Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Abstract We aimed to investigate (1) if trainee therapists differ from controls regarding childhood maltreatment and adult attachment and (2) if there are associations between childhood maltreatment, adult attachment and the alliance bond capacity. To answer the 1st question, a sample of 134 trainees and psychology students was matched to population‐representative controls (CTQ: N = 2504, ECR‐S: N = 2555) and compared on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (ECR‐S). For the 2nd question, the Facilitative Interpersonal Skills task was used to measure trainees' alliance bond capacity. Regression analysis was performed with age, gender, training status, CTQ and ECR‐S scales as potential predictors. We found that psychology students and trainees reported more childhood emotional abuse (t = −6.268; p < 0.001), but less physical neglect (t = 2.927; p = 0.004), a lower tendency to minimize or deny adverse experiences (t = 5.415; p < 0.001) and less attachment avoidance (t = 3.048, p = 0.003) than controls. The alliance bond capacity was predicted by greater therapeutic experience (students vs. trainee, β = −0.284, p = 0.003; with vs. without licence to practise, β = −0.218, p = 0.025) and greater childhood physical abuse (β = 0.200, p = 0.035). Our results emphasize addressing therapists' personal wounds. The potential beneficial effects, suggested by the positive association between physical abuse and alliance bond capacity, require further investigation and replication.

Abstract This paper looks at those resolutions of the Oedipal situation that are characterised as defeat or triumph. We argue that both are defeats and the situation best resolves when intergenerational rivalry is contained and supportive co‐operation is dominant. We are struck by the Narcissistic quality we find especially in triumph and note that Oedipus and Narcissus both lived in a false reality constructed to avoid the shame of their own rejection. We are especially concerned about what happens when the child builds a life based on either defeating or being defeated by the same‐sex parent and how this appears and may find resolution in analytic psychotherapy. We consider the situation for the girl as well as for the boy and feel there are important distinctions that warrant further thought. Anonymised clinical material is provided to exemplify how this may play out in life and in our practices.

Abstract Psychoanalytic psychotherapy and autism have had a complicated relationship. Much of the complication has arisen from patients with autism being misunderstood by those who have used a psychoanalytic lens. These misunderstandings arose not for a lack of trying—but rather from a disavowal of how neurological difference shapes what it means to become a person, and how these differences affect treatment needs. It has been autistic patients who have had to bear the consequences of these misunderstandings in much the same way as they do in their daily lives outside of therapy. It is not the psychoanalytic lens that has failed these patients, but rather its use without reference to the ever‐growing body of neurobiological knowledge. In this paper, we make the argument that many of the key psychoanalytic concepts—countertransference, the frame, narcissism, intellectualization and obsessions—need to be reviewed and altered when working with autistic patients.

This paper takes issue with the way in which female sexuality and sexual repression has been limited by phallocentric position which has largely ignored the very real connection between sex and physical suffering, injury and death in childbirth which might have given women good cause to fear sex. It links the time at which Freud became interested in the subject, and various aspects occurring in the world around him in terms of history. The article suggests looking at hysteria as a phenomenon arising at a point where there is an extreme amalgamation of the life and death drives, and as a discourse that escalates at certain periods of history, when this fusion reaches, for whatever reason, a particularly high concentration. Vienna was such a point during the 19th and early 20th centuries, where the birth of psychoanalysis took place against the backdrop of a steep ‘inexplicable’ increase in female mortality in childbirth and neighboured with stunning discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics and revolution in art.

Abstract The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were a stark reminder of the reality of problematic ‘race’ relations. This paper, originally conceived in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder with his final words ‘I can't breathe!’, examines the psychoanalysis of anti‐black racism as a contemporary problem to address. This raises important epistemological questions about the forms of knowledge that get produced given the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and coloniality. Frantz Fanon unpacked the impact of racial violence and the white gaze as one of alienation, nonbeing and Black Rage in White Skin, Black Masks. This paper makes use of Fanon's 1952 thesis and clinical vignettes from analysts of colour in relation to ‘race’ as well as secondary literature on psychoanalysis and postcoloniality inviting the reader to appreciate Black Rage as a legitimate and constructive affect. I submit two ‘anchors’ for psychoanalysis to consider in theory and in practice for the birth of a physical and psychic ‘room to breathe’, a place for the black individual to exist with more psychological sovereignty: (1) an extension of Melanie Klein's depressive position and (2) an extension of the concept of mourning, as crucial intrapsychic processes for black lives to matter. The argument advanced is that, due to the extraordinary historical, social and political circumstance placed on black people as a racially oppressed group, the trauma of racism is one of alienation to a zone of nonbeing, a ‘space’ which, incidentally, offers radical hope in the form of Black Rage. Psychoanalysis is adequately positioned to acknowledge Black Rage as a powerful affect and civic tool, and this may be thought about through intrapsychic processes originating in classical psychoanalytic theory as well as Kleinian object relations, principally the concepts of mourning and depressive awareness, which considered together liberate aspects of therapeutic work.