Articles

The paper aims to address cynicism as a variant of cruelty in thinking. Cynicism would be,on the one hand, in a kinship relation with narcissistic perversion, distortion of reality and operativethinking and on the other hand, in a relation of defensive opposition with mourning, ideal, beauty andpoetic function. A particular relation of cynicism with the mental space and time is set forth, in anaction of "contraction" of the la...Read more

This work explores some aspects of the roots and development of our psychic functioning: anunstable Gestalt, generating a need for certainty, and each subject’s multiple identity.The author has as a reference, the Freud’s work ‘The Uncanny’’. Freud describes ‘Unheimlich’ as anobscure feeling, a type of fright that leads back to something that has been known a long time ago andwhich reappears, arousing horror and ...Read more

his paper explores the author’s perspective on intuition in psychoanalytic practice,expanding on his previous study of misunderstandings in the interpretation of Bion's work. Bion’semphasis on revealing the non-visible aspects of psychic reality can lead to misinterpretations when hisideas are read too literally, neglecting the role o observable elements. While intuition is a crucial toolfor accessing the patient's psychic...Read more

In the present work, the author, following the thread of the concept of psychoanalytic intuition, proposes a dialogue between the perspective of Wilfred Ruprecht Bion and those of some post-Bionian psychoanalysts (Howard B. Levine, Thomas H. Ogden, Antonino Ferro, Rudy Vermote, Judy K. Eekhoff), highlighting in particular mental processes such as observation, intuition, reverie and transformation (alpha function). How can we t...Read more

Intuition, sometimes defined as ‘instinctive knowledge’, is by no means an innate instinct. We acquire it in the field of the early dyad and develop it further in later phases, well into adulthood. In the analytical field it becomes an important, if sometimes deceptive, element. The paper applies this interpersonal model of intuition to the cinematic artwork and its analytical interpretation from a specific methodological ...Read more

n this paper, the author explores a special type of emotional experiences which is difficult to process it, to contain and dream about, and sometimes even impossible. These experiences bring forth death anxiety and multiple defences for the one who lives them, but also for those who are beside him/her. What is specific to this working-through towards the anxiety of death is related to the setting and the place where the analyt...Read more

This work explores some aspects of the attempt at subjective prediction, taking into account the inevitable oscillation between physiological and pathological modes of functioning, which to some extent are common to all human beings, but which beyond a certain level of regression or functional excitement can unbalance the reality-ego structure.

This year’s theme, proposed by the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis, refers to the phenomenon of intuition in its dual meaning: both as a means of psychic knowledge and as an extremely valuable working tool for the psychoanalyst. In the Oxford Dictionary, intuition is defined as: “the ability to know something by using your feelings rather than considering the facts; an idea or a strong feeling that something is true alt...Read more

This issue of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis is cantered on the theme of Intuition. Although not a concept specific to psychoanalytic theory or clinical work, intuition, as a psychic phenomenon, is quite present in the analyst’s work. The articles in this issue offer various approaches to intuition, with clinical vignettes serving as clarifying examples of how intuition can be used in the analytic process.

One of the topics proposed for debate for the Scientific Seminars of the Romanian Society of Psychoanalysis for the year 2024 was psychoanalytic empathy. Aside from the texts of Bion and Kohut on the subject, proposed as handouts for the discussion, a particular attention received the book on psychoanalytic empathy written by Stefano Bolognini. I propose here a review of this book as a valuable textbook for all analysts, begin...Read more

Fate and Destiny are not terms included in psychoanalytic language, in metapsychology, although from the very beginning of the discovery of the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud was impacted by what repeats itself, what cannot be analysed, what overflows over generations of individual life. From Freud to contemporary psychoanalysis, the author attempts to delimit these concepts in order to reveal their significance for the individual...Read more

In psychopathology the concept of borderline patients in the early nineties is completely updated nowadays. The clinic of psychoanalytical psychotherapy shows that, today, patients suffer more and more from historical and social fractions. Hundred years ago, the early psychoanalysts thought that sexual liberation would help for more individual freedom but even after the 1968 movement, patients still suffer in the same way. The...Read more

The author offers an overview of the definitions of the concept of narcissism as presented by various authors. From the classic myth of Narcissus, enamored with or frightened by his own reflection, to the authors of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, narcissism has been approached from diverse perspectives. One such perspective is that of the “lyrical generation” or the “boomer chi...Read more

So called Narcissism has a multilayer structure. It' a kind of “onion”. Each model , historically emerged, enlights one or more layers of this structure. We have considered main models or hypotheses i.e freudian, kleinian, Kernberg, Kohut, Mitchell, Gabbard, Lash and so on. Some models are more explicit, others more implicit. All models have their usefullness and their limitations. All models have their inspiration. We pay...Read more

Among the structuring aspects of narcissism and the more conflictual, problematic dimensions that anticipate the psychopathological developments, this paper focuses on the aspects of drive and the destruction of the reality-testing function, which ultimately lead to disturbances in thought and relationships. I develop the mechanism of narcissistic syndrome formation, attempting to capture its formation phases frame by frame, u...Read more

Starting from the myth of Narcissus and Echo (specifically the version in Ovid's Metamorphoses), I will explore themes that have been less examined in psychoanalytic reflections on narcissism: the role of Echo (not mentioned in Freud’s index), the violent circumstances of Narcissus's birth, the impact of prophecies and curses, Narcissus’s despair, and his transformation into a flower. Narcissism appears as a choice rather ...Read more

Before delving into the analysis of Sophocles’ text, the author sets out to define the mythological background that underpins it. Thus, the first part of this study focuses on what precedes the character of Oedipus, much like how every human is born within a transgenerational chain. Oedipus’ birth is positioned not only within the succession of generations but also within the internal, fantasized scene of his immediate pre...Read more

Narcissism is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon shaped by early experiences and with a significant impact on a person's relationships and overall well-being. Psychoanalysis invites us to a more comprehensive approach to narcissism that includes both individual and social dimensions and provides a valuable framework for understanding and treating narcissistic disorder, allowing patients to explore unconscious conflicts and ...Read more

The article deals with the ethnopsychiatric clinical practice as an investigative and group therapy apparatus, as it has been carried out in France for over 30 years. The author, a psychologist and psychotherapist, briefly presents her encounter with ethnopsychiatry. Trained in Romania, where she practised for 16 years, the author immigrated to France and began a second apprenticeship in ethnopsychiatry with Professor Nathan, ...Read more

This study explores the multifaceted nature of burnout, delving into its roots in individual vulnerabilities and institutional practices under the lens of sociocultural and ideological frameworks. Historically linked to professions with intense public interaction, the burnout phenomenon is recognized through several symptoms, such as exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy, greatly impacting both personal wellbeing and p...Read more

The author examines the concept of daydreaming as a means of transitional phenomenon between himself and his analysand, Demeter. He proposes that daydreaming functions as a transitional phenomenon and protective mechanism, enabling Demeter to endure intense emotions that arise due to the analyst's silence during sessions and absence on weekends. Additionally, daydreams fulfill both Demeter's conscious and unconscious desires f...Read more

The article proposes an analysis of the narcissistic social architecture through the spectral light of the contemporary Zeitgeist, a sifting through the thinking filter of psychoanalysis, regarding the internal attributes that motivate the orientation of the collective mind towards certain accents of the current ideology. By the narcissistic matrix, I am referring to the structure and organization of human experience, animated...Read more

This work aims to address the psychogenetic aspect of narcissism, the characteristics of this psychic dimension, and the destinies of primary narcissism in structuring the individual. The paper mentions a series of typical challenges in the transference relationship with patients marked by archaic narcissism. Additionally, it describes specific unconscious countertransference reactions in relationships with these types of pati...Read more

The author aims to examine the intricacies of the experience of perfection by drawing on clinical material provided by a patient who remained confined for years in an imperative of internal perfection, leading to various obsessive defense mechanisms that limited her connections with the external world. The author revisits what in Freud’s work on primary narcissism is associated with understanding the need for perfection but ...Read more

The Book of Disquiet of Fernando Pessoa is about the suffering of Bernardo Soares. Bernardo’s parents died before his age of three. Soares is a fictional creation and does coincide with what Pessoa experienced. Soares captures Pessoa's dynamics: the identification with a dead object is portrayed in his poetry and expressed as negative narcissism. Soares appears as a hypersensitive person who is bombarded by perceptions and e...Read more

In the attempts to understand narcissism, starting from Freud’s introduction of this concept, ther e are several perspectives, all beginning with the fragile image reflected under the pressure of seeking truth, presumed reality beyond what is reflected. What is the path to truth? Is truth the result of discovery or construction? Who has access to truth? Who can testify to truth? These are questions I embarked on alongside It...Read more

Narcissism is an inner self-image requiring an external confirmation. This is more evident in gender identity, as two clinical cases will support. The first is that of a young man accepting with difficulty his homosexuality. He was in individual therapy with the author, in private practice, for several years. The outcome was satisfying. The second case was followed in a psychiatric day care, where he was admitted for unclear r...Read more

Reformulating Freud’s hypothesis that primary narcissism has a protective function for life, S. Nacht attributes to it the role of “guardian of life”. Primary narcissism, “an absolute affective climate”, is indispensable for the construction of the human being and life itself. According to us, the concept of “narcissism as guardian of life” belongs to the “common representational treasure”. It represents, for...Read more

The theme of this year’s issue, Narcissism, tries to capture the multiples facets of its manifestations in our life and furthermore, all over the world. Nowadays, we live disturbing times, with ongoing wars and many other conflicts around us. The “Narcissism of minor differences”, inevitable in any group, the intolerance for differentiations, for other opinions and solutions, lacks of differentiations, the illusion of su...Read more

Narcissism continues to pose a significant challenge in the realm of psychoanalysis. In this collection of articles, authors delve into the distinction between primary narcissism, characterized by a primitive world devoid of objects, and secondary narcissism, marked by the internalization of the object. They explore the influence of the environment in fostering secondary narcissism, the intricate connection between narcissism ...Read more

The article tries to analyse the reactions of some of the characters in Michel Houellebecq’s "Submission" to the installation of an imaginary Islamic dictatorship in today’s France. The approach draws on defense (AE) mechanisms, as described in Jerome Blackman’s book "101 Defenses. How the Mind Shields Itself". Houellebecq’s novel is emblematic of the insidious ways in which ideological discourse is instilled in people...Read more

In order to illustrate the repetition compulsion, “this eternal return of the same”, Freud evoked Torquato Tasso’s poem, La Gerusalemme liberata19, and the fact that Tancred kills Clorinda, at war, unaware that under the enemy’s armor right in front of him was the woman he loved. After her burial, Tancred enters a magic forest, he slashes with his sword a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clori...Read more

The article follows the destiny of the fusion of drives and de-fusion of drives within the Shakespearean character Hamlet. Drawing from Benno Rosenberg’s theory about the mediating object, André Green’s hypothesis about Hamlet’s fraternity with Ophelia, and Catherine Chabert’s perspective on war as an expression of fraternal rivalry, the role of Ophelia is outlined as an object of drive intertwining.

The shock of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and the helplessness and disorientation we feel as contemporaries reminds us of Sigmund Freud's commentary on the outbreak of the First World War in Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod (2015), which underlines the experience of disillusionment. But our perplexity is different now, as are our illusions, the collapse of which we must contend with today. We lived in an Automa...Read more

Based on the novel “Fractured Soul” by Akira Mizubayashi (2019) which relates the loss of a father for a young child and the destruction of this father’s violin, the author reflects on the question of mourning and trauma from the perspective of symbolic repair of lost origins and unconscious transgenerational mandates. The child became a violin maker and spent his entire life trying to restore his father’s broken violi...Read more

This paper offers some clinical illustrations which show the way the specialist with a psychoanalytical approach, works with the patients suffering by different somatic pathology, trying to manage their anxieties, during the entire period of hospitalization. In a general hospital- not a psychiatric one- the body is the most exposed to a lot of maneuvers and investigations and it represents the main point of interest from the m...Read more

Time, especially the various temporal dimensions in the psychoanalytic process, serves as a crucial reference point for psychoanalysts. Whether it involves accompanying the patient in the inscription of subjective time within historicity, the rhythms of interaction between analyst and patient, or the inherent differences found in the consulting room between the patient’s time and the analyst’s time – whether synchronized...Read more

Psychoanalysis is not only a theory of the mind, a method of studying mental processes and a form of psychotherapy. It can be said to have founded critical theory and to still be an authoritative voice of it. On the one hand, it can be argued that there are no essential differences between individual and social psychology; on the other hand, after Freud, psychoanalysis has made great progress in the study of groups, for exampl...Read more

The author aims to link the origin of war within the human psyche to Freud’s discovery in the context of the second theory of drives: it concerns the death drive. While conflict is a part of a peaceful psychic state – to the extent that peace presupposes the democratic coexistence of differentiated elements of the self and objects – war is underpinned by the omnipotence of a part of the psyche that seeks to impose its la...Read more

The theme of this issue is anchored in the disorientation and the lack of possibility for a prognosis regarding the evolution of the current socio-political context. The psychoanalytic perspective on reality, as revealed in the articles published in this issue, seeks to explain on-going phenomena and thereby reduce the disorientation felt on a social level. Even though war no longer dominates the majority of news space, even t...Read more

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This article proposes to bring into discussion the dynamics of mind maps, the mental positions involved in conflict management and the mechanisms that operate at both individual and collective levels, with relevance to the ways that members of a group, but also groups, one towards the other, develop at the level of relational transactions. The vector of orientation in the proposed analysis focuses on the nature and functioning...Read more

In 2009, at the CPLF Congress, Paris, we were delighted to work on this complex and essential, but not so easy to approach, theme in psychoanalysis, l`Après-coup, Bernard Chervet and Jacques André being the key-speakers of the Congress. Not so easy to translate in all psychoanalytic languages this Freudian concept, Nachträglichkeit so hard to describe and to clarify the psychic process involved in it, and especially the sem...Read more

The Author considers the group psychological dimension in war, some vicissitudes of destructiveness in it and the reparation after it. The individual and group transgenerational traumas provoked by wars hinder reparation which needs a long working through in order to make possible reconciliation.

