Introduction to Japa’s: Inter-Regional Encylopedic Dictionary Review Series

The Mission is in the Method

IRED’s methodology flows organically from its mission. Quite intentionally, its methods depart from any those of other psychoanalytic dictionaries or encyclopedias to reflect its commitment to pluralism. As Fernando has remarked, “Methodology is the key.”

Unlike other such reference books, IRED generates content from the bottom up, not from top down, preconceived ideas of what constitutes today’s psychoanalytic canon. Thus, from the outset, IRED’s entries were chosen democratically and empirically by polling a broad group of psychoanalytic scholars of diverse geographical areas, cultures, institutional affiations, and theoretical orientations within each of the three IPA regions (North America, Latin America, and Europe) as to which five concepts are most relevant to psychoanalysis generally, as well as one that either originated in or is especially resonant within a region. By tallying their frequencies, five general concepts and one regionally specific concept (known as the 5 + 1 methodology) from each region were identified. The initial group of five most frequently cited general concepts included the unconscious, transference, countertransference, containment, and projective identification. Subsequently, entries on the next most frequently cited general concepts, conflict, object relations, amae, and Nachträglichkeit, were added to IRED. Most recently, again based on frequency of citation, a third group of six general concept entries are now in process: free association, infantile sexuality, regression, representation, symbolization, and internalization.

With respect to concepts identified as having special regional resonance, North American analysts most often endorsed enactment, amae, ego psychology, self, and intersubjectivity. European analysts gave greatest regional significance to setting and drives, while the Latin American group most often identified enactment, theory of communication, psychoanalytic field, and transformations as either having arisen from their region or being especially resonant there. Over time, IRED has included entries on the next most frequently occurring concepts in at least two of the IPA regions, as well as additional regionally specific or general concepts not identified by other regions.

Regarding the structure of entries, each concept entry is written in a standardized format that includes a dictionary portion, an encyclopedia portion, and a second dictionary portion. The first dictionary portion consists of an introduction that provides multiperspectival definitions within and across regions and a conclusion that summarizes key points of divergence and convergence. Between the two dictionary portions, the encyclopedic portion traces the evolution of the concept within the various theoretical perspectives represented in each region.

In IRED’s unique, recursive methodology, each concept entry undergoes a complex, multiphasic, interactive process that reflects the full embrace of pluralism in its practices as well as its content. Beginning with the Regional Phase, the regional concept team (a subgroup of contributors) within each region jointly write an English-language regional draft for the concept overseen by the region’s co-chair. This draft is then circulated among all regional contributors for an intraregional All Regional Review. During this review, all regional contributors are first asked, “What is missing?” and, second, “What needs to be better explained?” regarding its “inter-perspectival translation”—that is, its comprehensibility to those from different linguistic, geographic, and theoretical perspectives. Their responses are then considered by the regional concept team and included in the finalized regional draft of the concept.

The Inter-Regional Phase that follows is similarly multifaceted. The three regional drafts undergo many rounds of feedback loops as they are reviewed and merged by the interregional team (composed of representatives from regional concept teams guided by the Inter-Regional Coordinating Chair and/or Co-Chair) into a single Tri-Regional entry that fully represents and rigorously retains the integrity of each of the three region’s contributions. The Inter-Regional Co-Chair also considers how the concept entry fits within the scope of IRED and provides cross-referencing with other IRED entries.

In the final translational phase, the Tri-Regional entry is assessed again for its comprehensibility by a collaboration among the Inter-Regional Coordinating Chair and/or Co-Chairs and translators. This finalized English-language Tri-Regional entry becomes part of IRED’s e-book, to be followed by professional translations into the three other official IPA languages (French, German, and Spanish). Volunteer analyst-translators have thus far translated IRED into ten additional languages.

