Working Through Apocalyptic Times: When the Psychoanalytic Frame is Blown Up

Abstract

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.

Working through multiple crises: the experience of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in Lebanon

“…Soumaki and D.C. Anagnostopoulos [ 27 ] argue that the statement often repeated that the analyst is the guarantor of the framework does not imply rigidity or coldness, given that analysts present their own psychic framework as the cornerstone of the analytic process, guaranteeing that they will assume full responsibility for it. On this, Abdel Malak [ 28 ], revisiting Winnicott, emphasizes the role of the psychotherapist and psychoanalyst to carry some of the functions of the frame themselves, notably those of a sense of continuity. 'Through my proposed options, I tried to preserve a continuity in discontinuity and testify to a presence in absence, despite the absence in presence, which would allow patients to 'experience separation without separation' [ 29 ].…”