When We Feel Provoked by the Politics of Our Patients with Heribert Blass, Dr. Med. (MD) (Dusseldorf, Germany)

Sep 21, 2025

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“I think that the comparison [between political and erotic passions] is related to the danger of transgressing boundaries from the side of the analyst. It's not totally the same, but it's because of the emotions and the danger of being too much involved as an analyst, if you don't pay attention to what is happening in ourselves with our own emotions, then it can be similar. I think both are important for the psychoanalytic process, to see it as a real relationship - there is this setting where two people in the room meet. They are real persons, but at the same time, a kind of dramatic play fantasy creation coming up from fantasies of the patient, and our own reactions as analysts come into play and gradually just build up the story that is mainly related to the patient's biography, the patient's relationships, and what's going on in her or his life at the moment, but now in relation with us.”

Episode Description: We recognize the passionate political world we are living in and the challenges it introduces into the psychoanalytic relationship. Such moments of intense personal conviction challenge the clinician's capacity to hold those convictions, allow the same for the analysand and still locate an analytic surface with which to find additional meanings. Heribert feels that this creates opportunities for intensity akin to "erotic-sexual impulses." He discusses clinical encounters that include his "revealing my assessment of reality" as an aspect of his authentic self living in relation to the patient. He presents the case of a young man whose effort to locate his analyst's "soft spot" entailed provoking him with his idealization of Hitler. Unlike the patient's father who turned away from him at such times, his analyst tolerated "my required countertransference" which enabled the patient to recognize and tolerate his tender longings that had lived disguised in his sado-masochistic preoccupations.

We close with Heribert, the new IPA president, sharing his vision of psychoanalysis having a presence beyond the couch in universities and the community at large.

Our Guest: Heribert Blass, Dr. Med. (MD), Psychoanalyst and training analyst for adults, children and adolescents, member of the German Psychoanalytic Association and IPA (DPV/IPA), also specialist of psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy, psychiatry, working in private practice in Düsseldorf, Germany. Since August 2025 President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). From 2020 to 20204 President of the European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF). He has published on the image of the father, male identity and sexuality, gender dysphoria and transidentities, aspects of thought function in the psychoanalytic process and in the institution, psychoanalytic supervision, psychoanalysis in society and as editor of a book on Time and the Experience of Time (first in German, the English publication will follow soon) about the exchange of psychoanalysis with other sciences.