Entirely virtual and freely available on the IPA website, IRED invites public discussion from our community of analysts and its fellow travelers, which further widens its conceptual lens to consider any and all perspectives. Commentary from this interactive forum contributes to IRED’s ongoing revisions, updates, and expansion. The entry for Containment has already been published in its second expanded and updated edition, which, for example, now includes recent Bionion and post-Bionion contributions, as well as interdisciplinary work from neuroscience, neuropsychoanalysis, and infant research. Filipe Muller, successor to Abel Fainstein as co-chair for the Latin American region, emphasizes, through an ongoing openness to new input, how IRED evolves intergenerationally. As Papiasvili offers, “Knowledge is a process; knowledge is not static.”

As Muller puts it, “Full representation is an aspiration the realization of which is impossible as it would then be the thing itself.” Instead, IRED is “an imperfect, but beautiful process of continually bringing many different and smaller units together in one place to build a greater whole. In keeping with Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, IRED’s mission “opposes Thanatos; rather, it expresses the work of Eros.”

A commitment to pluralism is also embedded in the multiphasic writing process itself, progressing through multilevel interactive feedback loops both intra- and inter-regionally and in the translational process. In the writing of each entry, the aim is to be thoroughly inclusive of psychoanalytic models whether mainstream, nonmainstream, or newly emergent. Fernando explains, “We are guided by the mantra: no authors, only contributors.”

Still, Muller acknowledges the challenges this poses for an IRED contributor, steeped as we all are in a privileged theoretical framework, but tasked with putting aside one’s own authoritative voice in favor of group authorship and an unbiased posture. Muller writes that “we encounter a transformation, a new style where the ones who write become a silent voice that speaks the words of other authors, the ones to be represented, and in that process the writers as authors fade and they become contributors.” In Bolognini’s words, “We attempt to preserve a balanced and multifaceted point of view of the many different schools of thought, to respect their existence, and to give proper proportion to each of them. Of course, this is a work in progress.”

The Ego Psychology entry provides an example (among many throughout IRED) of the inclusion of nonmaintstream and emergent approaches. In further developing Freud’s conceptualization of post-traumatic mental functioning, Fernando (2012) posits a new level of mentation, “zero process.” In zero process mentation, as distinguished from primary and secondary process, post-traumatic memories have the basic qualities of memories of past experience but operate more as anticipated and feared events, imminent or further off in the future, or as happening in the present, as in flashbacks. In primary process functioning, sensory impressions are organized presymbolically in ways that can become symbolized and fluid as they are available for recursive modification through later experience. In contrast, trauma-inducing events subvert or abort this first-order construction of the traumatic moment so that traumatic memories do not join the stream of past experience but are instead frozen, encapsulated, and timeless, and persist in a perpetual present. Fernando’s concept of zero process reconceptualizes the established ego psychological view of mental functioning.

Newly discovered for me, thanks to IRED, is the Japanese concept amae, long known in Japan and having some familiarity to our West Coast U.S. colleagues, but emergent on the world scene only recently. The term amae is derived from the Japanese adjective amai, meaning “sweet tasting.” An expression commonly used in Japan, amae refers to the dependent child’s efforts to elicit parental love and indulgence once the infant’s recognition of the mother’s independent existence has dawned. Amae can also be broadened beyond the childhood familial setting, as applicable across the lifespan, and thus can include entreaties for love and favor occurring within intimate relationships or dynamics between hierarchically structured dyads like boss/subordinate or teacher/student, and, beginning with Doi (1971), transference manifestations within the analytic dyad. In Doi’s view, the concept amae can be used to understand the analysand’s efforts to win the analyst’s love through sweet solicitations much like those of a helpless, dependent child. Applied to the psychoanalytic framework, amae resembles and enlarges more familiar analytic concepts and developmental models, for example, Bion’s container/contained (1962), Mahler’s separation-individuation process (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975), and Winnicott’s holding environment (1965). Who knew? Apparently, according to IRED, only a handful of psychoanalytic theorists have discussed amae.

IRED entries like Amae exemplify Papiasvili’s contention (2023a) that “IRED chronicles how psychoanalytic concepts migrate and mutate through their encounter with (internal and external) otherness.” IRED’s interperspectival methodology is a vehicle whereby “the alien other becomes the familiar other.”

