1) Nouveau livre en français

"PSYCHANALYSE, LIEUX DE MéMOIRE ET TRAUMATISMES COLLECTIFS", sous la direction de Giuseppe Leo, écrits de J. Altounian, S. Amati Sas, M. Avakian, W. Bohleber, M. El Husseini, R. El Khayat, Y. Gampel,  R. Kaës, J. Kristeva, G. Leo, A. Loncan, P. Matvejević, M.-R. Moro

Collection "ID-ENTITÉS MÉDITERRANÉENNES", ISBN 978-88-97479-29-1, pages 482, publié en juilliet 2020.

Quatrième de Couverture: L’identité, tant dans sa dimension individuelle que collective, semble une construction et élaboration continue de mémoires qui sont accueillies dans des lieux qui, en tant que espaces où aller dans un va-et-vient, parcourent les vies des hommes pendant toute la durée. Se retrouver dans les lieux de sa propre mémoire semble une manière originale de traiter le sujet de l’”id-entité”; mais à ce point il faut tout d’abord le circonscrire: en introduisant un tiret, il faut prendre en considération le “id” (le ça), c’est à dire la dimension inconsciente de l’id-entité. Et donc, ce sont la psychanalyse, comme pensée sur l’inconscient, et les psychanalystes à qui on peut poser la question: “Peut la psychanalyse nous aider à comprendre ce dialogue entre lieux de mémoire et id-entité?”. Cette question s’inspire de deux différentes sources: l’importance des ‘biographies de l’inconscient’, ainsi que celle du partage de la mémoire, voire celle de l’acte de se souvenir, pour qu’elle maintienne sa significativité. L’historiographie est certes une revisitation critique du passé, aspirant à une image totale de celui-ci. Elle n’est pas sélective comme le sont les souvenirs personnels, sans avoir complètement le caractère de la fixité et de l’immutabilité psychopathologique qui ont les souvenirs traumatiques. Toutefois, ce qu’est irremplaçable dans l’acte de se souvenir, et en particulier dans celui de “se souvenir ensemble”, est la configuration d’un climat émotionnel unique, on dirait empathique, parfois même ambivalent. La communauté affective provoquée par l’acte de “se souvenir ensemble” devient symbolique d’un groupe donné car il se constitue à travers des personnes qui ont developpés chacune un itinéraire de différentes histoires individuelles au cours du temps, mais qui à ce moment-là réussissent à se reconnaître et à se réunir. Bien sûr parler de mémoire signifie aussi se mesurer avec le problème de l’usage que un certain groupe, détenteur d’un pouvoir politique ou économique, peut faire d’une telle mémoire. Combien de monuments aux seigneurs des guerres balkaniques célèbrent des mémoires collectives qui en réalité sont à ce jour fonctionnelles d’intérêts en jeu de certains groupes sociaux?! Cette vision dynamique et conflictuelle des mémoires collectives est susceptible, elle seule, d’ouvrir un débat sur les responsabilités de la mémoire, en définissant le rapport avec le passé en terme d’une élaboration collective, étroitement liée à la perception sociale des phénomènes actuels problématiques tels que ceux des identités collectives (identité de genre, ethnique, nationale ou locale) ou du préjudice vers les groupes ‘autres’. Ce livre est dédiè à la mémoire de Predrag Matvejević, un historien et écrivain qui a consacré beaucoup de ses œuvres à la Méditerranée, mais qui était aussi très intéressé à la psychanalyse.

2) Chaîne You Tube de Frenis Zero: "René Roussillon parle du dialogue entre Psychanalyse et Psychothérapie" Lien: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbsuPrTx1g4  

3) Chaine You Tube de Frenis Zero: Jacques André parle d'une psychanalyse de rêve. Lien: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0H14YfoP3E 

1)  We  are glad to announce the issue of the last book  published in English by Edizioni Frenis Zero: "FEAR OF LOCKDOWN. PSYCHOANALYSIS, PANDEMIC DISCONTENTS, AND CLIMATE CHANGE"  edited by Giuseppe Leo, writings by Hilda Catz, Anna Ferruta, Marco Francesconi, Pietro Roberto Goisis, Giuseppe Leo, Nancy McWilliams, Giuseppe Riefolo, Merav Roth, Cosimo Schinaia, Daniela Scotto di Fasano. Collection "Borders of Psychoanalysis", Frenis Zero publisher, Lecce 2020, pp.296. 

