Panel Report, IPA Congress Boston 2015: Working with Transference and Countertransference: Special Learning Moments in Our Psychoanalytic Journey

As Beatrice Ithier, chair of this panel, underlined in her introduction, the fil rouge of the three presentations is the concept of enactment, which can lead the analyst, in the reception of projective identifications, to feeling and putting into words what can only be acted out or staged by the patients because of their absence of symbolisation. This requires an unconscious participation of the analyst to the analytic process and a deep working through of transference-countertransference dynamics, two points that will be stressed by the three presenters, Borgogno, Jacobs and Maldonado.

The panel was opened by Franco Borgogno with a paper titled “Between repetition and transformation: A special learning experience in the dynamics of transference and countertransference from the beginning of my psychoanalytic training”. In this presentation, which refers to an experience dating back to the time when he was taking his very first steps as an analyst, Borgogno very subtly described the entanglement of the multiple traumatic losses experienced by his patient, and the following defences he established, with his own anguishes about losing the patient himself, who was his second training case. The analyst brought out between the lines of the narrative why he believes this to have constituted a fundamental moment of learning from transference and countertransference, and how it also represented the point at which he first discovered and came into contact with that particular area of analytic phenomena which he has discussed and written about a great deal over the last twenty years, i.e. “inter-intrapsychic dynamics governed by role reversal”. Borgogno offered in short many reflections on the transformative factors that had a bearing in opening up an avenue in the repetitive enactment which had charact