A dialectical model that nevertheless abjures a privileged synthesis, “the method is analogous to the psychoanalytic method at its best, which listens with evenly hovering attention to whatever comes up and lets the material speak for itself rather than trying to speak for it” (Fernando 2023). Like a propitious engagement of analyst and analysand, through the encounter with IRED’s text, ideally, reflective readers can gain a greater capacity to access material that may lead synergistically to transformations of their conceptual understanding.

Papiasvili likens IRED to an “open work in motion,” a phrase coined by Eco (1979) with respect to the plastic arts to describe “the continuous kaleidoscopic capacity to change and assume new and unrealized structures” that she had invoked in the context of understanding the often-observed progressive integrations that occur after termination of a productive analytic experience (Papiasvili 2016, p. 88). Perhaps this is also an apt depiction of IRED’s potential to catalyze creativity.

Translation and Interpretation

“Translation and interpretation,” Hoffer (1989) has asserted, “are fundamentally similar creative processes” (p. 207). Further extending this perspective, Papiasvili (2016) writes, “I look at interpretation . . . as a dynamically and developmentally meaningful (re)configuration of progressively widening bands of dynamically severed and blocked translational connections and reconnections between and within various experiential systems” (p. 89). In her view, emergent in IRED is “a web of internally dialectically connected pluralistic psychoanalytic thought in evolution . . . offering a reorganization of psychoanalytic knowledge.”

Clinically, the intimately intertwined interface of interpretation and translation across experiential domains is recognized as central to our understanding of analytic process. IRED investigates translational choices that color the interpretation of theoretical constructs that in turn inform the unfolding of clinical technique. IRED gives analysts a vital tool to gain greater translational fluency in the domain of theory that might potentiate access to a wider range of interpretive possibilities. After his years developing IRED, Bolognini has shared that in the course of his analytic work he has noticed that associations to psychoanalytic ideas outside his own may enter his mind more freely with salutary effect.

Each of IRED’s key figures whom I interviewed spoke of their work with IRED as a personal journey of discovery. Fainstein shared his personal experience in learning the role that cultural differences play in our perception of the other. Unlike his Buenos Aires peers, largely of Western European Christian descent, he was raised in an Argentinian Jewish family that in an earlier generation had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Despite his experience of otherness, as a psychoanalyst, he acknowledged, “Early on I was unfamiliar with some psychoanalytic communities outside of Argentina. At first, I was taken aback by the differences, but having now been more exposed to other societies, I have realized that everyone has an experience of being the other. Otherness is very important in the building of psychic structure. . . . As humans, we are all raised in our own family culture, but we must come to know the world outside the family in order to grow. Our psychoanalytic societies are like families—they can become insular and rejecting of alternative views. IRED democratizes knowledge,” countering inclinations toward “inbred confinement.”

Arne Jemstedt, previously co-chair of the European region and now a consultant to that region, was among the editors of the Swedish translation of Winnicott’s work. He draws on Winnicott to articulate IRED’s potential, commenting that “ideally, IRED provides a venue, in Winnicott’s terms, ‘a potential space’ in which inner and outer reality . . . fertilize each other” and the question of what comes from inside and outside is inspected; like the transitional space, it is a place where “paradox is to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and for it not to be resolved.” Borrowing from Bion, Jemstedt asserts, “Reading IRED sharpens our ‘binocular vision’” and in doing so wakes up the creativity of the reader.

Hermeneutic questions of translation arise not simply from the perspective of literal and denotative sense but also from the need to do justice to semantic integrity, semiotic sources, and connotative colorations. Textually, linguistic translation wrestles with how best to convey inherent differences, semantic nuances, and subtleties of inflection as language is refracted through linguistic arenas and cultural contexts. Inevitably, translation wrestles with the question of how best to bridge the gaps between—and sometimes within – languages and the extent to which they can indeed be bridged.

Fainstein reminds us, however, that “in any language each work is a translation. . . . There is always a gap between the object and its naming; like Magritte’s painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This Is Not a Pipe), of which the artist said, “Could you fill my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not?” He then quipped, “In Spanish, too, pipa is not a pipe.”

