International Conference of Psychoanalysis
THE ARCHAIC
*Scientific Committee
Prof. Univ. Dr. Rene Roussillon – psychanalyste, psychologue etprofesseurémérite de psychologie à l'université Lumière Lyon 2, membre de laSociété psychanalytique de Paris. Training ans supervisor Analyst. Sigourny Award 2016. Authors of numerous articles and books in Psychoanalysis.
Dr. Med. Jean-Michel Quinodoz - psychoanalyst in Geneva, Switzerland. Training Analyst and supervizor of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society. Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Consultant at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Geneva, Member and later Chair of the Training Committee of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society, Former Editor for Europe of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1994-2003, 2008-2009). Since 2003, he has been Editor in Chief of the European Annuals of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Sigourny Award 2010. Authors of numerous articles and books in Psychoanalysis.
Dr. Med. Milagros Cid Sanz – psychoanalist, member of Spanish Society of Psychoanalysis. Trening analyst and supervisor. Former President of Spanish society of Psychoanalysis, Madrid.
Assistant Professor Bogdan Sebastian Cuc – psychoanalyst and psychologist, member of Romanian Society of Psychoanalysis (RSP). Doctor in Psychoanalysis, Sorbona 13, Paris. Current member of the Scientific Committee of RSP.
Dr. Rodica Matei - psychoanalyst and psychologist, member of the Romanian Society of Psychoanalysis (RSP). Doctor in Psychoanalysis, Sorbona 13, Paris. Former Vicepresident in charge with scientifical activities in SRP. Current member of the Scientific Committee of RSP.
Dr.med. Gianina Micu - psychoanalyst and psychologist, member of the Romanian Society of Psychoanalysis (RSP). Doctor in Medicine, Carol Davila University, Bucharest. Former President of RSP. Current Vicepresident in charge with scientific activities in RSP. Editor in chef of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis. Editor in chief of the Romanian Annual of International Psychoanalysis.
*Abstracts of the papers
“After this nothing happened”: Immobilized archaic parts of the self
Dr. Laura Viviana Stauss
Psychoanalyst, Germany (DPV)
Abstract: The psychoanalytic setting can be defined as an agreement between analyst and patient that vouch safes their roles in order to enable the process. It becomes a frame of reference and influence show the psychoanalytic experience is perceived, structuring the selves of the participants while at the same time being structured by them.
When changes or interruptions take place there is a need to reinforce or re-establish it. Yet, its impact might be difficult to detect when it operates as a constant invariable.
There are patients who have experienced the collapse of their own frames of reference without being aware of its implications on the self.
Based on Steiner’s description of psychic retreats and Bleger’s dialectic description of the psychoanalytic setting as a framework in which psychoanalytic experience occurs, as well as a depository of archaic parts of the personality, I will describe a clinical casein whicha collapsed frame of reference of the patient, containing archaic parts of her personality, is deposited and immobilized in the psychoanalytic setting.
The correlation between an archaic attachment of the self to a dead, but present object, and the preservation of a collapsed frame of reference will be described.
Keywords: archaic, psychoanalytic setting, dead object, self, archaic attachment.
The archaic in words
Associate Professor Dr. Brînduşa Orăşanu
Psychoanalyst, Romania (RSP)
Abstract: Freud's reflections on the archaic contain references to ancient civilizations and suggest analogies to the beginnings of the infantile psychic universe. The myth of the primitive horde imagined by him expresses the search for an even more distant, originary time. Other authors, such as Melanie Klein, Bion or Winnicott, have thought of this issue in a rather "frontal" way, approaching the individual archaic clinically and theoretically. Psychoanalytic access to the archaic is a complex issue, due to the necessity of passing through the phenomenon of après-coup, due to the specificity of the method based on free association and its expression in words, and also due to the fact that the "archaic" phantasies are not the same with the archaic mechanisms. A privileged way of exploring the archaic is to look for it inside verbal language, at the intersection of different psychic registers, then in moments of psychic reorganization, when the symbolic function is improved.
Keywords: archaic, infans, verbal language, splitting, primary and secondary symbolisation.
The Archaic, archaic communication and psychic figurability
Dr. Psy. Daniela Luca
Psychoanalyst, Romania (RSP)
Abstract: In Constructions in analysis (1937), S. Freud compared the analyst’s work to that of the archaeologist searching among vestiges, with the big difference that the object of our work is alive, and working with it causes fear, pain and suffering. Last year, during a visit to Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius, impressed by the strangeness of the atmosphere, by people carbonised by lava, eternal statues in a shocking atemporality among the archaic objects and traces of the place, I picked up the thread of psychoanalytic reflections on such ruins, vestiges, the layers of “ash” also present in the human psyche and their relevance in the work of the analytic cure. How to communicate the unthinkable, the unsayable, the un-representable, the barely figurable? How to transform traces of your “ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors”, even as passed down from Superego to Superego, or via inter-transgenerational transmissions? How to transform the formless into form?
From S. Freud to D. W. Winnicott and W. Bion, from A. Green and J. McDougall, via D. Anzieu and R. Roussillon, the author is proposing to revisit the psychic vestiges as they are expressing during the analytic process.
Keywords:: analyzability, psychic archeology, archaic communication, Ego-skin, figurability, originary
“Listening with a Third Ear” - Is there a key to the Archaic?
