A Cross-Cultural Perspective
New IPA reference tool traces the global migration and mutation of key ideas
By Eva D. Papiasvili
Courtesy the International Psychoanalytical Association
The complexity and richness of psychoanalysis worldwide is lost on the wider culture that surrounds us when we psychoanalysts attach ourselves too exclusively to one conceptual network, one school of thought, one “psychoanalytic language.” A new kind of reference work is necessary for analysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, scholars, and educators to make many psychoanalytic languages understandable, doing justice to the richness and complexity of both the tradition and innovation. That work is the IPA’s Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED).
After 10 years of unprecedented collaboration of more than 150 psychoanalysts worldwide, IRED offers a new way of organizing psychoanalytic knowledge. More than 20 concept entries—key ideas such as the unconscious, transference, and nachträglichkeit—have been published in the English-language IRED e-book of more than 1,000 pages and are gradually being translated. Besides the four official IPA languages—English, German, Spanish, and French—volunteer teams are translating IRED into Italian, Portuguese, Farsi, Romanian, Serbian, Japanese, Hebrew, Traditional Chinese, Classical Arabic, and Russian. Because IRED is an encyclopedic dictionary, there are both dictionary/definitional parts (introduction and conclusion sections) and encyclopedic parts (everything in between).
It was in late summer of 2013, after the IPA Congress in Prague and Post-Congress in Freud’s birthplace of Pribor (today in the Czech Republic), Stefano Bolognini, that the newly minted president of the IPA, first unveiled his genuinely pluralistic vision for an encyclopedic dictionary, which would depict global psychoanalytic conceptual landscape in evolution. Weary of the reductionistic integration of only a few culturally decontextualized mainstream perspectives, IRED was to strive for a full representation of regional and theoretical diversity, including hybrid and emerging formulations, as well as areas of ambiguity, uncertainty, contradictions, and controversies.
Years later, analyst Matthew Shaw, introducing IRED at a conference of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and academics, put it this way: “Psychoanalysis flourishes amidst dialogue, good-spirited conflict, and shared learning. Whether one is wrestling with a clinical dilemma or writing about one’s work, IRED provides a methodology and resource for thinking both deeply and broadly.”
“Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it.”—William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Translations of Meaning
The approach to selection and description of concepts is from bottom up. It starts with grassroots identification of concepts most relevant to today’s analysts in their thinking and work. It then proceeds from regional to inter-regional stage of team writing, beginning with the regional drafts, towards inter-regional (tri-regional) entries. This process of interactive teamwork has many recursive feedback loops along the way—as one learns about the other and about oneself through the eyes of the other—while guarding against stereotyping and dogmatism. Throughout, the teams proceed with the guidance of the regional and inter-regional chair or cochairs and cross-references with other entries.
At the heart of this interactive process are multidimensional, multitheoretical translations of meaning. Considering the inherent plasticity of words, their capacity for deformation, displacement, and polysemy, the translation of meaning (not just of words) between different languages of diverse psychoanalytic cultures is a complex interpretative art. For example, in the entry “Ego Psychology,” francophone analysts “mistranslated” the meaning of equidistance (from all psychic agencies) as a “constant distance” from the patient, which they contrasted with their “flexible distance” approach. We found out that the only way to navigate this situation is by the interactive inter-regional methodology.
As expected, we ran into challenges. Some inter-regional teams got so attached to their regional drafts that they were reluctant to make them a part of a more expanded tri-regional entry as our methodology required. The inter-regional cochair promised that the regional contributions will shine brighter as parts of the lager panoramic layout of the global entry. We labored through this process of “binding” smaller units into larger ones, and when the entries were completed, there was a sense of triumph. They were not incompatible; they were complementary! The cochair (author of this piece) sighed with relief.
Plurality and Complexity in Theory and in Action
IRED is consistent with William James’s vision of the evolving pluralistic universe, and with contemporary epistemologies that emphasize interactivity, incompleteness, unpredictability, and heterogenous routes of evolution. In other words, knowledge is a never-complete evolving process: we interact with the object of our inquiry and are changed by it—all within specific historical-cultural and clinical conditions. With enough complexity, new unpredictable developments emerge. For instance, in developing the entry “Countertransference,” we learned how Ferenczi’s ideas landed differently in London (via Michael Balint, influencing both the Kleinian and independent schools of British object relations); in Buenos Aires (via Heinrich Racker, who utilized Ferenczi’s “identification with the aggressor” in his formulation of “complementary identification” with the patient’s aggressive internal objects); and from Budapest to New York (via Clara Thompson to the Sullivan interpersonal school, where the coconstructive character of the analytic exchange was further accentuated, while regression, so crucial to Ferenczi, Klein, and Racker, slipped away).
