RBP - Revista Brasileira de Psicanálise

Pré-Verbal communications as expression of omnipotence and omniscience
Virgínia Leone Bicudo

The non-verbal communications, that is, the expressive movements, during the analytic situation, were utilized by the patients as a regressive way of contacting their internal and external objects. The more the patients were under paranoid and depressive anxieties, the more trey used expressive movements instead of verbalized speech. The psychic mechanism of projective and introjective identification appeared connected with this regressive way of communication through which the patient forces undesirable parts of the self into his object.
When frustration has been felt as intolerable, patients are inclined to make excessive use of projective identification in consequence of which the developing formation of conception, thoughts and symbols become inhibited.
While parents should understand the expressive movements of their children in order to give them confort and reassurance, by means of ratifying experiences from analyst, this cannot be expected to relieve a patient’s anxiety. Instead, he should do so by interpreting his patient’s verbal or non-verbal communications. We understand that to the extent to which patients achieve insight, they will find an increasingly open channel for the fantasies, conceptions, thoughts and symbols, which is followed by a devalution of gestures as communication.

Psychoanalytical clinic in contemporaneity: new symptoms or new maladies?
Aurea Maria Lowenkron

A very frequent issue that emerges from everyday clinical work is that contemporary psychoanalytical patients are very different from those in the beginning of psychoanalysis. Some authors believe that there is no real change in clinical structures, so differences observed are merely related to the emergence of the troubles. Infantile conflicts common to all times could have being enlarged by modern life and even masked with descriptions subordinated to medical paradigms. So instead of new pathologies, contemporary patients must be considered as having new symptoms. Other authors are convinced that we are really faced with new pathologies, which are understood as effects of socioeconomic changes, technological revolution, beliefs and symbolic system changes, including human relationship. In those patients, interpretation of meaning is replaced by actions or somatic symptoms. Highlighting common inhibition of psychic life associated with considerable deficiency of psychic representation and inability to symbolize significant experiences, this paper proposes a comparison between such a distinguishing trait of contemporary days patients and those that Freud have described as a diagnostic category named actual neurosis.

Key words
Contemporary psychopathology • diagnosis • new symptoms • new maladies • actual neurosis.

Notes for an approach towards contemporary demands of psychoanalysis
Luiz Augusto Celes

The article aims to establish the transformations of psychoanalysis in the face of social, historical and cultural changes. It discusses the imprecision of relations thus established and characterizes a certain common basis for psychoanalysis at the present time. The emphasis given to transference as a possibility of opening to alterity is discussed as a characteristic response of psychoanalysis to contemporary demands generally perceived as narcissistic.

Key words
Transformations in psychoanalysis • transference • alterity • contemporary demands.

Freud and science: what science are we talking about?
Maria de Fátima Chavarelli

This paper attempts to contextualize Psychoanalysis within the domain of epistemological schools. In order to develop her reflections, the author makes use of the neo-positivistic approach and the ideas of Carl R. Popper and Thomas S. Kuhn. In the theory of paradigms, elements are found for understanding the meaning of Psychoanalysis as a science in modernity. A “dialogue” is constructed between metapsychology and the theory of paradigms, delineating Psychoanalysis as a post-paradigmatic science. Finally, the term post-paradigmatic is defined as referring to a manner of thought that leads to permanent ruptures and transcendence.

Key words
Psychoanalysis and Science• Scientificity of Psychoanalysis• Psychoanalysis and Theory of Paradigms.

The bodily ego and the brain – mind continuum – The therapeutic action of psychoanalysis from a perspective of its interface with neuroscience
Victor Manoel de Andrade

Neuroscience development is beginning to fulfill Freud’s prophecy that in the future biology would explain psychoanalytic hypotheses. Present-day neuroscience believes that mind is brain at work. The influence of affective relationships on babies’ neural circuits stands out among the neuroscientific discoveries in the mind realm – babies may have brain atrophy if they are not cared for adequately. The emergence of new neural connections to replace damaged neurons is another important find. There are evidences that psychological methods can lead to changes in the brain. This point is particularly important, as psychoanalytic method is based on an affective relationship (transference). Since ego is prejudiced in narcissistic disturbances, by reason of inadequate object relations, one can assume that its basic faults correspond to brain alterations, confirming the idea of a body-ego. The repetition of past inadequate real relationships in the virtual scenery of the psychoanalytic process allows the transferential relationship (virtual) to achieve ego changes and amend its faults. Since psychotropic drugs are artificial and have generic and coarse action upon the organism, it could be said that psychoanalysis is a sort of natural psychopharmacotherapy, for it fills gaps in the original affective mother-baby relationship, acting upon mind and brain.

Key words
Affect as body expression • natural psychopharmacotherapy • transference • virtual relation.

Conceptualization of topography on psychoanalytic process: the unrepresentable
Ruggero Levy

The author studies significant alterations that occured, since Freud, on the comprehension and conceptualization of the topography of the mental apparatus and their repercussions on the psychoanalytic process. One started with Klein’s contributions that amplified the geography of the mental phenomena, especially due to the description of the projective identification, which passed to include the interior of the object such as one more space capable to contain fantasies or parts of the self of the subject. In another, it was starting from the impossibility of representation of some traumatic experience, creating zones of non representation in the psychical apparatus. The first an amplification of the geography of the mental spaces, such as the expansion of the frontier of the classic topography. The second passed to create inside the psychical space of the subject, a zone that goes beyond what would be considered the mental itself. The two contributions reflect on the conception of the psychoanalytical process and are studied along the paper.

