Female Passion and the Matrix of Mother,Daughter, and Body: Vicissitudes of the Maternal Transference in the Working Through of Sexual Inhibitions

The maternal object is rarely seen as a girl's source of identification as a vibrant, sexually desirous woman. In this paper, I propose that the mother's capacity both to convey her own pride and pleasure in her female body, its sexual and procreative capacities, and to confer the privilege of passion on her daughter is requisite for a girl's full, pleasurable possession of her body and sexuality. Using observations from two analyses, I explore ways in which transformations of the negative transference manifestations of thwarted maternal sexuality and its pernicious expressions within the mother–daughter relationship paralleled recovery of a fuller capacity for sexual pleasure and agency. To offer clinical pathways toward development of female analysands' capacities for feminine pride and sexual passion, theories must allow for adaptive resolution of oedipal-period conflicts—resolution that can lead to a mature mutuality between mother and daughter.     

Between a suffering body and a body in a state of need: Aulagnier’s theory of discourses on the body applied to primitive mental states

ABSTRACT

In her theory of discourses on the body, Aulagnier makes the comparison of the concept of ‘a suffering body’ and the concept of ‘a body in a state of need’. The last type is what she thinks is often found in addiction, anorexia and in borderline states, conditions marked by a radical negativity. On the other hand, ‘a suffering body’ is a concept that indicates a relation and two bodies, mother’s and child’s, that communicate. Suffering and infantile sexuality is a first attempt to accept separation by weaving a net of fantasy over the abyss of lack and separation. If pleasure and suffering are lacking as representations, the sensory reactions may exist physiologically but without psychical existence. The concepts of ‘a suffering body’ and 'a body in a state of need' will enable us to think about important structural differences between neurotic-, borderline- and psychotic conditions. As a foundation for her concepts lies a metapsychological elaborations of three kinds of processes for representation: the primal-, the primary- and the secondary process.     

20 Years is not long enough1

The author presents some Latin American sociopolitical vicissitudes exemplifi ed by Argentina, where she lives and where she trained and practices as a psychoanalyst. The exposition is based on the impact that her experience with two patients, Ana and Juana, had on her, and is presented in the form of clinical vignettes. The author refl ects clinically and technically on the transference and countertransference and on the ways in which self–analysis enabled her to distinguish between the countertransference related to the patient and that related to the psychoanalyst. Finally, the author discusses the traumatic effects of ‘the human condition’, ‘social violence’ and ‘Evil’, referring specifi cally to the ‘repetitive trauma’ individuals experience under the globalization of terror and to the use of mechanisms of disavowal that result in serious splitting. The author confronts the reader with totalitarian terror as something that attacks and destroys the main constitutive characteristic of human beings, namely, their ability to think, remarking that H. Arendt is the one who speaks about ‘radical evil’ as ‘the banality of Evil’. The author addresses the question of whether by tempering aggression and organizing levels of symbolization ‘words’ might prevent the emergence of ‘pure jouissance’ and be more powerful and signifi cant than violence, overriding it.     

Fire at the theatre: (Un)reality of/in the transference and interpretation1

Only in Bion's extended idea of ‘waking dream thought’ is the oneiric paradigm of the cure (already an obvious Freudian principle) completely applicable. The author's basic hypothesis is that, by adopting this paradigm thoroughly, one can combine the radical antirealism which is expressed in the postulate by which all the patient's communications are transference‐connected (here meaning ‘false connection’‐i.e. as projection/displacement of elements of the patient's inner psychic world) with the ‘reality’ of the transference, that is to say with the conviction that the facts of the analysis are co‐determined by the patient‐analyst dyad and actually rooted in how they interact. The Freudian metaphor of the fi re at the theatre is reintroduced here to suggest the crisis of the therapist's internal setting and capacity for reverie, which occurs when the irreducible ambiguity of the transference is resolved defensively, either in the patient's external reality or in his unconscious fantasy constellation. The author gives three clinical examples. The fi rst shows some of the not necessarily negative effects of this temporary crisis. The other two vignettes show a way of listening to the traumatic events of the patient's life from a perspective (that of the ‘analytic fi eld’) which is thought to be potentially the most transformative and vital to the analytical relationship.     