Previously unforeseen connections are many. For instance, we included among North American perspectives in “Object Relations Theories” and “Intersubjectivity” a French North American theorizing of the Quebec/Montreal region. During the regional drafting, Montreal francophone analysts noted self-identified ego psychologist Hans Loewald’s revision of Freud’s drive theory, specifically his view about instinctual drives organizing the environment and being organized by it. Upon reading many more texts of his, they included him with the “Third Model” French theorizing, which up to that point was seen as counterposed to ego psychology. This Third Model posits that in development, “two-person psychology” precedes the “one person psychology” of the internally conflicted subject of Freud’s first and second models (topographic and structural theories). Thus, Loewald became, besides Winnicott, the only non-French psychoanalyst who was included in the French tradition of psychoanalytic thought. The Montreal region proved an example of a “logic of the limits,” where interactions between theoretical currents (French, British Object Relations, and North American ego psychology) create a liminal territory with the logic of a “trading zone” and “trading languages,” where new phenomena can emerge.
For another example of this theoretical and geographical complexity, see The Self: Some Trends of Conceptual Evolution below.
Conceptual migration-mutation is linked to various encounters with otherness, creating particular emergent patterns. First, as noted in the entry for “Intersubjectivity,” when the psychoanalytic concepts are migrating from historical psychoanalytic centers towards the periphery,
Cultural conditions impose changing patterns that differ from the cultural patterns of the countries where these ideas were born. The history of our profession starts in a center (Vienna, London, Paris). When it moves toward the periphery, new phenomena occur, and more so when it crosses the oceans. There, the fortunate expansion of psychoanalysis intertwines with a variety of factors.
For example, there is the broadening of Bion’s conceptualizations in Latin America towards intersubjectivity; additional metapsychology of the “dramatic point of view” of North American Kleinians, and others, echoing the hypercomplexity of complex network science about the novel “branching” occurring when heterogeneous trajectories head for “previously empty spaces” as described by physicists Éverton Fernandes da Cunha and Luciano da Fontoura Costa.
Second, in areas of confluence of several psychoanalytic traditions, and several cultures and/or languages, where the number of interactions exceeds a certain threshold, new developments and redrawing of boundaries may occur—as seen in the francophone analysts described above.
Overall, elements of any conceptualization can be prioritized in a new historical cultural-social-linguistic context, and can, under certain circumstances (undertheorized areas, areas of ambiguity) become core elements of new conceptualizations and even new theories, as seen in the entries “Object Relations Theories,” “Self & Self Psychology,” “Ego Psychology,” and “Intersubjectivity.” Yet, as soon as new theoretical strands emerge, rapprochement between strands of theorizing, previously thought incompatible, may follow, as in intersubjective ego psychology of English-speaking North America.
With the second expanded and updated editions we can see the spiral motion when the contemporary up-dates also reveal previously invisible “pre-dates,” expanding on the historical roots. For example, writing the second updated expanded edition of “Containment” led to surprising discovery of implicit pre-Kleinian roots in Freud, highlighting the nonlinear “palimpsest” character of IRED. It was as if a buried ancient imprint came to light. “This has Freud’s footprint from Interpretation of Dreams, and his Nachträglichkeit, and God knows what else written all over,” reflected North American and European inter-regional team members, after the Latin American team member added her neuroscientific contribution and the implicit roots in Freud. Now the whole team, including the coordinating chair, further expanded the previously invisible Freudian roots.
A Resource for Future Generations
Three consecutive IPA Administrations (Bolognini, Ungar, and Wolfe) recommended that IRED be included in the training curriculum of IPA-affiliated psychoanalytic institutes, and as an up-to-date tool for consultation, research, and reference in current scholarly and clinical publications. We concur. We believe that we can pass on to future generations of psychoanalysts a wealth of knowledge and help establish a more conscious historical identity and a professional self suitable to understanding clinical practice in its wide variety.
