Not to interpret: some considerations on M. Balint and two clinical fragments
Vicenzo Bonaminio
172
Book Reviews
189
New Launchings
195
Notes to Contributors
197
Possible resonances
Abstract: After reading professor Carlos Vogt’s interview to the RBP, the author makes statements about the epistemology of psychoanalysis while dialoguing with other sciences, emphasizing its originality. He mentions as an example that the issue of truth in the psychoanalytical investigation is present both in the form of coherence as well as in correspondence and symbolic consensus. One of Vogt’s ideas is reconsidered by the author, who comments the usage of symbolic analogy, mainly in Bion’s and Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis. He ends this comment by recommending that dialogue should be maintained with Vogt in respect to this one and other issues mentioned by him. Keywords: epistemology of psychoanalysis; symbolic analogy; truth; interdisciplinary dialogue.
Abstract: The text dialogues with the ideas presented in Carlos Vogt’s interview, outlining the theorical-methodological implications of the relations of psychoanalysis with poetical creation, the specificities of the production mode of knowledge in psychoanalysis and questions belonging to John Stuart Mill’s associationist nominalism present in Freudian thought. Keywords: Psychoanalysis; poetry; method; Freud; J. S. Mill
Abstract: The author aims to show that the paradigm of psychoanalysis is based on the concept of unconscious, instinct, transference and repetition. Those who have welcomed Freud’s legacy admit, also, that the activity of symbolization represents the sign of human, even if they could disagree about the pathways followed in its conceiving. Winnicott has enlarged the limits of psychoanalytical clinics when he described a space – neither external nor internal, neither me nor not-me, a transition between what’s subjectively conceived and what’s objectively perceived – where one creates the self and the world, domain of the symbolical and source of the culture. For him, our task is built in such space; it’s a game where the subject is thought as a permanent “going on being”. Such conceiving of clinics is especially efficient with psychotic patients or borderlines, patients whose psychic suffering is beyond the Oedipian conflict, reflecting the impossibility of constitution of their own self. Keywords: paradigm of psychoanalysis; symbolization; playing; transitional space.
Abstract: This paper is a literature review conducted in the work of D. W. Winnicott about his theory on the psychological depression, in its relationship with the capacity for concern with the other. It holds an approach the articles that refer ways of pure and impure depression. A purpose is to demonstrate the assumptions of the author on the existence of mental processes derived from the mother-baby and linked to integration of primary cruelty necessary for the establishment of capacity for concern and recognition of otherness. Keywords: depression; primary cruelty; concern
Abstract: Considering Winnicott’s thinking “in any cultural field it is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition” (“d. w. w. by d. w. w”), this paper aims to follow the tracks of Winnicott’s contemporary authors and to delineate possible influences that could have contributed to the “invention” of the concepts of “transicional objects” and “potential space”. We looking for in this way, under this vertice, to bring informations to the discussion about the possibilities of the clinics and theories developed by Winnicott to make an new paradigm in the psychoanalytic field. Keywords: paradox; transitional objects; Winnicott; fetish
On constructing the work of paradox in psychoanalytic clinic
Abstract: This paper intends to deal with the way Winnicott uses the notion of paradox in psychoanalytic work. Clinical material of a 9 years old girl shows the way how analytic process creates paradox functionning. The patient was in a psychotic onset when she came to psychoanalysis. During some time, she presented delusions and imaginary friends. Bit by bit, she becomes more obsessive, nevertheless starts to relate and play with the analyst. The session here exposed is a trial of Bia experiencing paradox mode. In this case, the kind of paradox is the well-known paradox of “finding-creating” the object. At the end, the author traces some theory on paradox following Roussillon’s ideas within his systematic study on paradox in psychoanalysis. Keywords: paradox; symbolization: child clinic; Winnicott: transitional object; transitional phenomena
Winnicott’s main contributions to clinical practice
Abstract: Winnicott offers possibilities of analysing difficult patients, with theory on “personal maturation” and the usage of “regression to dependence” phenomenon in the interaction between patient and analyst, which supplies the necessary “holding” and has to decide when to speak and when to be silent, mainly in trauma “defrosting” situations, in which acceptance of patient’s criticism towards the analyst’s faults, lacking revenge or justification, is an important element for reconducting development, mainly in cases of borderline, schizoid and severely narcissistic patients, where the most important aspect is the “analyst’s survival”. Keywords: absolute dependence; regression to dependence; holding; traumatic situations defrost; analyst’s destruction and survival; setting management.