‘Telepathic’ phenomena and separation anxiety

By discussing a treatment characterized by its difficult ending, the author strives to show the dynamic impact of separation on phenomena that can be seen as ‘telepathic’. Led to develop some inalienable attachment to her analyst in the primary transference, the analysand found herself caught up in the contradiction of her visceral dread of dependency, which compelled her to interrupt the work in progress. She then began to work out her analyst's comings and goings and to run into him in public places, as if to be assured of his immovability. This phenomenon arose with high frequency as the effect of some idealization of the maternal object aiming to deny the spatiotemporal gap. The chance that the experience of rejection via indifference may be repeated also entailed the transferential unfurling of a fantasy involving a double, undifferentiation counterbalancing the lived experience of separation. Furthermore, a ‘telepathic’ dream occurred as confirmation of this twin relationship which illustrates the analysand's refusal to renounce her narcissistic object. Projective identifications, agglutinated ego nuclei along with primitive cross‐identifications could, among other concepts, account for such phenomena which are projective in nature yet real all the same. Such mechanisms could have the power to relay thoughts the moment undifferentiated parts of the ego – if not unborn parts of the self – were activated in a potentially symbiotic zone. Marked by a feeling of dispossession, the analyst's countertransference not only seemed to underscore this hypothesis, it also gave a partial explanation for it. Until the analyst could recognize his own nostalgia for a symbiotic relationship, he had to encourage the occurrence of those unexpected meetings which stemmed from a convergence between the transference and the countertransference.     

Beyond transference,countertransference, the silences and the opinion1

The author examines several works of an intersubjectivist trend, as well as writings by Hanly, Cavell and Bion, defending many of the named psychoanalysts' viewpoints. These viewpoints are expressed in the search and the struggle for truth, recognizing, like Popper, that truth exists but that we cannot know with certainty whether and when we touch upon it, only that this endless effort merits a lifetime's work because it is the attempt at an encounter with ourselves‐the true encounter. The author explains the criticisms by Green of Jacobs, and defends the maintenance of ‘a certain possible neutrality’ (Eizirik). He poses some questions with regard to Ogden's ‘third subject’, considering it, among other aspects, from the supervisory point of view, which may demonstrate the existence of ‘a certain possible objectivity’ of the emotional confl ict. He develops some criticisms concerning silence as an interpretative action by Ogden, and summarizes two case histories. Both were unconsciously attempting to manipulate the analyst intensely‐one of them to get the analyst to intervene in his love life, and the other to interrupt acting out.     

The explosion of the present and the encapsulation of time: Transference phenomena in the analysis of a psychotic patient

The paper deals with some basic problems concerning the experience of time and space in the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients. Whereas borderline patients tend to distort the experience of time and space under emotional pressure, the concepts of time and space seem to dissolve in acute psychotic states of mind. Sometimes this manifests itself in an explosion of the present, where the past is ubiquitous and the future is perceived as the end of all times. The case of a 48 year‐old patient with the external diagnosis of ‘paranoid–hallucinatory schizophrenia’ is presented to illustrate that the main task is to recreate a structure to contain the experience of space and time. Such a development may occur if primitive psychotic anxieties can be taken up and metabolized. A near‐psychotic decompensation before the first break and the development of a transference psychosis in the second year of the analysis are depicted in detail. Subsequently some developments became visible which helped the patient to better tolerate catastrophic fears of loss. This included the formation of a structure which the patient called ‘hibernation’ enabling her to psychically survive without falling apart. By retreating into her ‘time capsule’ she managed to overcome breaks and to delay her fears of fragmentation until they could be taken up and worked through in the transference. The creation of a structure like the patient's ‘time capsule’ is considered to be an attempt to construct the experience of time and space. It prevented a collapse of her internal space thereby enabling further steps towards thinking and symbolization. In conclusion, some theoretical and clinical aspects are discussed including the role of the countertransference.     

