Abstract

This presentation brings together a series of short vignettes and clinical anecdotes that illustrate what I call La Tensa Calma, a South American term that describes the strange way that emotional experience feels off during difficult political moments when the atmosphere is tense but, at the same time, life carries on as though everything were calm. We will explore the affects that attend the tensa calma as well as the variety of ways that it shows up in psychotherapy sessions. Referring both to clinical practice and to examples drawn from the news, I elaborate how the tensa calma permeates the culture and is in no small part a feature of what I have called Reality.AI. AI plays a big role in the tensa calma because of the way it presents information in a decontextualized sequence of statistically relevant facts. Fruitful but without pith, AI presents detail without the thickness of history or experience, without wrestling with what AI is able to name but not feel—which is akin to the kind of atemporal dissociation that the tensa calma mandates.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Identify affects that emerge in the context of the tensa calma and discuss

interventions to address this form of dissociation in psychotherapy.

2. Evaluate relative degrees of stress that attend moments of psychosocial

standstill in the political surround and develop strategies to address them with patients.

3. Describe how AI constructs a new kind of reality and an attendant form of

dissociation, with the goal of addressing it clinically.

Biography

Stephen Hartman, PhD, is a co-editor in chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and an emeritus editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. In addition to co-chairing the Relational Track at the New York University Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, he teaches at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and the Sociedad Méxicana de Psicoanalistas Relacionalistas. His edited volume, Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Generating a Field, grew out of his commitment to experimental writing inspired by his mentor, Muriel Dimen. Stephen has written extensively about the interrelation of psychic and political experience in the throes of gender, sexuality, technology, and the psychoanalytic frame. He practices in New York and San Francisco commuting via Zoom and can often be found writing on the roof of his home in Mexico City.

References

Hartman, S. (2019). Hashtag mania or misadventures in the #ultrapsychic. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 20, 84–100.

Hartman, S. (2024). The stork. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 34, 501–521.

Hartman, S. (2026). On noise and noiselessness. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Advance online publication.

Abstract

The frame is the “home” or base of the psychoanalytic process, which involves a person seeking help and the analyst’s offerings in response. The analyst has always been responsible for assuring safety. When in-person work was a given, the warmth and privacy of the consulting room were often equated with safety and care. In contrast, I will discuss the dark side of the frame: the danger that the in-person setting evokes for some adults carrying childhood trauma due to abuse or neglect. It was the reluctance of some patients, post-pandemic, to stop teletherapy and return to my office that alerted me to the danger that in-person work posed, and to the defense that the “screen” offered. Bleger (1967) saw that people dominated by a primitive organization, as some who suffered trauma are, embed that organization in the frame for stabilization.

A change in the frame breaks into this stabilization, forcing early anxieties into the open. While challenging for both patient and analyst, this may provide a means of living trauma anew, toward healing. I will use vignettes to illustrate these phenomena, including the disorganizing impact of my in-person “otherness” on some people who had only worked online, and bodily fragmentation due to the rupture of a stabilizing frame.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the varied components, human and inanimate, that make up the

psychoanalytic frame.

2. Describe the stabilizing function of the frame, and the way that changes in the frame can cause eruptions of early anxieties in some patients.

3. Identify the possible limitations of teletherapy in work with some adults who have histories of childhood trauma.

Biography

Lisa Director, Ph.D. is faculty and clinical consultant at the New York

University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is also on the faculties of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center.  She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.  She has published and presented widely about a variety of subjects including the psychodynamics of chronic substance use, relational innovations in technique, the role of the analyst-as-catalyst, language and expressivity, and the psychoanalytic frame.  She is in private practice in New York.

References

Ehrlich, L. T. (2025). Teleanalysis Does Not Have to be “Muted”: On the Crucial Role of the Analyst’s Internal Frame in any Setting. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 73(2), 153-183.

Levine, H. (2024). On the question of the internal frame. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 105(2), 234-241.

Trub, L. (2024). The elephant in the room: Will psychoanalysis survive the screen? American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 84(2), 203-228.

Bleger, J. (1967). Psycho-analysis of the psycho-analytic frame. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 48, 511-519.