The book belongs to the collection "Borders of Psychoanalysis", devoted to publishing books in order to investigate an area of research that our publishing house has been wanting to cover since its foundation: that of the dialogue of contemporary psychoanalysis with adjoining disciplines (for example, neuroscience, infant research, cultural anthropology), often with epistemologies that in origin and history appear to share nothing with it. The front cover photo is a reworking of the myth of Oedipus (Lekythos, 420-425 b. C., Archaeological Museum of Taranto), inspired by the paper written by Anna Ferruta "Coronavirus: a Sphinx of modern times".
Contemporary psychoanalysis has recently made a “paradigm shift” consisting of dealing with the discontents of civilizations emerging from the extension of the explicative dominion of psychoanalysis not only in the direction of social and political phenomena, but also in that of understanding the impact of environmental and ecological issues on the human psyche. New paradigms need new concepts such as the term “pandemic discontent”, contained in the title of the present book. The concept of “pandemic discontents” refers to Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” in order to focus on those anthropological mutations, including the expansion of technologies and the mutations of ecology, which represent irreversible fractures which have shifted a part of humanity in the face of the fragility of the social and cultural structures on which, as Kaës writes, the permanence of a civilization is based, or even the human species itself. And dealing with the discontents of civilizations leads psychoanalysis to a challenge which has not yet been completely assimilated, i.e. to measure up to the social dynamics and no longer only the intra-psychic ones, and to think of these changes as ‘extra-psychic conditions’, as Kaës defines them, which provide a framework or a setting for the formation of the psychic apparatus, for the forms of subjectivity that derive from them and for the sufferings they have produced. After the foreword written by Nancy McWilliams, "Psychotherapy in a Pandemic", written during lockdown in NY and dealing with therapists' feelings during online consultations, after the introduction written by the editor, Giuseppe Leo, the section “Psychoanalysis in Pandemic Times” (writings by Anna Ferruta, Hilda Catz, Giuseppe Riefolo, Merav Roth, and Cosimo Schinaia) concerns how to apply analysis to the Covid-19 crisis (psychoanalysis as a tool for interpretation of the pandemic crisis at various levels, individual, social, political) but also how to practice analysis under the Covid-19 pandemic (dealing with the conditions under which the practise of psychoanalysis is possible in such an unprecedented global context). The section “When the psychoanalyst is the patient” contains the memoir written by Pietro Roberto Goisis, a Milan-based psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who survived the coronavirus. In this pandemic both analyst and patient have to deal with a dangerous external reality, with the supplementary task for therapist of helping the patient face his/her internal jeopardy. Finally in the section “Psychoanalysis and Climate Change” there is the chapter written by Marco Francesconi and Daniela Scotto di Fasano.

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2) We are glad to announce the last numer (n.34, year 17, june 2020)  of Frenis Zero online journal: "Psychoanalysis, Climatic Change, and Pandemic Discontents" with  papers written by Nancy McWilliams, Anna Ferruta, Daniela Scotto di Fasano & Marco Francesconi, Cosimo Schinaia, Hilda Catz, Giuseppe Riefolo, Silvia Vessella. Link: http://web.tiscali.it/cispp/pandemic.htm 

3) We  are glad to announce the issue of the last book  published in English by Edizioni Frenis Zero: "ROCK MUSIC AND PSYCHOANALYSIS"  edited by Giuseppe Leo, writings by Lewis Aron, Heather Ferguson, Joseph LeDoux, Rod Tweedy. Collection "Borders of Psychoanalysis", Frenis Zero publisher, Lecce 2020, pp.201.  

Many books deal with this subject, but not so many are written by analysts (such as Lewis Aron and Heather Ferguson) who play rock or pop music. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts have multi-layered identities. With regards to psychoanalysts, on one side, the discover that some of the most famous of them play (or even compose) music evokes several question: how their musical practice influences their therapeutic work? How their learning music and psychoanalytic training have been interlaced? How the evolution of their clinical theorisations has gone together with their reflection about music and its psychological aspects? Not all contributors of this book are psychoanalysts: Joseph LeDoux is an influential neuroscientist, whose investigations have become precious clues for psychoanalysis, plus he is the founder of music band “Amygdaloids”; and Rod Tweedy is an essayist and editor whose chapter deals with David Bowie. Anyway their interests show that music, and pop/rock music in particular, have oriented consistently their scientific output.

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 Watch the launch video on our You Tube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i5ciBtNpd4 

4)  In order to commemorate Horst Kaechele (1944-2020) we publish the paper written with Otto Kernberg and others "Changes in Prefrontal-Limbic Function in Major Depression after 15 Months of Long-Term Psychotherapy". Link: http://web.tiscali.it/cispp/kaecheleKERNBERG.htm   

5) "'The Abyss Inside You' said the Sphynx... And the Plague too!" is the title of Giuseppe Leo's re-interpretation of the myth of Oedipus in which we can find some interesting iintuition, according the author, about.climate change and pandemics. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P6HjYvhd7I 

6)  We  are glad to announce the issue of the last book  published in English by Edizioni Frenis Zero: "ENACTMENT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS" edited by Giuseppe Leo and Giuseppe Riefolo, writings by Efrat Ginot, Jay R Greenberg, Jessica Kraus, Jeremy D Safran. Collection "Borders of Psychoanalysis", Frenis Zero publisher, Lecce 2019, pp.326.