Silence as the Voice of Trauma

Silence is a key to the unspoken world of the patient. Rather than interpreting silence as a defensive maneuver, the analyst may understand this disruption as a royal road to the patient’s traumatic experiences. The author proposes to recognize traumatic silences in the analytic process and the transference as a re-experiencing of past, unpredictable traumatic affective states and memories. Silences in this context are both a repeat of a disconnecting experience as well as a manifestation of a silencing identification with the original silencer. The clinical material illustrates effects of a German mother’s World War II (WWII) personal traumata and collective shame-based silence on her daughter’s self and good object development. In the daughter’s analysis, the patient and the analyst, who herself experienced similar WWII traumata, face the pain of trauma recovery and un-silencing. The author suggests that the deadening effect of past traumata may be reversed by an analytic process of re-membering and re-speaking for both the patient and analyst. This allows for a more transparent, subjective experience in the transference and a verbal integration of ego functions.     

Pentheus rather than Oedipus: On perversion,survival and analytic ‘presencing’1

Following an introductory review of the main developments in the psychoanalytic thinking on perversion, the author focuses on her own understanding of perversion and its treatment, based on the psychoanalytic treatment of patients with severe sexual perversions. This paper uses the term ‘autotomy’ (borrowed from the fi eld of biology) to describe perversion formation as an ‘autotomous’ defence solution involving massive dissociative splitting in the service of psychic survival within a violent, traumatic early childhood situation; thus, a compulsively enacted ‘desire for ritualised trauma’ ensues. The specifi c nature of the perverse scenario embodies the specifi c experiential core quality of the traumatic situation. It is an actual repetition in the present of the imprint of a past destructive experience which is pre‐arranged and stage‐managed; it thus encounters haunting scenes of dread or psychic annihilation while, at the same time, controlling, sanitising and disavowing them. Hence, the world of severe perversion is no longer oedipal, but rather the world of Pentheus, Euripides's most tragic hero‐a world dominated by a mixture of a mother's madness, devourment, destruction and rituals of desire. According to this view, the (diffi cult) psychoanalytic treatment of perversion focuses on patient‐analyst interconnectedness‐brought about by the analyst's ‘givenness to being present’ or ‘presencing’‐at a deep, primary level of contact and impact (the emphasis being on the ontological dimension of experience). This evolving therapeutic entity creates and actualises a new, alternative experiential‐emotional reality within the pervert's alienated world, eventually generating a change in the perverse essence. The author illustrate this approach with three clinical vignettes.     

ON BECOMING ABLE TO PLAY: INDIVIDUAL CHILD PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHODRAMA AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYMBOLIZATION

In this paper, the authors analyze the relevance and transformative potential of individual psychoanalytic psychodrama in the treatment of children with severe impairments in symbolization. Central features of this modality, including promoting the representation of early traumatic experiences, are presented and discussed. Specific features include double‐envelope containment of the co‐therapists’ group and play leader, consequent diffraction of the transference‐determining portrayal, gradual integration, and initial figuration of coexisting split‐off fragments. Drawing on in‐depth clinical material, the authors show how psychodrama tempers the potentially traumatic effects of the encounter with the object, allowing these patients to access the transitional area of play.     

The analyst's narrative function: Inventing a possibility

This article describes a psychic function common to analysts that was gradually revealed through clinical work with children. It is a psychic quality derived from function α, which involves analysts’ capacity for reverie – their narrative function. The author presents two clinical situations where this function developed in the analytic field in relation to patients’ difficulty in symbolizing. In the first case there was an early traumatic experience unavailable for representation. The analyst lent the patient her ability to represent and produced a narrative that made it possible to create a world of phantasies and transform nightmares into ‘dreamable’ dreams. In other words, she removed the quality of unbearable, irrepresentable reality that characterized those raw experiences encrypted in the psyche. In the second case the analyst's narrative function sought to connect with the isolation, the shell that housed a child suffering from an autistic disorder whose ability to represent had not been established. The analyst provided meaning for the patient's repetitive, stereotyped play, thus weaving the child's subjectivity and gradually introducing a notion of alterity. The author seeks to show how this function, in the thematic construction of the session, facilitated both the working‐through of a traumatic situation (with the ability to share representations) and the constitution of the psychic fabric.     

