The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States Without Representation

ISBN-13: 9781583918142 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 238 str.

Cesar Botella

Opis

The majority of psychoanalysts today agree that the analytic setting faces them daily with certain aspects of their work for which the answers provided by an analytic theory centred exclusively on the notion of representation prove insufficient. On the basis of their experience of analytic practice and illustrated by fascinating clinical material, Cesar and Sara Botella set out to address what they call the work of figurability as a way of outlining the passage from the unrepresentable to the representational. They develop a conception of psychic functioning, which is essentially grounded in the inseparability of the negative, trauma, and the emergence of intelligibility, and describe the analyst's work of figurability arising from the formal regression of his thinking during the session, which proves to be the best and perhaps the only means of access to this state beyond the mnemic trace which is memory without recollection. The Work of Psychic Figurability argues that taking this work into consideration at the heart of the theory of practice is indispensable. Without this, the analytic process is too often in danger of slipping into interminable analyses, into negative therapeutic reactions, or indeed, into disappointing successive analyses."

Spis treści

Parsons, Introduction. Part I: The Work of Figurability and the Negative. The Limits of Thought: Paris-London Back and Forth. The Negative Duality of the Psyche. Non-representation. The Geometer and the Psychoanalyst. Figurability and the Work of Figurability. Part II: The Dynamic of the Double. On the Auto-erotic Deficiency of the Paranoiac. Working as a Double. 'Only Inside - Also Outside'. Community in the Regression of Thought. Part III: The Hallucinatory. The Negative of the Trauma. The Hallucinatory. Mysticism, Knowledge and Trauma. Part IV: Outline for a Metapsychology of Perception. A Psychoanalytic Approach to Perception. 'The Lost Object of Hallucinatory Satisfaction'. Bibliography.

O autorze

César Botella and Sára Botella are child and adult psychoanalysts in private practice. They are training analysts at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, and in 1983 received the International Price Maurice Bouvet for their article 'On the auto-erotic deficiency of the paranoïa'.