To see, to be seen, to see that you are seen, these are experiences that are composed and de-composed in a succession of excitations, identifications, projections, wounds, grievances. They are experiences that may follow the path of processes of elaboration, or can turn into fixed, traumatic landmarks, which become markers of identity. Experiences of psychic construction are composed and de-composed around the gaze, starting f...Read more

Freud considered the death drive as the intrapsychic cause of wars, but usually, a non-aggression pact exists between humans. The evolution of civilization further limits the violence that can hurt. Concerning the Ukrainian war, it takes place between two countries from the Slavic brotherhood: one, Ukraine wants to adopt Western values, the other, Russia aspires to the glory of the former USSR. The fraternal relationship sugge...Read more

Psychoanalysis has founded critical theory and still is an authoritative voice of it. The thesis that I propose in this article, with a view to 'updating' Freud's diagnosis of the malaise of civilization, is that both individual and social suffering arise from mechanisms of splitting that are used to cope with anxiety and fear. The spiritual needs of individuals and groups are sacrificed to the need for security and the satisf...Read more

The paper proposes a psychoanalytical investigation of the Romanian group psyche in Prof. Dr. Vamir Volkan’s terms and conceptual descriptions of the large-group identity, historical trauma, and undigested trauma. The analysis addresses certain phenomena witnessed in the Romanian society during recent decades generated by opening the borders once the country joined European Union, the global lockdown during the Sars-Cov-2 pa...Read more

I examine human destructiveness looked at from the angle of a destruction of thought process which leads to different forms of destruction: external, internal, social, political and even bodily. The proposed clinical material concerns an analytic work with a psychosomatic patient.

Starting from the question posed almost a century ago to Freud, "Why war?", and to which he formulated the first ideas about the causes of war, the current international context brings back into question the need to complete the dialogue between Einstein and the father of psychoanalysis, to review and update the understanding of the phenomenon from our perspective, in accordance with the knowledge of the 21st century.

The theme of this issue is closely linked to the current socio-political context, namely the issue of war. War, like any conflict, brings along with it the death drive and its manifestations of destructiveness, aggression and hatred. The traumatic consequences of the experience of war affect the psychological functioning of the individual. Those directly involved in the conflict are not the only to suffer, as those who feel th...Read more

With the analysis of the joint demise of Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Charlotte ( in 1942, the present article concludes a series of short essays dedicated to double suicides of famous European writers. It proposes a parallel between the tragic event and the suicide pact evoked in “The Post Office Girl”, the anticipatory novel published posthumously and written by the Austrian author long before his death. Some of the...Read more

Radu Clit is a Romanian psychoanalyst who lives in Paris, France, since 1993. In 1999, he received his PhD from the Sorbonne, with the paper “Totalitarian Framework and Narcissistic Functioning”, published in Romania in 2004. His most recent work, “From Trauma to Writing. A Viewpoint on Herta Müller’s Literary Creation”, was written in 2018, and the author translated it into Romanian and published it in Romania in ...Read more

This article has its starting point in a clinical situation in which I found that the way I was listening to the patient had changed. Starting from there, I attempted a theoretical excursion to find the answer to the question: “What happened?”. This article is about the milestones of this personal journey. Listening is a specific theme of psychoanalytic work, but is easily found in multiple cultural facets. Listening can b...Read more

In this paper, I explore phantasy in relation to the drive and work out the hypothesis that phantasy is part of the requirement of psychic labour that the drive demands in order to subjectify the body. What distinguishes drive from instinct is the phantasy of relation: it emerges from the body, it learns from the body the procedures of functioning with internal and external reality, for the Ego before being the Ego is the bodi...Read more

Disruptive behavioural pathology is considered an indication of antisocial personality disorder or a precipitating or triggering factor of an Axis I psychiatric disorder. Psychodynamic psychiatry, which originates from the psychoanalytic explanatory view, takes into account the complex aetiopathology of the violent dysbehavioural syndrome. The present article describes the pathology of impulsivity, when and whether it is a str...Read more

The psychoanalytic theory attaches various meanings to silences. Silences can express wishes, such as the wish to return to a lost paradise in which all wishes will be fulfilled without uttering a word, or that a new experience of calm and secure holding will revive in the arms of the life-giver without the need to express this wish verbally. It is also possible that the silence acts-out a desire for a mature intimate experien...Read more

This article relates the notions of sensoriality/symbolization and individuality/groupality to writer Heinrich Böll’s modes of expression in Group Portrait with Lady. Its concreteness, sought by the writer behind each word, is related to sensoriality, recollection, phantasy and affectivity, using Freud’s view of the concrete imagery of dreamlike figuration as a reference. Because Böll imagines, starting with the title (G...Read more

Thematically, this issue of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis is the continuation of the previous issue’s works, with both issues being subsumed under the heading Groups and Institutions. In this issue, the authors analyse the group and the institution as actors of psychological life, questioning the functioning of the small group in the parent-child or analyst-analysand relationship, the collective groupality of the to...Read more

The topic of the article aims to address, from the perspective of some theoretical considerations, how the nature of human interactions is metamorphosing, transforming, when interfaced with current realities. We will make a few references starting from the meanings arising from the linguistic semantics of the terms, then going through the semiotics and logic of functioning of the binomial “individual-group”, which vectors ...Read more

This article explores the representational power of the myth put forward by Freud in his work „Totem and tabu” as well as its function in establishing the evolution towards language and henceforth humanity, understood as the ability to contain the violence of the primitive drives by binding them. It also examines the parallel between the inner (psychosis) and the outer limits (totalitarianism, burnout) of this process and ...Read more

Psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic institution are inseparable from analytical training and practice. However, the two terms are not equivalent. Psychoanalysis refers firstly – or should refer – to the work of the analyst, in their office – their own – space, with their analysts. However, the analyst belongs to another space: a professional group, a community, respectively an association or a society – an institut...Read more

The space-time unit, as the basis of institutional construction, a place and a time in which anxieties, conflicts, the thanatic impulses or the drives of the Eros can be updated, conceived, integrated, is in a relationship of dependence with the context, a context in which it grants its functionality. This conditioning highlights the fragility of the space-time unit, under the pressure of multiple affiliations, of the polysema...Read more

Regression is considered as an important outcome of the beginning of a therapeutic group. Sometime, collective regression can be observed only after the group has gone through the first phase. It is the case of a group psychodrama group of children, organized by the author of this paper in a consulting centre in the Paris area. This form of group therapy supposes for the participants to: first, proposing stories, memories, pha...Read more

The 20th century was marked by multiple anthropogenic historical traumas, constructed by totalitarian regimes, in the context of which certain groups became targets of the death drive. These traumas show similarities, related to the general specificity of the trauma, whether individual or collective, but they also feature significant differences, which are the result of social, political and cultural factors. In this article, ...Read more

The notion of ‘retreat’ is often connected to war and other confrontational situations. As a verb, it may signify the dynamic aspect of ‘moving’; as a noun, a static aspect prevails: a place to hide, isolate and defend oneself, but also a possibility for bringing something new to life. Psychic retreat implies dynamic relations, not only intra-psychically and in terms of subject-other, but also in dominance-submission r...Read more

This essay explores the craving for polymorphous perverse relationships of a son of a Holocaust survivor mother. The material presents the interplay of two levels which shaped the patient's character structure and object-relating: the active behavior of the mother to her developing child and the mother's internal struggles, which the son could not help but sense and accommodate. This theme is illustrated by means of a detailed...Read more

A century ago, Freud addressed the problem of groups, stating that “Group psychology is therefore concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose” (Freud, S., 1921. ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, SE XVIII...Read more

The events we have experienced in recent years at a global level have led us to think and feel differently than in times of relative stability and relative peace. This “other” has called for a revision of the representation of the human condition along the fundamental dual dimensions that define it from a psychoanalytic point of view: subjectivity-otherness, Eros-Thanatos. The pandemic, as a borderline existential event, r...Read more

Taking Winnicott’s concept of transitional space as a starting point, I extend it to the idea of a transitional time (the temporal interval between two events) and to that of a bridge space/time – a bridge being a structure spanning an obstacle for the purpose of providing passage over it. In the process, I make reference to a variety of psychological and cultural phenomena that we experience in our daily lives, and more s...Read more

There are books that make the reader feeling so delightful and passionate, when he or she is discovering the beauty of the author`s thinking and the multiple dimensions of his/her discourse. As Roland Barthes mentioned in his book The pleasure of the text: “The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural.

Using the notes of Ferenczi throughout the Clinical Diary, I recomposed his work with patient B., through which, together with patient R.N., Ferenczi came to encounter the psychogenesis of trauma and mental shock, urging him to develop a theory and a technique of working with trauma, constantly seeking healing and treatment. Based on this clinical excerpt, I discuss about trauma, approached theoretically and technically, empha...Read more

This paper summarizes and extends the author’s view of the need for a two-track theory of psychoanalysis, transformational as well as archeological, and its application to patients and mind states that are ‘beyond neurosis’ at the limits of analyzability. Considerations of the unstructured unconscious, the transformational movement from unrepresented to represented states, the role of intuition and construction in the co...Read more

Psychoanalytic thinking was born in the psychoanalytic relationship and its biography begins in the first persson plural, us. Maybe this plural, me and my patient, is at first only in the mind of the therapist clearly stated. My patient and I are concerned from the beginning to find together those mental, emotional connections that will open the way for the therapeutic process. We are, as Donnel Stern says, partners in thought...Read more

The principle of a clinical setting, created in a centre for autistic children in Greece (The Perivolaki 3), was based on the combination of different mediations within a given group workshop: reproducing sounds, movements, drawings and then reformulating the patterns in a different register. In this article I propose the theoretical-clinical support of this setting on psychoanalytic and neurocognitive data and hypotheses rela...Read more

With respect to same-sex parenting, we are obliged to take a renewed look at the relevance of the theory of the Oedipus complex in its « simple » form, just as Freud himself found it necessary to do (Freud 1923b). We could argue that the psychical flexibility that is typical of human beings helps same-sex parents to implement in their children a fantasy scenario that supports the structuring of their psychical organization.

I shall begin with several vignettes which I’ve associated to the patient « Adrien » from François Richard’s presentation, and then I will move on to refer more closely to this remarkably rich and sophisticated paper that opens our reflection to many registers of psychic functioning with respect to the issue of the fraternal.

The appearance of a younger child, brother or sister, may represent a decisive moment in the existence of the first born. The possibly violent exit from the Eden-like universe of primary narcissism, of limitless self-love, via the birth of a second child represents a structuring experience, which forces the repositioning of the Ego in a manner similar to the hierarchic positioning within the primitive horde. In this context, t...Read more

This article considers the relationships between brothers and sisters from the angle of a more primitive problematic which encompasses them. The archaic bond to the mother, with its moments of subject/object confusion and envious aggressiveness, pervades the ordinary rivalry proper to the fraternal bond – which is a corollary of the specular structure of the self, between narcissistic triumph and annihilation. An adult clini...Read more

The main direction of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis’ current issue could have as its goal thinking as a whole, the ineffability that is created before the emotional bond of the therapeutic alliance and has its roots in the very concept of resonance, from unconscious to unconscious, analytical function and auxiliary mind. To build as a whole with your patient, for your patient, in his place, to fill in gaps of emotio...Read more

In this review I will focus on societies mistreating children in order to fulfil certain needs through them, to project internal conflicts and self-hatred outward, or to assert themselves when they feel their authority has been questioned. Regardless of their individual motivations, they all rely upon a societal prejudice against children to justify themselves and legitimate their behaviour. We are all familiar of prejudice ag...Read more

The following three papers were presented in September 2019 at the Simposio Psicanalise e Envelhecimento convened by the Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de Rio de Janeiro. They are the result of the internal production of the Travesía Foundation of Buenos Aires, institution devoted to the meta-psychological study of midlife transition and crisis since 1989. We would like to thank the SBPRJ for its invitation and the cord...Read more

It is a consequence that many women are unaware or are not able to identify the emotional consequences of menopause. It is likely that this ignorance must be associated with factors which, in fact, aggravate their physical and emotional state. Emotional manifestations are controversial and scarce in the psychoanalytic literature, a fact that motivates a deeper exploration of the theme. A literature review was carried out, exam...Read more

In the game of drive, the Eros has the role of psychically binding excitations, so that a tolerable quantity of psychic energy is maintained, avoiding a traumatic spill of libidinal energy. Freud discovers the possibility of impulse entanglement by directing destructiveness outwards through the action of the libido. When the child is insufficiently invested by the environment he develops in, his psychism will develop on a frag...Read more

The author retraces, by means of a patient’s short analysis, the reshuffling of the forces at play in his psychic life. The article is about the continuity of the dreamlike sequences, which have highlighted the evolution of the patient’s ability to reconstruct a link with his objects, despite the influence of a narcissistic sector of his personality that hindered its development. All of this clinical material has enabled t...Read more

The aim of this work is to propose some thoughts on the construction of alternative realities in which some patients live. They can be designated in various ways as hysterical, borderline, psychotic or even people who manage to lead an apparently normal life. To appear real, alternative worlds must be constructed with special fantasies that do not correspond to the kind of fantasy capable of creating art or myth. The alternati...Read more

Reproduction, a biopsychosocial process, is surrounded by many secrets and secrecies. Reproductive medicine, in particular, which for more than 40 years carries out fertilization extra-corporally, employs frightening, and hitherto unanticipated and, to psychoanalysts, ‘indigestible’ methods, which may well negate both blood ties and the generational chain. A child may have up to seven different parental parts at the beginn...Read more

The discussion of an analytic session which includes the dream of a patient is followed by some theoretical reflections on contemporary dream interpretation in clinical psychoanalysis. The approach to dreams is increasingly intersubjective and relational. The focus is more on the dream as a curtain of illusion. Contemporary analysts are focused on the unconscious message in the dream about transference-countertransference dyna...Read more

The author addresses the siblings theme not only by considering it part of the bonds of a concrete and real family but by relating it to more phantasmal analogies in order to give voice to the world of internal representations. This paper is inspired by some fundamental considerations formulated by René Kaes in the book “The fraternal complex” (Le complexe fraternal, 2008): n the fraternal complex two different levels can...Read more

The author, through the analysis of the psychoanalytic literature on the theme of the fraternal, traces a path aimed at bringing out the way in which this question has been treated in classical authors and in contemporary international literature. In a first part of the article, the contributions of Freud, Klein, Winnicott and Lacan are analysed. Subsequently, the author tries to show the theoretical evolutions relating to the...Read more

The integrative and assimilatory tendencies of modern society are based on "fraternity", which refers to the sibling level. Siblings are for each other primary objects with all the possible positive and negative affects that can go along with it. The ego functions are strongly stimulated by the exchange with the siblings, but also the infantile sexuality. In adolescence there can be sexual assaults between sister and brother t...Read more

Siblinghood is the paradigm of horizontal links. When we talk about siblinghood we are not only referring to blood ties in families, but also to social ties in different stages of life. Siblinghood can include any relationships between peers which are participative and which involve horizontal rather than hierarchical links. To develop the concept of siblinghood we have drawn on the work of several authors regarding the frater...Read more

No. 1/2021 of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis proposes the topic of fraternal relations as the main topic of debate, with all the implications and vicissitudes that appear within such relationships, both at the intrapsychic level and at the inter-relational level. Along with the works that focus on fraternal relations, within the Journal you will find other extremely interesting topics that we hope will capture your att...Read more

One of the psychological reactions to the Covid-19 lockdowns is psychic withdrawal, claustrophilia. The author asks why this paradoxical reaction occurs, naming the death drive and fear of freedom.

