Luisa Marino, Some reflections on MT Hooke’s paper

1. Luisa Marino, Some reflections on MT Hooke’s paper I will raise the following very much condensed comments to Maria Teresa’s paper based on what's been myexperience along the years with young generation of analysts.

2. 1. Are we “young” analysts in training or new associates members aware of the impact of age and ageing in the process of the so called “transmission” of psychoanalysis? As we sow, things changed, true, there is a sense of maturity and more awareness inside IPA and local Institutes, but what about analysts in training?...

3. Maybe, it’d be like asking a blind person undergoing a surgery for regaining sight to see before the operation, not to talk about before the long time of rehabilitation required after such surgery.

4. Topic of ageing involves issues as time, loss and separation, all delicate and painful feelings we as analysts and human beings would wish not to face between our beloved idealized colleagues or in our Institutes; it goes with it that dependency, legacy and transferencial relations between young and senior analysts are a delicate matter: they have been (sometimes still are) our personal analysts and supervisors.

5. Roughly, some data: 30% of candidates experienced personal or via colleagues’ experiences “problems with ageing”, such as the illness and/or death of their analysts and/or supervisors. • Then, when talking about the impact of ageing on the so called “transmission of psychoanalysis” trough generations, how are our mind shaped after these (let’s say) traumatic events? • How will we be as ageing analysts aware of our limits in the future?

6. 2. When we tend to deny these issues, why is it? We believe that despite some elaborated understanding of this, a lack of awareness on the ageing implications may have to do with a strong and complex system of defenses as well as historical reasons where transference’s implications, intergenerational transmission of traumas, denial and deep anxieties are only some of the causes. • More facts: first, as MT underlined, the analytic trainings nowadays (in some area of Europe and North America, less so for Latin America and Asia) seems to have become a second/third career choice:it means it comes with great exceptions. • It often coexists with highly competitive psychotherapy trainings that are easier to access. • A possible consequence: this creates the paradoxical effect of making the analytic training highly overestimated and idealized, just for being demanding, “hard” (mostly “emotionally” we believe due to transferencial implications), selective, and requiring lots of money. • Are these true guarantees of quality standard of the analytic Training?

7. More facts: When the analytic training is on the contrary a first choice, as for some Institutes in Latin America and new groups in Asia, why is it? • It seems that they have “younger” Institutes, lots of value is given to intergenerational support and exchange, specifically in post-traumatic environment (due to political reasons, civil wars, extreme poverty or highly different social levels). As MT said, psychoanalysis may be successful in those countries where the high level of traumatism requires an “understanding-human related” and “reparative to post traumatic situation” approach. • An approach which we all as analysandshopefully experienced psychoanalysis can provide effectively. Still, some research underlines how time may consume and affect such awareness and faith in our own personal analysis(Tessman, 2003).

8. It seems that one reason of the young age of applicants in Latin America or Asia could be due to the fact that Institutes (still) believe that young people can be trained during and along the training, that they don’t have to arrive already “wise” or “highly trained” from previous carriers. • An unpredictable side effect: these Training Institutes, being younger, are not (yet) under the “ageing effects” of transgenerationaltransmission not of psychoanalysis, but of “Institutional traumas”.

9. An Unconscious fantasy: The “Wisdom Factor” • What above mentioned may create some ‘biases’ somewhere else, and could be at the origin of an unconscious collusive fantasy between young and senior analysts: a candidate has to be already trained, wise and experienced; then a young candidate cannot apply to the analytic training till “wise” enough; so the average of the applicants keep rising. • Who supports this collusive fantasy of “growing wisdom”? • Let’s push it a little further, can we still blindly believe in the exponential growth along our life (circle?) from a lower to a higher “level of wisdom” and of the capacity to learn from experiences?

10. The Institute as a Retreat • An hypothesis: what are we defending from, when we tend to deny the ageing problem? I suggest that sometimes the Institute may be unconsciously perceived as a “retreat”: “[the retreat] can take an interpersonal form, usually as an organization of objects or part-object which offer to provide security” (J. Steiner, 1993). • It goes with it that when coming out from the “retreat”, we may experience and having to mourn what we are calling “our ageing environment”.

11. Being so empathetically bonded to our senior colleagues could be “used” unconsciously to avoid facing painful anxieties coming out from schizoid-paranoid and depressive positions denied in the “Institute retreat”: peer to peer conflicts, and vertical conflicts (Oedipal level); as well as anxieties referring to the inevitable mourning process for loss of senior analysts and our longing for them, de-idealizations and delusions; not last, anxieties for having to take over their positions and legacies; and I may add, a retreat to avoid being creative in return, when relying exclusively on the “past”.