Growing up with a Brain-damaged Mother: Anosognosia by Proxy?

In Self-Defense: Disruptions in the Sense of Self, Lateralization, and Primitive Defenses

“…In the brain-injured population, a similar claim has been suggested, specifically regarding the way that patients reduce their defensiveness when proper contextual support is offered (Fiegelson, 1993;Salas, 2009;Ylvisaker & Feeney, 2000), or maintain it when denial stabilizes an interpersonal system (Clarici & Giuliani, 2008). The fluctuation in the use of defense mechanisms has also been reported in patients with right-brain damage and anosognosia, where variations seem to appear spontaneously (Moss & Turnbull, 1996), are sensitive to sensory manipulations (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998), or depend on the self-referential quality of the interview questions (Marcel, Tegnér, & Nimmo-Smith, 2004).…”

Neuropsychoanalysis has an influence on psychoanalytic technique but not on the psychoanalytic method

“…Tea's therapist said that, at the beginning of therapy, Tea manifested behavioral patterns that could be described as more appropriate for a two-year-old: it was as if Tea remained "frozen" at the age she had been when her mother had had her accident. The development of these two therapeutic pathways has been described in the cited article (Clarici & Giuliani, 2008) and led to a substantial recovery, alleviating Tea's "anosognosic" symptoms and reinstating her social and learning skills. The therapist helped Tea -not without moments of acute pain -to mourn a mother whom the child had apparently internalized implicitly in her first years of life.…”

“…In the second patient, Mrs M, it was mainly through the use of introspective psychoanalytic methodology that I allowed myself to see in a new light a neurological syndrome that has long been recognized, namely, the unawareness of illness, or anosognosia (for a more detailed account of this case, see Clarici & Giuliani, 2008). Anosognosia is a disorder that usually affects patients with right cerebral hemisphere lesions: for clinical neurologists, it is one of the most common symptoms of this syndrome (usually accompanied by left hemiparesis, and perceptual deficits of the left side of the body due to unilateral left hemineglect).…”