EDITORIAL / Georgiana Dobrescu
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):7-12
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0014
Abstract: 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.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):17-41
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0015
Abstract: 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 that he has built to map the possible evolutions of the unconscious emotional climate (O) that pervades the session at a given moment. The author then reports an entire session with a psychotic patient and illustrates the use that can be made of this notion, paired with that of progress, in the post-Bionian theory of the analytic field.
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Keywords: Bion, regression, progression, grid, analytic field, psychosis
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):43-72
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0016
Abstract: 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 not try to “tear off the masks”, but start a dialogue with the text or person we try to understand. If we succeed in this, the truth “steps forward”. In this conception we need to move on to goals and positions not yet attained. According to the general view Freud belongs to the first tradition. The author asks how we view understanding in modern psychoanalysis. Through a reading of (1) the Boston Change Process Study Group, (2) Peter Fonagy and Mary Target and (3) Veikko and Riitta Tähkä he concludes that we in psychoanalysis have moved from the first to the second tradition. He discusses what inferences we should draw regarding technique and theory, concentrating on the phenomena and concepts of interpretation and the unconscious.
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Keywords: understanding, hermeneutics, moments of meeting, mentalization, the unconscious, interpretation
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0017
Abstract: 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 elaboration of the sexual register, pre-oedipal and oedipal, of the elaboration of the traumatic, of the affects of shame, humiliation, guilt, as well as their impact on the psychic life of the subject, how they marked the subject’s existence and relationships. Another essential dimension is the inter- and transgenerational transmission of family “secrets” – often violent, incestuous experiences, such as severe diseases, genetic abnormalities, murders, suicides – transmitted over two, three or more generations, unconsciously. This work aims to reveal the secret’s dimension of life in clinical practice, as well as the deadly dimension of secrets and their vicissitudes in transfer-counter transference.
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Keywords: confidentiality, shame, guilt, secrecy, transfer, inter/ transgenerational transmission.
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):93-116
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0018
Abstract: 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 of envy in literature. The author continues with searching his own life for traces of envy. He then draws on his own clinical practice and on case studies of other analysts. He concludes that a theory, describing envy as directly deriving from the death drive does not do justice to the multiple aspects of the complex emotional state of envy. Anne-Marie and Joseph Sandler’s work on the present and past unconscious as well as Mark Solms’ neuropsychoanalytic research on the unconscious and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis corroborate this conclusion.
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Keywords: envy, death instinct, countertransference, interpretation, sin, neuroscience
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):117-130
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0019
Abstract: 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 foundation of a good enough child development for what concerns the unavoidable impact of the parental environment upon the child’s psyche’s formation. I will use the Oedipus’s “anamnesis”, describing the potential dynamics of any parents’ psyche through this myth. I will insist upon the ethical dimension, while, following Emanuel Levinas, I will define ethics as a responsibility for the other, an ability originating, in my view, in the feminine/ maternal of any human being and resulting first from the traces left in the infant and then the child’s psyche’s zone of infinity by the enigm-ethic messages coming from the adult world, which is in charge of him or her. Respecting this emotionally loaded asymmetric responsibility in the parent/child relationship, in any kind of parental constellation, facilitates a sense of singularity, of identity and of belonging in the child.
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Keywords: asymmetry, ethics, new parentalities, saying-well, sexual, vital narcissism.
6 - FOREWORD / Paolo Fonda
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):131-156
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0020
Abstract: 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 much for a psychotherapeutic session? » The answer was: “We should do it to feel alive, to do something different from what was ‘politically correct’ and imposed”. Perhaps this is one reason behind the tremendous interest in psychoanalysis that Westerns encountered in Eastern Europe immediately following 1989.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2019, 13(2):159-172
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0021
Abstract: 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 après-coup and therefore becoming secondarily elaborable. This occurs provided that the analyst is sensitive to the non-verbal forms of returning archaic experiences. I will then describe the nonverbal forms of returning archaic experiences using various clinical examples.
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Keywords: Après-coup, procedural and declarative memories, synthesis and integration, archaic, primary traumas, language of the affect
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):175-184
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0022
Abstract: 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 communication, and ambiguity as a way of moderating reality. Authors of prose and poetry are brought to support this psychoanalytic thinking.
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Keywords: micro-area of fusion, separation coefficient, quantitative factor, theoretical continuum, ambiguity
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):185-190
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0023
Abstract: 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 creation or expression of unconscious life. In clinical practice, “Secret of life, secret of death” reveals the secret in relationships (in professional relationships, familial ones, and in the therapeutic
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Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):193-204
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0024
Abstract: 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-threatening experience in the prison of Seville) to the Freudian death drive and to Imre Hermann’s clinging instinct, as approached in Philippe Van Haute and Tomas Geyskens’s book “From Death Instinct to Attachment Theory”.
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Keywords: Koestler, death drive, clinging instinct, aggressiveness, double suicide.
Rom J Psychoanal 2020, 13(2):205-214
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2020-0025
Abstract: 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.
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Keywords: Covid 19, psychic retreat, claustrophilia, death drive, lockdown, narcissism.