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ABSTRACTIn early 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) in collaboration with the First Psychiatric Department of the University of Athens, Eginition Hospital carried out a three-month pilot art psychotherapy program on the museum's premises. The program was held for a closed group of 10 participants, following an open call. During the long-lasting period of economic, political and social crisis that Greece is facing, the two institutions have been collaborating in order to offer participants a space for self-expression, creativity, critical thinking and for reducing anxiety through art making while simultaneously engaging participants with the museum collection.

Inspired by Bion, the concept of asoma-psychotic part of the personality is suggested. The authors present four clinical vignettes to illustrate certain clinical phenomena in which the body played a key role in the patient’s personal history, during the analytic process, or both. Certain aspects of analytic technique with these severely disturbed patients are briefly referred to, including the analyst’s reverie and transformational capacity, and some observations made in these cases lead to tentative generalizations on mental functioning and psychosomatic unity. A theoretical model is constructed to contain both data and conclusions, and to offer a solution for the integration of the somatic in psychoanalytic theory.

In this paper, the author explores moments of incoherence and confusion in the analysand; moments when the analyst is unable to understand, feels alienated and may even slip into lethargy. The clinical material is taken from the analysis of a female patient. The period presented is dominated by incoherence, confusion, unfinished sentences on the part of the patient. The interpretations dealt with her tendency to create a relationship devoid of aliveness. In trying to understand the struggle of both sides of the analytic dyad with aliveness and deadness as well as the patient's effort to experience her analyst as a transformational object, the analyst had to rely on his own reveries. Bion's work on the ability of the mother-child relationship to transform the unbearable primitive sensations is the starting point of the theoretical framework. The author is concerned with the ideas developed in Bollas' work on the unthought known and the transformational object as well as the way in which Ogden presents the rôle of the analyst's reveries in grasping the inchoate part of the psyche.

Containment and interpretation are two inseparable aspects of the psychoanalytic technique. This is better understood by Bion’s clinical metaphors of “container-contained” relationship and the capacity for reverie. Bion, continuing and expanding Klein’s concept of projective identification, has transposed this from what happens to an infant to what happens in the link between mother and infant; until now he laid emphasis on the mother’s (or therapist’s) ability to contain the primitive anxieties which the infant (or the patient) experiences. He described three types of links—love, hate, and knowledge—and proposed two metaphors which laid the foundation of a new and efficient frame of reference of the analytic process and technique, namely, the container-contained relationship and the reverie.Two clinical vignettes will illustrate the pivotal function of the therapist’s reverie within the therapist—patient interaction. In the first case, a dead (internal) object of the patient was contained in the context of the session, enabling the patient to contain and sustain the psychic pain and her self-destructive tendencies; the second case stresses how the therapist’s reverie, during a silence, revealed a bad part of the patient’s self, which was lost through projective identification.

Containment and interpretation are two inseparable aspects of the psychoanalytic technique. This is better understood by Bion's clinical metaphors of “container‐contained” relationship and the capacity for reverie. Bion, continuing and expanding Klein's concept of projective identification, has transposed this from what happens to an infant to what happens in the link between mother and infant; until now he laid emphasis on the mother's (or therapist's) ability to contain the primitive anxieties which the infant (or the patient) experiences. He described three types of links—love, hate, and knowledge—and proposed two metaphors which laid the foundation of a new and efficient frame of reference of the analytic process and technique, namely, the container‐contained relationship and the reverie.

A certain subgroup of borderline patients often presents depressive symptomatology (either chronic or periodic) and an underlying borderline personality organization.In this article, the effort is directed at elucidating the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic process of these borderline depressives by presenting clinical fragments of several psychotherapeutic cases.The process goes through periods of activation of the patient's depressive or primitive mental functioning, which also reflects on the therapist's countertransference.The capacity of the therapist to tolerate and elaborate on his patient's projections, facilitates the development of the therapist-patient communication and plays a significant role in the therapeutic outcome itself.