Abstract
Mitchell Wilson, Donald Moss, and Chris Lovett, with commentary by Giuseppe Civitarese.
What you are about to read are somewhat revised presentations given on a panel at the 54th International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) Congress in Lisbon in the summer of 2025. The Congress itself had the title Psychoanalysis: An Anchor in Chaotic Times. One, perhaps, should not take too seriously the overarching theme of a psychoanalytic conference. In this case, the metaphor of an anchor works both ways. In rough seas, an anchor can be stabilizing; that is its purpose. An anchor can also cause trouble, and not of the good kind. The same goes for the adjective chaotic, which, frankly, doesn’t seem quite right as a descriptor of the times we live in. Certainly, the rise of authoritarianism in many Western countries is deeply concerning, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to this regressive development. For those living in Gaza, the word chaos also doesn’t fully capture the brutality and murder happening there daily. Authoritarian times? Murderous times? These descriptors seem more to the point, though, as we know, language has its inherent, structural limits.
In this context, we toed the line of the IPA, and titled our panel Showing Up in Chaotic Times: Three Clinical Reports.
Showing Up. You will read about different ways of showing up, various instances of how showing up manifests itself in the analyst, in the analysis, and in life. Implied, but not explicitly stated, is a belief, a faith, that in these ways of showing up, something genuine happens, and a sincerity of purpose comes through. This sincerity of purpose is often under pressure, as our capacities as analysts are tested, and the structural limitations of our theories and the language we use to grasp the realities before us cause us to stumble. And yet, despite everything, we continue to strive to show up.
Chaotic Times. As already noted, chaotic is a vague term, an imprecision that allows for much filling in with specific clinical moments and how the analyst strives to engage with those moments. This raises questions about the status of the analytic frame, the analyst’s role and functioning, and the human mind more broadly. These are open questions, leading quickly to others: the key one for our purposes is how porous the boundaries of the clinical setting are with what we might naively call the outside world. This fluidity and porosity act like an osmotic gradient, challenging any simple division between the external world and the human mind—between outside and inside, surface and depth, and so on.
Clinical Reports. Our panelists offer relatively brief gestures in addressing these essential and enduring questions, which they do with their clinical reports. And here, regarding these reports, you will encounter different styles of reporting. The recent history of psychoanalytic writing is the history of explorations in style as well as content: the conventional paper is only one of several now common forms of psychoanalytic writing, as memoir and auto-theory, essay, and shorter forms all clamber for recognition on the analytic stage of communication, of publication.
