International Journal of Psychoanalysis最新文献

In this paper I describe how a vertical relationship of mutual grievance is commonly set up when the idealised horizontal relationship between infant and mother collapses. Mourning is interrupted if the lost object is internalised as a critical superego making the patient feel inferior and humiliated. He attempts then to turn the tables on the object in a response of manic triumph which creates the vertical, "up or down" world. This pattern is examined in clinical material which seemed to show progress even though the grievances were deeply entrenched. The reasons for the softening of his resentment were examined and the role of the vertical as well as other obstacles to mourning were reviewed.

This paper is about sexual perversion and its enactment. It is divided into three parts, including, a consideration of William Gillespie's reading of Freud with Klein as the basis on which he formulated a general theory of perversion; a selective reading of more recent works on the psychoanalysis of perversion; and a clinical contribution to the analysis of a case of scopophilia.

Pregnancy and early motherhood are periods of great psychic demands, in part, due to the various physical changes the mother faces. Women may have a wide range of experiences during this time due to various factors: their early childhood, internal objects, current relationships and environment, as well as their physical state. This paper will explore the experiences of three women, who before starting analysis, had suffered extreme and prolonged physical difficulties in their first pregnancies or post-partum periods, which gave rise to claustrophobic panic and feelings of disintegration. Once in analysis, the three women each went on to have a second baby. Each mother navigated her second pregnancy through a complex process of disavowal of her unborn baby, which I have termed 'creative disavowal' as it allowed an intermediate area which protected them and their baby from the violent bodily experiences, primitive anxieties, and hatred that they felt, as well as opened space for more passionate feelings to unfold and take shape. The analytic work in each case involved giving meaning to the mother's somatic experiences, and containing her intense hostile and primitive unconscious phantasies, whilst also creating space for the psychological or imagined baby to be born and held.

The discussion about the nature of what is achieved in the analytical process gained a significant contribution with Ogden's proposal, which characterises two modi operandi of the psychoanalytic treatment method (one that seeks understanding, and the other that seeks experiences so that the self may integrate and become more profoundly itself). However, he did not focus on describing the different types of experiences of the self, achievable within the analytical process. This article aims to partially fill this gap by drawing on Winnicott's work, associating experiences of Being with the way he conceives of object relations in the context of the analyst-patient relationship, differentiating and characterising the following experiences: am-ness, when the analyst acts as a subjective object for the patient; am-with, when patient and analyst share transitional phenomena; I-am-different-from and I-am-predicated-on, when the analyst is understood as an external object; and I-am-finite, as an experience, perceived or apperceived, by the self in relation to itself, the other, and the world over time. This understanding can broaden the comprehension of the various ways of experiencing and managing transference within the analytical process.

The Covid-19 pandemic posed challenges for the psychological care of adolescents, and in particular those in therapeutic groups. Exploring three sessions of a psychoanalytic psychodrama group in early 2021 in a day hospital in Paris, the article considers how the pandemic threatened the intra- and intersubjective relations, and how these dangers were elaborated. The psychodrama group helped the adolescents to create fantasy and symbolisation activities, so that a transitional space could be restored.

The difficulties involved in ending treatment are complex and can present a set of challenges and possibilities for both analyst and patient. When early trauma is part of the clinical picture, ending treatment may very well stir an experience of an earlier attachment rupture or loss. The author presents a case of a long-term analytic patient where an acute enactment crisis occurred causing a pause in ending the treatment. It is proposed that these very 'ending enactments' become necessary, crucially disrupting a bastion (Baranger & Baranger, 2009) formed by the dyad. This tearing/ending of the analytic frame (Bleger, 1967) may, catalyze a 'second look' which revealed a more chronic enactment. Ultimately more deeply buried pieces of the early relational trauma became accessible to the analytic process. The author argues that sometimes this very upheaval is needed to unblock a bastion. Thus, what was sequestered, and unknowable may enter the dyad as an enactment. In this way, insight, and the self-reflectiveness it entails, may occur post-enactment.

In this article the author looks at the psychotherapeutic treatment of a patient imprisoned for acts of domestic violence. She describes how the inversion of the drive coordinates (in this case, hypercathecting thrust to the detriment of the aim, which is normally to reduce tension) can herald a surge in mastery, which is then difficult to contain within the ramparts of the therapeutic setting. The sensory dimension at work in the transference is mobilized to illustrate how withstanding mastery can perceptually serve to rehabilitate the aim to the detriment of the thrust. This reorganization of the drive coordinates serves to lower tension against the backdrop of a struggle against the loss of an object whose contours are already very precarious. While violent acting out may indeed be seen as a failure of symbolization, therapeutic work in prison seems to maintain in this restricted space the hallucinatory trace of the lost/found object in the transference. Capturing the object would illusorily circumscribe the risk, but it is precisely through the handling of the meaning and strength of the transference that the patient can be enabled to let go, thereby freeing the lost object, or rather its ghost, in favour of the experience of loss.