A new paradigm for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

This article seeks to propose a reflection on the immediate future of psychoanalysis. Winnicott's Third Way, in England, and Lebovici, in France, sought to reform psychoanalysis by focusing on empathic observation and enactment, but reconciling it with the mythical paradigm of the Freudian-phantasmatic model, which created an impasse. In order to resume its development, psychoanalysis needs to carry out a scientific revolution proposed by, among others, Stern and the Boston group in the United States with the theory of inter-subjectivity, and by Coimbra de Matos, in Portugal, with the theory of the New Relation. Continuing along this path, we propose that intimate human relations, and their transformation, constitute the new paradigm of current psychoanalysis. To access this new object, psychoanalysis preferably uses the methodology of inter-intentional observation and intervention. Thus from the quality of the "foreintentional" OU "forward-intentional" attunement, from the analytic pair, there are often spontaneous complementary intuitions, empathic enactments and future-oriented actions that result in new forms of intimate relationship in daily life, new social relations in the world and new meanings for life. This is a proposal that integrates the discoveries of neuroscience and psycho-sociology in psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis in the other sciences.