KEEPING IT ALIVE... DURING THE WAR. PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE MODERN WORLD AND IN WARTIME
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/upj/2025-3-1-7Keywords:
psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic training, Russian invasion, Ukraine, war.Abstract
Abstract. The paper is an extended commentary on and discussion of Paolo Fonda’s article “Developing psychoanalysis and keeping it alive”. It discusses the impact of social change on psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as on the organisational aspects of the psychoanalytic community, especially psychoanalytic training. The possibilities and difficulties of remote analysis are discussed. The general changes in contemporary psychoanalysis are correlated with those experienced by Ukrainian psychoanalysis during the war. Clinical and historical examples prove that the preservation of psychoanalysis as a practice, a way of thinking, and an organised professional community is important for the processing of traumatic experience at the individual and social levels. In individual psychotherapeutic work, psychoanalysis helps to restore the boundaries of mental life and protect it from the destructive intrusion of external reality. It also, despite all the changes, emphasises the importance of emotional relationships at all levels of mental functioning. In the social area, psychoanalysis partially performs the same functions, asserting the need to protect and restore the psychic life of a person and demonstrating the consequences of the traumatic collision of social and psychic realities. Historical examples demonstrate the dual consequences of the interaction between psychoanalysis and society in times of social cataclysms. On the one hand, the psychoanalytic community developed theoretical and practical innovations, consciously or unconsciously responding to the challenges of wars and other catastrophic changes in society. On the other hand, this reaction also consists in the fact that psychoanalysts are involved in fundamental social reforms – in psychiatry, child care, family relations – which in turn led to changes in society, individual psychology and psychopathology. An example of this is Paolo Fonda’s work in the field of psychiatry and psychoanalytic training. In the Ukrainian context, such examples include psychoanalytic support for professional working with traumatised people, as well as the organisation of events for interdisciplinary understanding of the phenomenon and experience of war.
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