After two years of frustration and forced separation, the Comparative Clinical Methods Association (CCM) workshops for 2022 will be in person - within the walls of the Vatican City at the Instituto Maria Santissima Bambina - a convent spectacularly located just across from St Peter's Basilica.

Work begins at 2 p.m. on Friday7th and ends at 1 p.m. on Sunday 9th October.

We aim to match that the sublime view of of the piazza, St Peter's Basilica and the buildings around the square, seen above from the roof of the convent, to a unique personal and clinical experience. It will be guided by the new principles of discussing and reflecting on psychoanalytic clinical material with mutual learning that the group has been working on and which is now coming to fruition after 20 years.

The CCM method focuses on the central tasks the psychoanalyst takes on in every psychoanalysis - how to infer patient's unconscious repetitions, driven from their past, and how successfully to interrupt and modify them to give a patient more freedom.

Whether we know them or not, we all make suppositions about how to work. We have no choice but to enact those suppositions, consciously and, of course unconsciously, in the everyday work. But what suppositions are we making that are crucial to psychoanalytic work and how can we become aware and refine those we use?

CCM was built on work in the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) beginning in 2002. The core proposition is that there are several very different and apparently successful ways to work psychoanalytically and we can learn a lot about our own work by looking deeply at the work of another clinician whose work is different to ours - much more than we gain by imposing our ideas on him or her, whether out loud or just silently, as happens so often. So, for many years the CCM group has worked to find a method and new set of concepts that avoid judgment and de facto supervision of colleagues and instead to allow everyone to explore what a presenter actually does and be stimulated by it.

In the last few years, forcing ourselves to put our thinking in writing for a book we hope to publish in 2023, we have found that the way to make sense of psychoanalytic work is to look at our suppositions in action - specifically to ask how do we suppose that we infer the unconscious meaning and repetitions in a patient's material in the analytic situation and what do we suppose we should then do and how does that work? .

In Rome we will present the simple schema that is the outcome of our 20-year work and describe how it has now resolved to a small set of precise and highly practical questions which help to specify and assist the particular mode of doing psychoanalysis any psychoanalyst chooses to adopt.

The pandemic was a massive assault on the psychoanalytic setting. Potentially it became lethal to meet people in the same room. During it, some analysts took to remote working, others, as most in Germany, stayed in their consulting rooms throughout. Now everywhere many have gone back, some have partially and some not at all. What happens now if a patient wants to move to another city or if their child or partner get ill and want to Zoom in? Or if the analyst does? What suppositions do we all have about all this and will psychoanalysis be better or worse, strengthened or weakened, as a result? Answers require analysis of the core suppositions we have been working on.

The Rome meeting will mainly consist of moderated small group clinical workshops discussing a presenter's method of doing psychoanalysis in one case (usually through two sessions) in depth using the CCM method. But we will have plenaries, grounded in the small group experience, to look at how the pandemic and its assault has or not changed things. Because we need to meet in small groups for a significant amount of the time, the meeting is limited to 50 registrants.

One group will mainly use Italian as its language, the others will be in English.