Parents’ Paradoxicality and Adolescents’ Self‐Engendering Fantasy

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss psychotherapy sessions that I undertook with a female adolescent patient. As a psychoanalyst specialized in couple and family psychoanalysis, I was primed to focus on her representation of her parents' and family's dysfunctional dynamics. She felt locked in perverse narcissistic relationships and vampirized by her internal 'objects', her attachments causing her to experience libidinal haemorrhage. Her links to her internal 'objects' seemed like chains that impeded her individuation. In my analysis, I build on Racamier's concepts of pregenital 'incestual' functioning, primal mourning, paradoxicality, and self-engendering fantasy. However, while Racamier noted that the self-engendering fantasy is part of an 'incestual' picture, which serves the death drive, I interpret this fantasy as a constructive effort to achieve psychic reorganization; it helped my patient disengage from her internalized incestual family dynamics and the violence of an incestuous primal scene. Through this fantasy, she seemed to end the narcissistic depletion that threatened to overwhelm the boundaries of her weak ego. The self-engendering fantasy serves the life drive, albeit paradoxically, using this logic. With this thesis in mind, I accompanied my patient in her process of separation and individuation and interpreted transference and countertransference dynamics.