldo's journey, the author illustrates the psychoanalytic endeavor to transform suffering into a narrative that enriches the understanding of oneself and one's world.

Two superegoic voices in Luiz de Camões' Os Lusíadas, and one more in Fernando Pessoa

Luís Claudio Figueiredo — 2025-03-14

The question of the superego field and the formation of different figures of superego is addressed taking as a starting point characters from Os Lusíadas and a poem by Fernando Pessoa. In these characters we identify a cautious, censoring and inhibiting superego, an absolute, envious, destructive and annihilating superego and a loving, beloved and protective superego. We raise some ideas about the psychoanalytic clinic and how to work therapeutically with these different qualities and intensities of superego in which the impulsive quotient and the cultural or intersubjective quotient vary, as well as their greater or lesser integration. We suggest that in the pathologies in which superego ghosts hatch the work requires us to take into account the foundations of the loving and beloved superego generated in the experiences of reliable and enduring attachment in which the seeking for security is satisfied and eventually idealized.

Playing as a clinical tool facing tyrannical formations of the Superego

Paula Ferreira Alves — 2025-03-20

The article explores how contemporary factors such as the accelerated flow of information and the demand for productivity intensify feelings of failure and melancholy associated with tyrannical action of the Superego. From the ideas of André Green and Byung-Chul Han, it discusses how these factors generate complex individual and collective psychic symptoms. In the psychoanalytic field, play and creativity become relevant therapeutic tools in clinical practice with adults, aiming the elaboration of trauma and experiences that are difficult to symbolize, highlighting their role in psychic integration and self-expression as proposed by Donald Winnicott. Two cases illustrate how playing in the clinical setting confront Superego impositions and process its derivatives in suffering, contributing to the debate on psychoanalytic techniques for contemporary times.

Editorial

Ana Cristina Pandolfo — 2025-03-19