In the wake of profound cultural change, the traditional image of the father has been destabilized, prompting renewed psychoanalytic reflection. No longer confined to authority alone, the paternal figure is now expected to embody both care and limit. What psychic space does the father occupy in the life of the child? In this episode, Heribert Blass explores fatherhood through a contemporary psychoanalytic lens.

Drawing on clinical experience, interdisciplinary research, and cultural observation, he outlines a model of committed paternity that integrates emotional presence with symbolic function. From early play to Oedipal conflict, the father's task is to protect, to differentiate, and to support the child's path toward autonomy. Rather than fading, he emerges as a complex figure situated at the intersection of intimacy, separation, and symbolic function—and essential to the child's inner world.

Heribert Blass, medical doctor, is a psychoanalyst for adults, children, and adolescents; a training and supervising analyst of the German Psychoanalytic Association and the IPA; also a specialist in psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy, and psychiatry, working in private practice in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is the president-elect of the IPA and served as president of the European Psychoanalytic Federation from 2020 to 2024. His publications cover a wide range of topics, including male identity and sexuality, the image of the father, supervision, generativity both in clinical work and within psychoanalytic institutions, boundary violations, the relationship between internal and external reality, psychoanalysis and society (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic), as well as time and the experience of time.

You can download a copy of the paper here

This Podcast Series, published by the International Psychoanalytical Association, is part of the activities of the IPA Communication Committee and is produced by the IPA Podcast Editorial Team.

Co-Editors: Gaetano Pellegrini and Nicolle Zapien.

Editing and Post-Production: Massimiliano Guerrieri.

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The current social, political and historical context offers many difficult challenges. We have experienced up close and from a distance awareness of a remarkable number of challenges including the wars, political unrest, growing socioeconomic inequities, climate catastrophe, and human and animal suffering. These times are also marked by polarized thinking, including among analysts, candidates and in our communities. An application of a psychoanalytically-informed method that rests on psychoanalytic clinical theory but focuses on group experiences of psycho-historical conflict as it continues in the present is offered as a means to facilitate deep and moving change when there is toxic polarization.

In this episode, Dr. Harriet Wolfe presents a unique application of psychoanalytic thinking. She describes an interdisciplinary group that is international, intergenerational and diverse that meets periodically to apply analytic thinking to intractable large scale historical group traumas. This method, called the International Dialogue Initiative includes psychoanalysts but also others (e.g. economists, lawyers, diplomats, historians) who share stories and deeply listen with the purpose of gaining perspective on unmanageable feelings through exploring cases of traumatic residues. While others, including Freud have theorized application of psychoanalysis to groups, this particular use is novel and important in today’s times and speaks to how psychoanalysis can be truly psychoanalytic and at the same time be applied to political and social issues.

Harriet Wolfe, M.D., is President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Her scholarly interests include clinical applications of psychoanalytic research, organizational processes, female development, and therapeutic action. She has co-authored a number of psychoanalytically informed guided activity workbooks for children, parents and teachers to help children cope with natural and manmade disasters. She has a private practice of psychoanalysis, and individual and couple’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy in San Francisco. This Podcast Series, published by the International Psychoanalytical Association, is part of the activities of the IPA Communication Committee and is produced by the IPA Podcast Editorial Team.

Co-Editors: Gaetano Pellegrini and Nicolle Zapien.

Editing and Post-Production: Massimiliano Guerrieri.

To stay informed about the latest podcast releases, please sign up today.

A subtitled version of this podcast is available on our YouTube channel:

You can download a copy of the paper here.

What happens when the analytic setting—built on confidentiality and silence—meets the institutional demands of psychoanalytic training? Can the frame of supervision truly preserve the integrity of the analytic pact, or does it inevitably put it at risk?

In this episode, Ellen Sparer explores a central paradox in psychoanalytic formation: the tension between the confidentiality of analytic work and the structural requirements of supervision. Drawing from her experience at the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute, she asks whether supervision risks undermining the very foundation of the analytic situation—what Freud, in An Outline of Psychoanalysis, described as a pact in which “the patient’s sick ego promises us the most complete candour…” while “we, on the other hand, assure him of the strictest discretion.”

Through reflections on André Green, José Bleger, and Freud’s concept of disavowal, Sparer examines what she calls a “noisy contradiction”—a situation in which the analyst-in-formation becomes both observer and observed, and where the silence essential to the analytic space is disturbed by institutional structure. She invites us to consider the Institute’s role as a symbolic third—present, structuring, yet potentially unsettling—and to ask whether we can live with this paradox without disavowing its presence.

Rather than resolving the contradiction, this episode engages with it directly, as Ellen Sparer offers a nuanced and courageous inquiry into a space of ethical tension, institutional inheritance, and potential transformation at the core of analytic formation.

Ellen Sparer is a training analyst at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and former Director of the Paris Institute of Psychoanalysis, a role she held until March 2025. She has served as co-chair of the Applicant Societies Committee of the IPA, where she contributed to the evaluation of emerging psychoanalytic groups seeking IPA recognition. She is also an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, where she’s part of the Education Section, and a scientific advisor for the Jahrbuch of Psychoanalysis. From 2009 to 2019, she was on the editorial board of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse. Most recently, she was elected to the IPA Board as a European representative.

Her scientific work and publications focus on the unconscious ego, supervision, training, the frame, and ethics. She has also written on countertransference phenomena, including the function of the analyst’s dream in the treatment process.

This Podcast Series, published by the International Psychoanalytical Association, is part of the activities of the IPA Communication Committee and is produced by the IPA Podcast Editorial Team.

Co-Editors: Gaetano Pellegrini and Nicolle Zapien.

Editing and Post-Production: Massimiliano Guerrieri.