Learning about the diversity of psychoanalytic conceptualizations and theoretical perspectives around the globe fosters an awareness of the inherent incompleteness of any single theoretical position, given the vast complexity of psychic reality. The president-elect of IPA Heribert Blass says this strengthening of our understanding of others has a positive effect on ourselves, because we all gain an expansion of our own theoretical and conceptual horizons through this exchange. In this way, IRED helps us to recognize the limits of our own concepts and to become humble. At the same time, it strengthens scientific curiosity and the desire to explore the unknown, so that it also enriches us on an intrapsychic level.
The Self: Some Trends of Conceptual Evolution
Conceptual developments frequently start in undertheorized areas, areas of ambiguities, uncertainties and controversies. In the conclusion section of “Self,” we find a statement illustrating the importance of ambiguities
The tension, ambiguity and duality inherent in Freud’s ‘Ich’, which encompasses both the ‘ego’ as the mental structure and psychic agency, as well as the more personal experiential ‘self’, as the generator of subjective experience, has led to numerous psychoanalytic approaches to the age-old problem of what constitutes ‘the self’, in relation to ‘the ego’, in relation to the development of psychic structure, and in relation to the formulations of narcissism.
A thorough study of etymological roots revealed that studies of self would have to start in English-speaking psychoanalysis. “Self” has an illusory substantiality in English as it does in German; there is lesser need for “self” in French, as the “Le Moi” (“Ich”/“Ego” in French terminology) is already self-saturated; and there is no equivalent term in other Romance languages—Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.
In North America
The ego-self division in William James predates Freud’s terminological complexity and ambiguity surrounding the Ich/I (ego as well as self). Hartmann reformulates Freud’s concept of narcissism as an investment in self, not ego, and separates self as a person from self-representation, elaborated further in Jacobson’s and Mahler’s self and object representations. Loewald’s internalization of the subjective representation of the self and other and Erikson’s “self-identity” continues the expansion of the object relations dimension within ego psychology, extended further by Kernberg, for whom self is a sum-total of self-representations, which recovers Freud’s ambiguity of ich. In this environment, North American Kleinians develop the notion of unconscious phantasy as a complex of animated representations of transactions between self and object into the “dramatic point of view,” an addition to the Freudian metapsychology.
A major landmark in the theory of narcissism and the concept of self, Kohut’s classical self psychology places the development of the self at the center of psychoanalytic inquiry. It articulates how the self forms through the internalization of early empathic experiences, giving rise to internal “self-objects” which help maintain a stable sense of self, and how a caregiver’s empathic failures (a mutation of Balint’s basic fault) effect narcissistic psychopathology. The contemporary self psychology of Lichtenberg elaborates on motivational systems in the development of self. For interpersonalists and relational theorists multiple selves emerge in the interpersonal field—a progeny of Sullivan and Ferenczi.
In Europe
Various strands of Winnicott’s concept of self proliferate and mutate across continents. Bollas gradually replaces Winnicott’s “true self” with the term “idiom.” Specific elements of Mahler’s theory contribute to original developments of Italian child and adolescent psychoanalysis. Alvarez forges a connection between Kleinian view of self and elements of Kohutian self psychology. French analyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis credits both Kohut and Hartmann for opening the door to studies of narcissism. While maintaining the ambiguity of Freudian ich, Europe also forges a nuanced approach to various self-ego configurations in the clinical work, by Bolognini, which resonates with North American psychoanalysis.
In Latin America
In León Grinberg’s “Ego and Self,” elements of Jacobson meld with Klein and John Wisdom. Resnik works with James’s preanalytic formulation of ego and self.
Pichon-Rivière’s conceptualizations of “self-link” and “linked self,” translated as the relational linkages between self and object representations, also include the unconscious internal group formation, which is an important part of Latin American psychoanalytic identity.
The growing influence of Kohut, Lichtenberg, and relationists, together with Winnicott, contribute to Nemirovsky’s emphasis on the importance of psychoanalysts reinventing themselves and developing adequate theoretical instruments to approach the clinical problems of the present times.
Eva D. Papiasvili, PhD, ABPP, is the global chair (Europe, North America, Latin America) of the International Psychoanalytical Association’s Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED) committee, and the chair of the Tri-Regional Editorial Board of IRED.
Published September 2024