Editors’ Introduction

We are delighted to publish Volume 13, Number 1, comprising eight original articles, and three book review essays. The editors hope this issue provides, as ever, material for reflection, debate, and continued inquiry into the questions that animate our field.

We begin our issue with Ricardo Luna’s article, Subject of Truth, Object of Power: The Emergence of the Analytic Training Dispositif, where he develops a Foucauldian genealogy of psychoanalytic training analysis in order to illuminate the power relations that organize its institutional logic, conceptualized here as the analytic training dispositif. It argues that training is inaugurated through the candidate’s renunciation of personal authority in submission to the power/knowledge vested in the instructor and the institution. On this basis, the paper examines psychoanalytic training as a regulatory dispositif that remains distinct from psychoanalysis as a field of thought and practice. Drawing on Freud’s self-analysis and his multifaceted relation to Jung, it traces the establishment of a disciplinary structure in which interpretation functions not as a neutral technique, but as a technology for molding and regulating the candidate’s psyche. The paper thus calls for a renewed consideration of training analysis as a site of both institutional power and ethical opportunity. In this context, self-analysis is proposed not as a substitute for analytic work, but as a practice of care of the self and a mode of counter-conduct capable of sustaining disagreement, dissent, and singularity within an institutional formation that otherwise risks favoring conformity over creativity and critical thought.

We turn next to Roi Ezra & Moshe Mishali’s Learning from Experience? Artificial Intelligence and the Institutionalization of −K, a consideration of the psychic and epistemic implications of artificial intelligence via an examination of Wilfred Bion’s distinction between knowing (K) and learning from experience. Against approaches that emphasize structural affinities between AI and unconscious formations, the authors argue that AI facilitates forms of intelligibility severed from emotional transformation. The essay advances this claim along three related lines: it reconsiders Bion’s concept of genius as an epistemic function, interprets AI as an institutionalized form of −K that attenuates the affective demands of knowing, and presents AI as a revealing object that renders culturally legible psychic configurations previously confined to clinical or internal domains. The essay concludes by proposing that AI generates pseudo-alpha-elements: formations that appear fully symbolized yet lack the transformation required for genuine knowing. It thereby raises a broader question concerning whether learning from experience can persist once counterfeit knowing becomes functionally indistinguishable from the real.

We continue our explorations into artificial intelligence, with Psychoanalysis and Artificial Intelligence: Metapsychological Foundations, Clinical Implications, and the Transformation of Analytic Practice by Christopher D. Allan, wherein he directly engages every major contribution in the February 2026 “Problematizing AI” special section of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis while providing an answer to Soh’s (2026) call for a clinic-based problematic of AI. Noting that the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) across mental health has outpaced psychoanalytic reflection, leaving theoretical work fragmented and largely unintegrated, this critical narrative review brings foundational psychoanalytic concepts into dialogue with empirical research on AI-mediated psychotherapy, therapeutic relationships, and analytic practice. Focusing on the unconscious, transference and countertransference, and mentalisation, it argues from Freudian, Lacanian, and relational perspectives that AI may produce outputs resembling mentalisation, but without embodied subjectivity. The review introduces the algorithmic third as an evaluative AI presence that can generate surveillance anxiety and constrain the analytic frame. When granted unquestioned authority, AI risks disrupting core analytic processes. The review therefore treats AI as a non-subjective technological system whose outputs function as propositions within a human-centered analytic framework, and it considers the implications for ethics, clinical practice, and training. It concludes that, before AI is integrated into psychoanalytic work, the field must ask whether the supporting evidence for doing so is sufficient and how such integration may affect the treatment process.

We then turn to Gabriella Hiatt and her essay, A Knotting of Three Bodies: Speech, Symptom, and Psychoanalytic Listening wherein she revisits psychoanalytic skepticism about the efficacy of speech in light of contemporary neurobiological and somatic models that displace therapeutic action from the scene of address. From a Lacanian perspective, the paper rethinks the body in analysis as constituted across the symbolic, imaginary, and real, rather than as an unmediated substrate, and draws on clinical material to argue that repetition, complaint, and the demand for relief are not signs of analytic failure but structural features of treatment. In doing so, it invites a reconsideration of what counts as therapeutic change and of how language, embodiment, and enjoyment are to be understood in analytic practice.

With our next entry, A Difficulty in the Path of Neuropsychoanalysis, John Dall’Aglio responds to Jan de Vos and Lacanian critiques of neuropsychoanalysis more generally by clarifying the author’s commitment to dual-aspect monism, according to which psychoanalysis and neuroscience offer two partial perspectives on the same mental apparatus. Against the charge that neuropsychoanalysis reduces the subject to affective adaptation or psychological coherence, the essay argues that affective consciousness provides no stable ground and that the subject remains bound to repetitive action plans that fail yet persist. In this way, it proposes a non-reductive relation to biology that preserves the place of the real and reopens the question of how psychoanalysis might engage neuroscience without relinquishing the divided subject of the Freudo-Lacanian tradition.

