Tome XVI, no. 1 - 2023 (11)

Editorial / Gabriel Balaci

Abstract: 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 threatened by the possible extension of the conflict also do. We know that events in reality are triggers for intra-psychic predispositions, and war is such an event with great potential for harm. Exposure to such a context activates ways of defending ourselves that we did not suspect or that we have long given up, such as primary defences. The authors of the articles in this issue address all these topics.Read moreKeywords: .

1 - Argument on the theme / Sorinel Mocanu

Abstract: 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. Read moreKeywords: .

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2 - Destruction of thought-processes / Marilia Aisenstein

Abstract: 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. Read moreKeywords: destructiveness, thought-process, dementalization, representation, affect, psychosomatics

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3 - Running over border, running to the border / Daniela Andronache

Abstract: 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 pandemic, and the migrations throughout the European territory following the wars in Syria and Ukraine. The analysis follows the actualization of transgenerational traumas under the influence of geo-political and social events, generating specific group and individual behavior responses. The trauma of communism is addressed, a historical event still unelaborated and unintegrated within the mental of the Romanian population. Group concepts are sustained with inferences from individual analysis cases. Read moreKeywords: group mental space, large-group identity, historical trauma, acute trauma, borders drawing, trauma of communism

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4 - Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory and Diagnosis of the Bad Present (part I) / Giuseppe Civitarese

Abstract: 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 satisfaction of material needs. Just as an internal critical agency is formed in the individual, so in society it can take the form of a power that no longer obeys ethical principles and becomes self-referential. What makes this kind of power particularly dangerous is that it uses advances in technology to exercise increasingly invasive and alienating forms of control. Read moreKeywords: splitting, technology, recognition, fear, arrogance, doxa

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5 - The identity war / Radu Clit

Abstract: 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 suggests Orwell’s “Big Brother”. Freud’s concept of “narcissism of small differences” between neighboring countries could help to understand this conflict. It is a difference of collective identity, defined by Erik Erikson, and allowing to interpret this war like an identity conflict. As the Russian Army often attacks civilian populations, there is also a ‘war of terror’, forcing the acceptance of Russian identity. But instead, the Ukrainian population is fighting it. Losing one’s identity can generate terror, like in psychopathology – there is a strong relationship between psychosis and identity confusion (Erikson), especially in schizophrenia. In short, the Ukrainian population is trying to fight external terror so that it does not take over its psyche. In this way, the Ukrainian identity is preserved despite the war. Read moreKeywords: aggression, brotherhood, identity, narcissism, type of society, terror

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6 - Between being and being seen / Bogdan Sebastian Cuc

Abstract: 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 from the mother’s gaze that returns to the child the “digestible” forms of its own sensations. In the experiences specific to psychoanalysis with children, this sometimes appears in a form that preserves, or rather returns the violence of the first interactions, in which the efforts to identify one’s own outline, one’s own boundary, passed through the forms processed by the mother’s gaze. Such a psychoanalytic experience acquires particular accents when it takes place in an institutional environment, specific to orphaned or abandoned children, as was the case with Alexandra. Read moreKeywords: symbolization, narcissism, autism, autoeroticism, language, object

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7 - When war overwhelms us / Paolo Fonda

Abstract: 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. Read moreKeywords: war, empires, groups, kleinian positions, transgenerational traumas, reparation

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8 - Writing about nachträglichkeit in time. Review on the Bernard Chervet`s book Après-coup in psychoanalysis / Daniela Luca

Abstract: 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 semantic and semiologic vicissitudes of the term, the metapsychological way of thinking from Freud, to CPLF 2009, till 2023, when this important book is published, we have now the great privilege to understand and to use this concept more accurately in our psychoanalytic mind and practice. As Bernard Chervet wrote as a sub-title of his book, we are certain that his entire writing is “a fulfilment of desire and thought”, and a rich reservoir for our clinical, technical and theoretical matrix. Read moreKeywords: desire, interpretation, mentalization, thought, time, Nachträglichkeit

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9 - Positions of the mind in conflict dynamics. Archaic movements revealed in film, with social reverberations / Codruța Zerfas

Abstract: 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 of the individual psyche in correspondence with the nature and functioning of the group psyche, as well as the close relationships of interdependence and co-determination between the two entities. It is a continuation of the previous article23, but this time, the Balkan matrix is put under research, with the specificity of the psychology of the population in that area. Read moreKeywords: omnipotent phantasm, schizo-paranoid position, depressive position, projective identification, object relations, partial self-objects

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10 - Publication ethics / SRDP

Abstract: . Read moreKeywords: .

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