Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):7-10
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0001
The events we have experienced in recent years at a global level have led us to think and feel differently than in times of relative stability and relative peace. This “other” has called for a revision of the representation of the human condition along the fundamental dual dimensions that define it from a psychoanalytic point of view: subjectivity-otherness, Eros-Thanatos. The pandemic, as a borderline existential event, revealed again how we regress, how rapid and sudden our return to magical thinking is, how argumentative our paranoid-persecutory attitudes can be. However, at the end of the pandemic, we were happy to announce that we had managed to join forces and become a “big work group”.
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Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):13-14
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0002
A century ago, Freud addressed the problem of groups, stating that “Group psychology is therefore concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose” (Freud, S., 1921. ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, SE XVIII, pp. 65-143).
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Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):17-42
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0003
This essay explores the craving for polymorphous perverse relationships of a son of a Holocaust survivor mother. The material presents the interplay of two levels which shaped the patient's character structure and object-relating: the active behavior of the mother to her developing child and the mother's internal struggles, which the son could not help but sense and accommodate. This theme is illustrated by means of a detailed description of the first phases of a case study, in which the patient realized that he enacted his own pathological relationship with his mother, as well as his mother’s traumatic Holocaust past through his polymorphous perverse relationships. This enactment, which was also expressed in the transference, was achieved by means of a compulsive, repetitive technique of intimacy, which served to hide a weak, unintegrated self, and which decreased his sexual and affective needs.
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Keywords: polymorphous perverse relationships, enactment, role-responsiveness, technique of intimacy, transmission of trauma
Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):43-57
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0004
The notion of ‘retreat’ is often connected to war and other confrontational situations. As a verb, it may signify the dynamic aspect of ‘moving’; as a noun, a static aspect prevails: a place to hide, isolate and defend oneself, but also a possibility for bringing something new to life. Psychic retreat implies dynamic relations, not only intra-psychically and in terms of subject-other, but also in dominance-submission relations between subject and group. Some implications of the concept of psychic retreat will be drawn when we turn our eyes to our psychoanalytic institutions and cultures and their impact on the desire of an individual to become a psychoanalyst.
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Keywords: psychic retreat, defensive organisations, group dynamics, disagreements, creativity, ethics
Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):58-68
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0005
The 20th century was marked by multiple anthropogenic historical traumas, constructed by totalitarian regimes, in the context of which certain groups became targets of the death drive. These traumas show similarities, related to the general specificity of the trauma, whether individual or collective, but they also feature significant differences, which are the result of social, political and cultural factors. In this article, I will refer to the fate of the people deported from the Moldovan SSR during the Stalinist regime, analysed from a psychoanalytical perspective, based on oral history testimonies. The results and reflections presented in the article are part of a research dedicated to the deportations from the Moldavian SSR, carried out within the “Recovery and historical exploration of the memory of the victims of the totalitarian communist regime in the Moldavian SSR during the years 1940-1941, 1944-1953” State Programme. As an anthropogenic collective trauma, the deportations brought communication with the Other to the forefront of reflection. In particular, we will refer to the specificity of the relationship of the deported persons with the community, with the State, with state institutions, in the process of mourning and mentalizing the trauma.
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Keywords: historical trauma, latency period, relative, community, bereavement, processing
Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):69-80
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0006
Regression is considered as an important outcome of the beginning of a therapeutic group. Sometime, collective regression can be observed only after the group has gone through the first phase. It is the case of a group psychodrama group of children, organized by the author of this paper in a consulting centre in the Paris area. This form of group therapy supposes for the participants to: first, proposing stories, memories, phantasies leading to dramatic scenarios to be interpreted; second, playing as on a theatre stage the common scenarios; third, discussing the scenarios and the way they were played. An evolution of the content of the scenarios was observed. In the beginning, the content was banal, but little by little, the most frequent script supposed a group of twin babies, not talking, toddling, urinating and defecating without restrain, and angry because their parents were divorced; they were assisted by an uncle or an aunt. To mention that the author was accompanied in this therapy by a female colleague. The group included first 4, then 5 children, two girls and three boys. They had different sorts of psychological problems, and progressed quite well in the way of expressing their difficulties. The collective regression is understood as a synchronic process, as evoked by René Kaës.
