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 seminars will include theoretical and clinical seminars with the themes:

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Lecture 1, "The Tower," is mainly clinical. It describes how a pathological organization ( the 'tower') has been built up by a severely traumatized young patient, how it entered the transference-situation, and how patient and analyst struggled to free themselves in the course of a long-term analysis.

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Lecture 2 describes how Roger Money-Kyrle conceptualized counter-transference as a multiphase process and how he came to the conclusion that working-through and understanding are linked to processes of reparation. In the second part, Weiss will try to show how Roger Money-Kyrle anticipated later ideas, such as the concept of "analyst-centered" interpretations.

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Lecture 3 takes up the theme of concreteness in the analytic communication. The difficulty of detecting concreteness and transforming it into symbolic thinking is illustrated by clinical material from two patients with claustro-agoraphobic problems.

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Lecture 4 examines the retreat into timeless states of mind and the emergence from psychic retreats as described by Henri Rey in his concept of the „reversibility principle“. Which changes are reversible and which are not? Where are the limitations of psychoanalysis in the treatment of severely traumatized?