Well aware of the vastness of the translational task at hand, Papiasvili, a polylingual immigrant herself, sees it as an opportunity to acquire a more thorough cultural competence and as a call for methodological innovation. “Culture,” according to her (Papiasvili 2023a), “is the third party where translation resides.” For this reason, IRED’s recursive, interperspectival translational process is scrupulously attentive to the legibility of concepts across all its constituencies. Throughout this multiphasic process, translations are reviewed with an open ear for what may be missing and a sharp eye on assuring that concept entries are comprehensible for audiences across the full spectrum of theoretical orientations, geographies, and languages.

Papiasvili draws a parallel between Bolognini’s principle of translational fluency (2004) to the analyst’s own epistemological journey via IRED. Bolognini underscored the value of the analyst’s translational fluency, “the readiness to reflectively access images across all layers of the mind including the metaphoric bridging pertaining to various systems of experiences, and between them” (Papiasvili 2016, p. 93). Similarly, facilitating translational fluency with the various conceptual frameworks is essential to IRED’s goals: “Translational bridges to understanding the heterogenous routes of the other’s and one’s own psychoanalytic culture are created, where various perspectives can meet in the territory which does not belong to any of them. Here new translations, new terminology, can spontaneously emerge, and boundaries can be reconfigured . . . [through] appreciation of the ambiguity, the unfamiliar, the under-theorized, the under-represented, the controversies and contradictions, and the uncertainties” (Papiasvili 2023b).

Fainstein notes one such translational bridge, reflecting that the Spanish translation of neutrality, neutralidad, derived from Strachey’s English, suggests a nonintrusive position in relation to the patient, whereas in Freud’s original German, indifferenz, indiferencia in Spanish, would have conveyed something more like free-floating attention. Similarly, Jemstedt reflects on his participation in the Swedish translation of the Standard Edition, which drew both on Freud’s German and on Strachey’s English. He recalls the translational dilemma of choosing between the German Masse Psychologie and the English translation, group psychology. The Swedish translators, opting to follow Freud’s German expression, went with the Swedish Massa Psykologi to convey a primal sense more akin to Freud’s original meaning.

Within IRED one can find numerous examples that trace conceptual mutations as a function of their migratory pathways. Among them, IRED identifies the variety of meanings of the term enactment interregionally as well as regionally. Broadly, within North America definitions vary substantially in the degree to which the phenomenon is located within the analytic dyad; it is less often conceived of as extending beyond it. While IRED’s contributors found less plurality within both the Latin American and the European understandings of enactment, Latin American formulations tend to see it as a co-creation within the analytic field, while European analysts cleave closer to the North American conceptualization that typically views enactment as the product of the analytic interaction within a countertransferential context.

Bolognini encountered an unexpected confluence found through his work IRED. “I discovered absolutely by chance that, while the term enactment was rarely used in France, French-speaking Belgian analysts had re-created exactly the same concept, L’experience agie partagée, the experience of shared action, that was equivalent to enactment.” IRED’s Enactment entry concludes that, despite significant divergences, common ground can be found across regions in the prevailing view that enactments are dynamically meaningful and, ideally, come to be understood and interpreted.

The influence of geographic and linguistic contiguities can matter in intriguing, sometimes unanticipated, ways. From a North American perspective, Loewald is now widely regarded as a transitional theorist who bridges ego psychology and object relations theory. French psychoanalysts have traditionally viewed him as representative of ego psychology, and his theoretical framework as residing within Freud’s structural theory—in their terminology, the “second topography” (la deuxième topique). Yet, surprising to some, in North America the French-speaking Canadians, generally allied theoretically with their transatlantic co-lingual colleagues but sharing a border with the U.S., see Loewald, like their North American neighbors, as a figure transitional between ego psychology and object relations theory, placing him within the Continental French model of the “third topography” (la troisième topique) that encompasses the intersubjective realm.

Similarly, the Latin American regional team initially found a general disregard or even antipathy toward an ego psychological orientation, viewing it as closely allied closely with a cognitive-behavioral perspective. Only after casting a wider net did they discover that ego psychology was more fully and favorably represented in Latin America, for example in Mexico, which shares a border with the U.S. While British object relations theory, Kleinian ideas, and French psychoanalysis predominate, technical approaches that derive from an ego psychological framework (e.g., interpretation of defenses and resistance), though not identified as such, could also be found among Latin American psychoanalytic groups.

