International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

The following text describes an analysis, ongoing for three years now, of a boy currently 12 years old, whose projective-expulsive functioning becomes evident through rude and vulgar words. The image of the Cretan labyrinth and its meanders, created by Daedalus as a "protection" against the ferocity of the Minotaur, were the inspiration for this narrative. The intricate defences that imprison the patient, with their characteristics of pathological organisation, resemble a labyrinth, and through this path, the analyst and the patient go on confronting the difficulties of the process. Insufficiently contained primitive parental objects are introjected by the patient as partial objects and vehemently projected. Transference is a constant target for much hatred and incontinence. As the analytic process continues, the initially inhospitable frame begins to change, slowly but noticeably. An important characteristic of this clinical case relates to the fact that it is an analysis conducted in two modalities: starting by means of video during the pandemic and, when working conditions allowed, transitioning to the present in-person modality, with a frequency of three times per week in both modalities.

This text explores Dana Birksted-Breen's notions of penis-as-link and negative and positive femininity, rooted in primitive mental and bodily states, in a dialogue between the manifestations of the biological body and their interpretation by the psyche in the construction of a sexed bodily mind. When the capacities for introjection have been impaired from an early stage, there is a great difficulty in representing and relating to a receptive internal space, hence to one's femininity, be it for a girl or a boy. This capacity for introjection in its relation to femininity plays a great part in the analytic capacity to display one's bodily receiver instrument as a sounding board for the analysand's unconscious. Instead of countertransference, one might think in terms of protransference.

In this article, the author aims to shed new light on how sensoriality can be considered and deployed in the treatment of severely autistic children. Whereas psychoanalysis has explored in detail the defensive function that sensoriality can have for these patients, the author puts forward the idea that this can be used to further the differentiation and structuration of the body ego. Through some detailed clinical material, drawn from the psychotherapy of a five-year-old girl, the author sets out to illustrate how work on the different sensations can lead to relational openings that are initially specific to each sensory channel and then more general, as well as how the access to otherness emerges from this work on sensations. Much of the article is devoted to "technical" questions: in fact, for these processes to be carried out successfully, the analyst must situate himself in and intervene as closely as possible to sensoriality. It is in this way that the various sensory flows are gradually (re-)inscribed in the relational circuit and can begin to be (re-)connected with each other.

In order to honour the work of Dana Birksted-Breen I will attempt to show how the reading of her work has impacted on my own thinking and changed it or modified it. I would like to begin by highlighting one of Dana's claims in The Work of Psychoanalysis. I will focus on two areas: (1) the development of symbolic capacity and its connection with temporality, and (2) the concept of reverie as a cornerstone of the psychoanalytic enterprise and that which promotes change. I will discuss these two topics following the development of some sessions of a patient. Through the clinical material I will deepen my understanding of Dana's concept of reverberation time in connection both with the progression of symbolic representation and with the use of reverie by the analyst in the inter-subjectivity of the session.

In the field of child psychoanalytic psychotherapy, structured competitive games such as Monopoly, UNO or football have traditionally been regarded as less conducive to deep psychodynamically oriented work. By contrast, some contemporary authors have pointed out that in middle childhood it is often precisely in play with structured games - game-play - that spontaneity and strong emotions come to the fore. These authors suggest that game-play constitutes a potentially powerful therapeutic tool for access to, and communication with, the older child's inner world. In this paper, clinical theoretical arguments are presented alongside clinical examples in support of this view and a variety of forms of game-play encountered in the analytic playroom are discussed and analysed. The paper examines how the rules and partially predetermined content of these games act as a framing structure in which the analytic work can take place safely and spontaneously, and how the model of the container ↔ contained can be usefully applied to game-play in the child therapy room. Emphasis is placed throughout on the therapeutic role of a flexible and carefully calibrated approach to the game's rules and structure and the child's cheating.

This paper tries to study the complexity of the personal and professional relationship between S. and A. Freud and A. and J. Strachey when they were translating Freud's Case Histories, starting with the years they spent in Vienna immediately after the end of the first world war being both in analysis with Freud and were checking the translations with him and his daughter. Those unique meetings according to me influenced even many aspects of Strachey SE later on and have still to be kept in mind even today as far as Mark Solms Revision of the SE is concerned. I also try to show the importance and the final control of the Strachey's translation exerted by E. Jones who had planned the Standard Edition of Freud' work already in 1920 and create a very rigid glossary in order to translate him which the Strachey's had to apply to their translations. I have used published and unpublished letters and notes on the translation to try to prove what I just stated.

This paper explores the concept of drives as basic motivational neurobiological structures determining the organization of psychic life. I express my agreement with Mark Solms' radical reformulation of the general principles organizing human behaviour at the neurobiological and psychodynamic levels, his combination of Friston's computational information theory and Panksepp's affect systems. I agree with him that the affect systems described by Panksepp constitute the primary drives and that the conflicts between affect systems are the origin of unconscious intrapsychic conflict. I disagree with Solms in my proposition that, while the original unconscious conflicts indeed reflect conflicts between antagonistic affects, I believe that the integration of affect systems into internalized object relations determines a significant motivational shift: now unconscious conflicts are between complex organization of idealized and persecutory object relations at oedipal and preoedipal levels, and no longer between affect systems themselves. At the various developmental levels, the integrated fusion of affective components of these conflicts in effect evolves into libido and aggression as supraordinate motivational systems, but they no longer can be considered biological drives.

In this brief paper I argue that to understand Freud is to understand the meanings of his ideas. The choice of words to describe these ideas is usually relatively insignificant and does not in itself determine understanding. Thus, the translation of Trieb as "drive" rather than "instinct" does not change the phenomena that Freud addresses through the term Trieb, nor does it open us to the understanding of Freud's profound, complex and evolving ideas regarding these phenomena. To think that it can, in fact, limits understanding. This runs counter to a popular view that Strachey's translation of Trieb as "instinct" led the Anglo-American analytic community to see Freud as more biological and mechanistic than he actually was. Accepting the popular view would make the change of the term, which does occur in the Revised Standard Edition, seem especially significant. Evidence against this popular view may be seen in the fact that Klein and her followers, like Strachey himself, commonly use the term "instinct" and yet their understanding, which emerges from a close study of Freud in context and the phenomena to which he refers, maintains and develops the richness of Freud's thinking and does not at all offer a biological or mechanistic perspective. Important to the understanding of Freud in context are his early letters to Fliess, and thus it is very unfortunate that the unabridged version of these letters which became available in 1985 were not included in the RSE.