Dr. Eike Hinze
Psychoanalyst, Germany (DPV)
Abstract: My position is that I do not believe in a privileged access to the Archaic. There is not such a thing like a Third Ear. We can approach the preverbal realm of the psyche by not only listening to the content of language but to the way how the patient is talking, to the prosody of his speech. And there is an abundance of other non-verbal signs if we use other channels of perception.
In the classical analytic setting we do not see the patient’s face and abandon all the signals emanating from it. Doesn’t this contradict the emphasis on all non-verbal signals? Staying in constant eye contact impedes the development of a regressive relationship between analysand and analyst. Furthermore, it impedes the development of free association and evenly suspended attention. All the above-mentioned verbal and non-verbal signals of the patient and the corresponding reactions of the analyst are embedded in this relationship. The analyst is co-creator of the analytic field between the analysand and himself, which constitutes the fertile ground necessary for giving birth to all the phenomena he needs in order to approach the archaic dimension of the patient.
Keywords: early trauma, language, non-verbal sign, third year, psychosomatics
The Archaic - some notes on fusion
Dr. Paolo Fonda
Psychoanalyst, Italy (SPI)
Abstract: Fusion is often considered an archaic phenomena on that after the earliest stages of life disappears or only manifests in pathological conditions. In fact, the fusional side is present and essential in all object relations. It is in constant dialectic interaction with the side of separateness.
Due to the fusional component, in the mother-baby matrix the child experiences the maternal mental functioning as if it were present in part within the child herself.
Historically, fusion in group life is seen as the starting point from which features of individuality emerge. However, fusional channels always remain essential in the sum total of group life mechanisms. These channels allow for the synchronization of contents that are essential for group cohesion and functionality.
The “meta-Ego” is the undifferentiated pre-objectual area to which concepts such as Winnicott’s mother environment, Bleger’s glischrocaric nucleus, and Ogden’s autistic-contiguous refer. This area also allows the individual to have fusional connections with his or her surroundings, guaranteeing a sense of continuity and stability. It is reductive to claim that these areas are but remnants of the earliest stages of life that, if they spill over, lead to psychotic regression.
Keywords: fusion, mther-baby matrix, earliest stages, autistic-contigous, meta-Ego.
Beginnings: how transference-countertransference metapsychology actualizes them
Psy. Irina Adomnicăi
Psychoanalyst, France (SPP)
Abstract: Unlike all other forms of therapy, the analytical cure mobilises the archaic aspects of language, thus establishing a regressive dynamic that incites the significant to reveal the primordial function of representing the ultimate essence of the inconsistent psychic tissue/fabric. In this perspective, the word, which as all psychic action cannot subtract itself from the dominance of the all-powerful principle of pleasure-displeasure, becomes the main instrument for investigating the method. In its turn free association allows transference, an intra-psychic and inter-subjective phenomenon, to reveal the emotional archaic fund consisting of infantile sexual experiences re-actualised in the patient-psychoanalyst relationship.
An unavoidable economic determinism, the regression of language and words from word-representation to the representation of the object, meaning image, in the psychoanalytical setting defines the way in which varied means of communication, from the most primitive (extra-linguistic) sensations, gestures, psychic, corporal or somatic aftermaths, to the most sophisticated, can be found again, constructed or reconstructed during the analytic cure. Moments from practice evoked thus open new lines of thinking and reflection, necessary in approaching a fundamental question: what does the archaic aspect of the analytical relationship, as a determinant mechanism for changes and transformations induced by the psychoanalytical protocol, consist of?
Keywords: free association, prehistoric time, primitive experience, transference-countertransference.
The archaic, a history beyond words?
Professor Vladimir Marinov, PhD
Psychoanalyst, France (APF)
Abstract: The archaic is an old obsession of psychoanalysis. It does not only depend on the early inscriptions in the infans’ psyche but also the fantasies and parental gestures that precede the maturation of the child. The murder of the criminal, the act of the alcoholic, the self-mutilation of the autistic, the real or fantasmatic body of the severely somatic patient, of the bulimic or anorexic patients, finally “the original time of the inseparable”... all these symptoms refer in one way or another to adult sexual message inscriptions in the infans’ psyche, while the latter does not have any means of language, only bodily or somato-psychic expressions. Should the therapist be discouraged by the severity of these symptoms, or should he/she rethink the specificity of the constructions and interpretations transfers they generate?
Therefore, the archaic: returns from an ancient past to the level of a present act or a “feeling”; the outbreak of a sense of stopped time; encystment of the “traces”, inscriptions from before the constitution of an unconscious, which itself depends on the “game” between the representations of words and the representations of things.
Keywords: fantasmatic body, real body, traces, representation, construction.
Archaic, the inducement of a re-historicization
Assistant Professor Dr. Bogdan Sebastian Cuc
Psychoanalyst, Romania (RSP)
Abstract: Exploring the archaic, as a space-time unit that we can only identify as an après-coup, leads us to strange, peculiar experiences, but which by the way they appear in thehere and now of the cure lead to the re-configurations of the interactions inside the consulting room.
Placed in a personal pre-history, connected with the fusion and de-fusion experiences, the archaic may represent for the psychoanalytic situation the occasion of a re-writing of the history, a history that starts from the same pre-history, but which it re-configures in other possible histories ... The histories we hear, but also those we build inside the analytical process, are carried out under the pressure of the archaic experiences penetrating the analytical situation in the negative of the present forms.
Keywords: historicization, après-coup, re-writing the history, analytical process, negative.
