Giuseppe Civitarese | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Dreams that mirror the session.

Dreams in which the analyst appears undisguised almost always depict violations of the setting. Often experienced as special, epiphanic moments, they give a glimpse of an intense, emotional reaction to traumatogenic or otherwise significant events that have occurred during the session or in the most recent previous ones. Probably, the essential aspect of these dreams can be found in the 'form of their content'. This may be paralleled by the narrative technique of mise en abyme or mirror-text. The dream appears as a story within the main story and the scene of the analysis is reflected anti-illusionistically. The fictional structure of the setting is emphasized. Its theatrical self-consciousness quality is revealed at its best. The author postulates that the transformative therapeutic value of these dreams derives from denouncing the referential illusion of 'concrete reality' and of 'what really happened'. For the analysand, they are an effective (i.e. emotionally intense) opportunity to discover the spatial articulations and the staggering refractions of the inside/outside, the textual/extra-textual, the psychic reality/material reality. In the continual comings and goings from one term to another, the work of symbolization is reactivated and the subject is constructed. Dreams that mirror the session, from this point of view, provide a model for conceptualizing the analytic work, and their significance goes beyond the specific phenomena referred to. A clinical case is given, in which some of one patient's dreams are considered as they occurred over a short period. In one of them, the dream-within-a-dream phenomenon is present.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Fire at the theatre: (un)reality of/in the transference.

Only in Bion's extended idea of 'waking dream thought' is the oneiric paradigm of the cure (already an obvious Freudian principle) completely applicable. The author's basic hypothesis is that, by adopting this paradigm thoroughly, one can combine the radical anti-realism which is expressed in the postulate by which all the patient's communications are transference-connected (here meaning 'false connection'--i.e. as projection/displacement of elements of the patient's inner psychic world) with the 'reality' of the transference, that is to say with the conviction that the facts of the analysis are co-determined by the patient's analyst dyad and actually rooted in how they interact. The Freudian metaphor of the fire at the theatre is reintroduced here to suggest the crisis of the therapist's internal setting and capacity for reverie, which occurs when the irreducible ambiguity of the transference is resolved defensively, either in the patient's external reality or in his unconscious fantasy constellation. The author gives three clinical examples. The first shows some of the not necessarily negative effects of this temporary crisis. The other two vignettes show a way of listening to the traumatic events of the patient's life from a perspective (that of the 'analytic field') which is thought to be potentially the most transformative and vital to the analytical relationship.

Communication↗