In a second article penned by John Dall’Aglio, Lacan’s Attitude toward the Neuroscience of Freud’s Project: A Neuropsychoanalytic Reading of Seminar VII, the author presses further on the intricacies of the possible relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Dall’Aglio argues that some objections to the neuropsychoanlytic project rest on a misreading of Seminar VII, highlighting the importance of Lacan’s nuanced analysis of Freud’s scientific project as the ground for a topological conception of the brain. Taking Freud’s preliminary work and Lacan’s further elaborations on the subject, he concludes that that neuroscience should not be excluded from psychoanalytic theory and that the task of neuropsychoanalysis is yet to be defined.

Moving forward, we present Indries Krisztián’s intriguing text Rethinking the Unanalyzable, which challenges Lacan’s notorious statement about the un-analyzability of the Japanese. Through linguistic theory, cultural criticism, and clinically grounded analysis where, Krisztián argues that the kana–kanji writing system actually provides a rich terrain for unconscious articulation. Rather than refuting Lacan, the paper transforms his provocation by demonstrating how unconscious processes take shape through the distinctive phonetic, graphic, and polysemous structures of kana-kanji in ways that diverge from alphabetic models. Drawing on Lacan’s later teaching, particularly his concepts of lalangue, the letter, and jouissance, Krisztián argues that Japanese homophony and logographic multivalence do not obstruct the unconscious rather provide it with unique routes of expression: thus he proposes a psychoanalytic ethno-psycholinguistics that positions the exploration of Japanese as an epistemologically generative field that enriches rather than merely adapts to Western theory.

Up next is Soren Larsen’s Maybug Dreams, an essay centered on a close reading of Paul Celan’s poem Frankfurt, September, an intervention on the Jewish intellectual legacy of the postwar cultural industry. Moving through several poignant poetic images and in dialogue with Freud, Kafka, Adorno, and Lacan, Larsen speaks to silence in psychoanalytic ethics as oriented toward unspeakable trauma, showing how Celan’s fractured syntax and enjambments do not merely represent the impossibility of mourning, but rather enact it. Drawing on Lacan’s concepts of lalangue, the letter, and the Real, and weaving in Kafka, Adorno, and Arendt, the author shows how Celan’s poetic fragmentation is not a failure of speech but instead a productive intervention, a kind of models for an analytic listening attuned to trauma’s irreducible remainder.

Our book review section opens with Andrea Streva’s review of Stella do Patrocínio: Falatório/Chatter, a volume edited by Iracema Dulley and Marlon Miguel about Stella do Patrocínio, a Black Brazilian woman confined for nearly thirty years in the Colônia Juliano Moreira psychiatric institution during the military dictatorship. The review situates her falatório (a term she used for her own speech connoting chatter or noise), within the racialized and disciplinary logic of Brazilian psychiatric institutions, arguing that what was dismissed as logorrhea and symptom was in fact structured, coherent, and politically charged discourse rendered inaudible by the absence of a legitimating social register through which it could be recognized. Drawing on Lacan’s theorization of the voice as object a, Anzieu’s concept of the sound envelope, and Canguilhem’s analysis of the norm, the author argues that Do Patrocínio’s voice resists symbolization not due an incoherence on her part, but because the dominant institutional and cultural frameworks could not legitimize her speech. Streva concludes that what is at stake in Do Patrocínio’s falatório is not meaning but audibility itself, and that her speech continues to demand a reckoning with the structures that have historically determined which voices are granted a place to land.

We move forward with Loryn Hatch’s Dolto and the Fruits of Castration, an illuminating engagement with the 2025 retranslation of Françoise Dolto’s Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent, bringing to light the work of a major French analyst largely unknown in the U.S. The review situates Dolto according to key biographical points, namely, a working through of her neurosis in an analysis with René Laforgue, decades of conservative Catholic proselytizing coupled with her radical clinical instincts, and her excision from the IPA alongside Lacan. Also highlighting Dolto’s theoretical clarity, the essay brings to light her young patient Dominique’s transformations via an emphasis on symbolic speech, highlighting Dolto’s clinical work against the backdrop of his inheritance of intergenerational colonial prejudice, arrested maternal sexuality, and unmetabolized paternal loss.

We close this issue with Matthew Oyer’s personal essay entitled (Re)Constructive Technique, the author reviews Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment using the book as an occasion to reflect on Freud’s technique of construction and its place in clinical practice. Central to his argument is that construction, paired with interpretation, arrests the interminable chain of association by authoring a counter-myth: a narrative fragment that speaks the truth of the subject’s desire without claiming mastery over it. For Gorelick, analysis concludes when the analysand assumes its own interminability and takes ethical responsibility for the unconscious it inherits. Oyer reads this framework against his personal clinical formation, noting an absence of conviction and of construction in his own practice, and links this to an uncertainty about bringing analyses to conclusion. Writing in the wake of his father’s death, he reflects on the authorial dimension of construction.

In closing, we thank our Managing Editor, Michelle Boyle for the excellent work and careful attention she devoted to assembling this issue. We are indebted to her skill and editorial eye.