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Psychoanalysis is currently at a turbulent moment, with challenges from the ‘external’ world, and from within psychoanalysis, as it becomes increasingly pluralist and contradictory, said Francis Grier, Editor-in Chief of the IJP.
The aim of the IJP panel was to explore the function of the journal as an anchor for the international psychoanalytic community, exploring its role in containing different – and even antagonistic – strands of psychoanalytic thought.
Heinz Weiss, Editor of the IJP Education Section, opened the presentations.
Recent years have seen unprecedented social crises, creating a paradigm shift and disrupting our certitude, said Weiss. We seem plunged into an “uncertainty cloud,” as Bion called it. Can psychoanalysis help us find our way through?
In light of these crises, the IJP Education section has taken up certain pertinent topics, inviting commentaries with divergent views. By doing so, Weiss said, we hope to offer a sort of containment and ‘anchor’, and space for emerging ideas.
One topic explored was the concept of the supergo. Examining the superego as a hinge between the individual and =society, the IJP considered its pathological organisations, and how its psychotic and perverse elements might help us to understand the recent impact of digital media, virtual reality and propaganda.
In 1934, after attending propaganda speeches by Hitler and Goebbels, Roger Money-Kyrle wrote “The Psychological Causes of War.” The work is stunningly topical, said Weiss, addressing the role of splitting, projection and manic defences against paranoid fears. The IJP Education section published Money Kyrle’s piece, along with a collection of papers on Freud’s “Why war?”, plus a paper on human destructiveness, configuring war as a breakdown in symbolic thinking and return to primitive, concrete, omnipotent mechanisms of thought.
In recent years, with Covid and new digital technologies, the analytic setting has come under threat. In response, the Education section publishe