The present article is a sequel of “Encounter with Death (I). An Interrupted Dialogue” (DOI:10.2478/rjp-2020-0013 Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(1):197-204) and it aims at exploring the possible psychoanalytical semantics of the double suicide committed by Arthur Koestler in 1983, together with his wife, Cynthia, at their home in London. It tries to relate the tragic event (in the context of Koestler’s previous life-threateni...Read more

Despite the fact that the secret was not the subject of psychoanalytical research and therefore the term was not indexed, we come across it in day-to-day life, in many aspects and many relationships. It appears in the discourse of patients in psychotherapy clinics, but also in the patient-psychoanalyst and transference-countertransference relationships. We find it woven in many defence mechanisms and processes of symptom creat...Read more

In his conference, Paolo Fonda highlights the concepts of "micro-area of fusion" and of “separation coefficient”, which makes it possible to think in terms of quantitative factors. The perspective of the gradualness of some mechanisms or phenomena implies the existence of a theoretical continuum between psychotic and neurotic functioning. Another aspect addressed concern symbolic component versus concrete elements of the c...Read more

Certain early experiences of a traumatic nature have not been subjected to the conventionally described processes of “après-coup” reorganization because of the defence mechanisms implemented against the traumatic threat they harbour. Using vignettes from different sessions, I study the process by which these early experiences merge with transference during treatment, thus offering the opportunity for a first form of aprè...Read more

In 1990 in Belgrade, at one of the first East European Psychoanalytical seminars, I met Aurelia Ionescu, a colleague from Bucharest. During a lengthy discussion about the situation in Romania, she also told me how risky it was to perform psychotherapeutic sessions during the Ceausescu regime. At times, patients and psychotherapists even had to check for hidden microphones in the room. I asked her: «But was it worth risking so...Read more

In light of the questioning related to contemporary parental combinations, I maintain that whatever these combinations may be, in the majority of cases a good enough mixture of life and death sexual drives, of ethical ability and of vital narcissism, will exist in the parents’ psyche, even though proper genital sexuality has been either partially or completely excluded from procreation. This good enough mix lies at the found...Read more

Envy has always been a frequent topic in religious scriptures and literature. Freud formulated penis envy as a central element in female psychology. Nowadays this theory has been largely abandoned. Envy, however, continues to keep its position as a central psychoanalytic concept in the form of oral envy. Melanie Klein conceptualized it as a direct derivative of the death instinct. This paper starts with demonstrating examples ...Read more

From his first Freudian studies, but especially in S. Freud’s correspondence with W. Fliess, the term “secret” (geheim, geheimnis) appears frequently, hence its weight and significance in psychic life, and implicitly as a form of intimacy and of confidentiality shared in the analytical relationship. The need and ability to keep a secret, but also the ability to confess, to share a secret, are mainly related to a certain ...Read more

Psychoanalysts try to facilitate their patients’ grasp andunderstanding of themselves. Since the mid-19th century, we have two conceptions of understanding. In one tradition, we need to suspect presented pictures and try to get “behind” facades in order to grasp the “true” self. In this tradition we get a hold of ourselves if we look for the origins: we need to see where we come from. In the other tradition we should...Read more

Bion hardly ever mentions the concept of regression in the classical sense. However, he uses it to understand whether the direction taken by the therapeutic relationship in the here and now of the session is towards psychic growth or rather in the opposite direction. Therefore, asking oneself what it represents for Bion implies inscribing the concept of regression in the framework of the grid, the kind of conceptual compass th...Read more

The articles presented in the 2/2020 issue of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis continue the theme of THE SECRET, begun in this year’s first issue.

The article focuses on psychic mechanisms at work in a life experience of maximum intensity: imprisonment awaiting the death penalty. “Dialogue with death”, the memories of Arthur Koestler on the most traumatic period of his life – his stay in the prison of Seville during the Spanish Civil War – was initially published in 1937, as an important part of the “Spanish Testament”, and was in itself one of the most signi...Read more

The present work compares two literary figures, imagining the internal conflict of each, in connection to a secret. In Hamlet’s case (Hamlet by W. Shakespeare), it is a traumatic impossibility to reveal a secret that leads to his death, while for Gregers (H. Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), the opposite occurs, his inability to keep a secret leads directly to the death of another character. In this work the secret is viewed as the ...Read more

This paper considers what occurs during midlife when the certainty-uncertainty tension that inhabits every subject is affected. The body with its drives becomes the messenger who announces the passage of time and life’s finitude. Time is challenged by one’s own body, triggering a psychic work that will enable the subject to deal with his/her own transience. Based on Freud’s writings, the author suggests that one’s own ...Read more

The author argues for a conception of the oedipal complex that excludes the idea of a pre-oedipal phase which, according to him, comes from a confusion with the pre-genital. The author seeks to identify the existence of a “couple object” present early on in the young child whose pre-history he returns to in the first lineaments of a form of “being with”, as in the first form of recording relational models concerning th...Read more

Following the secret’s customs, encountering it in the myriad manifestations of psychic life and relational domino effect, the current work separates the secret from the act of secretiveness and from trauma, with which the former often confused. The fact that it is intrinsically linked to truth, as it is hidden information waiting to be found, defines the secret as a process involved in working with information-about-self an...Read more

The hiding aspect of shame makes the study of shame difficult. In this article we aim to show through Hanna’s case study how shame manifests and develops during the course of one psychotherapy process. This will be done using Assimilation analysis (APES) and Dialogical Sequence Analysis (DSA) to show in detail one idiosyncratic developmental path through which the relationship toward the problematic shame experience changes ...Read more

In this paper, the author tries to underline some aspects about one of the most important secrets: the secret of our own mortality. It is a paradox, all of us know that we will eventually die, but this knowledge is quite unbearable and makes us anxious, which is why it is very difficult for us to represent our death. This secret of mortality is related to what Freud called “the biological rock” – our supreme and ultimate...Read more

The article covers diverse approaches of the term secret: individual, group, social, transgenerational and psychoanalytical, with reference to various psychoanalysts having reflecting about this topic. The author pays special attention to importance of secrets in the psychoanalytic relationship. Conscious and unconscious secrets are brought into play in transfer-countertransfer, stressing on the importance of tolerating the se...Read more

Initiated as a search for the truth hidden by the symptoms of hysteria, psychoanalysis, but in fact psychoanalysts, had a particular relationship with the secret over time. Beyond the historical truth of using the word „secret” to name meetings back in the time when the first group of psychoanalysts was being formed, beyond the stigma of secret society or even occult society with which the psychoanalyst society was then la...Read more

This is the second part of the paper in which fusion is considered as one of the fundamental mechanisms of mental functioning, an essential element in every object relation – with variations only in the degree of participation – along with the component connoted by separateness. There is a continuous dialectic relationship between levels of fusion and separateness. Human beings are characterized by an extremely sophisticat...Read more

The psychoanalytic treatment of patients suffering from a somatic disease or from chronical pain covers an important field. When confronted with those patients the psychoanalyst needs a theoretical background and technical adjustments. This paper exposes the theoretical corpus of the Paris School of Psychosomatics and relates three clinical cases.

Even without being a truly psychoanalytic object (in Bionian terms), the secret can be articulated with many elements of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Implied from the start by the psychoanalytic frame (a secure place hidden from the others and from where nothing can `escape` without patient’s accord), or by the analyst’s `neutral` attitude (allowing secrets to be kept as long as needed for the patient and to be reve...Read more

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The majority of book-to-film adaptations operate more or less important adjustments on the initial text. In this respect, the present article attempts to investigate the psychoanalytical relevance of such a textual intervention in Roman Polanski’s 1992 film, ”Bitter Moon”, based on Pascal Bruckner’s novel, ”Lunes de fiel” (1981). The analysis takes the Freudian theories on sadomasochism and death instinct as a star...Read more

Midlife is an age of crisis according to many authors, as it sets the subject up against the inevitability of the ageing process, loss, and the limitedness of life. Most authors view midlife as an age of crisis where everything can be staked back into the game. But some other authors have highlighted how midlife is characterised by a new burst of creativity, by new object investments and by a redressing of the balance between ...Read more

Creation is a fundamental definition of genius, and we are wondering if those minds that created totalitarian systems, could remain in human history through destructive impact on millions of people‘s minds, and could they possibly be included in genius category. Certainly, we could support the idea of the participation of these people in the creation process – in the creation of ideology of a new world, of a new Human etc....Read more

When describing the two instincts in his work “The Ego and the Id”, Freud says that the “Eros, by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it”. This complication, which I consider to be rather an increased complexity, can be found in the patients’ discourse through the div...Read more

The work of mourning and organization of the mental space may be seriously disturbed by the real loss of the object and the way how communication with the “still alive” objects is built. Certain obstacles in communication with significant people make the mental separation difficult. The problem of separation, individuation and building of somebody’s own mental space is linked to the way in which the child mourns in relat...Read more

The present paper is an attempt to create bridges of understanding between the subjective investigation in the psychoanalytic situation and the empirical research concerning a subject not enough explored in its earliest dimensions – the place and role of the father in the first year of the child's life. As part of a more extensive empirical research on the dynamics of child development in the first year of life, the research...Read more

The theory of matriarchy still enjoys wide popularity, even among psychoanalysts. Following Freud’ ideas, they invoke the passage from matriarchy to patriarchy as a historical analogue to the individual psychosexual development. After a review of anthropological discussions, some hypotheses vis-a-vis this persistence are proposed: matriarchy is a secular cosmogonic myth, developed within the evolutionary paradigm; a fantasy ...Read more

: In “Constructions in analysis” (1937), S. Freud compared the analyst’s work to that of the archaeologist searching among vestiges, with the big difference that the object of our work is alive, and working with it causes fear, pain and suffering. Last year, during a visit to Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius, impressed by the strangeness of the atmosphere, by people carbonised by lava, eternal statues in a shocking atemporalit...Read more

Fusion is one of the fundamental mechanisms of mental functioning, an essential element in all object relations – with variations only in the degree of participation – along with the component connoted by separateness. There is a continuous dialectic relationship between levels of fusion and separateness in every human relationship. Among the goals of the basic human search for an object we should also include the attempt ...Read more

The clinical vignettes evoked in this text open up, I hope, new lines of thinking and reflection, necessary in approaching the following fundamental issue: what does the archaic aspect of the analytic relationship consist of, considered a determining element for the changes and transformations induced by the psychoanalytical protocol? An indispensable question for the deepening of means of evolution for the psychoanalytical te...Read more

Having witnessed its constant growth since it was founded in 2008, I feel satisfied looking back at the significant and fulfilled road, one which had national and international academic acknowledgement of the RJP as a main landmark, a goal gradually and continuously attained. And this included its indexation in prestigious data bases thanks to the quality of authors who published in the RJP’s pages throughout the years.

This number of the RJP, the second part of volume XII, will continue the subject of this year – „The Archaic”, and marks a turning point in the Journal’s history. Matei Georgescu, our Managing Director, appears confident that his "offspring" will manage well enough in the future and passes the managerial task on to Gianina Micu. In his farewell speech he plays a real game with "beads of meaning" to also convey, in this...Read more

THE ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (RJP) only receives original articles for publication (in electronic or printed form, in English, French or Romanian) about any psychoanalytic theme.

The papers published in the ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS have undergone editorial screening and anonymous double-blind peer-review. They may be reviewed by the Editors, Editorial Office staff and assigned peer reviewers unless otherwise permitted by the authors. All submitted manuscripts are treated as confidential documents. By accepting to review a manuscript, referees agree to treat the material as confidential.Copyr...Read more

Motto: “In the time that « has not yet run out » lay all events,all feelings, every thought, every dream that did not come to beyet and from which generations and generations of peoplewill extract their necessary part of reality, dream and madness.”(Max Blecher, The Lighted Den)

I were prompted to choose one of the core subjects of Solenoid —among a lot of possible interesting ones – I would not hesitate to select the subject of reality. Let’s listen to the author: «What is reality? Which is the visceral and metaphysical drive that transforms what is objective in subjective?» (p. 526). What Cărtărescu names «visceral and metaphysical drive» leads to fear, and this is the reason why he also...Read more

MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU is a Romanian poet, prose writer, essayist, literary and publicist critic.He was born on June 1, 1956, in Bucharest.He graduated from the Faculty ofRomanian Language and Literatureof the University of Bucharest in 1980.Currently he is a PhD professorat the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest.

This paper proposes to explain the split of female identity in Turkey in terms of veiled/non-veiled, by attributing it to the exclusion of female founding figures during the instauration phase of the Republic. Introducing the psychoanalytic aspect overlooked in relevant sociological studies, it argues that we can refer to “Republican Girls/Daughters” rather than “Republican Women” and tries to disclose the possible dyn...Read more

The unconscious, initially a psychic instance, later a quality of the psychic in Freud’s terms, is often associated with, in current thinking, the psycho-mental contents that consciousness has forgotten or repressed. This is the so-called Repressed Unconscious, from the triad model proposed by J. and A.M. Sandler: Conscious – Repressed Unconscious – Present Unconscious (Sandler&Sandler, 1983).