Biographical truths and their clinical consequences: Understanding ‘embodied memories’ in a third psychoanalysis with a traumatized patient recovered from severe poliomyelitis

The relationship between ‘narrative’ and ‘historical–biographical truth’ in psychoanalytic treatment has become the subject of many controversial debates in recent years. Findings of contemporary memory research have lead to great scepticism as to whether therapists are able objectively and reliably to reconstruct biographical events on the basis of their observations in the therapeutic situation. Some authors even claim that psychoanalysts should concentrate exclusively on observing the here and now of the patient′s behaviour within the transference relationship to the analyst. In this paper it will be discussed whether the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater in this debate. Centred around the insights from a third psychoanalysis with a patient who suffered from a severe case of childhood polio, the hypothesis will be discussed that working through the traumatic experience in the transference with the analyst, as well as the reconstruction of the biographical–historical reality of the trauma suffered, prove to be indispensable for a lasting structural change. Integration of the trauma into one′s own personal history and identity is and remains one of the main aims of a psychoanalytic treatment with severely traumatized patients. The reconstruction of the original trauma is indispensable in helping the patient to understand the ‘language of the body’ and to connect it with visualizations, images and verbalizations. The irreversable wounds and vulnerability of his body as the ‘signs of his specific traumatic history’ have to be recognized, emotionally accepted and understood in order to live with them and not deny them any longer. Another important aspect in psychoanalysis is to develop the capability to mentalize, in other words, to understand the intentions of central (primary) objects related to the trauma. The concept of ‘embodied memory’ might be helpful in understanding precisely in what way ‘early trauma is remembered by the body’. Observing in detail the sensory‐motor coordinations in the analytic relationship enables one to decode the inappropriate intensity of affects and fantasies which match the original traumatic interaction and are revealed as inappropriate reactions in the present, new relationship to the analyst.     

PSYCHOANALYTICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY: Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy: A long and troubled relationship

The extended, inconclusive debate over distinguishing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has been muddied by two underlying issues. The scientifi c identity that psychoanalysis claimed, leading it to affi rm that it was more than a treatment modality, was in confl ict with the actual therapeutic mission it assumed. Psychoanalysis was further hampered in those discussion by its internal confl icts over doctrinal purity; deviations for psychotherapeutic ends were vulnerable to the charge of dissidence. More recently, the debate has been clouded by the fact that newer candidates, by and large, can anticipate careers primarily as psychotherapists, driving a wedge between generations within institutes. The course of the debate and the problems encountered in it are affected by the formal relations between the psychoanalytic establishment and the health-care industry, including government agencies. In the long run, it appears to make little difference whether psychoanalysis is offi cially recognized as a mental-health treatment, as in Germany, or attempts to maintain its independence, as in the UK. Finally, as the debate appears to be winding down, the fate of dynamic psychotherapy is also in the balance. If in the past psychoanalysis seemed at risk of losing its specifi c identity, today dynamic psychotherapy is in danger as well.     

AFFECT IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY: DISCUSSION OF ANDRÉ GREEN'S “ON DISCRIMINATING AND NOT DISCRIMINATING BETWEEN AFFECT AND REPRESENTATION”1

André Green's 1999 programmatic essay on affect and representation, an attempt to extend Freud's model of the neuroses (where affect and representation have different vicissitudes) to non‐neurotic cases is submitted to critical reading. Green wishes to restore the importance of representation; to use the second topographical theory, where id, psychical impulse and object‐cathexis replace the unconscious and the ideational representation in order to conceptualise borderline disturbance, and to show how ultimately the ‘non‐discrimination’ affect‐representation obtains in non‐neurotic cases as well. The author, interested in the question posed in Green's essay as to what we have to sell our borderline patients, addresses the various reasons why this project fails. Among the problematic points are the paradox of Green's model of unconscious affect, that does not allow the analyst to generate meaning with borderline patients, the view of ‘representation’ as replacing presence and perception of the object that does not allow the analyst to be a nonabsent object, and the inabilty to conceptualise affect‐representatives and to work out the definition of affect as ‘the anticipation of a meeting with the other's body’ which does not allow the analyst to function as an ‘anticipatory object’ or ‘an object of affect’.     

