International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology

We present Xanadu, a full-scale participatory theater production that integrated generative AI into a live musical. Over two weeks, 500 audience members contributed sketches, movements, and sounds that were transformed in real-time --via pipelines combining vision-language models, diffusion models, and moderation-- into images, 3D objects, poetry, and choreography rendered within an extended reality environment. Audience inputs were framed as ritual "offerings" to the Muses, with performers guiding participation and AI serving as interpretive intermediary. A hybrid hosting architecture combined controllable, research-driven models with fast foundation models, enabling 30–60 second generations while preserving stylistic and narrative coherence. We discuss design strategies and trade-offs that supported large-scale, group-level human-AI collaboration. This work contributes practical insights into deploying generative AI in live performance and highlights opportunities for designing AI systems that facilitate collective rather than individual creativity.

This individual participant data meta-analysis aimed to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy with a trauma focus (CBT-TF) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, we examined the effect of moderators on PTSD symptom severity. This study included randomized controlled trials comparing CBT-TF to an inactive or active comparison group for adults with PTSD. The primary and secondary outcomes were PTSD symptom severity and remission, respectively. Moderators included sociodemographic and clinical variables. Twelve studies compared CBT-TF with inactive (n = 625) and 11 with active comparison conditions (n = 706). The one-stage individual participant data meta-analysis found that CBT-TF was more effective than inactive comparison conditions (β = -0.78; OR = 2.34) and not significantly different from active comparison conditions (β = 0.02; OR = 0.53) in reducing PTSD symptom severity and achieving PTSD remission, respectively. When comparing CBT-TF with inactive treatments, moderator analysis found that divorced participants had greater PTSD symptoms postintervention following CBT-TF than participants who were single, cohabitating, or married receiving CBT-TF, both in the completer (β = 0.93) and full-sample (β = 0.59) analyses. For the active treatment comparison, moderator analysis found that participants taking psychotropic medication had lower PTSD symptoms following CBT-TF than those not taking psychotropic medication in the completer analysis (β = -0.39). Based on our moderator analyses, further research is needed to understand the effect of psychotropic medication on the CBT-TF intervention process. Moreover, divorced participants with PTSD receiving CBT-TF might benefit from enhanced support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

ABSTRACT This discussion focuses on Letsatsi’s “The Complexity of My Blackness” (2025, this issue) and Barber’s “Context, Race, Power, and Culture: The Third in a Therapeutic Dyad” (2025, this issue). Both uniquely South African papers focus on race and context, raising profound and appropriate uncertainty about whether or not I should, as a privileged White woman, take on the role of a discussant. However, thoughts about what would be perpetuated by my silence, and Letsatsi’s comment (2025, this issue) that if we do not “show up”, there is little chance of achieving the mutual recognition we value in our professional work and lives, led to my decision to show up. But with limited aims—to share only those thoughts that were evoked in me, and my personal responses to both papers.

ABSTRACT The sense of self-constructed and maintained intersubjectively becomes a “sense of identity” in a bonding and social context. In this register, a representation is configured, both experiential and virtual, currently enormously amplified by the multiple channels of images that we can offer others and images that others offer us at multiple levels of the current virtual world. Teenagers and young people meet, play, and “relate” mainly online, not in an interpersonal exchange. Can anyone be a person in an environment devastated by virtualization? Immersion in virtual worlds has been carried out to avoid the experience of mental pain in the face of loneliness or failures of omnipotence. Young people seeking connection with others through technological means or through immersing themselves in virtual worlds are trying to reduce or cancel that mental pain. Within this virtual space, between the formative and the transformative, buried personal experiences are accessed and lived, perhaps to preserve them for a future encounter. They are “unlived potentialities” that could be lived. We need direct intersubjective feedback, which includes an empathic connection that resonates both with me and the other. What we seem is not enough. If our adolescents are seeking the real encounter, and if it does not arrive, the virtual will be able to fill the “as if” need, but it will not be enough for a mature subjectivity.

ABSTRACT This is a discussion of “Permeable boundaries: Therapeutic benefits,” by Geist and Nocek. In my opinion, the core of their paper is the mutuality of their love and trust for each other, and they use the term “permeable boundaries” as a metaphor for these feelings, rather than it being the kind of singular, relational state they are proposing. As a positive contribution, the experience-near description of their mutual love for each other expands the degree of intimacy in psychoanalytic writing about analytic love. However, there is a lack of sufficient information to understand their paper as a psychoanalytic treatise, and I have a number of disagreements with their conceptualization of “permeable boundaries,” as well as concerns about the quality of their mutual love which they portray as idyllic but which, in my opinion, lacks certain key elements of analytic love.

The main topic of the article is the use of ideological criticism (as presented by Slavoj Žižek) as a method in comparative analysis of The Hourglass Sanatorium by W.J. Has and The Monument by J. Szelc. The author not only looks for objective determinations of social reality, but also for its hidden forms. The conclusions allow us to see the dynamics of changes in the symbolic orders that implicitly organize the narrative structures of both films. Furthermore, in this perspective they become a diagnosis of the present in the face of Polish “year of dangerous dreams”.