Key words
Psychic topography • representation • non representation • unrepresentable • geography of the mental spaces.

Repetition, new transcriptions and new meanings in the process
Deodato Curvo de Azambuj

The work seeks to monitor certain insights that have been extended as from September 11, 2001. The author emphasizes certain models, based on his insights, of absurd realities, which are disclosed based on surprising, and sometimes unprecedented, happenings. They are dreams, hallucinatory states, schizo-paranoid, and the “spectacle of growth and reproduction” through the juxtaposition of the feminine and masculine, the collapse of the Twin Towers of the WTC All these make room through language and communication for new transcriptions and new meanings and for the uncertainties of reality, alongside absolutisms that seek eternal repetition.

Key words
Insight • repetition • new transcriptions • new meanings • language, freedom • absolutism • relativism • success • reality • absurd.

Psychoanalysis in Psychotics
Isac Germano Karniol

The use of psychoanalysis in the treatment of psychotics is quite restricted at present. Despite achieving considerable theoretical-practical development, this continues to be the case. The consideration of the possible existence of an underlying organic substratum, as well as these patients’ difficulty in communication, have added to this situation.
In this study, we describe experience over the past 15 years in the psychoanalytical treatment of schizophrenic. We ally Antonino Ferro’s technique with children with the possibility of the psychotics communicating through art as shown by Nise da Silveira.
We verify that psychoanalysis has an important role to carry out in this area and that, in Bionian terms, our patients showed a clear mental development.

Key words
Psychoanalysis • psychotic • squizophrenic • art • communication.

Sodoma e Gomorra – Mille e tre essays about sexuality
Celmy Correa

“Taking as an axis the text of Proust – Sodoma e Gomorra – the author choses metaphors for the Freudian concepts of instinct and object and with them reflects on the theme of homosexuality, recently so discussed in the international psychoanalytic literature.
The need of historic-cultural references to understand the human sexuality and its fates, becomes an issue that turns difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize an homosexual identity as psychoanalytical profile, as pointed out by a number of psychoanalytic authors.
The prejudice with which this theme has been treated has limited the understanding of singularities, making psychoanalysis act as instrument of orthodoxy”.

The Stranger
Carmen C. Mion

The author presents a case report along with the theoretical reflexions arised by this nine years clinical experience with a patient apparently uncapable of experiencing or expressing feelings. The author was confronted by the feasibility of analytical work since the beginning of the analysis, considering either transference or emotional experience in the absence of emotional involvement by the patient. It does not mean that the patient did not cooperate. On the contrary, he never missed a session, he was usually very punctual and presented very rich material, like drawings, dreams and visual images. The problem was that eveything that he used to say in analysis was manifestly deprived of any emotional meaning for him and, therefore, deprived of any sense. At the begininng, the question was how to communicate myself with Peter, after some time it, turned out to be how to make it possible that Peter communicates with himself. Confirming Bion’s observation that the patient is the best coleague that an analyst might have, the pathway was indicated by Peter himself. This paper is a theoretical exercise based on this clinical experience and the employment of some concepts of W. Bion, A. Ferro and D. W. Winnicott.

Key words
Narcissism • dreams • Alfa function • continence • holding.

From the psychical I.C.U. to the divan: the constitution of a mind through the analytical relationship
Gina Khafif Levinzon

This paper deals with the theme of psychical immobility, of mental states characterized by paralyzation and encloisture through the recount of a ten year analytical experience. Stressed here is the need to develop technical resources that enable the understanding and handling of cases that do not fit “classic standards of psychoanalysis”.
The patient here described showed characteristics of inaccessibility and resistance to establishing a therapeutic alliance, therefore being compared by the analyst to an Intensive Care situation, where the patient seemed to be “breathing with the aid of machines”, and the analyst was someone responsible for all reanimation procedures. The standstill situation, which lasted approximately five years, began to show changes when the mood of stagnation was interrupted by the analyst’s attitude, enabling the recognition of one’s own limit and those that permit analytical work to be performed.
From this moment on, changes in the patient were seen as well psychical movement, which denoted the beginning of a process of constitution of a mind, was verified.

Key words
Psychical immobility • pathological organizations of the personality • inaccessibility • the negative • the constitution of a mind.

Is interdisciplinarity a new challenge to psychoanalysis?
Odilon de Mello Franco Filho

When Psychoanalysis enters the interdisciplinary area, it involves complex questioning, from authentic efforts to consolidate knowledge to distortions generated with a tinge of omniscience, rivalry, search for prestige and fashion. Taking this into consideration, this paper aims at conceptualizing Interdisciplinarity, understanding its limits and placing Psychoanalysis in its context.
Discussing this theme is an opportunity to contemplate the nature of Psychoanalysis, starting from its method and object, emphasizing, at the same time, its singularity and its interaction with the other disciplines. The main idea is that, if there is not reasonable mutual agreement among us, our interdisciplinary efforts run the risk of not flourishing and transforming it instead into an impediment to a consistent dialogue with the other disciplines.

Key words
Interdisciplinarity • epistemology • psychoanalytical method • psychoanalysis and truth.