Announcements

Remember, Work-Through, and Transform - Past and Future

If remembering is living, dreaming of the future is an essential creative nourishment. Under the auspices of the dreamlike, we can invite our colleagues to remember, but also to reflect on the challenges, dilemmas, and questions, as well as the possible paths for the future of psychoanalysis.

In his seminal article “Remembering, repeating, and working-through” (1914), Freud taught us that in the psychoanalytic process there is a repetition of events under the aegis of transference, which, when associated with the compulsion to repeat, leads to acting out and constrains understanding, preventing transformation and development. The recollection and subsequent working-through of events and associated affects are of utmost importance, enabling awareness, the emergence of thought, and potential transformation. There are also experiences that cannot be remembered because they were never known or conscious; these belong to the realm of the unthought and sometimes the unthinkable. It is not only the aspects of the primitive mind but also those of intersectionality that challenge us in contemporary times.

The personal analysis of future analysts rarely includes exploration of ethnic, national, or religious affiliations. In the dreams of analysts in analysis or their analysands, feelings and anxieties related to belonging to a larger group are rarely mentioned on the couch because they are considered non-analytical (Varvin & Volkan, 2018). However, our belonging to a group, a culture, and our history as a country and as a people shapes our identity.

Alexander Mitscherlich (1971) emphasized the need to work closely with professionals from other disciplines and social sciences, but cooperative studies of this kind are often excluded from psychoanalytic scientific journals. In the future of psychoanalysis, we will have to accept that if we do not include historical knowledge in our reflections and if we are unable to elucidate specific areas of reality, we will not have new dreams for the future (Varvin & Volkan, 2018). Our history as a people also shapes the history of psychoanalysis in Portugal and the history of the Portuguese Society of Psychoanalysis. Could our dream, dreamt amid lived traumas, past glories, and the collapse of time through the regressive repetition of large groups, introduce a dream of the future—a dream of increased life drive?

We know that the life of psychoanalytic institutions, like that of individuals, is marked by the process of repetition and remembrance, often seeking to understand something enclosed within the organization, at times attempting to overcome a traumatic event, and sometimes as a search for growth. For transformation to occur, it is essential that, in remembering, thought can be united with the thinker. Will the practice of future psychoanalysts continue to be a space for a solitary figure? Thus, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese Society of Psychoanalysis, we invite all colleagues, through this call for papers, to share their thoughts in the form of an article to be submitted to the RPP.

References:

Deadlines:

• Submission deadline: July 15, 2025
• All submissions will undergo a double-blind review process, after which the RPP commits to responding to the author by September 20, 2025.
• If the article is accepted, the author must return the revised article, incorporating the requested changes, by October 15, 2025.
• Publication date: December 2025 issue.