Abstract: This article is available in French only.
Read more
Abstract: 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 terms of how the purpose of the psychoanalytic approach was represented. The working hypothesis is the manner in which psychoanalysts establish their main benchmark that supports their undertaking, directs and organizes the way of relating and using the psychoanalytic setting. But whether we start from the feature of regulatory benchmark or we use the setting as a work tool, the following question remains: how do we understand the curative value of the psychoanalytic undertaking.
Read more
Keywords: setting, space, body, limit, rule, analytic situation
Abstract: 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 training and professional identity, develop with their patients unconsciously different therapeutic projects.
Read more
Keywords: psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, session frequency, psychoanalytic identity
Abstract: 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 provoking traumatic separations of the past and present, in general, the training is effective, and brings mostly acceptable results, especially if the intermittent setting becomes regular and predictable, and analysands can create in their shuttle place the second psychic home. This evokes a sense of continuity, stability, and shapes the psychic basis for good psychoanalytic work.
Read more
Keywords: shuttle analysis, condensed analysis, psychic home, psychoanalysis in Eastern Europa, external reality, analytic setting
Abstract: 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 and identity pertain to the “spatial” twine between the instinctual exigency (soma) and the exigency of the external reality (the object), which represent another series of limits. In the clinic, these vertical and horizontal limits themselves are caught in the process of analytic movement. There are phenomena of overlapping and repositioning of the psychic limits, which sometimes go through body, somatic expressions or through acts on the brink of the setting, on their way to transference.
Read more
Keywords: limit, hyper-limit, soma, setting, body-ego, affect
Abstract: This article is available in French only.
Read more
Abstract: 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 transference but also because of her own capacity and limitations. Freud’s writing on his second homosexual case who was referred to a woman analyst because of her resistances gives us some clues also about analyst’s possible resistances because of his overwhelming experiences.
Read more
Keywords: counter-resistance, analyst’s resistance, bastion, Sidonie Csillag
Abstract: 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 from the side of the involved protagonists. From this perspective, Roussillon speaks about the issue of symbolisation of the double parenthood, Berger - about the phantasm of the family novel situated at the limit of the reality. Invested with positive valences and confirming often its status by the realities it builds, the adoption may still determine, in certain conditions, a limit psychic functioning. By the means of the presented case, we will attempt to analyse the conditions under which an unreported adoption becomes a phenomenon that produces „instability in a stable way” (Schmideberg), particularly in a psychosocial context in which the adoption excites and destabilises both the central stakeholders, the enlarged family, and the community.
Read more
Keywords: abandon, adoption, filiation, identification, splitting, narcissistic agreement
Abstract: 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”.
Read more
Keywords: drive, binding-unbinding, mentalisation, negation, disavowal, spliting, conformism, submission
Abstract: 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.
Read more
Keywords: suicidal gesture, autopainkiller, psychic treatment, hystérisation
Abstract: 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’s own Viennese society or Western “civilised” society in general? In addition, Freud was interested in historical and “primitive” societies from the evolutionist perspective of the British anthropologists of his time. Our work considers the interrelationship between these different societies and cultures, and raises many questions. What constitutes a culture? What are its essential traits, its functions, its relationships with society, for example. Moreover, we present the Freudian central notion of Kulturarbeit, which is constructed from a strictly Freudian perspective.
Read more
Keywords: culture, society, kulturarbeit, drive, sublimation, social sciences
Abstract: This article is available in French only.
Read more
Abstract: 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 paranoid» (Berke, Pierides, Sabbadini, Schneider 1998, p.3). The title of our book is Even Paranoids Have Enemies.
Read more
Keywords: movie
Abstract: 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.
Read more