The book is dedicated to Jeremy Safran and Lewis Aron, whose recent  loss drove the editors as well as the publisher to gather these contributions about enactment, a topic to whom Safran and Aron devoted many papers of theirs. As Safran wrote, though problematic and source of confusion among different psychoanalytic approaches, the epistemological status of psychoanalysis, related to its condition of ‘liminality’, is a meaningful source of vitality for the discipline. The book explores the subject of enactment in relation to boundaries in psychoanalysis, referring to a series of viewpoints that lead to many crucial areas. 

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7)  We  are glad to announce the issue of the book  published in English by Edizioni Frenis Zero:"INFANT RESEARCH AND PSYCHOANALYSIS" edited by Giuseppe Leo, writings by Beatrice Beebe, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, Jeremy P. Nahum, Elisabet Solheim, Colwyn Trevarthen, Edward Z. Tronick, Lauriane Vulliez-Coady. Collection "Borders of Psychoanalysis", Frenis Zero publisher, Lecce 2018, pp.273.

This book has the hard task to cover an interdisciplinary area in which psychoanalysis has to deal with infant research. The development of infant research methodologies is illustrated in the present book by the contribution written by Beatrice Beebe, whose ‘journey’ leads us through the ‘creating’ of a discipline with its creators, her traveling companions, such as Daniel Stern, Frank Lachmann, Joseph Jaffe and many others. Trevarthen’s chapter is a discussion of his work with T. Berry Brazelton, passed away on March 2018. Brazelton used his trust and enjoyment of innocent company to greet a newborn infant as a friend, and he showed that the baby is read to share friendship with mother and father, giving them joy. Brazelton’s belief in innate human nature transformed pediatric care and early diagnosis of developmental disorders, guiding treatment, not ‘of’ the baby, but ‘with’ him/her as an individual with unique expressions of vitality. The last two chapters, instead, deal with clinical implications of infant research. Tronick’s contribution focuses on mother-infant dyad as well as on analyst-patient one, conceived as open dynamic systems, capable of meaning making, in which coherence is at best imperfect, and coordination alternates with mismatching. In open dynamic systems messiness itself is inherent to the process of meaning making because of limitations in their capacity, «their different time scales, the many polymorphs of meaning that have to be integrated, and because of the many kinds of meaning making processes» (including affective, cognitive, memorial, linguistic, bodily and psychodynamic meaning making processes, such as a dynamic unconscious, projective identification and transference). «Dyadic states of consciousness» Tronick writes in the chapter «are joint creations and, as such, bring together the messy, unpredictable and inchoate features of two individuals’ state of consciousness, not just the messiness of one». But meaning meaning processes and security making ones, though normally overlapping each other, are not the same, and this heterogeneity between motivational systems (Lichtenberg et al., 2011) can cover the heterogeneity of psychopathological conditions. Lyons-Ruth and colleagues’ chapter is focused on the representational world of the mother, particularly on the assessment of mother’s representation of role-confusion in her relation with her child. The authors call attention to the dimension of sexualisation in the relationship, a high indicator of role-confusion. This emerging body of work points to the importance of being alert to indicators of role-confusion in the clinical setting. The findings can inform and enrich counselling and psychology practice by familiarizing clinicians with how to listen for indicators of role-confusion while talking with parents about their relationship with the child.

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Two videos, in Frenis Zero YouTube channel, devoted to Daniel Stern and Berry Brazelton, take a cue from the chapters in this book:

a) "A Tribute to Dan Stern". Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LggjzmUeO4

b) "Tribute to Berry Brazelton". Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQER32NadVo 

8) NEW VIDEOS about two talks held last January in Rome by Daniel Dennett and Antonio Damasio

9) Book "FUNDAMENTALISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS", Giuseppe Leo (Editor), Prefaced by Vamik D. Volkan, writings by Lene Auestad, Werner Bohleber, Sverre Varvin, Linden West. Collection "Mediterranean Id-entities", Frenis Zero publisher, Lecce 2017, pp.214. 