In this article I have chosen to approach the topic ofpersonal truth, always subjected to repression, therefore beingunconscious. This truth governs the choices in our lives, the attitudesand desires. Repression shows that this truth is unacceptable,unutterable - it must not be exposed, presented, or even consciouslyrepresented. When we discover it and manage its integration withinthe ensemble of our personality, we achieve th...Read more

Starting off with a collection of clinical observations belonging to some psychoanalysts at the end of their career, we have tried to underline the specific of that which we call “authentic” in psychoanalysis (and analytic psychotherapy). The clinical sequences do not come from classic cures. They put into question the reciprocity and nature of the transfer, the therapeutic device, but more importantly showcase the signifi...Read more

Freud did not describe a feminine narcissism, but pointed out the importance of this structure in women, as well as that of masculine identifications. This theme is sought after by a writer, Herta Müller, in six of her novels. She uses the first person and has both male and female protagonists, whom she should, in principle, identify with. All her characters are confronted with narcissistic anxiety (Green), in a totalitarian...Read more

Exploring the archaic, as a space-time unit that we can only identify as such in après-coup, leads us to strange, peculiar experiences whose manner of emergence in the here and now of the cure lead to re-configurations of the interactions inside the consulting room. Placed in a personal pre-history, connected with the fusion and de-fusion experiences, the archaic may represent for the psychoanalytic situation the occasion of ...Read more

Many psychoanalysts underline the transition in contemporary Psychoanalysis from conceptualization in terms of structures to greater emphasis on process and movement. This paper proposes an option of describing and interpreting the chronicle of psychoanalytic treatment through the prism of the processes of transformation. A case study is presented that illustrates the transformation of an analysand from motionless impasse towa...Read more

How can the analyst get access to early preverbal material in the patient’s internal world? The author proposes a dynamic view of memory with no strict boundaries between different memory systems as particularly suitable for clinical purposes. Being in a state of evenly suspended attention and feeling open to all the verbal and non-verbal signals emanating from the patient, the analyst has the best opportunity to approach th...Read more

ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS only receives original articles for publication (in electronic or printed form, in English, French or Romanian) about any psychoanalytic theme. When submitting an article, the author must confirm that the paper has not been published elsewhere and is not being considered for publication elsewhere, in whole or in part, and is intended for sole publication in the Romanian Journal of Psychoanaly...Read more

In 1923, in “The Ego and the Id”, Freud states that “In essence a word is after all the mnemic residue of a word that has been heard” (Essential Works vol. 3, The Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 226). This assertion opens a perspective on the understanding of the meaning of words, which contains more than just the logical connexions built through semantic sedimentations and kept within the pages of dictionaries, incl...Read more

The papers published in the ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS have undergone editorial screening and anonymous double-blind peer-review. They may be reviewed by the Editors, Editorial Office staff and assigned peer reviewers unless otherwise permitted by the authors.

This Issue of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis brings forth a long-standing, topic, yet still prevalent and provocative: The Archaic. As you will come to realize, by reading the articles of the Journal many aspects and perspectives on Archaic are opened and elaborated under your eyes.

: In this paper I examine the overdetermined significance of the small gifts offered to me by my analytic patient, Miss A. — in particular, her wish to escape from the memory, re-lived in the transference, of her deprived childhood, into the fantasy of an extra-analytical relationship. Miss A’s presents, mostly cards, were hidden in the envelope containing the money for my fees and they were never openly talked about. The...Read more

For the 10th anniversary since the first issue of The Turkish Annual of Psychoanalysis appeared, it is my honour to now have the opportunity to present it to the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis (RJP). I find this moment to be significant and remarkable, if I were to set it on an axis that places at its starting point the first appearance of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP), which is, in its turn, celebratin...Read more

Through its richness and multiple perspectives and references, this book by the erudite psychoanalyst Vladimir Marinov seems to represent a great argument in favour of the idea of multi-determinism in psychoanalysis. The author regards the artwork, in this case sculpture, from so many points of view that, while reading, our interest for the artistic works of sculptors Constantin Brâncuși and Alberto Giacometti, and for artis...Read more

Terms such as vitality and authenticity are difficult to define. Moreover, they cannot be considered true psychoanalytic concepts. If, however, as is happening, psychoanalysis tries to theorize in a more fine-grained manner the non-specific aspects of treatment, such as those related to the person of the analyst, then it becomes inevitable to refer to them. The thesis of the article is that vitality should emerge from its vagu...Read more

Neutrality and subjectivity represent notions that seem contradictory in the analytic process, with further clarification and integration, both conceptually and clinically, being required. In a relational context, neutrality should be regarded as a tendency towards balance between safety and danger, the equidistance between the three impulse-Ego-Superego instances, and not as indifference or inactivity. In a broad sense, neutr...Read more

What kind of functions does a theory carry out in the analyst’s mind at work? The author tries to describe, using a few analytic trailers, how Bion Field Theory (BFT) can become an oneiric psychoanalytic tool in the mind of the analyst working with inaccessible states of mind and the violence of nameless turbulences. The hypothesis expressed is that BFT, as described in the works of its principal authors (Ferro, Grotstein, O...Read more

Authenticity may be difficult to assess in schizophrenia. The evolution in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a patient, J., under care at a day centre, shows a form of changing that would allow authenticity. From the beginning, J. speaks of two themes, repeated at each session: the seismic situation of the world, and the “vision” he claimed to have experienced it in the past, a cinematic hallucinatory occurrence. J. give...Read more

Bion created different theoretical tools to observe emotional transformations during a therapeutic session. In the relational field, these tools are particularly useful to observe how emotions create representations as steps in the transformation of further emotional experiences. Describing the complex unfolding of this process, Bion used the word “truth” to highlight the tension towards the unknown, the absolute unachieva...Read more

The paper aims to illustrate the issue of authenticity during the training as a psychoanalyst, first establishing a meaning for the concept of ‘authenticity’, and following the factors involved in the process of ‘authentication’ (a term used contextually as describing the process of acquiring authenticity). Three sources are considered to influence the candidate’s interventions during sessions: their own analyst, the...Read more

The question that has prompted this article could be formulated as follows: what are the vicissitudes of the analyst’s subjectivity in the bi-personal models and, more specifically, in the Bion field model? Using a clinical vignette, the author shows his own “toy box” mainly the way he uses reverie and the interplay between plot and characters in the session.

Authenticity and the authentic, despite the absence of a consistent metapsychological conceptualization, is an important milestone in psychoanalysis, since defining the authentic, its conceptual and metapsychological setting from a psychoanalytic perspective, can be an exciting challenge for a psychoanalyst for whom abstinence and neutrality are structuring guidelines. At the level of common language, authenticity is often att...Read more

In this work the author considers how the Freudian psychoanalytic paradigm has been transformed by Bion’s theory and how the transference-countertransference dynamics must be transferred into an oneiric way of thinking. Here, a “quid” of lie becomes necessary to compare the traumatic experience of the patient with the analyst’s capacity to suffer his own personal and professional critical steps. If the analyst is to co...Read more

Maturescence is not a synonym of midlife, but a really special period during midlife. In this paper the author deeps into his previous ideas about the metapsychology of maturescence bringing about a new set of «opening doorways» in order to open the discussion to new horizons —not blurred by chronic repetitions—, as if he challenged himself and the reader to think of aging again from the very beginning. His idea is to sh...Read more

This article presents a summary of the theses advanced in Bion’s Transformations and describes their application by the analyst in the session. It then discusses the development of post-Bionian transformations in dreaming and play. Clinical material illustrates how these transformations may become effective therapeutic tools.

: The deportations that took place in the Moldavian SSR featured several traumatising instances: deportation, uncertainty, stigmatisation, survival in harsh conditions, the violation of all rights, loss of loved ones, witnessing multiple deaths and the threat of one’s own death. The interdiction to speak of these events, enforced for almost five decades, was a specific part of this trauma. Identification with the aggressor, ...Read more

The six articles hereby presented are variations on the theme of “Authenticity” written by a group of psychoanalysts who have shared a supervision experience with Antonino Ferro and who in the past ten years, under his leadership, have begun working on theoretical and clinical aspects arising from a particular reading of Bion’s thought and the model of the analytical field.

This article reviews the importance of the double for the integration of narcissism and the formation of the Self. A brief review of Freud’s articles On Narcissism and The Uncanny serves as a starting point for reflection on the narcissistic double. The article On Narcissism uses the myth of Narcissus as reference. With regard to the uncanny, it demonstrates the frequent appearance of the double in literature and in certain ...Read more

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian contemporary female artist who is in exile by choice. Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1957, the artist moved to the United States in 1974 in order to study arts. Due to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, she was prevented from going back to her country. In 1990, after almost 12 years, Neshat visited Iran for the first time after the revolution, which transformed her artistic life into a productive one, full o...Read more

: In his work “Selfpresentation”, written in 1925, Freud brings up an old remark Fliess made on the spiritual nature of the dream. A dream would be spiritual “by necessity”, as “the straight and immediate path leading to the expression of thoughts is closed”. Wit would thusly also have to be considered in dream interpretation. But this notion of Freud’s leaves aside the relation between wit, comedy and humour, ex...Read more

This paper is centered on the subject’s private dialogue with his/her own body during midlife – in this case «body» means an open history coming from the wish of a child that parental figures projected, something that remains open to changes till the last minute of life. This situation revalidatesego’s discourse with him/her during this period of the life cycle, highlighted with the imprint of one’s own finitude. The...Read more

The approach of authenticity and the authentic is among the subjects that are of great interest to the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis, especially since it comes as a continuation of the previous theme, the psychoanalytical perspective over identity. Like identity, the authentic allows for the differentiation of the individual and the affirmation of his or her uniqueness, in relation to the Other.

This issue of the Romanian Journal of Psychonalaysis (RJP) is a legitimate sequel of the previous issue, dedicated to the same theme: The Authentic. What I found beyond ordinary and I provoke you to find it also by reading the articles of this issue is the surprising quality of the Authentic.

Identity is not a psychoanalytic concept. We find this term in different approaches - sociological, cultural, ethnic, historical, economical, scientific, philosophical, but also in certain concerns and worries related to global situation of our time: migration of individuals, migration of cultural, political, religious values, identity transformation, changes of pathology. We are challenged by all these transformations, as com...Read more

Here we find ourselves with the first issue of a new decade, following the ten-year anniversary of the Journal’s founding. Rejoicing at the support offered by the Journal’s founders, the feedback from our readers strengthens our belief in the future existence of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis (RJP) and the serious and dedicated work of its team, contributing to the promotion of written psychoanalysis.

In Romania, psychic disorder is still considered a stigmata and even if there are initiatives, both at governmental and non-governmental level, the addressability and participation of these organisation is reduced, because of financial and logistical implications. (David, 2015) The psychodynamic psychiatry occurred in the context of manifestation of some marked divergences between approaches that were mutually negating the con...Read more

Identity cannot be artificial or virtual, even by most generous criteria. On the other hand, ideology can imitate something real, and sometimes it is so successful that one’s identity suffers irreversible damages. As in: computing is or could be a replacement for a person. Confusion is at home in such ideological position, and, as Andrea Sabbadini remarks, there is quite a difference in having an intimate relationship throug...Read more

The difficulties that an analysis has to face in attaining the core of Authentic Self in the patient, when the False Self is the structural element of the patient’s personality, are specifically mentioned by Winnicott. In this case, the False Self is what we call in common language a second nature.

In the continuous flow of experience, to mark the identity landmarks is not always a process that easily reveals its importance, although the vitality of such a process is obvious. To know, illusory or not, how the body constitutes in senzations, perceptions, emotions, structures and thoughts is a way to find your place in your own body, mind and life. As Bogdan Cuc showed in his paper, this “livens each therapist’s work�...Read more

The exploration of unconscious functioning, and of such psychoanalytic ideas as those pertaining to internal object relations, stages of development, defence mechanisms, or the phenomena of dreaming and parapraxes, combined with our clinical experience with real-life analysands, can also contribute to an understanding of the personalities and behaviours of the fictional characters we encounter in literature, drama and cinema. ...Read more

A war mindset in humans seems to coincide with the paranoid-schizoid position. In war also, groups regress to PS. Some symptoms of such a regression were evident also in Freud himself when WW1 started. The 20th century was the bloodiest century in recorded history and its enormous traumas have gathered and overloaded humanity. Its traumatic legacy included also unbearable feelings of those who killed other humans and the voids...Read more

Mourning stands among the early traumatic experiences that lead to narcissistic identity disorders. The separations that the child has experienced, regardless of their cause, are difficult to work-through and integrate within the child’s psychic life, sometimes even impossible. The child’s capacity to go through a process of mourning depends on his / her relationship to the mother, on the age at which this separation is ex...Read more

Amalia, aged 14, was born in France, in a Portuguese family. Amalia’s mother requests psychological counselling. At the first session she comes alone. Displaying a skeptic attitude, she claims that her daughter experiences two classes of symptoms: possession by a dead person’s spirit and emotional disturbances, nightmares, breathing difficulties, spasmophilia. This article develops mainly two theoretical hypotheses as well...Read more

Identity, seen not as a result or as a final construction that allows us to identify an individual trough differentiation, but as a process, or rather as a series of processes, gives us access to the various ways of managing, of working through the amorphous entity of drives, for dynamic structures and mental changes. The modalities involved, the shapes accessed during these processes, are those through which contact, communic...Read more

The paradox of our existence, in the Winnicottian sense of the term, and as it is already known in psychoanalysis – especially in the construction of the sentiment of being – needs the encounter with an alter, with the Other – the real and external object, with its qualities and capacity to also fundamentally threaten the human being, possibly through its adhesive nature, its intrusion, revenge, disappearance etc. This p...Read more

The author investigates the question whether narcissism is still a useful clinical concept. The term is so widespread and often so loosely used that it seems to have lost its descriptive and discriminatory power. The descriptive use of the term in our everyday discussions of patients has evolved into a kind of behavioural shorthand (Goldberg, 2013). Departing from two case vignettes narcissism is being discussed from the vanta...Read more

When we refer to identity, we have in mind its three levels: gender identity, generational identity and ethnocultural identity. In this era of globalisation, we wonder whether this concept is still important or to what extent it changes its dimensions. Psychoanalysis approaches the issue of identity mostly from a psychopathological perspective when it deals with personality disorders such as borderline states or psychoses. As ...Read more

The contexts of history lie within generational and lineage dimensions. This is why we will first submit to your attention a few historical coordinates that have led to the the contents of the current issue. In the Communist era, psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular were banned. The Institute of Psychology was closed and university study programmes were discontinued. Some professors and researchers in the fie...Read more

ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS receives original articles for publication (in electronic or printed form, in English, French or Romanian) about any psychoanalytic theme. When submitting an article, the author must confirm that the paper has not been published elsewhere and is not being considered for publication elsewhere, in whole or in part, and is intended for sole publication in the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis.

