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The looming prospect of AI therapy is a topic very usefully raised by Agnieszka Piotrowoska in her speculative essay on “techno-transference,' alongside responses by Bob Hinshelwood, Michael Chanan and Kurt Jacobsen. This suddenly hot topic – hitting society like lightning in November 2022 with the advent of ChatGBT – is worth all the engagement and scrutiny one can muster so as to curb a very different yet no less dangerous form of “wild analysis” than that which Freud encountered.
In a harrowing era, when undisguised and unmuted authoritarian tendencies even in avowedly centrist circles flood out like so many demonic wraiths from Pandora's box, Judith Hughes continues her psycho-political interrogations with a rueful diagnostic chronology of Donald Trump's “paranoid style” via his Heritage Foundation-refined agenda (Project ) during his second and ever more turbulent term. Andreas Ginkel adds an appraisal of psychosocial ingredients in Trump's success, via “omnipotism”, from a Winnicottian framework. $IDlker Özyıldırım and Baran Gürsel follow up this authoritarian theme with a relevant retrospective analysis of Freud's experiences with hypnotherapy from an emancipatory psychoanalytic perspective, with an eye to contemporary politics. In many ways, their essay too is an unintentional but pertinent response to the techno-transference thesis, which needs to be thoroughly “problematized.”
Next David Morgan offers a soul-searching remembrance of his fascinating brushes with the Philadelphia Association, and a sober reconsideration of R. D. Laing's therapeutic ambitions. The issue concludes with a pair of extensive cinema-oriented essays, one a grim and intriguing disquisition on the Japanese classic Woman in the Dunes and the other on film director Pedro Almodovar and the Madrid Movement.
Finally, the annual Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conference takes place online this year over the weekend 15-16 November, co-sponsored again with the Freud Museum. The theme, wit