Search

In the game of drive, the Eros has the role of psychically binding excitations, so that a tolerable quantity of psychic energy is maintained, avoiding a traumatic spill of libidinal energy. Freud discovers the possibility of impulse entanglement by directing destructiveness outwards through the action of the libido. When the child is insufficiently invested by the environment he develops in, his psychism will develop on a fragile foundation. This frailness can be encapsulated in a rigid protective shell that will not allow for authentic development. We speak of a narcissistic deficit that leads either to an internal dynamic that aims to repair the deficit of primary investment, or to an internal dynamic that perpetuates this deficit. Defense mechanisms specific to narcissistic functioning are idealization and devaluation, and the need for reparation can emerge only after acknowledgement of the narcissistic wound. The sentiment of one's own worth is disturbed in both situations, the identity nucleus itself being affected. The person would feel shame, sentiments of inferiority, permanently in need of reassurance regarding his/her worth. The capacity to love will be conditioned by the establishment of a good contact with the authentic self, through valuing the self, recognizing one's own needs and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human body has several methods to release the tension generated by temporary frustration. Used regularly as a response, such methods will become the only way out of a tense situation. Some persons experience an altered consciousness and perception of one's body, rendering inter-subjectivity and self-reflection impossible. We can then ask ourselves how the symbolic dimension can be accessed to enable psychical elaboration. According to the Lacanian theory, psychoanalytic therapy will have to replace imaginary self-knowledge by a symbolic self-knowledge, for imaginary knowledge hinders the subject's access to symbolic knowledge. In the analytic therapy of the individuals suffering from somatic symptom disorder, the solution refers especially to the behavioural component, while the representations, even if present, concern the body and the way it works in a more or less illusive manner. As, by means of interpretation, the subject accesses their emotions and the relational experience thus expressed, the relational somatic functioning will be replaced by the psychic functioning and representations will lose their corporeal content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social trauma, with a specific reference to the Soviet occupation, the enforcement of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle for survival during the "Golden Age", produces splits, even fractures in the sense of belonging to a family history, of continuing or discontinuing a tradition, but preserving psychic suffering as landmark of contemporary Romania has origins in our predecessors' traumas, unspoken or unthought, namely not worked-through. The analytic treatment faces an impasse, in the extent to which these traumas are activated. The analyst is faced with the patient's stringent need to regain his identity and family tradition in order to heal transgenerational suffering. In analysis of social phenomena reveals spontaneous attempts to recover this connection, broken by social trauma. The activation of these processes may lead to an impasse in the cure, especially if it activates the same traumatic nucleus in the therapist. We hereby propose methods of approaching this impasse so that the patient may resume his development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the study which elaborates impasse, the failure and the negative reaction in the psychoanalytical treatment of the individual with narcissistic traits. The author states that the study demonstrates that impasse is the place where elaboration of impasse begins. The author also explains the therapists' difficulty of being containing and welcoming and the therapists' reactions including the feelings of powerlessness, anger, revolt, pity and pain in the healing process.

In this article, the author arguments on a study titled "Dreaming the impossible dreams in the analytic space." Topics discussed include how reverie and dream can be used as tools for knowing the unconscious, phenomena that occur during the development of analytic cure, and a research paper titled "The dream as image of the analytic process" by Mark Hebberecht.

Archaic functioning refers to psychic processes preceding primary processes specific to the developmental period in which there is no separation between body and psyche. This type of functioning is found through regressive dynamics in the psychoanalytic cure of the subject who suffers from addictive or psychosomatic pathology. The way in which the analyst looks or listens will be confronted with somatic or behavioural forms of expression, including the severe activation of basic needs that bring to discussion the classic psychoanalytic frame and the psychoanalyst's neutrality as it requires an active response. This way a bodily impregnation of the affects is revealed which provides a new connotation to the concept of frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The somatic continent is an unknown land for psychoanalysis and, for this reason, it is avoided. The patient's expression on this register is frequently ignored by the therapist, even if it refers to the deeper and structuralized levels of his personality. Considering the psychogenesis of the addictive behaviors, the pain subjected of the body symptoms finds his origin into the earliest stages of the psychic development, stages when the words were not yet skills of the psychic elaboration. The anxiety in front of the loss of the addictive or somatic symptoms is more intense because the capacity of psychic elaboration of the Ego risks to be overcome by the psychic movements. Through the signifiers that operate in the analytic space, except thing-representation and word-representation, it is necessary to consider also the affect, the body impression and the act. In the case of an addictive patient, the representation process didn't succeed in gaining the word-representation. Thus, he's utilizing the specific manners of representation and he tries to integrate them in the analytic space. In the transference, the analyst is challenged to recognize them, and he must try to help the patient to verbalize them. The addictive solution is a necessity of a psyché with the capacity of representations in deficit to the extent it finds in itself a response to his needs. The body functions are attributed a symbolic value, the erogenous functions and zones are invested so as to replace the the function of elaboration belonging to the thinking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]