The papers published in the ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS have undergone editorial screening and anonymous double-blind peer-review. They may be reviewed by the Editors, Editorial Office staff and assigned peer reviewers unless otherwise permitted by the authors.

For the last 36 years I have worked extensively with Holocaust survivors’ offspring, and have published and presented many papers and several books on this topic (see bellow the List of Publications). They focus on the transmission of trauma from Holocaust survivors to the following generations, and describe my approach to the understanding and treatment of these patients. The books were translated into several languages, as...Read more

In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles builds a whole plot based on something well known by everyone at that time, and we may say that it is still well known. Thus, this something remains unsaid in the play. The question of the Sphinx has this quality – namely, it is well known by everybody so it can allow itself to remain unuttered.

2017 is an anniversary year. We celebrate 10 years of Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis (RJP), a milestone in a hopefully enduring and meritorious endeavour.

Identity is not a pPsychoanalytic concept. We find this term in different approaches - sociological, cultural, ethnic, historical, economical, scientific, philosophical, but also in certain concerns and worries related to global situation of our time: migration of individuals, migration of cultural, political, religious values, identity transformation, changes of pathology. We are challenged by all these transformations, as co...Read more

Freud relates the Oedipal conflict to neurosis and the phallic stage, while melancholy would be characterized by the choice of the narcissistic object and by a fixation in the oral stage according to Abraham, and to the expulsive anal stage. This text intends to demonstrate that, in the sometimes unrestrained search of the love of the absent or dead person, melancholy restrains even a taboo and faces any interdiction of the s...Read more

Intimate loving relationships, in their varying combination of physical and emotional components, reflect the infinite variety of human beings: their personal qualities, their past experiences, the culture in which they have grown up, their fantasy lives…

Arbitrariness, either a witting or an unwitting one, is a factor that belongs to a mentality, a state of facts that is more common than we would like to be. Maybe it is the most effective vehicle in revolving an unknown by not facing it, yet knowing it is there. Its efficacy becomes plain in looking at its endurance. Such a mentality (along with mythical thinking) is detrimental to any scientific endeavours, and that for many...Read more

I have chosen to explore the identity of contemporary western couples by taking a twofold approach, sociological and pPsychoanalytic. Starting from issues surrounding the historicity of the very notion of couple, I first propose my personal view, which constitutes an initial, theoretical, identity construction. Then, I look at a major attribute of the identity of any couple, its culture, which proceeds from work, couple work, ...Read more

The paper discusses the role of arbitrariness in identity formation and its implications for pPsychoanalytic research. Throughout the history of pPsychoanalysis starting with Freud, clinical findings have rarely been subjected to formal validation; this has impacted the processes of defensive group identity formation

Firstly, Veronica Șandor tells us that psychic suffering is a sign of a potential identity rupture. In other words, identity is a prerequisite for the emotional balance, therefore identity disruptions cause psychic suffering.

This paper sheds light on the connections between the exploration of psychic truth and identity construction, going through the processes of historicization and affectivation, specific to the analytic process. The main theoretical setting revolves around the view of M. de M’Uzan on the archaic beginnings of identity formation. As metaphorical illustration, the evolution of a character from the novel Group Portrait with Lady ...Read more

Interesting from a psychoanalytic point of view..., a formula that incites, that challenges us intellectually, even more so, as the phrase belongs to a novelist, who doesn’t even use it in relation to the main character. On the other hand, it is a phrase that incites all the more so as it makes a direct reference to the truth ... but which truth are we referring to? What truth can be interesting from a psychoanalytic point o...Read more

Problematica identității pare că se așază pe un curs similar, încât, bine cunoscută, lasă lucrurile în nespusul lor aproape întotdeauna. Identitatea se extrage definiției imediate, precum timpul din Confesiunile lui Augustin: dacă nu întrebăm despre ea, știm ce este, dar dacă întrebăm, alunecă în necunoscut, iar asta pentru că identitatea alunecă precum timpul, acesta din urmă fiind un factor fundamenta...Read more

The papers published in the ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS have undergone editorial screening and anonymous double-blind peer-review. They may be reviewed by the Editors, Editorial Office staff and assigned peer reviewers unless otherwise permitted by the authors.

Many years ago, in the Introduction to a co-edited book, my colleagues and I wrote: «We need to differentiate between a paranoia that is the result of ill-conceived thinking […] and a paranoia which is the result of processes going on outside of one’s mind and control […] Although the term “persecution complex” is almost synonymous with paranoia, there is a definite sense in which one can be persecuted without being...Read more

This article is available in French only.

In this paper, we explore the representations of society and culture that Freud developed in the course of his work and we shall distinguish two periods. Distinct from contemporary sociological and anthropological conceptions, they led to his construction of a personal socio-anthropology that was virulently criticised by the social sciences. But what exactly is meant here by “culture” and “society”? Do we mean Freud’...Read more

This article is based on Marie’s psychotherapeutic follow-up, who tried to commit suicide, mentally more than physically, the suicidal gesture is understood as a passage through the psychic treatment of trauma in the form of an attempt of hystérisation.

The author reflects on some interviews conducted with Hutu killers during the Rwanda genocide. She considers the difficulties of negative assertion which involves a regression of the superego and a drastic attack on thinking process. She proposes the idea of a “conformist dementalisation”.

The adoption, alongside with the task of making a family, also has the task to elaborate the traumatism of the abandonment. According to Winnicott, a child needs first of all parents, even more than love, because having parents means for him/her the certitude of the survival when he/she is detested and even detestable. The adoption implies specific psychic realities which request additional skills in elaborating and containing...Read more

The term counter-resistance in the analysis has been accepted as the analyst’s unconscious identification with the resistance of the analysand. In their clinical practices, psychoanalysts acknowledged different kind of resistances, displayed by the analyst in various situations, it is debated whether only counter-resistance should be accepted or the analyst can have resistance responses not only because of analsysand’s tra...Read more

This article is available in French only.

The psychic truth, as a discovery of or as a journey towards the self (to become oneself; to become what you truly are), acquires its content from two directions. On the one hand, within it, the present, the past and the future entwine in the Freudian thread of the desire or in the traumatic thread in which the present is flooded with the past. The present and the past limit each other. On the other hand, the subject’s truth...Read more

The shuttle and condensed analysis does not belong to standard training models within the IPA but quite a number of analysts in countries and regions where no training possibilities had existed were already trained in this modality. The author has been active in this training model as the training analyst since 1995 and describes some of his experiences. Although there are problems, specifically with the intermittent setting p...Read more

Real conditions sometimes impose the attemp to perform psychoanalytic treatments at two sessions a week, but such treatments should be carefully considered. Unconscious fantasies on the common therapeutic project, co-created by the analyst and patient in the analytic field, have a continuous organizing effect on the development of the therapeutic process. It seems that psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, having a different tr...Read more

The difficulty of analyzing the setting of the psychoanalytic cure is rooted in the history of psychoanalysis and in the way in which psychoanalysts’ thinking evolved in more than a century of clinical and theoretical attempts of exploring the human psyche. In this paper I’ve tried to capture the forms in which the setting was used in the work of psychoanalysts, not only from a historical perspective, but primarily in term...Read more

This article is available in French only.

The papers published in the ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS have undergone editorial screening and anonymous double-blind peer-review. They may be reviewed by the Editors, Editorial Office staff and assigned peer reviewers unless otherwise permitted by the authors.

Ever since I first saw it on the shelf of the small improvised bookstore at the Conference for Relational Psychoanalysis in Rome this year, I felt a strong desire to go through it. I thought at that time: what did psychoanalysts write and conceptualize regarding a topic that is found so often both clinically and in our general lives? So difficult and complex?

Beyond its light, entertaining, and gently comical façade, Pop-Up (written, directed and produced by Stuart McBratney) is in fact an important film which presents us with questions about some of the issues with which its numerous characters struggle in their emotional and interpersonal existences: the search of meaning in life, tolerance of difference, gender stereotypes, how to deal with loneliness and the loss of significan...Read more

his contribution presents the mental apparatus, postulated in the metapsychology of Freud and subsequent authors, as governed by the difficult coexistence of conflicting and opposing mental territories and forces that accompany each individual’s problematic confrontation with otherness on both an intra-psychic and inter-personal level. This contentiousness can be described in terms of a simultaneous opposition and overlappin...Read more

TPS are often self-reported by therapists. However, therapists sometimes feel entrapped in situations without knowing how and why. The microanalysis of situations can further the research process, methodological rules of situationism are outlined. Five TPS – implementing a new evaluation or a new metaphor, the decay of multimodality in speaking, suicidality, ironically commenting the therapist’s professionalism - are prese...Read more

Zayna is a 25-year-old woman, the daughter of a French mother and an Algerian father. When she was 8 years old, Zayna killed her mother with a rifle. For the past six years she has been taking antidepressants for : severe emotional disorders, insomnia, nightmares, inability to focus, professional faiure. She attempted suicide twice. Aside from medication, Zayna tried several psychotherapies. Her last psychiatrist referred her ...Read more

The initial field of psychoanalysis involved neither psychosis nor group therapy, despite both being implicated in the definition of identity. Henry is a schizophrenic patient who participated in two therapeutic groups: collective psychodrama and staff-patients group. Henry expresses his complex delirium in the setting where he meets the staff, demonstrating a better grip on reality when participating in the psychodrama group....Read more

The author broadly shapes the setting where the observation of the baby takes place, namely in its family. This allows the author to examine the countertransferential elements noticed by the observer and the transferential elements noticed by the mother. This paper aims to follow the baby’s development in the first months of life and the nature of its identifying processes. Following a detailed study of the clinical material...Read more

In the present article, a fragment from a psychoanalytic psychotherapy offers support for a hypothesis regarding hypochondria. The assumption made here refers to a movement involving a thought without a thinking process to engage it. It describes an impasse, subsequent to confusion due to massive projective identifications. It also opens a perspective over self-deception and looks into the form and function of paradox, infuse...Read more

The micro-transformations are unstable and reversible transformations that take place during the session. In my paper, the focus will be on the paranoiac configurations - paranoia not as pathology but as a configuration of the couple that could be experienced in any analysis, characterized by an impasse in the analytic field. I will also present two short clinical vignettes to complement the theoretical concepts.

The human body has several methods to release the tension generated by temporary frustration. Used regularly as a response, such methods will become the only way out of a tense situation. Some persons experience an altered consciousness and perception of one’s body, rendering inter-subjectivity and self-reflection impossible. We can then ask ourselves how the symbolic dimension can be accessed to enable psychical elaboration...Read more

The text analyzes the process of establishing a relationship of intimacy with another person and with oneself. We analyze Leslie Jamison’s essay “The Empathy Exams” with respect to issues relating to authenticity, self-transparency and empathy. In part two we will talk about intimacy with oneself as a condition of mutual connection in the relationship with another person.

The paper explores ‘listening’ as the key technique of psychoanalysis. It considers different concepts of listening and tries to shed some light on the relations between ‘listening’ and ‘understanding’. The receptive quality of listening without ulterior motives and the development of trust regarding the capability of initiating and maintaining a psychoanalytic process guided by the unconscious play a crucial role ...Read more

The method of elaboration concerning loss and mourning depends on the nature of the object’s choice, the love-hate relationship, of the concrete psychical grief caused by the loss of the object, through the introjection of an inner object. Mourning is a process on the elaboration of loss, of desidealisation in regards to the Other and the Self as well as a continuous process of building and reorganizing limits. Both mourning...Read more

Considered a brilliant tool due to its simplicity and adherence to the experience of practical life, Bion’s concept of the container/content effectively describes the dialectic identity/difference upon which the process of psychic growth rests. The mind develops if, thanks to another mind, it becomes capable of transforming proto-emotions and proto-sensations, the newness that bears news of internal and external environment ...Read more

The clinical reality that we come across in the classic psychoanalytic framework or in psychoanalytic consultations often brings to the fore moments when the patients use the framework as a tool of construction, one which develops at the disadvantage of the relationship with the psychoanalyst, as an attempt to restore the “original form”. There are moments when the patient brings into the analytical situation forms of mani...Read more

This second issue of 2016 facilitates communication between that which is part of the clinic and the technique on one hand, and clinical research and psychoanalytical theory on the other. A dialogue on limits and boundaries, created within and between the articles, which evokes the infinitesimal limits of the detail, either bound by the confines of early mental life observed in minute detail or, maintaining the prehistory of ...Read more

Throughout the book, we see how the author provides parenthesis, offering general considerations that go beyond the actual topic and use the film as if to retrieve analytical thinking, while maintaing a close relationship between psychoanalysis and film. I'll start with them.

We speak today about a multidimensional perspective that explores different factors that influence the apparition of bulimia like sociocultural factors, personality traits, family dynamics, genetic and biological factors. The researchers agree that the motivation to have an appearance that conforms to the present standards of thinness that drives these patients to follow restrictive diets which in their turn elicit bulimic beh...Read more

Starting from the issue of the diabolical in psychoanalysis, evoking the mythological and folkloric themes, by means of a short illustration, through the relation between the Oedipus complex and fraternal relationships, using the theory of social beginning, we attempt to explore the archaic dimensions of sibship.