The collection “Mediterranean Id-entities” is devoted to publish books in order to investigate the role of Mediterranean cultures from a psychoanalytic point of view, in front of the anthropological transformations concerning human societies and social institutions in the contemporary world. This book has the hard task to cover an interdisciplinary area in which psychoanalysis has to deal with fundamentalism as a social phenomenon and therefore with ‘bordering’ disciplines (such as religion history, transcultural studies, cultural anthropology) often with epistemologies that for origin and history appear to be incomparable to it. Lene Auestad intends to integrate the psychological analysis of the subject with its social embedding. She investigates the importance of the social unconscious and its effects on the prejudiced intentions of the individual apart from its own active interpretations. She highlights the importance the psychoanalytical approach provides in understanding the unspoken, unconscious contents of the social phenomena and how much the socially critical approach is able to enrich the analytical view which merely focuses on the subject regarding the effects of the social consensus. While Auestad’s scrutiny aims at the social convention’s role as an agent affecting the individual’s deeds and thinking, Linden West’s contribution draws on ‘psycho-social’ understandings, combining psychoanalysis and critical theory, as well as the work of John Dewey, to interrogate Islamic fundamentalist groups in a post-industrial city. It explores processes of self-recognition in groups and paranoid-schizoid modes of functioning, in which unwanted parts of self and of culture are split off and projected on to the other. The world is correspondingly divided into good and bad, pure and impure. John Dewey makes a crucial distinction between processes of democratic education and closed groups, which is what fundamentalist groups are, by reference to the quality of relationship to the other, and to experiential and narrative openness. However, it is also suggested that fundamentalism is ordinary, in that each of us can feel out of our depth, at times, and we may grab at ideas promising truth and nothing but the truth, which is ultimately illusion. Except not everyone reaches for a Kalashnikov, which is where individual biographies matter for subtler understanding of difference within commonalities. Fundamentalism has increasingly become a part of the political discourse in Western countries and is to a large degree associated with Islamic Jihadism. Fundamentalism has, however, been a concern in all religions, and Werner Bohleber in this book discusses its connections with violence in monotheistic religions. Fundamentalism is also a concern in professional organisations and in this book Sverre Varvin discusses the relation between fundaments for a science and fundamentalism in psychoanalysis. This is related to general trends of fundamentalism in religious and political contexts. A central question is how adherence to fundamentals, understood at basic principles for a profession or a religious-political movement, may develop into fundamentalism and how this may develop into more violent forms. Psychoanalytic understanding of mass psychology and unconscious processes at group levels are developed in this book by each of the outstanding authors in order to understand present Islamic and other forms of fundamentalist movements in the European context.

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10) "NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS", G. Leo (ed.), prefaced by Georg Northoff, writings by  David Mann, Allan N. Schore, Robert Stickgold, Bessel A. Van Der Kolk, Grigoris Vaslamatzis, Matthew P. Walker, Collection "Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience", Frenis Zero Publisher, Lecce 2014, pp.300, € 49,00.

The book gathers some papers concerning the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Following the Introduction written by Georg Northoff, concerning the possibility of overcoming the highly impasse generating contraposition between localizationism and holism, G. Vaslamatzis deals with a “Framework for a new dialogue between psychoanalysis and neurosciences”. In this chapter the author describes three points of epistemological congruence: firstly, dualism is no longer a satisfactory solution; secondly, cautions for the centrality of interpretation (hermeneutics); and, thirdly, the self-criticism of neuroscientists. David W.Mann in his contribution “The mirror crack’d: dissociation and reflexivity in self and group phenomena” tries to show how reflexive processes generate each of three levels of the human system (self, relationships, group) and integrate them one to another, while dissociative processes tend throughout to pull them apart. Health and illness within the self, the relationship and the group can be understood as special states of the dynamic equilibria between these cohesive and dispersive trends. In “Sleep, memory and plasticity” Matthew P. Walker and Robert Stickgold outline a review of the researches following the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep, and specifically of those that began testing the hypothesis that sleep, or even specific stages of sleep, actively participated in the process of memory development. The last two chapters, “Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD” by Bessel A. Van Der Kolk, and “Dysregulation of the right brain: a fundamental mechanism of traumatic attachment and the psychopathogenesis of PTSD” by Allan N. Schore, demonstrate how the psychopathology of traumatic conditions can be a fertile field of dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

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  11)  "PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ITS BORDERS",  G. Leo (ed.), writings by J. Altounian, P. Fonagy, G.O. Gabbard,  J.S. Grotstein,  R.D. Hinshelwood,  J.P. Jiménez, O.F. Kernberg,  S. Resnik. Collection "Borders of Psychoanalysis", Frenis Zero Publisher, Lecce 2012, pp. 348, € 19,00. 

You can view a video introducing the book in our You Tube Channel ( www.youtube.com/frenis0 )

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