Summary page issue 1, 2021

In her Editorial, Dana Birksted-Breen reflects on the issue of temporality at the heart of psychoanalysis, and how time is transformed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The new experience of remote sessions has created the possibility of ‘unpicking’ the threads of the usual setting, enabling authors to develop ideas about what is normally left silent.

“What it is like to read Freud again in the time of the coronavirus pandemic?” asks Jonathan Lear. In his close reading of Freud's “On transience,” Lear’s paper brings to light how Freud’s essay might be read differently with the thoughts of world-catastrophe on our minds.

Rosine Perelberg’s paper describes the analysis of a patient during the first six months of the pandemic when the setting was profoundly disrupted. In the absence of the physicality of the setting, the most primitive anxieties about the symbiotic relationship with the mother were expressed and contained in the transference and countertransference.

Joona Taipale’s considers the overlooked issue of interpersonal understanding from a Winnicottian perspective. Focusing on one of Winnicott’s letters to Klein, the paper explores the successes and shortcomings of interpersonal encounters – both in everyday life, in clinical settings, and in the historical community of researchers.

Originally, the term ‘enactment’ was used to describe an aspect of countertransference expressed by subtle actions within the analytical process, as opposed to the noisier performances of ‘acting-out’, explains Valeria Corbella. In her empirical and conceptual study, she examines the history, translations and uses of the term enactment, along with its epistemological status.

Giampaolo Sasso identifies a projective-introjective ‘oscillatory dynamic’ that forms the basis of the mother-infant relationship but also the foundation of psychoanalytic theory. Arguing that the ‘oscillatory dynamic’ is present on a neurological level in the maternal interaction with the infant, Sasso says the dynami