Oedipus myth illustrates the failure of Oedipus to work-through his complex: Oedipus has fulfilled his unconscious wishes, he has killed his father and married his mother. What role did the affects play in this failure? For the author, the fact that Oedipus has two parental couples, parents from Thebes who abandon him and parents from Corinth who adopt him, has a universal phan-tasmatic significance: the dicho¬tomi-sation avo...Read more

This work illustrates the analytical therapy of a bulimic and obese patient. The viewpoint I would like to put forward relates to the specificity of the analytical work with this type of patients. These patients seem to live in a psychic reality where the mental representations of the emotions they have experienced are missing. And they are not able to recognize the full meaning of their emotional experience. Although these a...Read more

The author tried to outline the way in which the feeling of love appears and develops during lifetime. Thus, the relationship between a mother and her baby can be described as a relationship in which attachment, sensuality and mirroring exist. Later in adolescence, romantic love can be described by a lot of idealization and high expectations and values. In adult life, the feeling of love becomes more complex and conflictual: t...Read more

What could “Ego analysis” mean? The Ego, described by Freud as “first and foremost a body-ego“, could this primitive Ego continue its life beyond the developments and transformations whose object it is? The Ego’s transformation into an object of love (and hate), by means of narcissism, inevitably raises the issue of unconscious Ego and its analysis. The setting plays a privileged role in the analysis of the Ego.

The author explores the traumatic impact of growing up as a replacement child to parents who were Holocaust survivors. Using a case study in which the patient was a replacement child for parents who each lost a child during the Holocaust, the author examines the damage to the child’s ego functions (thinking abilities and reality testing) and emotional develop¬ment. Analysis consisted of an attempt to understand the meaning ...Read more

Starting from several examples of dreams reported by children pa-tients, the author examines the evo-lution of psychoanalytic theories re-garding dreams: S. Freud, A. Freud, M. Klein, S. Ferenczi, Kohut, Lacan, Winnicott, Erikson and concludes on the dynamics and economy of dream interpretation in the therapeutic pro-cess emphasizing their impor¬tance in transference, repetition (of trauma), recollection and working-through.

Early insomnia in a six months old infant born to young parents is un-derstood by reference to narcissism, a psycho-analytic concept intro-duced by S. Freud and later deve-loped to make sense of a variety of pathologies. Consultation with a psychoanalyst is the treatment to cure the anxiety responsible for the pain.

Mental development is not linear. Each stage is configured depending on the previous stage but also on the relational, narcissistic regime, that of psyche-soma continuity, somatic accommodations, transgenerational and cultural registration. This paper presents 4 diagrams with 4 determinants of psychic development with the intention of achieving a holistic view of the human psyche in its becoming.

A model of the dissociative mind could have a transformative poten-tial for the way we concepttualize mental processes. With respect to dissociation many of the basic notions of psychoanalysis have a different meaning. For examaple, the structural model postulates the tripartite unit of the Ego, the Id, and the Superego, all of them being in a dynamic conflict. This model, which implies a unitary, cohesive self, could appear d...Read more

Social trauma, with a specific reference to the Soviet occupation, the enforcement of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle for survival during the "Golden Age", produces splits, even fractures in the sense of belonging to a family history, of continuing or discon-tinuing a tradition, but preserving psychic suffering as landmark of contemporary Romania has origins in our predecessors' traumas, unspoken or unthou...Read more

The paper is an attempt to establish a connection between the analyst’s ethics and the analytic method, a connection that emphasizes the notion of ethics in relation to the notion of method. The specific temporal dimension of psychoanalytic ethics indicates a back and forth process in relation to the method: after a movement to transgress analytic thinking, the ethical process consists in a movement to return to analytic thi...Read more

Therefore, the section Theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis, unmodified, follows the topic of this year’s first issue - Impasse, crisis and working-through, connecting this issue with the series of articles previously published. I would like to add a personal comment to what was already said in the previous editorial regarding the topic of impasse and working-through, a comment that is appropriate for this celebration of ...Read more

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

Acest articol este disponibil doar in franceza

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only.

Reading a contemporary psychoanalytic book on trauma, after over 100 years since Freud wrote about it in his personal correspondence with Fliess, is an experience of re-viewing and re-thinking the author’s theoretical background and of re-analysing his clinical cases. It is also an experience of coming in contact again, from so many perspectives, with what individual/collective traumas, traumatic events, and traumatisms mean...Read more

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

Daniela’s paper carries us to the outer limits of the psychoanalytical field, which are the most prolific ones for research and the progress of knowledge. As the author demonstrates, the impasse itself is the place where the elaboration begins. Starting with Freud`s impasse concerning the psychoanalytical treatment of the individual with narcissistic traits, Daniela smoothly guides us into the narcissistic patients’ world,...Read more

This article is available in French only

Guilt as a moral category is differ- rentiated from feelings of guilt as a psy- chological category. Psychoanalysts study and try to understand feelings of guilt. The author compares evolutionary and psychoanalytical concepts of the super-ego. In the analysis with an elderly woman with many traumatic events in her life history, different aspects of guilt and feelings of guilt are studied. Confusing the different levels of guil...Read more

The paper centers on the analytic treatment of a doctoral student, conducted in Munich, in the patient’s and the analyst’s common mother tongue. Far away from her family and her native town, the patient could not feel as free and vital as before; through our analytic work, she could also resume the developmental stages she had missed and eventually move towards the condition of an emotionally responsive, sexually active an...Read more

This article focuses on Marius, the protagonist of Everybody in Our Family (Radu Jude, 2012). His personality manifests itself both through his genuine love for his five-year-old daughter Sophia, and through his propensity for suddenly transforming his repressed resentment and conflictual relationship with his ex-wife Otilia into verbal abuse and physical violence. Some attention is also given to the psychological function of ...Read more

In this paper some theoretical and clinical issues are explored, about possible conscious choices and uncon- scious trends of the analyst regarding “solutions by crisis” and “solutions by lysis” in the psychoanalytic treatment. While the “crisis-like” solution is frequently represented in classical psychoanalytic literature through an active interpretative attitude by the analyst, the “lysis-like” option is us...Read more

While Westerners - English, Dutch, French, Germans, Italians - live, speak and write about "Hate and Love in Psychoanalytic Institutions" (Jurgen Reeders, 004), about fanaticism, schisms and queries on the apparent decline of psychoanalysis , Easterners - and we among them – having gone through their own historical-political metamorphoses, interrogate and self- interrogate, hopeful, to what extent the psychoanalytic institut...Read more

In my presentation, I will propose a series of assumptions stemming from my own patient practice and previous research in psychoanalysis. In doing so, I hope to find solutions to situations where I encountered therapeutic impasses in the analytical situation with patients. Beyond the distinctions of neurosis, borderline, psychosis, patients can show their existential difficulties (in other words feeling unable to exist in this...Read more

Within a free analysis in an institution, the termination of the treatment can prove to be difficult to accomplish. Based on a clinical sequence, I would like to point out how a dream and the inter-analytic exchange around its interpretation have allowed for re- launching the process of elaboration and leaving behind the impasse, as well as the risk of an interminable analysis.

100 years of narcissism in psycho- analysis – respective of Sigmund Freud’s “On Narcissism. An Intro- duction”, and other decades of clinical and theoretical thinking, decades marked by Herbert Rosenfeld, Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg, André Green, Jean Bergeret, Catherine Chabert, René Roussillon, among others. 100 years configuring the matrix of working on the impasses, disruptions in treatment, analytical errors, on ...Read more

The intrusion of the psychoanalytical settings by the actual brings about a deadlock of the elaboration and of the psychoanalytical process. How are overcome these moments and especially what it means to overcome those moments and continue the development of the psychoanalytical process is a challenge that has no solution, but rather a series of testimonials of essays that allows the psychoanalysts to access various forms of u...Read more

Continuing the series of major themes in psychoanalysis, this issue of the Journal is dedicated to the impasse.

This article is available in French only. My reflections on the dream part in what is one of my areas of clinical exploration in psychoanalysis, the narcissistic-identity issues and their psychoanalytic treatment. What is placed at the heart of their cure is the matter of integrating the narcissistic trauma and particularly the integration of the early narcissistic trauma, which we are to discuss further below. Their psychic i...Read more

In this paper I will explore what is that happens when a patient lies down on a couch and a Psychoanalyst sits behind. What does it mean if we say the patient then associates freely and the analyst listens to and then occasionally talks to the patient about the patient? I want to revisit the fundamental concepts of free association, resistance, transfe¬rence, countertransference and enac¬tment to discuss why it may be useful...Read more

This article is available in French only. The paper starts from a vignette containing a dream recounted in two sessions, a dream that consists of two parts. Developing Freudian ideas and those of other authors with respect to time, the author suggests that the feeling of time is not only related to external, objective time, or to the perception of one’s own psychic acti¬vities, but that it also includes an entire anti-traum...Read more

This paper will focus on the last of the six functions and will – by providing three empirical illustrations – point to the rather meager attention given to dream reports in treatment research. When we speak about dreams in psychoanalytic therapy, we tend to think of a specific dream; quite rarely it is considered that the repeated commu¬nication of dreams belongs to the core features, especially of psychoanalyic therapie...Read more

In the analytic space, which is a co-felt, co-created, co-thought space, both the analyst and the analysand, the dreaming and the reverie are present, session by session, if – as W. R. Bion, Th. Ogden, A. Ferro remind us – the emotional experience is possible, if the dream could be dreamt, unconsciously or consciously, if being able of analysing means internalizing the analytic function – a thinking, dreaming function, o...Read more

This article is available in French only. In the analyst’s way of listening, the words are losing their commu-nicational value, both those heard and those that unfold in the analyst, in his intimacy. They are imme¬diately decom¬posed and recom¬posed, according to the rules of the work of prototypical dream of the primary process, when thoughts of different kinds break, move and assemble, when sleep sets in and protects th...Read more

This article is available in French only. Cruelty, which is not a psychoanalytic concept, appears in different figures in Freud's work. It is first taken in the sexual current, as ephemeral “cruelty drive”, in part, or as a “predisposition” for easy cruel children, which must be contained and suppressed by morality and culture work, before appearing as cruelty of the obsessive neurotic, or as cruelty of the superego in...Read more

Attempts to measure the “moti¬vation for change” as a predictor of success or failure in psychotherapy are not warranted. The concept of motivation is useful if one looks in detail at the hierarchy of motives, from conscious to unconscious, from conflict-free to primitive, drive-determined for¬ces, at any given stage of psycho¬therapy. Doing so will help distin¬guish wishesto continue experiencing the real and fantasie...Read more

This article is available in French only. The article presents some footage on three dreams of a 17 year old girl. Based on various criteria of dream interpretation, the article proposes the hypothesis that the dream would be a search for a solution and that it would have a predictive dimension. An old Talmudic observation says that a dream not interpreted is like a letter unread. The article raises a number of questions regar...Read more

The thread of the paper carries us to perennial benchmarks of psycho¬analysis, namely to the structure of the dream function. K. W. Dream, science of dreams, function of the dream, the prospective dimension of the dream.

This article is available in French only. Je partirai, pour cette discussion de l’exposé du Professeur Roussillon, du processus de symbolisation primaire et je m’attarderai sur quelques questions concernant les conditions et les prémices nécessaires à la réussite de ce processus.

“Could you please introduce the discussion of a dream in your presentation?”…this is probably one phrase that many candidates in psychoanalytic training around the world have heard at least a few times and I believe most of us are quite familiar with the feeling of anxiety it always triggers.

I read Daniela’s paper on dreams, reverie, Bion… I read how she dreamt about her patient. And of course, the following night, I also dreamt about my patient, David, aged six.

This article is available in French only. Frances Tustin est psychanalyste, une des premières psychothérapeutes de l’enfant, au début des années 1950. Elle a pratiqué la psychothérapie avec des autistes pendant nombreuses années. Son activité avec les enfants souffrant d’autisme est marquée par la compréhension psychanalytique et le traitement inspiré par la psychanalyse des états autistiques chez les enfants e...Read more

This article is available in French only.

This article is available in French only. Frances Tustin est psychanalyste, une des premières psychothérapeutes de l’enfant, au début des années 1950. Elle a pratiqué la psychothérapie avec des autistes pendant nombreuses années. Son activité avec les enfants souffrant d’autisme est marquée par la compréhension psychanalytique et le traitement inspiré par la psychanalyse des états autistiques chez les enfants e...Read more

In this essay I wish to explore the elaboration of dreams and the elaboration of creative activity in treatment as a bridge to the unconscious. Through their creativity, as well as through their dreams, patients attempt to externalise aspects of themselves, and their object representations, as well as the interaction with these objects in their unconscious fantasies. The elaboration of creative activity is similar ...Read more

This article is available in French only. Based on the interrogation regarding the substantiality of the dream statute as “royal road” to the patient’s unconscious contents in a context defined by the increasingly relational orientation of contemporary psychoanalysis through the prevalence of limit-pathologies in current psychoanalytic clinic, the author resorts to a brief incursion in the history of dream psychoanalytic...Read more

In this workshop I am going to deal with the clinical use of dreams, what is called working with dreams, that is the analytical ability to constantly fluctuate between investigation and reverie in the dream analysis. The workshop consists of an introductory theoretical part and a second part in which oneiric texts brought by the workshop facilitator and the participants will be discussed. We will start from the Traumdeutung, i...Read more

Even since the fundamental book of psychoanalysis, Dreams interpretation, 1900, Sigmund Freud considered that the symbol has a universal value, and E. Jones added in 1919 the difference between the conscious symbol and the unconscious symbol. Enlightening the unconscious wish, the primitive anguish, the archaic conflicts, dreams could be often a metaphoric working through of them, but sometimes they could be also a symptomatic...Read more

Although the hate supports the self-conservative aggressiveness, it is distinguished from it. From the clinical experience point of view, this article attempts to distinguish faces of the hate. The Oedipal hate is objectal, it relates to the murder of a rival. This is hate that implies three persons and it is relative: the hate of the one is the measure of the love of another. The turning into its opposite are always possible,...Read more

This article is available in French only. In the past decade, the spread of incision practices (skin perforation) in adolescents comes from a sociological and psychopathological reality. Based on the clinical experience gained in a hospitalization unit and in an ambulatory for adolescents, we propose reflecting upon the processes involved in this form of bodily injury. If the notion of cruelty is normally used to describe acti...Read more

The present case report refers to a child who has been living in an oneiric-fantastic subculture, populated by believes in magic, witches, spells, and the power of curses. Stubbornness, as a distinctive personality trait, has turned into a structure of defence against maternal beliefs, stubbornness which, over the years, became extremely rigid, inflexible and maladaptive. As key elements of psychopathology, the patient present...Read more

This article is available in French only. The center of each analysis is the transferential relationship that starts with actions typical of humor and ends with a process of separation between the analysand and the analyst, in other words mourning. If we look at the transference without considering therapeutic knowledge, we can see a relationship that develops between two people, at least one of them being an adult. In this re...Read more

First of all, I wish to express all my gratitude and my appreciation for Ilany Kogan and for her passion (in the Bion meaning of the term) for the psychoanalytical work on dreaming, painting, living, and being. Her paper, so rich and so open-minding to reverie and thinking, reminds me, from the beginning to the end, the Marion Milner`s book About not being able to paint, but I dare to say that the Ilany`s paper is a reflection...Read more

This article is available in French only. Je remercie mon collègue, Alfred Dumitrescu, pour le défi que constitue la discussion de son exposé, défi lancé d’emblée au lecteur/public, le mot d’esprit et la problématisation scientifique faisant d’emblée partie de son style ; son discours oral/écrit en porte la marque, qui rend ce discours si reconnaissable par ceux d’entre nous qui le lisons/écoutons depuis de n...Read more

I am thankful to Simonetta Diena for giving us the privilege to have a working-group, like in a Bionian theory and method, on dreams, oneiric material and art. This method of working together with dreams, proposed by Simonetta, reminds me of Antonino Ferro`s theory about the bi-personal analytic field, co-created by the analyst and analysand, in the consulting room. In this conference room, all together, with Simonetta Diena a...Read more

The presence of a psychiatric case study brings to our attention the serious pathology, which in this case originates in the heavy repeated abuse at an early age by the patient’s parents.

