Tome XV, no. 2 - 2022 (8)

Editorial / Zinaida Bolea

Abstract: 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 totalitarian system, the fundamental role of the group in the constitution and knowledge of individuality as well as the role of the group and the institution in the prevention and therapeutic assistance of psychological suffering.Read moreKeywords: .

1 - Group portrait with lady and its concrete character / Brîndușa Orășanu

Abstract: 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 (Gruppenbild), the approach of knowing the individual in the context of a group, the work also attempts an exploration of the notion of group, where one may also identify concrete and abstract meanings. Read moreKeywords: Group portrait with lady, concrete, abstract, sensorial, affectivity, group.

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2 - What do silences in psychotherapy convey / Shmuel Gerzi

Abstract: 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 experience. Also, such silence can express the anxiety from the fulfilment of the wish or desire, arising from deep fears from a relationship that embodies dependency, or from the danger of abandonment or loss, or from fear of being engulfed and nullified by the containing object. The author suggests that many silences express the experience of void, emptiness and major absences, as the experience of a "black hole" or the "Dead mother". Yet alongside, one can perceive this same staging as an opening to create unknown experiences, such as the building of a potential space, an area that enables communication, creativity and a dialogue, in growing widening dimensions, from the existence in a single dimension towards life in four dimensions. Read moreKeywords: silence, void, absence. communication, trauma, deficiency, narcissism.

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3 - For a preventive approach to disruptive behaviour disorders, impulse control and conduct disorders as precursors of antisocial personality / Simona Trifu

Abstract: 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 strand of a personality. Oppositional defiant disorder and behaviour, intermittent explosive disorder, conduct disorder, pyromania, kleptomania, ADHD and aggression are described. Emphasis is placed on the importance of neurobiology as well as educational psychology and psycho-behavioural interventions, in which dialectics play a central role. Antisocial problems developed on the basis of a mentalisation deficit and a tendency to act without the filter of cognition represent an inability to manage the affections, which remain in their raw form with explosive outbursts. Such an internal dynamic cannot be regulated by censorship, but by a rigid, institutionalised super-ego. Read moreKeywords: impulsivity, mentalizing deficit, aggression management, antisocial personality, rough affect, psychodynamic perspective.

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4 - Relationship phantasy and surreal relationship / Gabriela Romaneț

Abstract: 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 bodily Ego. The phantasy of relation, as a form of investing the object with affects, sets the psyche to work in order to access the reality of the other, beyond its own pleasure principle. Going along the lines of the body drive and phantasy, I reach what I call the surreal relationship, which a person creates by denying anatomical/genital parts, subsequently repressing them. I refer to the psychic movement as an act of living immersed in the interior, denying the principle of reality in the inner life: one denies the body, parts of the drive, and the drive needs to satisfy itself with a dream or a phantasy of relation. When the principle of reality cannot be established, access to the object and access to the self are blocked. The anxiety of the body takes the form of the anxiety of the self, and relations are surreal. I use vignettes to illustrate relation phantasy and the surreal relation. Read moreKeywords: relation phantasy, drive, leaning-on theory, principles of pleasure and reality, surreal relationship, denial.

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5 - What is psychoanalytic listening? In search of an answer / Claudiu Ganciu

Abstract: 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 be subsumed to temporality by the presence of the two gods of time – Chronos and Kairos. Psychoanalytic listening involves an inclusion and exclusion of different contents that are created ‘here and now’ in the psychotherapeutic labour. A medical treatment can be seen as a hindrance to therapy and therefore excluded, or it can be seen as a content of therapy and therefore included. Therapeutic experiences become fundamentally different. In a more general picture, we could see the history of psychoanalysis itself as a permanent attempt to include and exclude different approaches, theories, methods, concepts, etc. From my point of view listening involves a permanent dynamic work between ECRO (referential scheme) and the state of spontaneity that can become creative for the patient and the therapeutic relationship. Read moreKeywords: listening; spontaneity; inclusion; exclusion; ECRO (referential scheme); temporality.

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6 - From Trauma to Writing. A Viewpoint on Herta Müller’s Literary Creation by Radu Clit / Georgiana Dobrescu

Abstract: 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 2019. There is a relationship of continuity between the two books, with the second work being constructed as a case study, an exemplification – through the literary creation of a great writer, Herta Müller – of the concepts of trauma, narcissistic functioning and totalitarian societies presented in his first book. Read moreKeywords: .

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7 - A Catastrophe Foretold – The Double Suicide of Stefan and Lotte Zweig / Alice Popescu

Abstract: 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 psychoanalytical assumptions advanced in two previous articles 14 of the series are reiterated here in relation to the Zweig case. Read moreKeywords: Stefan Zweig, double suicide, catastrophe theory, life and death drives, clinging instinct in death, The Post Office Girl

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