Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):9-12
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-1
The contexts of history lie within generational and lineage dimensions. This is why we will first submit to your attention a few historical coordinates that have led to the the contents of the current issue.
In the Communist era, psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular were banned. The Institute of Psychology was closed and university study programmes were discontinued. Some professors and researchers in the field of psychology were demoted and forced to take unqualified jobs such as waste collectors or machinists.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10 (2) :13-16
doi : 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-2
When we refer to identity, we have in mind its three levels: gender identity, generational identity and ethnocultural identity. In this era of globalisation, we wonder whether this concept is still important or to what extent it changes its dimensions. Psychoanalysis approaches the issue of identity mostly from a psychopathological perspective when it deals with personality disorders such as borderline states or psychoses.
As the articles of the present issue will reveal, the concept of identity is not only related to personal identity, to the sense of identity which emerges along with the development of one’s personality, but it also covers social, professional, national identity. All these aspects are connected with the ethnocultural origin and are formed starting from the transgenerational inheritance materialised in what we call tradition.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10 (2):19-34
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-3
The author investigates the question whether narcissism is still a useful clinical concept. The term is so widespread and often so loosely used that it seems to have lost its descriptive and discriminatory power. The descriptive use of the term in our everyday discussions of patients has evolved into a kind of behavioural shorthand (Goldberg, 2013). Departing from two case vignettes narcissism is being discussed from the vantage point of symptomatology, psychodynamics and normal narcissistic phenomena. Certain characteristic psychodynamic traits can be discerned in narcissistic personalities, but a specific common aetiology cannot yet be stated. At the core, however, of pathological narcissism are always severely disturbed early object relations. The author puts special emphasis on normal narcissism as part of the human condition. A rational and not abundant use of the concept of narcissism has still its place in psychoanalytic practice, theory and nosology. In group constellations, as for example in psychoanalytic institutions, the destructive potential of pathological narcissism has always to be considered.
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Keywords: primary narcissism, destructive narcissism, Narcissus, grandiose self, object love, fusion
Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):35-52
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-4
The paradox of our existence, in the Winnicottian sense of the term, and as it is already known in psychoanalysis – especially in the construction of the sentiment of being – needs the encounter with an alter, with the Other – the real and external object, with its qualities and capacity to also fundamentally threaten the human being, possibly through its adhesive nature, its intrusion, revenge, disappearance etc. This paradoxical situation, stressed out by the author in this paper, could be generative of a healthy enough Self, and thus the individual could feel themselves as the subject of their history, filiation, family, culture, within the matrix of the continuity of their existence; or, by contrast, this could be the main factor at play for certain severe pathologies (narcissistic-identitary, psychosomatics, psychotics, character disorders, personality disorders etc.).
This paper will open on the subject of False and True Self, but will also deal with the construction of a transitional area, the transformation of the space of illusion, the construction of the sentiment of being and of the Self.
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Keywords: integration, maturation, primary process, Self, sentiment of being, symbolization (primary)
Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2) :53-84
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-5
Identity, seen not as a result or as a final construction that allows us to identify an individual trough differentiation, but as a process, or rather as a series of processes, gives us access to the various ways of managing, of working through the amorphous entity of drives, for dynamic structures and mental changes. The modalities involved, the shapes accessed during these processes, are those through which contact, communication and the supplying of information occurs. These are practically the sensorial modalities, those which may be flooded with too much contact, interaction, information and nourishment, or, on the contrary, not be provided with enough. Each situation of the “too much” or “not enough” places us inside the area of the potentially traumatic experiences or even inside a traumatic experience itself. The difference could be made by the manner in which the experience can be worked over and worked through or transformed. The answer to the question on how we handle this process of transforming the “too much” and the “too little” could be one of the keys to unlocking a path of understanding the dynamics present in the processes of identity construction, especially when the potentially traumatic experiences are milestones for the unfolding of those processes.
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Keywords: sensorial, somatic, affect, trauma, shell, ego, ego-skin, drive, ego-work, dream, dream-work, identity, alpha function, evacuation
Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):87-110
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-6
Amalia, aged 14, was born in France, in a Portuguese family. Amalia’s mother requests psychological counselling. At the first session she comes alone. Displaying a skeptic attitude, she claims that her daughter experiences two classes of symptoms: possession by a dead person’s spirit and emotional disturbances, nightmares, breathing difficulties, spasmophilia. This article develops mainly two theoretical hypotheses as well as the technical arrangements necessary in the carrying out of the work of psychotherapy.