This article is available in French only. Un état de dépersonnalisation-déréalisation, car les deux sont souvent vécus ensemble, se caractérise par la sensation d’être étranger à soi-même et l’impression que l’environnement qui est très connu et dans lequel on se trouve est bizarre, irréel, totalement inconnu, comme si l’on vivait dans un rêve ou dans une autre dimension.

This article is available in French only. Un des points d’intérêt majeur de la psychanalyse a été et est toujours le rêve. De nombreuses discussions et disputes dans le champ de la psychanalyse se sont tissées autour du rêve.

Lucille is a child possessing a certain kind of emotional investment, a kind of total love that the latency period cannot nullify. Or, if we were to look at the same reality of emotions as in a mirror, we might wonder whether Lucille is choosing to remain in latency in order not to annul / to lose / to leave this type of loving. There are people who, even though later in their evolution into adulthood have known or will know ...Read more

This article is available in French only.

"Out of my mind" - meaning "I’m not in my right mind" made ​​me think forth to the conscious and unconscious levels of the complex process of loving – love... The next step is existent to an inevitable object of love. We could then rephrase and ask ourselves: What psychoanalyst do we love? Are there any parental figures (personal analyst, supervisor, teacher) involved and most important how are they involved during the...Read more

This article is available in French only.

“Sulivan Revisited – Life and Work”, by Marco Conci, is an extensive effort to lay down in a structured manner not only the life and work of Harry Stack Sullivan, but the obvious overdetermination between personal history, profession, work, quests, pursuits, and the atmosphere of those “terrible” times of research, development and innovation.

This article is available in French only. Defined by Freud as a consequence of “biological peacefulness”, latency has evolved, according to F. Guignard. The case of an 8-year-old little girl, placed in a specialized institution shows the difficulty of establishing this developmental phase. Her parents are separated and they are in conflict, and she suggests that her father used her as a sexual object. The girl shows, on th...Read more

This article is available in French only. This paper addresses the problem of filiation and affiliation in the psychotherapy of a Jung pubescent exhibiting behaviour problems. Elyah is the only child of a mixed couple Judeo-Christian (father Ashkenazi and mother Catholic). The working hypothesis involves that individual identity cannot be built outside the registration of a person in a filiation, and any filiation is unthinkab...Read more

“The dream as a picture of the process” gives an overview of the work that has been done during the psychoanalytic process. The dream is going to play a crucial role in the therapy or in the analysis. Its lucidity and transparency are characteristic. Although the patient doesn’t stress the importance of the dream during the session, he/she remembers them clearly and also later in the analysis or after termination, he/she...Read more

This article is available in French only. Learning the limit doesn’t differ from the depressive position described by M. Klein: the baby’s, then the child’s acceptance of the barrier that separates him from his mother and that triggers in him the existence of a dependency on her. In this respect, this limit opposes the expansion of the child’s narcissism or his egotism. The limit, if integrated by the ego, allows him t...Read more

This article is available in French only. No psychoanalyst can be immune to any theory, whether it is implicit or not. His theories or theoretizations are forgathered in the cure, throughout the analytic process. Useful to his activity, theories shouldn’t serve the analyst for “protecting against the experience of affects” (Freud). They shouldn’t function as a theoretical layer either. Only the subjectivity of the anal...Read more

The author investigates questions such as: “Why do we choose psychoanalysis as our profession?”, “What motifs contribute to this choice?”, “Why is the relationship often passionate?” or: “which is in fact the object of our love?”. Expectation to recover from psychic suffering and obtainment of narcissistic gratifications are among those components. There are several options in which analysis could be misused, a...Read more

This article is available in French only. Archaic functioning refers to psychic processes preceding primary processes specific to the developmental period in which there is no separation between body and psyche. This type of functioning is found through regressive dynamics in the psychoanalytic cure of the subject who suffers from addictive or psychosomatic pathology. The way in which the analyst looks or listens will be confr...Read more

This article is available in French only. In this paper, the author proposes an illustration of the psychoanalytic theories on transitionality – from D. W. Winnicott to Didier Anzieu and René Roussillon, and especially on the importance of arranging the analytic frame when working with difficult patients (non-neurotic), according to ”the principles of transitional analysis”. Transitionality first implies a form of psy...Read more

This article starts from observing the fact that there are similar clinical phenomena described in different psychoanalytic “theoretical languages” by authors belonging to different orientations. Concepts of projective identification and identification with the aggressor are provided as examples, their clinical description having a common core, also found in other notions, such as those of paradoxical system (M. de M’Uza...Read more

This essay reviews the place of the baby metaphor in relational thinking. The relational emphasis on mutuality (patient-as-adult) in the clinical encounter collided with models lodged in developmental metaphors and resulted in sharp critiques of the holding theme. Bringing my own Winnicottian / relational perspective to this critique, I proposed a view of holding that bridged the two models by exploring the analyst’s partici...Read more

This article is available in French only.

This paper focuses on the concept of“development” presenting behaviour asthe result of a complex interaction betweennature and nurture, between geneticvulnerability and early object relations. The author underlines that at the end ofdevelopment the individual has developedthe capacity to contemplate him/herselfand others in psychological terms andshe/he has constructed an internal workingmodel on the basis of which they ar...Read more

This article is available in French only Even if, as a follower of the Freudian path,Jacques Lacan takes over initial concepts -isolated by this one - and transforms theminto foundations of psychoanalysis, even ifhe recongnizes the genius of his master,his models, theoretical and culturalreferences, the methodology of thepsychoanalytic practice differssignificantly from those employed byFreud and his students. Can we therefore...Read more

The paper suggests the following: how doesthe couple therapist-patient look like in theepitome frustration/ gratification and theconsequences that the closed model of themind has on the patient; is it an enactmentof an amendable error or is it an inevitableconsequence of the subconsciousinteraction between the two actants? Theanswer refers to the way in which apsychoanalytical healing attitude can bebuilt within the context of...Read more

The paper looks into the contradictionbetween the theory of technique andclinical practice at Freud and presents atotally different Freud and not animpersonal, abstinent, neutralpsychoanalyst, a master of transferenceand resistances, expectances inspired bythe classical model of psychoanalysis. Aquestion thus arises: Was Freud in factFreudian? As any brilliant personality, thefounder of psychoanalysis wascontradictory in his s...Read more

This paper sets forth the idea thatcreativity, symbolism and play arereflected in the analytical relationship ascentral developmental concepts belongingto the transitional space. They take place ina space between inside and outside,between subjective and objective. It allbegins with an idea that appears, a prethoughtthat is expressed, being nurturedor damaged, by means of words. Depending on the safety of this creativearea one...Read more

The death drive is a psychoanalyticalconcept that was apprehensivelyacknowledged by the psychoanalyticalworld, despite the fact that Freud, ever sincethe moment he stated it, refused to everquestion it again. Melanie Klein embracedthe concept, but only developed it withinher own theory, while the concept wasrestored to the psychoanalytical world in itsentire complexity by André Green. Thepsychoanalytical practice faces regres...Read more

This article is available in French only. Taking into account the importance of thestake of pluralism in theory, practice,ethics and training in currentpsychoanalysis, the paper sets forth toclarify the notion of pluralism and set itout not in terms of movement, but inchapters of psychoanalytical theory andpractice. In the second part we will analyze a theoretical-clinical axis significant to thetheory of object relation, to t...Read more

This article is available in French only. Pluralism in psychoanalysis is a given fact,undoubtfully related to various factorsamong which cultural and theoreticaldiversity. This diversity is connectedpartially to the psychic complexity whilealso raising the issue of adaptations,reformulations, adjustements that approachthe matter of its identity and threaten itsdefinition - even if thus the diversityenriches psychoanalysis. I p...Read more

The practice of psychoanalysis places theanalyst on strong pressures – the analystworks alone in the consulting room in amedium of isolation, he has to bepermanently open to what is coming fromthe patient, he is emotionally affected byhis patients and he has the responsibility tokeep and maintain professional boundariesof this relationship. Hate incountertransference could generate aparticular conflict in the analyst – con...Read more

This article is available in French only. Winnicott invites us, in 1947, to workthrough the countertransference and thusto have access to the hate feelings that ourpatients inspire in us. Winnicott is quiteclear: the analyst could help his patientsrecognise their hate drives with onecondition: to recognise beforehand inhimself his own hate drives, in his ownwork analysis. To work through theprimitive elements, here is an hones...Read more

In his paper, “Psychoanalysis in / and development”, Thijs de Wolfleads with elegance, between biology and psychology, from psychoanalysisto psychopathology, from the attachment theory to internal workingmodels and further to mentalisation.

This article is available in French only.

This article is available in French only.

This article is available in French only.

With respect to the idea of pluralism in psychoanalysis, a theme broadlydebated in the psychoanalytic scientific community, a subject of more orless rich controversies between the representatives of variouspsychoanalytic movements, I would subscribe to the opinion according towhich it has its origin in no other than Sigmund Freud’s way of thinking(Ghunter, Perdigao, 2007), him being himself preoccupied with extractinghis obs...Read more

This article is available in French only. Psychoanalytical theories definetransference and countertransference asexpressions of unconscious exchangebetween patient and therapist. Thecountertransference is the therapist'sanswer to patient's unconscious requests. Ferenczi and, later, Lacan, change part ofthe meaning of countertransference,shifting the center of gravity from patientto therapist (Lacan even reverses it): thetransf...Read more

From the outset, psychoanalysisextensively utilized arbitrary convictionswhich subsequently generated andperpetuated an intolerance of criticism anddissent. Defensiveness about thearbitrariness and the need to protect theprofessional psychoanalytic identityengendered fear of, disinterest in, andcriticism of analytic research whosefindings might threaten unsubstantiatedarbitrary convictions. For these, and othercomplex reasons,...Read more

This article is available in French only. It would be difficult to think that theconstruction of the psychic life could beginonly with the fantasizing activity. Itwould mean to put away the interactionsthat are established since origin betweenthe baby and the outside world, andespecially with the mother. It would meannot to recognize the containing andstructuring value of the face of themother, with the function to reflect the...Read more

Mr. Zamfirescu’s work references an important debate, related firstly tocountertransference as a consciously controlled reaction to the patient’stransference, and secondly, to countertransference as a profoundly subconsciousphenomenon, which engages the therapist, but only après-coup, as the French haveit. And here follow a myriad of questions which could give further meaning to thisdiscussion.

This article is available in French only.

This article is available in French only. Discussion sur «Le contre-transfert du psychanalyste et la croyance du patient. Séquences cliniques» d’Irena Talaban.

