“Coming from Afar” and “Temporarily Becoming the Patient Without Knowing it”: Two Necessary Analytic Conditions According to Ferenczi’s Later Thought

Borgogno, Franco

doi:10.1057/ajp.2014.28

Cited by 15 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…In his work over the last two decades, Borgogno (see, e.g., Borgogno, 2014) uses the metaphor of contagion; he emphasizes of the necessity of ‘falling sick’ “with the same illness which is affecting the patient and then ‘recovering’ in order to re-mobilize the patient’s will to return to life” (p. 8). Other authors (Bellinson, 2014; Feldman, 2015; Goren, 2005; Howell, 2002; Kafka, 2008; Kuchuck, 2008; Shubs, 2008) describe cases where their vicarious trauma has led to striking insights and highly effective treatments.…”

Section: Does Vicarious Trauma Inhibit or Enhance The Clinician’s Abi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

When is vicarious trauma a necessary therapeutic tool?

Boulanger¹

2018

Psychoanalytic Psychology

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Trauma is contagious; its powerful affect and frequently unformulated memories can be transmittedsometimes nonverbally and often mysteriously-within families, across generations, and from patient to clinician; in the latter case it is commonly referred to as vicarious trauma. In emphasizing trauma's contagious quality, the current paper explores the relationship between vicarious trauma and dissociation. The author reviews a number of neuropsychological, cognitive, and psychodynamic explanations for this uncanny clinical phenomenon and its frequently unremarked boundary failures. Despite its disorienting effect on clinicians, it is suggested that in a long-term clinical engagement with a survivor of massive psychic trauma, vicarious trauma can be essential in helping both clinicians and patients process the traumatic material. Contrasting examples illustrate those occasions in which the emotional contagion can be addressed in treatment using containment, validation, and imagination, and other occasions, when there is no therapeutic contract, and other means must be found to formulate the dissociated material.

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Section: Does Vicarious Trauma Inhibit or Enhance The Clinician’s Abi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

When is vicarious trauma a necessary therapeutic tool?

Boulanger¹

2018

Psychoanalytic Psychology

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“…(2) To live the situation viscerally, as I characterize it (Borgogno, 2014; also see Bonomi's description of my work, 2014)-to be, we might say, a vulnerable analyst (Slavin, 1998) or, as I usually put it, an introjective analyst (Borgogno, 2011b(Borgogno, , 2014)-and to use my own affective response…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Special Learning Experience About Transference and Countertransference Dynamics at the Beginning of My Psychoanalytic Training

Borgogno¹

2016

Am J Psychoanal

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Drawing upon his description of the early phases of the analysis of the second case of official supervision, the author illustrates in his work why this experience became a foundational moment in his formative trajectory as a psychoanalyst. Three important aspects are discussed: (1) the significant role his supervisor played in helping to manage and to confront the difficult dynamics of transference and countertransference that characterized the author's early years of analytic work with patients; (2) the transformative factors that opened up new avenues in the repetition and the original traumatic pathology put forward at great length by the patient; and (3) the making contact for the first time with that area of inter/intrapsychic phenomena that the author has since then explored widely and theorized about, under the name of relational dynamics governed by role-reversal.

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“…Given the analyst’s likelihood of “falling ill” with the ailment affecting the patient (Borgogno 2014), there is considerable potential for the analyst to enact, and particularly to assume a masochistic or sadistic stance in identifying with the patient’s inner objects, rather than recovering in order to contain and subsequently to interpretively represent. The analyst’s ability to work with enactments and projective identification demands a particular “maternal” attitude (Ferenczi 1933) or “way of being” (Purcell 2019) entailing a profound emotional engagement not so easily represented linguistically.…”

Section: Dissociative Functioning and Analytic Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%

Return of the Repressed: Revisiting Dissociation and the Psychoanalysis of the Traumatized Mind

Diamond¹

2020

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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Psychoanalytic treatment is often indicated when trauma and its psyche/soma companion, dissociation, severely disrupt symbolic functioning and associative linking. After Freud’s initial thinking on these matters, repression replaced rather than supplemented dissociation (which occasions segregating units of experience) as the primary defensive response to severe trauma. Because psychoanalysis had “repressed” the salience of dissociation as actively motivated (though passively experienced), an unnecessary schism has occurred between trauma theories and mainstream North American psychoanalysis, and within psychoanalysis itself. To fully restore dissociation’s role in primitive mental states and provide a more integrated approach to technique, it is necessary to comprehend the triadic nature of trauma, which entails economic/drive, structural conflict and deficit, and object-relational factors. For a treatment model that addresses defensive dissociation in the here and now, primary and secondary dissociation must be distinguished, with each differentiated from splitting and repression. Technique requires addressing unconscious, repressed fantasies associated with the “trauma,” object-relational patterns that interfere with linking, and psycho-economic issues that have disrupted ego functioning. A clinical example illustrates both the analyst’s persistence in suffering the dead, eerie space of dissociated trauma and efforts to find language that helps structure the patient’s somatic and enacted expressions (and accompanying dissociative and repressive processes) by which traumatic experiences are registered and conveyed.

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“Coming from Afar” and “Temporarily Becoming the Patient Without Knowing it”: Two Necessary Analytic Conditions According to Ferenczi’s Later Thought

Cited by 15 publications

References 2 publications

When is vicarious trauma a necessary therapeutic tool?

When is vicarious trauma a necessary therapeutic tool?

A Special Learning Experience About Transference and Countertransference Dynamics at the Beginning of My Psychoanalytic Training

Return of the Repressed: Revisiting Dissociation and the Psychoanalysis of the Traumatized Mind

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