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Keywords: adolescence, crisis, identity, etiologies, affiliations, psychotherapy
Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10 (2): 111-132
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-7
Mourning stands among the early traumatic experiences that lead to narcissistic identity disorders. The separations that the child has experienced, regardless of their cause, are difficult to work-through and integrate within the child’s psychic life, sometimes even impossible. The child’s capacity to go through a process of mourning depends on his / her relationship to the mother, on the age at which this separation is experienced, but also on the relationship with the lost object. Sometimes, children are exposed to a mourning which the parents are unable to achieve, and which they displace upon their children, this having negative effects upon the narcissism of the latter. Throughout this paper, I set out to describe the consequences of such a mourning upon the child’s subsequent development. I took into account the parents’ loss of a child, either before the patient’s birth or, a different situation, the loss having occurred when the patient was less than two years old and had no direct contact with the deceased sister.
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Keywords: separation, loss, impossible mourning, early traumatic experience, ghost, crypt
Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10 (2): 135-156
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-8
A war mindset in humans seems to coincide with the paranoid-schizoid position. In war also, groups regress to PS. Some symptoms of such a regression were evident also in Freud himself when WW1 started. The 20th century was the bloodiest century in recorded history and its enormous traumas have gathered and overloaded humanity. Its traumatic legacy included also unbearable feelings of those who killed other humans and the voids left in the group fabric by millions of deads.
Unworked through war traumas with such contents of death and destruction lie split and silent stored in the minds of millions of individuals, constituting fragments of a secret parallel life. They are so similar that spread throughout the psychism of the group, where “mine, yours, his” all blend into “ours”. With their vibrations they form a mute chorus that converge into the background soundtrack of the group's mental life. How may all this have contributed to create so extremely destructive paranoid positions like communism, fascism, or Nazism were?
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Keywords: war, paranoid-schizoid position, Freud, trauma, group-nation, parallel life
Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):157-178
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-9
The exploration of unconscious functioning, and of such psychoanalytic ideas as those pertaining to internal object relations, stages of development, defence mechanisms, or the phenomena of dreaming and parapraxes, combined with our clinical experience with real-life analysands, can also contribute to an understanding of the personalities and behaviours of the fictional characters we encounter in literature, drama and cinema.
Some of these concepts, even when not directly referred to here, will inform my reflections on three classic British films: David Lean’s wonderfully romantic love story Brief Encounter (1945), Carol Reed’s intense post-Second World War drama set in Vienna The Third Man (1949), and zany comedy Morgan. A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), set in the ‘swinging London’ of the 1960s, by Karel Reisz.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):181-188
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-10
In the continuous flow of experience, to mark the identity landmarks is not always a process that easily reveals its importance, although the vitality of such a process is obvious. To know, illusory or not, how the body constitutes in senzations, perceptions, emotions, structures and thoughts is a way to find your place in your own body, mind and life. As Bogdan Cuc showed in his paper, this “livens each therapist’s work” and this is why we head our attention towards the manner in which identity is constructed, keeping in mind the fact that the atempt to manage a continuous changing process, specific for a non-structural identity, could signify the long traumatic for which we have not enough knowledge and understanding.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):189-198
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-11
The difficulties that an analysis has to face in attaining the core of Authentic Self in the patient, when the False Self is the structural element of the patient’s personality, are specifically mentioned by Winnicott. In this case, the False Self is what we call in common language a second nature.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):199-208
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-12
Identity cannot be artificial or virtual, even by most generous criteria. On the other hand, ideology can imitate something real, and sometimes it is so successful that one’s identity suffers irreversible damages. As in: computing is or could be a replacement for a person.
Confusion is at home in such ideological position, and, as Andrea Sabbadini remarks, there is quite a difference in having an intimate relationship through a technical device, as compared to: having a relation with a technical device. This last assertion is a derivative of the ideological credo of ‘computing is personhood’ or better said ‘reality is a simulation’.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2):237-246
doi: 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-14
In Romania, psychic disorder is still considered a stigmata and even if there are initiatives, both at governmental and non-governmental level, the addressability and participation of these organisation is reduced, because of financial and logistical implications. (David, 2015)
The psychodynamic psychiatry occurred in the context of manifestation of some marked divergences between approaches that were mutually negating the contribution to the evolution of mental health sciences. This tendency of permanent rejection of principles, studies, methods proposed by the other approaches proved, however, extremely fast, to be an artificial, ungrounded and ineffective one. Therefore, the clinical facts contradicted the tendencies mentioned above and highlighted precisely the impossibility to understand the complexity of the human being, appealing to theories excessively preoccupied to be delimited one from the others. (Gabbard, 2007).
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Rom J Psychoanal 2017, 10(2): 249-260
doi : 10.26336/rjp.2017-1002-15
Identity is not a psychoanalytic concept. We find this term in different approaches - sociological, cultural, ethnic, historical, economical, scientific, philosophical, but also in
certain concerns and worries related to global situation of our time: migration of individuals, migration of cultural, political, religious values, identity transformation, changes of pathology. We are challenged by all these transformations, as communities and individuals, we are called as professionals to understand and heal the new changes, configurations or borderlands (intermediate states).
Identity is not a psychoanalytic concept,
And still…
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Keywords: identity, fals self, impostor, snob, identification, as if personality
