This research project is to explore erotic feelings growing from the intersectionality of gender and race and its meanings in counselling relationships. I focus on the relationships between early career East Asian female counsellors and white male clients, which partially comes from my experience as an East Asian female counsellor working with white male clients, and also from my awareness of the phenomenon of East Asian women being fetishised in the Western culture and how it might be played in counselling relationships. This research is trying to go beyond the doer and done-to position and to understand the meaning of the erotic feelings in the relationship and for individuals. Instead of seeing it as a taboo, I value erotic feelings in counselling relationship since it is the space of our unrecognised feelings and a source of creativity. It narrates relational meanings through the deep and powerful bodily force, which hopefully can lead us to meet a person in more complexities. However, these experiences can be really challenging when powerful feelings are elicited and relational dynamics are enacted, especially for early career counsellors. I am researching nascent counsellors’ experiences because I am curious about how our emerging identities as counsellors are shaped by deep interpersonal encounters. The term “nascent” also carries the meaning of “birth”, “possibility”, and “vitality”. This research will be based on the reflexive-relational approach to phenomenology and psychosocial inquiry built on the basis of phenomenology. I hope this approach can bridge the lived emotional experiences and social power, the inner and outer worlds. Through deep interpersonal exploration, I hope the unspoken could be spoken about, the tension could be held, and the opportunity of meeting a person in full complexities could be clearer. This is the sense of "crisis" I am working through in my research.

Kierkegaard eloquently captures a deeply complex and contradictory aspect of anxiety: “There is something that is not dissention and strife, for there is nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that at the same time it is anxiety”. Kierkegaard’s ‘profound secret’ anticipates a psychosocial phenomenon that has shadowed our lives into the 21st century: this Nothing that is seemingly impossible to strive against because we ‘sense’ it rather than know/understand it. We are confronted with an aporia, an internal contradiction, offered the cold, false, and placating comfort of ‘there is nothing to be anxious about’, all the while knowing that indeed there is ‘a Nothing to be anxious about’. This is a Nothing embedded deeper into our psyche, a yawning abyss, that we can, at one (conscious) level be innocent of and have no strategy to strive against the anxieties. Here, perhaps, is one of psychoanalysis’ greatest gifts – its capacity to reveal the Nothing, with all its anxious-forming attributes, and present a different type of knowledge to strive against it. To work towards a graspable idea of these complexities, the focus of this paper will be the dream as an epistemic metaphor of the Nothing, drawing on concepts from Ella Sharpe (notably her work on metaphor) and Jacques Lacan (with a focus on his ideas on anxiety).

To mirror the themes of the conference, the issues at hand would seem to be the stress, depression, and anxiety that emerge from the Nothing, leaving us bereft of actions and comfort; yet in this seemingly hopeless place we find resilience to strive towards something stronger than coping (as Rhianna put it, something akin to love).

This paper critically examines melancholia through the dual lenses of Freudian and Lacanian theory, exploring its transformation from a natural process of mourning to a contemporary clinical condition. It aims to trace the experience of melancholia, by examining the presence and absence of palpable fabrics in the conceptual understanding of psychoanalysis. By unpacking the work of Sigmund Freud on Mourning and Melancholia (1917), the work twists and tangles with the relational schools and Lacanian framework to construct an understanding of pathological mourning.

The crisis of present times with increasing numbers of people experiencing clinical depression, this paper helps to understand the uneasy grappling with the neurosis and ‘the psychotic’ side of it. With carefully turning the tables from the burden of an overarching absence of the lost object, how it could manifest as an excessive presence, this study closely examines the concepts given by Freud, Klein, Lacan and other theorists. The investigation suggests that in the trajectory of depressive disorder, the ‘working through’ is denoted, not by forgetting the lost object but to find the right way to commemorate the loved-lost object (Hook, 2018).

The paper further situates this theoretical discourse within the context of today’s global mental health crisis, where rising rates of depression signal a collective struggle with the inability to mourn and commemorate loss in a socially and psychologically adaptive manner. By reinterpreting melancholia, this study invites a reconsideration of how we understand and treat loss in an increasingly fragmented, post- covid and crisis-ridden world.

Key words: mourning, psychoanalysis, remembering, loss

The paper’s argument is based on a comparative review of two recently published books: ‘Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead – Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive’ from Julie Reshe, and Gideon Lev’s ‘Spiritually Sensitive Psychoanalysis’. While the previous one presents an explicitly atheist psychoanalytic approach, the latter’s theoretical framework and therapeutic guidelines are based on certain spiritual beliefs. Although both authors trace back their framings to Freud and Lacan, however they have very different readings of them. In order to address these basic differences in interpretation, the paper shows how certain notions applied in both concepts, such as ‘selfless ego,’ ‘self-devotion,’ ‘salvation,’ ‘illusion,’ and ‘saint,’ express very diverse meanings in the context of atheist and spiritually sensitive psychoanalysis. Analyzing these notion-related differences it raises a number of crucial questions as well. What can be the goal of psychotherapy according to these framings? How can the ideal therapist be described along these understandings? What is the meaning of therapeutic intimacy through these perspectives? In our age, which is increasingly characterized by the deconstruction of social patterns and collective references, subjects are urged, in many ways and due to diverse pressures, to invent and continuously (re-)constitute themselves in order to better reflect on their individual challenges and the various social crises around them. The paper claims that the examined psychoanalytic framings, though in mostly contradictory forms, are striving to provide ‘contemporary’ answers to these individual concerns, sufferings, and trials.