The paper written by Monica Balasa brought to my mind the imageof the obstacles course of a riding event, a contest in which horse and ridertry to get over the obstacles faultlessly and as quickly as possible. I thinkthis impression is due to the large number of ‘gates’ left half-open by thispaper which, by lack of enough space, invites us to explore those barelytouched issues at leisure, individually or in small groups, o...Read more

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This article is available in French only. The somatic continent is an unknown landfor psychoanalysis and, for this reason, itis avoided. The patient’s expression on thisregister is frequently ignored by thetherapist, even if it refers to the deeper andstructuralized levels of his personality. Considering the psychogenesis of theaddictive behaviors, the pain subjected ofthe body symptoms finds his origin intothe earliest stag...Read more

It is a certified fact that the therapeuticmeeting psychoanalyst-patient during thepreliminary interview engages theprotagonists in an explicitly convergentintercession, an agreement in theconscious register for a joint effort thataims to cure suffering and ameliorate selfknowledge. This facet of the relationdefines the therapeutic alliance. However,what happens in parallel, in the subsurfaceof the meeting implies, likewise fr...Read more

The notion of countertransference hasknown a troubled history within the boundof psychoanalysis and was borrowed, moreor less successfully and more or lessadequately, by multiple psychotherapeuticcurrents, some placed entirely outside thespectrum of psychoanalysis. The authorwill try to approach countertransferencefrom a psychoanalytical perspective, morespecifically the way countertransferenceand regression (both of the patie...Read more

In this paper, the author is trying toclarify, through different psychoanalyticaltheories (A. Freud, P. Heimann, H. Deutsch, M. Little, C. York, H. Rosenfeldetc.) and also through his own clinicalpractice with addictive patients how theanalytic treatment of these patients doesnot succeed if one insists on a rigidadherence to the classical method. Thismeans that many parameters have to beintroduced in the analysis and that thea...Read more

This article is available in French only. In this article, the author tries to illustrate,from a historical point of view, howFreud’s urgent desire to take a distancefrom his initial practice in hypnosis to beable to establish a new psychoanalyticaltheory and practice, more scientific andout of all kind of suggestive influences, hasblocked him to give an adequate value tothe countertransference aspects involved inthe analyst...Read more

This article is available in French only. The paper starts from the perspective of H. Racker on the countertransference. Thepaper is proposing to make the linksbetween his concepts of analytic functionand subjective experience, with theconcepts of analytic space and analytictime. The author describes a phenomenonof the analysts’ internal space and timedilatation, as well as that of the creation ofa subjective time, as a cons...Read more

What role do we give to external reality when we have a patient lying onthe couch? Is it useful at all to even mention external reality in apsychoanalytic setting? Does it belong to an analysis conducted in theclimate described by Ilany?The issue of external reality in relation to internal reality has beencontended from the earliest days. This has happened not only in thespecific field of psychoanalysis, but in all human scien...Read more

At a time when war and destruction arepart of everyday life, and our safety isincreasingly threatened, one of thequestions we Israeli analysts ask ourselvesis, what is the place of psychoanalysis insuch a world? Can we in good faithpropose to practice psychoanalysis insituations of great anxiety caused by acrisis, and can we, in the face of the effectof terrorism, hold on to our identities aspsychoanalysts? The relationship be...Read more

Dans son livre La Construction de l’espace psychanalytique, SergeViderman nous a decrit la relation transfert – contre-transfert par unemetaphore eclaircissante sur la part obscure de notre espace psychique:≪Imaginons deux phares tournant en sens inverse et dont les feux secoupent periodiquement. C’est lorsque transfert et contre-transferts’entrecroisent que se situent les moments de la plus grande brillance. Moments...Read more

J’ai l’heureuse opportunite de soumettre a votre attention, avecl’intention de provoquer votre curiosite intellectuelle, le livre L’ecorce et lenoyau, etonnant par la richesse des pistes de recherche et de reflexionproposees, et par le regard de ses auteurs sur le psychisme. Les auteurs desarticles rassembles dans ce livre sont Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,continuateurs des idees de Ferenczi et de l’ecole hongroise...Read more

The paper is structured around extremely current interrogations onthe contemporary dynamics of psychoanalysis. I’m referring to the questionto what extent is the analyst’s countertransference influenced by the data ofhis personal psychology, as reflected in the professional training and in thechoices of his personal history.

Empirical research on the treatment processhas long time - for good reasons - avoided toeven try to measure countertransference,although this dimension of thepsychoanalytic work has gained inmomentum over the last decades. Our paper reports on various efforts of howto approach such a methodology formeasuring such an elusive concept. Thedistinction between habitual patterns ofcountertransference and situational affectivereactio...Read more

My contribution debates the relationshipbetween the rule of abstinence andcountertransference, existing much moreimplicitly than explicitly in the specializedstudies. I discern three moments: exclusionof countertransference by the demand ofabstinence as a rule; restraining theabstinence rule to neurotic disorders andemphasizing the importance of noticing andexpressing countertransference for thepsychotic pathology and borderli...Read more

In this paper, the author tries to analyze theway in which an analyst understands andmanages countertransference during time. The author asks herself in which way theanalyst’s counterstransference is affected/influenced by his/her professional status(beginner analyst, experienced analyst,belonging to some theoretical psychoanalyticalschools, etc); also, if countertransference isaffected by some significant events from theana...Read more

This article is available in French only. The setting can be seen as the keeper of thepsychoanalyst’s ethics. A very banal≪ agieren ≫, a session displacement coversand then clarifies what was, until thattime, a rather obscure aspect of thetransference/countertransferencerelationship. For this purpose, a wellarrangeddivan and a safe setting enablethe “reading” of the touch that the patientand the analyst leave on them...Read more

This article is available in French only. The purpose of this paper is to explore – bymeans of contemporary psychoanalyticaltheories – the nuances and the sense ofsilence, of primitive, non-verbal, affective,archaic communication in thepsychoanalytical work, with a special focusnot only on distinguishing and analyzingthe transference/countertransferencemovements but also on the destiny of the unheard and unsaid in creatin...Read more

Countertransference is one of the mostimportant tools of the analytic work. Inthis paper, I will try to show howcountertransference has been considered indifferent ways according to theimportance paid to the analyst'ssubjectivity. One important problemconcerns the therapeutic value of theelaboration of countertransference. Myhypothesis is that this necessary process isnot enough to promote the therapeuticprogress. I think that...Read more

This article is available in French only. Ce nouveau numero de la Revue Roumaine de Psychanalyse accueilledans ses pages une serie d’ouvrages interessants sinon significatifs par leurapproche variee d’un sujet qui anime plusieurs etudes et rapports cliniqueset scientifiques de la psychanalyse actuelle. De grandes personnalites dumonde de la psychanalyse signent la contribution au sujet, donnant de lavaleur a la publication...Read more

Any discussion that approaches psychoanalysis can be described using Freud's words that express openness, beyond various contradictions regarding the method: “Psychoanalysis gropes its way forward by the help of experience, is always incomplete and always ready to correct or modify its theories”.

or how the creative Ego writes itself, between psychoanalysis and Zen from Matei Georgescu’s point of view Motto: ”The Manner in which something is seen, heard, or cognizedis not what is refuted here, but the conceptualization of its trueappearance, which is the cause of suffering, is rejected here.” (Santideva – The perfection of wisdom)

Freud refers to the concept of altruism approximately ten times in hiswork, most often in a social or cultural context. In "Thoughts for the Timeson War and Death" he writes: “Throughout an individual's life there is aconstant replacement of external by internal compulsion. The influences ofcivilization cause an ever-increasing transformation of egoistic trends intoaltruistic and social ones by an admixture of erotic element...Read more

Symmetrically thinking, I immediately had in mind thecountertransference and its destiny in Freud’s works, realizing that, in thisregard, the psychoanalysis founder’s thinking couldn’t go beyond a certain point. He couldn’t realize the spectacular revalorization sensed in the caseof transference. The term of countertransference was used for the first timeby Freud in a letter addressed to Jung, in 1909. In a letter from...Read more

The point of departure of the article is thedisagreements about theory and techniquein the British Society. Fantasies of being“the owner” of psychoanalytic father ormother are described, for each group. Overtime, the solutions involved institutionalarrangements, then theoretical andtechnical rapprochements between groups. The over-valuation of one aspect or anothercan lead to exaggerations or diminutions inthe technique wh...Read more

This paper is focused on changes inpsychoanalysis from a different angle,namely, looking at that which has reallynot changed as much as we seem to like tobelieve: psychoanalytic concepts. Theauthor presents what has become one of thebest and most cited concepts inpsychoanalysis nowadays: projectiveidentification. Altruistic surrender,identification with the aggressor, puttingpassive into active are different ways ofunderstandi...Read more

This article is available in French only. A reflection on the analytical attitude and the arrangements of the analytical setting with borderline patients. The analytical setting is sustained by the analytical attitude, any arrangement of the setting will be the result of an internal arrangement of the analyst and his/her inner attitude, in the context of the transference-contertransference relation.

A psychoanalyst is placed between the scientific rigour and thesuppleness of art, when keeping the internal frame/setting constant andcontaining enough, flexible and immutable, at the same time, he/she isleaving his/her observatory, participatory spirit free and his/her owncreativity in order to explore, examine, investigate, interrogate his/her own limits facing the psychic reality of the other and of the world (includinghere...Read more

This article is available in French only. The article approaches the issue ofmetaphoric language in the patients'discourse, that have a polymorphicsymtomathology, includingpsychosomatic and addictivemanifestations. This reflection issupported by D Anzieu's perspectives onskin-ego, F. Marty's view concerningoperative thinking, and De M'Uzan'smetaphor in cure. Based on the clinicalillustration in R. Matei's paper, thehypothesis ...Read more

This article is available in French only. Addictive behaviours are a nosographiccategory difficult to approach from the pointof view of classical psychoanalysis. Due tothe subject’s poor capacity of psychicelaboration, free association and the access tothe analyst’s interpretations will encounterimportant obstacles during the analyticalwork. The subject’s tendency to “pulverize”affects, which will be crystallized eit...Read more

This article is available in French only. After a few general observations on theconcept of depression and the mourningscheme described by S. Freud and de K. Abraham, the depressive semiology indifferent stages of childhood and adolescencewas presented as being related to differentinterconnected psychopathological issues,especially to the question: What can be lostbefore the complete object instauration (canan object be lost b...Read more

Among analysts, S. Freud who invented psycho-analysis is an impressive example demonstrating how to change to better understand neuroses and to treat the pain of a variety of disorders: depression, perversion, psychoses, psychosomatics ... which imply a living metapsychology. The couch remains a reference for analytical work, but analysts should prepare themselves to work face to face when required.

18 years have passed since the issue of the first publication of theRomanian Society of Psychoanalysis, called Psychoanalysis Bulletin. If theprinceps vocation of a publication is to reflect the group that initiated it,then the shift from its compact form of “bulletin” to the current one of“journal” implicitly takes us back to the historic years of Romania’spsychoanalysis “coming of age”.

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The anniversary of 100 years from the foundation of the International Psycho-analytical Association (I.P.A.), under whose sign the Romanian Society of Psycho-analysis (S.R.P.) holds its conference this year, draws attention to the importance of institutional problems for the development of psychoanalysis. I intend to address especially those particular aspects (con-flicts, repeated splits, the organization of formation) that l...Read more

The author tries to find some answers to the question: What produces change in psycho-analysis? The reasons patients come in analysis are different and various but no matter what these are, the patient’s conscious and declared purpose is to feel good and not necessarily to change. The change in psycho-analysis is something else meaning it is more than behavior changing and getting rid of symptoms. The author reviews some of ...Read more

This paper defines the operations that are involved in the process of empathy in the therapeutic relationship and tries to define the relationship between empathy and the therapist’s countertransference. It noted that empathy - which appears at pre-conscious and conscious level - is related to a non-conflictual field of personality and is still based on projection and introjection, while the counter-transference occurs when ...Read more

The papers draws a few guidelines and pinpoints a few reference points that enable a certain perspective on change in psycho-analytic theory and technique, on extending the therapeutic area and the development of the theory of psychic apparatus functio-nality. Among these factors are the avatars of filiation, the avatars of transmission in psychoanalysis, the predominant focus on certain singular therapeutic factors, the chang...Read more

The imitation phenomenon in the new-born and the use of the reciprocal imitation between the mother and the baby in order to create a bond are explored in the psychoanalytic theory of the mirroring, imitation and identification. The author analyses the clinical material extracted from observing new-born babies and from the therapy conducted with two children, presents a syndrome of autism to light and reaches the hypothesis th...Read more

The paper aims to highlight the issue of change taking as landmark the primum movens of the psychoanalytic process. Paradoxically, the setting of the con-ditions conducive to psychic trans-formation brings the phenomenon of narcissistic regression described by Bela Grunberger, with its phantasy of retrieving the ideal ego. In Abraham and Torok's view, such a phantasy seeks unconsciously to change the external world and to keep...Read more

Decentralizing psychoanalysis in regard to the older “medical” approach to healing the symptoms features the issue of psychic change. This is certified when the patient goes beyond neurosis, more precisely in borderline pathology. What sort of hope for change may psychoanalysis nourish when the patient’s illness is deeply rooted in his/her early traumas? The Self is a “border being”, the word is accurate when the bor...Read more

Since I have been invited to this Conference as Chair of the Sponsoring Committee (S.C.) of the Romanian Society of Psychoanalysis Study Group I want to say only a few words of introduction about this Committee2. It is composed of a small number of I.P.A. (International Psychoanalytic Association) members who are appointed by I.P.A. to represent and act on its behalf in a given Country, where an original nucleus of at least fo...Read more

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

Not all news is good news, as not always no news means good news. At least, not in science, not in arts and not in psychoanalysis. However,what is new, when it does not frighten too much, has the potential to arisethe interest. This is, perhaps, because it activates our exploring, risk-taking behaviors, which, as we all know, represent something radicallyopposed to conservative, security seeking attitudes.

Clifford York was one of the leading Freudians of his generation. As Anna Freud’s close colleague, he was also one of the last remaining links to the theoretical and clinical tradition set by her father, Sigmund Freud. Clifford Yorke was a prolific writer and played a very active role in the scientific life of both the British Society of Psychoanalysis and the Anna Freud Centre. The Anna Freud Centre was the foremost interna...Read more

In this paper I will try to underline some peculiar situations that the candidate, in his so called ‘Training Analysis’, has to handle, when he meets some difficulties that analysands, with no training projects, usually do not meet. I will further point out some other difficulties that also trained analysts have to face in their psychoanalytic (this term, from here on in the text, will be replaced by the Greek symbol ø) a...Read more

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This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

IntroductionThe present paper aims to cast light on what I consider to be one of thefundamental aspects of Sigmund Freud’s work: the style of his writings. The discussion will focus on specific characteristics of his figurative language:the way he employs similitudes and metaphors, the uses to whichhe puts them, and the stylistic effects of this resort to analogy. It could, with some justification, be asked what interest a s...Read more

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One of the pillars of Freud’s thought was surely his view of dreams (Freud1911, 1916-17). Dreams as the royal road to the unconscious and as theguardian of sleep are among the most widely shared concepts in psychoanalyticthought. Yet the approach to the interpretation of dreams has changedgreatly, so that many — for example, Meltzer, in Dream Life (1984) —regard them no longer as puzzles to be decrypted, but instead as e...Read more

Research Subject: Emil Cioran’s name is often linked to such words as „philosopher” and„(a)moralist”. As moralist activities — i.e., interpreting ethical acts in theirpractical dimension — are obviously sub-species of philosophical activities,it is not hard to equate this man from Răşinari with a person whoundeniably belongs to the realm of philosophical reflection. What matters— especially in the light of t...Read more

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In all this time, I had a diffuse impression that I was waiting for somethingto happen. That elusive something was to make possible a «true»analytic therapy, comparable to what comes up with other patients: somefree associations, some memories, some insights, some working-throughof transferences, all accompanied by some affective halo. These terms suggesta minimum, to express the “analytic lack” of this therapy. While M...Read more

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This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only

This article is available in French only