Telling a traumatic story through Art: Arshile Gorky’s ‘The Artist and his Mother’

For more than a decade, through re-working a composition based on a sepia photograph, Arshile Gorky (ca. 1904–1948) tried to give form and represent that which by definition defies forms and shatters one’s capacity for representation. Having witnessed the systematic ethnic cleansing of his people as a child, Gorky began a ‘journey’ in his attempt to comprehend his traumatic ordeal through Art. In 1926, with the safety of a constructed name and life, the artist started working on ‘The Artist and his Mother’ series. Focusing on the two versions of Gorky’s early painting and using relevant aspects of psychoanalytic theory, the paper explores his work through a psychoanalytic lens. Psychoanalytic theories on extreme traumatisation along with psychoanalytic notions of temporality will be utilised in an attempt to follow the artist’s struggle to re-create and rework aspects of his traumatic history.     

不只是“谈话疗法”：精神分析治疗中的非言语维度

精神分析治疗在很长一段时间里被视为“谈话疗法”,其治愈机制是将潜意识的内容意识化,语言解释在其中发挥关键作用。自20世纪末开始,越来越多分析师强调非言语交流在治疗中的作用。非言语交流不仅能够为咨访双方提供更丰富的交流形式,还能通过互动中的“相遇时刻”,实现对患者过去经验的重组,改变其有缺陷的内隐关系知晓。非言语交流和语言交流能够在治疗中发挥互补作用,未来的精神分析心理学要继续加强对非言语领域的研究。     

Braving the erotic field in the treatment of adolescents*

Abstract

The psychoanalytic literature on erotic transference and countertransference in adolescence is notably sparse, despite the centrality of the developing sexual body/mind. Erotic feelings in the consulting room with an adolescent can feel taboo, causing the analyst to avoid the immediacy of these feelings. Excessive timidity on the part of the analyst can limit the growth of the capacity for containment of sexual feelings and yield what I term ‘erotic insufficiency’ in our work with adolescents. I offer clinical material from a period of erotic transference and countertransference with a 12-year-old boy to consider these ideas. Further, I suggest that the very terms ‘erotic transference’ and ‘erotic countertransference’ can feel defensively remote and antiseptic. I suggest that ‘erotic field’ better captures the subtle, nuanced interplay of feelings.     

Experience of traumatic events and personal myths of birth

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the analysis of a clinical case, this article studies the manner in which certain traumatic events can induce some individuals to produce auto-traumatic processes. In parallel, it demonstrates how the foundations of a subject’s origins can, at an early stage, find themselves undermined by an environment that does not recognise the subject, and that sends out messages that seem to exclude him or her from their filiation. What can follow is a partial breakdown in the ideation of origins that leads some individuals to create a personal myth of birth. This myth, that borrows some elements from collective myths, can to some extent substitute itself for the representation of filiation. This process will be differentiated here from delusional phenomena, or the ‘sexual theories of children’. This article also demonstrates the important role of the analysis of ‘anxiety dreams’ in these traumatic configurations: this analysis has the power to bring to light the different conflicting elements with which the ego identifies, so as to put an end to the auto-traumatic process, as well as giving clues for lifting the amnesia regarding a childhood personal myth of birth. Under these conditions ‘acts of birth’ can become inscribed into the analysis.     

不只是“谈话疗法”：精神分析治疗中的非言语维度

精神分析治疗在很长一段时间里被视为“谈话疗法”,其治愈机制是将潜意识的内容意识化,语言解释在其中发挥关键作用。自20世纪末开始,越来越多分析师强调非言语交流在治疗中的作用。非言语交流不仅能够为咨访双方提供更丰富的交流形式,还能通过互动中的“相遇时刻”,实现对患者过去经验的重组,改变其有缺陷的内隐关系知晓。非言语交流和语言交流能够在治疗中发挥互补作用,未来的精神分析心理学要继续加强对非言语领域的研究。