The body and The devils of Loudun: according to Winnicott’s psychosomatic theory
Abstract: The author studies a character in Aldous Huxley’s Devils of Loudun, a semi-fictional essay. Huxley approaches the subject of the possession of nuns from the Loudun convent by the devils, and their exorcism, giving special emphasis to the exorcist priest Jean-Joseph Surin. Surin becomes ill, suffering psychosomatic ailments for twenty years. The author analyses these diseases in the light of Winnicott’s psychosomatic theory, applying mostly his ideas about the basis of the self in the body. Keywords: body; self; psyche-soma; disintegration; splitting; integration
Transference and countertransference: the live clinic
Abstract: In this paper, the articulation between transference and countertransference highlights the psychoanalytic field as a live expression of the human encounter. The complexity of the subject is approached from the perspective of several psychoanalytic authors. From tradition to the contemporary, a vast conceptual territory is traveled, ratifying, since Freud’s discovery, the vigor of this relational phenomenon that actively challenges the continuity of the analytic process. We seek to highlight the vivacity and the importance of handling this experience as fundamental for maintaining and expanding psychoanalytic practice in today’s world. From there, a path originates going from ontology to the constitution of the psyche as a human issue in modernity. Keywords: transference; countertransference; ontology; psyche, repetition; handling
Abstract: Illustrated by two clinical cases, this paper’s attempt is to accompany the development and expression of the capacity of being alive in several stages of maturation. The theme is expanded by referring to Winnicott’s theory in order to outline its implications with bodily, emotional and affective experience up to the point where it reaches issues related to the patient’s and analyst’s ambivalence keeping in mind the capacity of being alive. Keywords: analytical relation; vitality in Winnicott; survival; alive presence of the analyst; to feel itself real; to be alive.
Playing as a model of the psychoanalytical method of treatment
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to show that the psychoanalytical treatment, from Winnicott’s perspective, offers a clinical model different from Freud’s and Klein’s. To have a global understanding of these authors’ objectives and differences, this model can be more clearly seen if we use the idea of paradigm as it was elaborated by Thomas Kuhn. By specifying the characteristics of the paradigmatic matrix of the traditional psychoanalysis, we can focus our attention on one of the elements of this matrix – which concerns the heuristic model for (clinical) problem solving purposes in psychoanalysis –, and by analyzing Winnicott’s work, we can distinguish a method of treatment which is based on the interpretation and unveiling of unconscious conflicts (sexuality and the Œdipus complex) from another type of psychoanalytical clinical model which has its telos in playing, creativity and meeting oneself. Keywords: method; treatment; playing; Winnicott
The Winnicottian paradigm and the future of psychoanalysis
Abstract: After displaying the present challenges which psychoanalysis is faced with, this paper analyses the responses to such challenges that have or could have been utilized by psychoanalysts. Having made a conservative response exhibit which consists in defending Freud’s metapsychology and the assimilative one, which includes psychoanalysis in the cognitive sciences’ confederation and in the acceptance of cognitivist metapsychology, the text presents the response to the paradigmatic change contained in Winnicott’s work. Keywords: neurosciences; cognitivism; metapsychology; paradigm; Winnicott
The non surviving object: some reflections on the roots of terror
Abstract: Following a very difficult phase with a borderline, sadistic patient – when the analyst felt terrorized –, the author sets out to explore the meaning of terror as a concept in psychoanalysis. Following Winnicott’s use of an object theory, the author suggests the notion of a surviving and non surviving object related to the earliest phase of development. As she had suggested in a previous work – that the surviving object emerges out of the survival of the object –, here she suggests the corollary that the roots of terror are to be found in the non survival of the object, dating back to a failure of the external object to offer the first theoretical feed. This is illustrated by a detailed clinical example. In the “afterword”, the author comments on how her recent research has shown that Winnicott, in the last three years of his life, felt that the non survival of the object at the beginning, in his use of an object theory, negated the need for a theory of a “death instinct”. In this way his theory represents a return to Freud’s metapsychology, although he disagrees with Freud’s later notion of a “death instinct”. Keywords: terror; survival of the object; intrapsychic surviving object; intrapsychic non surviving object; destruction; theoretical feed; primary creativity; theory of aggression.
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