This paper elaborates the impact that the traumatic experiences of the Lebanese socio‐economic crisis, the Port of Beirut blast, and the COVID‐19 pandemic have had on my work as a psychoanalyst in Lebanon. These shared traumas affected the psychoanalytic setting, frame, and process, ‘blowing up’ the constants of time, space and fees, triggering ‘topical collapse’, blurring boundaries, and reviving the ‘infantile’. They affected my internal analytic setting, compromising the fundamental rule of free association, triggering enactments, and violating the rule of abstinence. In such situations, psychoanalysts may try to repair the setting by adhering to strict ground rules and techniques. However, emphasizing the analytic frame's physical characteristics may transform it into a fetish that hinders the analytic process and encumbers the analytic relationship. The frame's holding and containing functions depend not on ground rules, setting and technique, but on the unconscious ability to use another person's mind. Thus, to creatively rethink my practice and co‐construct a malleable frame that safeguards the ‘analysing situation’, and to restore my internal setting, I had to do my trauma work.

Though mediation is commonly used to resolve international conflicts, most diplomatic efforts focus on rational analyses of real interests. Despite existing interest in the unconscious dynamics underlying international relationships and mediation processes and outcomes, more attention could be given to approaching unofficial or backchannel mediation from a group psychoanalytic framework. In this paper, I elaborate on whether a group psychoanalytic approach could complement peacemakers' current strategies by working through the unconscious dynamics at play during dialogues. Group psychoanalysts could analyze and interpret the psychic realities unfolding in the “here and now” of the group experience, that is, the psychic realities of the mediation group as a whole, its constituent members, and their links. A group psychoanalytic approach could help participants explore, elaborate, and symbolize the unconscious dynamics at play during their encounter to foster transformation of their conflictual relationships.

In this article, I propose extending group and family psychoanalytic theories to understand the unconscious dynamics that may underlie a nation‐state's constitution and the conflict that manifests during the process of establishment. I reflect on Lebanon's history, its birth, its development, and its crises during its process of “becoming.” An independent nation‐state requires clear borders or a body envelope to build itself; otherwise, its psychic envelope will fail to contain and transform primitive transgenerational persecutory and annihilating anxieties of its nation‐group and its citizens. I also analyze whether Lebanon's difficulty in delineating its borders has left it in a state of confusion with its two Siamese neighbors and characterize its group psychic apparatus as a pregenital, narcissistic, “incestual” mode of family functioning. I then reflect on whether Lebanese citizens are metaphorically part objects, who enact, through their fraternal pacts, the unconscious fratricidal fantasies of the archaic fraternal complex. Through these psychoanalytic reflections, I hope to contribute to the national and international dialogues and facilitate sibling countries to better mourn their original symbiotic state, thus allowing the Lebanese, as a result, to build their own nation‐state.

Peacemakers dealing with violent conflicts are often exposed to stressors that are detrimental to the peacemaking process. Such stressors hinder performance and challenge the peacemakers' professional identity and identifications, both consciously and unconsciously. Moreover, peacemakers may risk contamination by the “radioactive,” traumatic elements of the violence inherent in the bellicose situations they deal with at the peace table. They may become “crypt carriers” of expulsed mourning and denied lost objects. In this study, I elaborate on whether a group psychoanalytic approach to analyzing peacemakers' practice can offer mediators the space to explore, elaborate on, and symbolize the unconscious dynamics underlying their practice. Having such a space can help them perform the psychic “work of trauma,” and shield or decontaminate them and their practice from the “radioactive” effect of the potentially traumatic elements of their profession. Such an approach can provide peacemakers with a complementary tool for developing their practice.

In this paper, I discuss psychotherapy sessions that I undertook with a female adolescent patient. As a psychoanalyst specialized in couple and family psychoanalysis, I was primed to focus on her representation of her parents' and family's dysfunctional dynamics. She felt locked in perverse narcissistic relationships and vampirized by her internal 'objects', her attachments causing her to experience libidinal haemorrhage. Her links to her internal 'objects' seemed like chains that impeded her individuation. In my analysis, I build on Racamier's concepts of pregenital 'incestual' functioning, primal mourning, paradoxicality, and self-engendering fantasy. However, while Racamier noted that the self-engendering fantasy is part of an 'incestual' picture, which serves the death drive, I interpret this fantasy as a constructive effort to achieve psychic reorganization; it helped my patient disengage from her internalized incestual family dynamics and the violence of an incestuous primal scene. Through this fantasy, she seemed to end the narcissistic depletion that threatened to overwhelm the boundaries of her weak ego. The self-engendering fantasy serves the life drive, albeit paradoxically, using this logic. With this thesis in mind, I accompanied my patient in her process of separation and individuation and interpreted transference and countertransference dynamics.