THE PSYCHOANALYST OF THE FUTURE: WISE ENOUGH TO DARE TO BE MAD AT TIMES3

What sort of patients do we have in psychoanalysis now, at the beginning of the third millennium, and what sort will we have in the future? In the author's clinical experience, the patients who are currently seeking help from the psychoanalyst use primitive defence mechanisms alongside neurotic ones. Most of them do not explicitly request psychoanalytic treatment, but this does not mean that they would not want it if they knew what it was. She argues that is the psychoanalyst's task to identify the latent request behind the ‘non‐request’. To conduct a psychoanalysis with such patients, the psychoanalyst has to identify and interpret both primitive and neurotic psychic mechanisms; moreover, he has to use not only language that speaks to patients but also language that ‘touches’ them, because these patients are difficult to reach through verbal symbolism. This implies that the psychoanalyst must be attentive to the bodily manifestations and bodily phantasies accompanying his countertransference feelings. The author shows through clinical examples what she means by ‘language that can touch patients’. The psychoanalyst gradually builds up this language while, at the same time, daring to discover in himself his own mad aspects and giving himself enough psychical freedom to accept them.     

Melanie Klein’s letters addressed to Marcelle Spira (1955–1960)1

Between 1955 and 1960, Melanie Klein wrote some 45 hitherto unpublished letters to Marcelle Spira, the Swiss psychoanalyst living at that time in Geneva. In 2006, after Spira’s death, these letters were deposited with the Raymond de Saussure Psychoanalysis Centre in Geneva. They are the only known letters that Klein addressed to her psychoanalyst colleagues. Several topics are mentioned in them: (1) the meetings between the two women in Geneva and London; (2) Spira’s contribution to Boulanger’s translation into French of The Psychoanalysis of Children, which Klein herself carefully revised; (3) the papers that Klein was at that time working on, including Envy and Gratitude; (4) Spira’s own work; (5) the difficulties that Spira, a Kleinian psychoanalyst who trained in Buenos Aires, was encountering in her attempt to be admitted to the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society; and (6) a few items of personal and family news. In addition to the invaluable historical information that these letters provide, they offer us a very moving epistolary self‐portrait of Melanie Klein, enabling us to discover her personality in the final years of her life – she died in September 1960, just two months after writing her last letter to Spira.     

The European annuals of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis: the benefits of linguistic diversity

This paper presents the Annuals of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, which have been published in Europe since 2003, successively in French, Italian, German, Turkish and Russian. Like the Annuals published since 1985 in Latin America, these are designed to give non-Anglophone readers access to a selection of leading psychoanalytic articles. Each European Annual makes its own selection so the content varies from one Annual to another. Psychoanalysts on the various editorial committees translate the texts from English into their native target language on a voluntary basis. Beyond the geographical and cultural criteria, the desire to translate and the enjoyment of translating are among the key criteria. The Annual editors consider it important that the English language should continue to exist as a psychoanalytic lingua franca, without actually becoming its universal language, so that the richness and diversity of the psychoanalytic languages and terminologies can be preserved. The European Annuals in French, Italian, German, Turkish and Russian, with their linguistic and cultural characteristics, are then presented in turn.