FREE ASSOCIATION LISBON

While Freud is ever-present in his writing, Weiss’s thinking is firmly rooted in Kleinian theory. He draws often upon the work of Klein’s colleagues and later followers, including Herbert Rosenfeld, Wilfred Bion, Betty Joseph, Henri Rey, Edna O’Shaughnessy, Ron Britton and Michael Feldman. The work of Hanna Segal and John Steiner – both of whom supervised Weiss – has made a deep impact on his analytic understanding, not least in relation to borderline states. He edited a Festschrift for Segal and has worked collaboratively with Steiner on many occasions.

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Weiss often returns to one of Steiner’s most significant contributions: the concept of ‘psychic retreats’. This idea is keenly relevant to many of the aspects of psychic life on which Weiss has written: pathological organisations, projective identification, borderline pathology, narcissism, and countertransference. The concepts of space and time have played an important role in Weiss’ thinking. They feature centrally in his account of the internal reality of borderline and psychotic patients, as he conceptualises the ways in which experiences of the past, future and present are distorted – even ‘exploded’ – in psychotic states.

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Most recently, Weiss has looked at the workings of – and the difficulty of working through – trauma. In Trauma, Guilt and Reparation: The Path from Impasse to Development, he describes the challenge of working with severely traumatised patients, and examines the central Kleinian concept of reparation in relation to guilt, envy, time and a sense of reality. As always in his writing, he makes frequent reference to his own clinical work with patients to both illustrate and complicate his theoretical positions.

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The four seminar will include theoretical and clinical seminars.