Illustrative of IRED’s multilevel translational process is its resolution of a conundrum in Latin American region’s section of the Transformations entry from its English translation-ready version into the completed Spanish version. The English translation from Spanish texts referred to “living principles,” a phrase not initially comprehensible to the translator. Upon further research, the team discovered that this phrase could not be found in Bion’s writing available on PEP but was instead a Spanish translation quite different semantically from Bion’s English phrase “three principles of living,” an idea Bion had elaborated from Freud’s two principles of mental functioning. As Papiasvili (2023) explains, “Here, as in so many ways, a term that had been lost in translation was now not only gained in translation, but also discovered anew.”

Current Controversies, Future Challenges

IRED depicts a pluralistic psychoanalytic universe in which each element and subsystem has its own integrity and gravitational force that together form a multifaceted, interconnected, and reciprocally influenced whole. Bolognini describes his approach to IRED’s development as relying “on the ongoing process and on the progress of this enterprise.” It is, in his view, “comparable to an integration process in a common shared mind. . . . there is an organizational mind, a communitarian mind. Our task is to transmit the awareness, a consciousness about this fundamental issue. We don’t know how much we succeed in this task, but this will be an unending task.”

While Bolognini has found that respectful and stimulating dialogue has become more and more possible, he believes the need for IRED remains compelling. At the beginning of its second decade, IRED’s endeavor is in full gear. Even as IRED transitions to a new generation of stewards, its founders remain engaged as consultants, its philosophy endures, and its methods align with its commitment to full and egalitarian representation of the history and scope of psychoanalytic theories, and to a dual focus that works toward both a granular and a panoramic vision of psychoanalysis across the globe.

The IRED project, now comprising over nine hundred pages and seventeen concept entries, continues to build a kinetic encyclopedic dictionary in which the history of key concepts emerges over time, whether accessible or obscure, manifest or emergent, through the addition of new concept entries and the ongoing revision of those already available consequent on its readers’ responses. New entries are in the works, with new contributors being added every year. As IPA expands to recognize an Asian-Pacific Region, this will be reflected in IRED.

Inevitably, the magnitude, complexity, and ambitions of the IRED enterprise have provoked controversy. While most of those familiar with IRED regard it as an invaluable research resource, pedagogical and training issues have been raised. Some have speculated that candidates or less seasoned analysts would become bewildered by the sheer abundance of information, the complexity of conceptual nuances, and the panoply of theoretical approaches. On one hand, they argue that perhaps psychoanalysts in training might be better served, especially early on, by being presented a singular model, with alternative perspectives introduced once a cohesive foundation is mastered. On the other hand, however, it can be argued that being schooled initially within the framework of one’s psychoanalytic “home,” with what is favored by one’s psychoanalytic “family,” might foreclose consideration of alternative perspectives.

Some readers have suggested that it may be more experienced and well-established analysts, often siloed within their institutes and ensconced in their professional lives, who may be less willing to reconsider treasured doctrines, be unsettled by unfamiliar ideas, or feel unprepared to teach alternative views. Some may argue that they are already knowledgeable regarding the variety of theoretical frameworks in contemporary practice. However, with a willingness to delve into IRED’S fertile soil, they too may discover unexpected opportunities for growth.

Still other readers have expressed concern that IRED, for the sake of pluralism and inclusive representation without fear or favor, might promote, albeit unwittingly, an eclecticism that devolves into a smorgasbord of unreflective and indigestible theory-grazing rather than encouraging carefully considered choices among well-curated, fulfilling meals from an array of international cuisines, while acknowledging that another chef might possibly improve a recipe by suggesting different seasonings or regional flavors. Consumers of theory may find some dishes more pleasing to their palates than others; some may decline to sample the unfamiliar altogether.

