Refine
Document Type
- Articles (55) (remove)
Since 1999, the author has been working as a psychoanalyst in Munich, Germany, in the context of the German National Health Service, which covers psychoanalytic psychotherapy of up to 300 sessions with a frequency of up to three times a week. He has mostly been working with Italian patients in their common mother language. In other words, globalisation has made it possible to help patients heal the wounds of their old Italian self, develop a new German self, integrate them with each other, and thus allow foreign patients to become >citizens of the world.< After presenting the context of his clinical work, including the German Kassensystem and the characteristics of the Italian patients he works with, the author provides the reader with a review of the literature on migration and identity from a psychoanalytic point of view. Sociology and literature also offer an important key to the understanding of his patients. At this point in the paper, the author presents three patients, their history, the background of their migration to Germany, and the work he did with them. This allows him to come to the conclusion that psychoanalysis can help patients actualise the potentialities intrinsic in globalisation, in order to move towards a richer and more sophisticated identity.
The author compares the life and work of two pioneers and major sources of inspiration to the contemporary psychoanalytic debate: W.R. Bion (1897–1979) and H.S. Sullivan (1892–1949). Both their life and their work show similarities that allow the author to illuminate and constructively compare the one with the other. The author proposes his work as a useful exercise in the field of >comparative psychoanalysis,< an important key for the reconstruction of the history of our field and for a more scientifically coherent articulation of its theories.
The author explores the relationship between Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud in the light of their correspondence. This allows us to see how Freud was able to offer and create for Ferenczi a >professional and personal home< that enabled the latter to find a much more meaningful and creative contact with himself. According to the author, this experience played an important role in Ferenczi’s later readiness to offer to and create with his patients a similar >psychoanalytic home.< As Freud was not able to share such clinical research work with Ferenczi, a conflict developed between them whose nature has occupied psychoanalysts ever since, and whose seeds can be found in the 1246 letters that they exchanged between January 1908 and May 1933. From this point of view, Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (written in 1932 and published only in 1985) can be seen as the continuation of the dialogue they had entertained for so many years, as well as Ferenczi’s attempt not to give up the “professional and personal home” that they had created together.
On the basis of the assumption that the understanding of Freud's work can gain much from illuminating his own psychological development, the author tries to reconstruct the evolution of his self-analysis. Against the common view of placing it in the context of his relationship with Fliess, the author shows how it actually evolved out of a whole series of experiences and relationships. Freud's self-analysis was initially nourished by his study of the Greek and Latin classics; it acquired the necessary interpersonal dimension through his relationship with Emil Fluss and Eduard Silberstein; it gained a cathartic and thus therapeutic quality through his relationship with Martha; and it eventually became a professional enterprise once his patients forced Freud, with the help of Wilhelm Fliess, to systematically look into himself.