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Keywords: children group, group therapy, infantile sexuality, psychodrama, regression, synchronic process
Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):81-94
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0007
The space-time unit, as the basis of institutional construction, a place and a time in which anxieties, conflicts, the thanatic impulses or the drives of the Eros can be updated, conceived, integrated, is in a relationship of dependence with the context, a context in which it grants its functionality. This conditioning highlights the fragility of the space-time unit, under the pressure of multiple affiliations, of the polysemantism of representations, of uncertainty. Starting from an institutional perspective on the analytical setting, built as a unit of space-time, I propose a foray into the dream universe under particular existential pressures, together with Charlotte Beradt and her impressive testimony from the book “The Third Reich of Dreams” (Das Dritte Reich des Traums), in which she managed to collect 300 dreams of ordinary people who lived during Hitler’s regime.
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Keywords: institution, trauma, identification with the aggressor, dream, dream-work, fusion-defusion
Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):95-107
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0008
Psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic institution are inseparable from analytical training and practice. However, the two terms are not equivalent. Psychoanalysis refers firstly – or should refer – to the work of the analyst, in their office – their own – space, with their analysts. However, the analyst belongs to another space: a professional group, a community, respectively an association or a society – an institution. The psychoanalytic institution, in turn, guarantees the transmission of the rules of the profession of the analyst. Psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic institution are linked to the professional activity and ethical principles of its members. The founding power of psychoanalysts, that is, the power to set up an institution and make it evolve, is based on the professional activity and the commonly created and respected deontological matrix. The vitality and sustainability of this activity depends mainly on the quality of the shared common psychoanalytic space, on the processes of psychoanalysis containment, transformation, and transmission by each analyst and by the whole group, at the same time. These are some of the lines of debate that we propose in this paper on psychoanalytic groups and institutions.
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Keywords: content, ethics, framework, institution, space, transmission
Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):108-118
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0009
This article explores the representational power of the myth put forward by Freud in his work „Totem and tabu” as well as its function in establishing the evolution towards language and henceforth humanity, understood as the ability to contain the violence of the primitive drives by binding them. It also examines the parallel between the inner (psychosis) and the outer limits (totalitarianism, burnout) of this process and it questions possible solutions for the institutions in order to maintain their fundamental function – to support humanity.
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Keywords: institution, humanity, founding myth, psychosis, totalitarianism, burnout
Rom J Psychoanal 2022, 15(1):119-140
DOI: 10.2478/rjp-2022-0010
The topic of the article aims to address, from the perspective of some theoretical considerations, how the nature of human interactions is metamorphosing, transforming, when interfaced with current realities. We will make a few references starting from the meanings arising from the linguistic semantics of the terms, then going through the semiotics and logic of functioning of the binomial “individual-group”, which vectors the intersubjective specificity of a crowd, then we will go on with “mapping” the psychodynamics of the human cartography, applied to some samples of reality, of those we face today. We begin with the presentation of some conceptual condensations in order to offer to the understanding that we propose afterwards, an interpretative theoretical filter, starting with Freudian landmarks and continuing with some ideas of contemporary psychoanalysis. Our perspective aims at the parameters of the processes of "triangulation”, from the early period until the completion of the Oedipus, as the foundation of the later constellation of relationships, both at the individual and at the group level. We consider the interdependence of the mechanisms of functioning of the two categories, when facing the vicissitudes of internal and/or external reality, respectively, the prevalence of the mechanisms of the schizoparanoid position in the existential crisis dynamics.
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Keywords: object relations, schizo-paranoid anxieties, depressive anxieties, Oedipus, group unconscious, group ima