Antonio Perez-Sanchez (2023), Jemstedt’s successor as European Co-Chair, asserts that “sharing clinical and theoretical spaces does not necessarily mean that the future of psychoanalysis is eclecticism. To Wallerstein’s question . . . whether there is ‘one psychoanalysis or many,’ I think the answer should be: one and many. . . . One psychoanalysis, because each psychoanalyst acquires and becomes identified with the psychoanalysis of the group to which he belongs, and . . . which he has developed in his practice. And many psychoanalyses because they coexist. . . .”

IRED welcomes complexity across disciplinary as well as theoretical boundaries. Deeply rooted in the appreciation of other models of complexity and interdisciplinary inquiry, Papiasvili recognizes the confluence of IRED’s methods with those of both early twentieth-century and later philosophical theorists. Papiasvili (2023) elaborates: “IRED conceptualizes knowledge as an evolving process . . . [that] exposes connections not apparent before, and in consequence, it also reveals a paradoxical relationship between the whole and the parts: One Psychoanalysis and Many. This echoes William James’ notions of a Pluralistic Universe—a multiverse—of ‘manyness in onenes’” (James 1909, pp. 130–140), and its contemporary extension—“Unitas Multiplex”—described by Edgar Morin (2008). The whole (One Psychoanalysis) does not fragment into many, and the many (perspectives) do not disappear (de-differentiate/dissolve) into a whole.

Morin has written about methodology in ways deeply resonant with IRED’s way of working. “We need a kind of thinking that reconnects . . . [what] is disjointed and compartmentalized, that respects diversity as it recognizes unity, and that tries to discern interdepdencies. We need a radical thinking . . . a multidimensional thinking, and an organizational or systemic thinking” (Morin and Kern 1999, p. 130).

Aware of the tension between comprehensive inclusion on one hand and overwhelming confusion on the other, Bolognini reflects, “It’s impossible to read the whole thing in its entirety in a short time or to expect to be able to introject so many ideas. This would become a psychic invasion, not a good digestion. An old Italian analyst created a good metaphor to describe an approach to such potential richness. Like a whale’s approach to the ocean’s plentiful plankton—it takes in all that it can from the ocean; using only what it needs. We too, eat what we can, but we use what we need.” Like the whale that consumes and filters microscopic bits of tiny nutrients for its sustenance from the vast ocean, so may we select bit by bit from the vast store of knowledge in IRED, the intellectual sustenance needed for our own growth.

Historically, psychoanalysis has flourished when it has welcomed immigrants, a process now exponentially accelerated by virtual migrations through cyberspace that have vastly extended our reach. The migrations and consequent mutations of psychoanalytic ideas present us with our differences viewed either as an opportunity for mutual enhancement or as threats to treasured beliefs and ways of being. IRED is a virtual visa of sorts, allowing us passage to others’ conceptual homelands and histories, and the terrains they have traversed. Meeting at some perhaps unexpected crossroad, or at a metaphorical bridge, our laptops, perhaps both tourist and host find a yet untraveled path.

Summary

IRED is a breathtakingly expansive enterprise. It explores the essential concepts of psychoanalysis from their precursors to their genesis and subsequent elaboration in Freud’s voluminous work through their progression over time and across continents, cultures, and myriad translations, with full recognition of and respect for the profusion of its models and clinical approaches.

Now, more than a century since Freud launched us on this journey, psychoanalysis is no longer an epistemological ingenue. It is a mature discipline that has not merely survived, but thus far has thrived rather than succumbing to entropic forces favoring fragmentation or dissolution. Even while IRED’s team acknowledges the precarity that may accompany a rapidly expanding psychoanalytic world, IRED’s guiding principles and methods assume that psychoanalysis grows fruitfully not only by finding convergent theoretical positions, but equally through encounters with diverse, divergent, even contradictory viewpoints. As Papiasvili (2023) remarks, “Through deepening our understanding of all perspectives, controversial discussions become discussions of controversies.”

Most essentially, IRED strives to catalyze our quest to locate the stranger both outside and within ourselves, to become fuller, more vital analytic selves, to engage the present, to be available to new experience. As Loewald (1960) famously wrote, “In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life . . .” (p. 249). Or, to quote Pavese, “Finding myself, I found company.”