1)      Au lien de Frenis Zero (http://web.tiscali.it/bibliopsi/frenishome.htm) Vous pouvez lire le sommaire du Numéro 33, an 17 (janvier 2020) de notre journal, dédié au sujet de <<Psychoanalysis in an Age of Empirical Validation>> (articles en anglais). 

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 a Special Issue in Frenis Zero online journal: "Psychoanalysis, Climatic Change, and Pandemic Discontents" with two papers written by Anna Ferruta (IPA analyst, Milan) and Cosimo Schinaia (IPA analyst, Genoa). Link: http://web.tiscali.it/cispp/pandemic.htm 

2) 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 

3) We  are glad to announce the issue of the last number (n.33, year 17, January 2020) of Frenis Zero on-line journal: "PSYCHOANALYSIS IN AN AGE OF EMPIRICAL VALIDATION". The table of contents is at url: http://web.tiscali.it/bibliopsi/frenishome.htm . The papers are  in English. 

From the Editorial written by Giuseppe Leo: << In this last number of our journal we published some papers sharing one common concern: in a situation in which psychoanalysis risks to suffer for a relative isolation from other psychotherapeutic approach and <<methodological links to biology, psychology and psychiatry, and, above all, lacking in sufficient empirical research to support the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment>> (J. P. Jimenez, 2012, in "Psychoanalysis and its Borders, edited by G. Leo, p.127), we have to spread a psychoanalytic literature not solely based on hermeneutic principles, but open to confining fields of science (neuroscience, Infant Research, etc.) in order to strengthen "the evidence base of psychoanalysis" in accordance with which psychoanalysis <<should (...) develop closer links with alternative data gathering methods available in modern social and biological science>> (Fonagy et al., 1999, in Fonagy, Kaechele, Krause, Jones, Perron, "An open door review of outcome studies in psychoanalysis: Report prepared by the Research Committee of the IPA at the request of the President,  University College, London, p.45). 

Christian Roesler in his article "Development of Research Designs for Investigating Concepts of Analytical Psychology and the Efficacy/Effectiveness of Jungian Psychotherapy" maintains that what emerges in many outcome studies   << it is not the method which is crucial for outcome in psychotherapy, but the person of the therapist and how he/she succeeds in creating positive expectations in the client as well as in handling the therapeutic relationship. Especially the capacity of the therapist to adapt in a flexible way to the special needs of the client as well as to their changes over the course of therapy seems to be a crucial factor.>> (Roesler, ibidem). This implies that emphasizing manualized approaches, like the ones promoted by CBT, does not make really sense. It is important that candidated could be well trained  in order to become competent psychotherapists: this is a pre-requisite for any outcome psychotherapy project and study. 

Jakub Przybyla in the paper "Philosophical and methodological problems concerning neuropsychoanalysis" criticizes the idea of integrating neurobiology and psychotherapy based mainly on the study of psychoanalysis and neuropsychoanalysis. The author focuses on the philosophical and methodological problems which arise from attempts to carry out this integration. The article presents the view that this approach is a harmful reduction. It also proposes a look at the relationship between psychotherapy and neurobiology as an area ofcooperation that avoids the confusion of theoretical languages. 

Concerning neuroscientific understanding of memory processes, particularly in post-traumatic dissociative disorders, is the paper by Jelena Radulovic, Royce Lee and Andrew Ortony "State-Dependent Memory: Neurobiological Advances and Prospects for Translation to Dissociative Amnesia". The authors try to answer to the question of why memory for some traumatic experiences is compromised whereas other comparably traumatic experiences are remembered well. They introduce in their article clinical, cognitive, and neurobiological perspectives on memory research, in particular examining the role of state-dependent memory and discuss how advances in neurobiology of this kind of memory, gleaned from animal studies, might be translated to humans. 

Closer to a clinical perspective are the papers by Beate Schumacher "'We are all born naked'- is the rest drag? Some thoughts on gender identity development and psychoanalysis", and by Pilios-Dimitris Stavrou "The Consequences of Childhood Sexual Abuse on the Conjugal Life of a Young Woman and the Effects of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy  as a Method of Treatment".  

Finally, Michael Forrester's article "Psychoanalytic Underpinnings of Socially-Shared Normativity" considers the proposal that psychoanalytic thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early childhood. First, a framework is sketched out that highlights the fact that from the beginning, an infant’s earliest experience is bound up with those procedures, practices, and social actions that make up what conversation analysts call members’ methods. Second, comparisons are drawn between conversation analysis and psychoanalytic accounts of early experience for infants during the first years of life. Discussion then moves to the Kleinian notion of object relations and the concept of projective identification. Essentially, this is a theoretical account of how “what-was-once-one” (the mother-infant unit) somehow differentiates resulting in the gradual emergence of the “individuated being.” What is often glossed over in this account is the discursively embedded nature of projective identification; a process that is itself interdependent with the embodiment that makes up the infant’s lived engagement with the world. Whatever might constitute consciousness emerges from somatic, embodied, material-physical, tactile/affective experience – that is, a fundamentally social milieu. Ultimately, this raises the question of how transformation (i.e., from the social to the individual) occurs. One answer may be Winnicott’s idea of the transitional space, where the “good-enough” parent is said to be somebody, who can “contain” both negative and positive identifications coming from the infant, transform and re-project such identifications, but in modified form. In this way, the infant begins to recognize/experience what it is they are “feeling.” Such projective identifications are conveyed within and through the prevailing discourses that constitute all social practices. Concluding comments note that conversation analysis may find in psychoanalytic thinking a framework for understanding the interdependence between affect and action, given that in psychoanalytic thought, we find a thoroughly relational conception of human nature.    

4)"Dissociation, Symbiosis and Ambiguity in the movie Beanpole" is the review of Kantemir Balagov's movie. Link: http://web.tiscali.it/cispp/beanpole.htm  

5) 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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6) 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 

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

8) 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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9) "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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  10)  "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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