Comings and goings

During the XVIth Forum of the International Federation of Psychoanalytical Societies (IFPS) in Athens in 2010, Agnar Berle from the Institutt for Psykoterapi, Jan Johansson from the Therapeia society, and Darius Leskauskas from the Kaunas Society for Psychoanalysis discussed the possibility of re-establishing the meetings between the Nordic IFPS societies after an interlude of 10 years. This plan will be realized during this autumn, when the Kaunas Society for Psychoanalysis in Latvia has arranged a conference with the theme “Comings and goings” that will run from 30 September until 2 October 2011.

The title “Comings and goings” highlights the desire to give participants an opportunity to discuss shorter and longer term relations with patients, candidates, and colleagues alike. In this respect, I still miss working with our founding editor Jan Stensson – we shared the responsibility for this journal over a long period of time, and also shared an office for more than 25 years.

At the conference in Kaunas, we will all have an opportunity to discuss the effects that “comings and goings” have on the psychoanalyst, both when the treatment comes to a natural endpoint and also when it is for some reason interrupted. The psychoanalytic process might reach a stalemate, or a negative therapeutic reaction might develop in a way that the analyst cannot handle, so that the analyst has to interrupt the treatment.

But what I especially have in mind here are those tragic cases when the patient gets severely ill, becomes incapacitated, or even dies. My own experience is that these patients stay with me in a very special way. They do not fade away in the same way as patients whose treatment comes to a natural end. The mourning is different and does not develop in the same way as it does during an ordinary phase of termination. The quality of separation in these cases has a more traumatic character. The relation goes beyond transference and countertransference. These patients continue to