EDITORIAL / Anatol Reghintovschi1
Abstract: 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 the verb as timeframe, revealing the limit represented by the archaic.
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Abstract: 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 manifestation of archaic experiences or of the traumatic potential, forms that belong to an unpsychized, potential time, a time that preserves the topicality of its expressions and the lack of elaboration regarding its contents. In this study, the analyst is viewed as the guardian of the framework, an instrument guaranteeing the success of the analytical process, who is subjected to a difficult test, one which involves finding ways of ensuring a space and enabling the elaboration, participation and involvement specific to the process of construction that is essentially based first and foremost on the strength of the framework. The difficulty of answering this challenge and finding solutions derives from the fact that, under these circumstances, what should be the support of the psychoanalytic labour becomes instead the main target of the patients’ attacks.
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Keywords: original forms, archaic, perceptive mnesic traces, porte-parole mother, process of symbolization, aesthetic tuning
Abstract: 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 in continuous evolution, through forms of thought which are both “semiotic”/corporal and logical/rational. The author illustrates this dialectic with examples taken from cinematography and with a clinical vignette. The central thesis of the article is that the emotional work required from the analyst is to “suffer” understanding.
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Keywords: Bion, container/contained, negative capacity, reverie, Ida, Locke
Abstract: 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 and coming to terms with loss condition the creation. The mourning – limit – creativity triad is related to the elaboration of the depressive position
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Keywords: loss, mourning, narcissistic / objectual investment, limit, creativity
Abstract: 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 in the formation of an analyst.
The necessity for psychoanalysts to work on keeping an open mind and several methods on how this can be attempted are discussed.
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Keywords: listening, understanding, receptive attitude, open mind.
Abstract: 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.
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Keywords: intimacy, empathy, dream, relatedness, applied psychoanalysis, self-analysis.
Abstract: 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. According to the Lacanian theory, psychoanalytic therapy will have to replace imaginary self-knowledge by a symbolic self-knowledge, for imaginary knowledge hinders the subject’s access to symbolic knowledge.
In the analytic therapy of the individuals suffering from somatic symptom disorder, the solution refers especially to the behavioural component, while the representations, even if present, concern the body and the way it works in a more or less illusive manner. As, by means of interpretation, the subject accesses their emotions and the relational experience thus expressed, the relational somatic functioning will be replaced by the psychic functioning and representations will lose their corporeal content.
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Keywords: neo-needs, emotional dependency, dispersion of emotions, overinvestment of the body, psychosomatic, dependency
Abstract: 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.
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Keywords: analytic field, paranoia, transformations
Abstract: 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, infused on an interpersonal level. In asking how deceiving oneself induces mental pain and how this pain is able to travel between minds, what becomes clear is that the process equates a complex dynamic form through which a body is given to a dream.
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Keywords: hypochondria, empty thoughts, paradox, dreaming, self-deception
Abstract: 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, the author launches the hypothesis regarding the early stages of the depressive position, which involves the fact that the positive evolution of the baby, his/her introjective capacities, result in the perception of a separation between him/her and his/her primary object. The enhancement of the ego’s capacities is intrinsically associated with the consciousness of losing the object and its capacities.
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Keywords: mourning, adhesive identification, introjective identification, baby observation, depressive position, drug withdrawal
Abstract: 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. At one point, he is the target of an ironic remark in the second group, but wants to stop attending the first (psychodrama). His different ways of functioning in the two groups could be considered a form of fluctuation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, both described by Melanie Klein. The patient’s refusal to continue psychodrama shows his difficulty to adopt the depressive position. But the exercise of the paranoid-schizoid position - which evokes both Bion’s ‘imaginary twin’ and De M’Uzan’s ‘paraphrenic twin’ - seems necessary for the patient positive evolution. Although Henry is not treated using the classical psychoanalytical cure, his evolution can be understood in the terms of Freud’s theory.
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Keywords: depressive position, group, identity, paranoid-schizoid position, psychodrama
Abstract: 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 to me. I will present some sections from the three year of psychotherapy and some supervision series that will emphasize the limits of various theories and interpretations. This case will be approached by means of ethnopsychiatry.
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Keywords: matricide, depression, failure, psychotherapy, ethnopsychiatry, supervision
Abstract: 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 presented in a detailed transcription. For two of them analysis of prosody is included. Solutions for a better handling of TPS are proposed. Finally, the role of clinical theories as “sensitizing” concepts is addressed.
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Keywords: typical problematic situations (TPS), conversation analysis (CA), metaphor, multi-modality of speech, suicidality, clinical theory
Abstract: 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 overlapping of familiarity and alienness. Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny”, identifies the unconscious as the principal locus of this conflictual coexistence.
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Keywords: alienness, dream work, familiarity, meta-psychology, representational function, uncanny
Abstract: 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 significant others, how (or even whether) we can ever learn from experience... All issues, these ones, also central to our psychoanalytic theories and therapeutic work.
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Abstract: 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?
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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.
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