Growing old: a psychoanalyst's point of view.

With the help of clinical examples, the author shows that psychoanalysis or psychotherapy after the age of 70 can be a fascinating experience, one that enables patients to reconstruct their internal history in such a way that their final years can be given their rightful place in the overall journey through life. Often it will be a matter of going beyond the conflict between paralysing time with the illusion of keeping death at bay and taking the transient nature of life into account in order to perceive its true flavour. We can grow old passively, juxtaposing different periods of our life without linking them together, thereby creating the illusion of time without end; or we can grow old actively, integrating the different phases of our life into a coherent historical narrative.

Being a psychoanalyst: an everyday audacity.

This paper is the work of five psychoanalysts who came together as a group in order to reflect on their work as analysts. How are we analysts to identify the unconscious resistances that may sometimes hold us back from offering psychoanalysis to some patients? Do these resistances sometimes hamper the inner freedom that we require in order to maintain a psychoanalytic focus once that process is under way? How do we manage from time to time to overcome these resistances or, better, make use of them in order to develop our understanding of the unconscious dynamics that create the link between analyst and patient? The authors discuss these issues with particular reference to clinical situations taken from classic psychoanalytic treatment cases during which the analyst had to find within him- or herself the audacity to be a psychoanalyst. Each clinical situation is different: preliminary interviews, in the course of the actual treatment, issues that emerge in the training of candidates.

Words that touch.

In this paper the author examines her own use of language as a psychoanalyst and asks: what is the best way to help analyse and to find the words to express not only what they are thinking but also what they are feeling and experiencing? In common with other psychoanalysts, the author has observed that each of us simultaneously utilises both advanced psychic mechanisms that are accessible to symbolism and more archaic ones, which are less so. However, she draws a distinction between people who are able to tolerate the perception of their own heterogeneity, even if it is sometimes a source of suffering, and those whom she terms 'heterogeneous patients'. Patients in the latter category, whose lack of internal cohesion causes them anxiety, are afraid of losing their sense of identity.

Termination of a fe/male transsexual patient's analysis: an example of general validity.

The author describes the termination of an analysis, which, while relating to the particular case of a male-to-female transsexual patient, may be relevant to all analysts, particularly those whose patients need to integrate disavowed and split-off parts of themselves. The patient had undergone sex-change surgery at the age of 20. Having lived as a woman thereafter, she had asked for analysis some twenty years later.