Absolute Truth and Unbearable Psychic Pain by Allan Frosch

Author:Allan Frosch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karnac Books

Case: Mr T

Mr T wanted an analysis because he was unassertive, was unable “to feel”, and felt deficient. Early in the analysis, Mr T recounted memories without any apparent meaningful connection to his current state of mind or life. He found satisfaction in his claim that he was doing his analysis correctly by “free associating” and not censoring. He brought in dreams, not because he remembered them and was affectively attached to them, but because he had written them down. He told of events that he thought “should” stir him; he stated that he knew how he “should feel” but did not feel.

Mr T wanted the analyst to be fully “attuned”, to feel what he feels as he feels it. To feel for herself, as his analyst, was not sufficient. Mr T associated his longing for attunement to his mother “raising me by the book”, according to strict rules. He remembered minimal involvement with an unempathic stern mother and remote ineffective father. Mr T frequently returned to his memory of an event that he “supposed” to be traumatic and formative: the “trip to the institution”. He had disobeyed, mother threatened to leave him at the nearby institution, he continued to disobey, and she drove him to the institution. The car ride created sheer panic for Mr T, as he begged his mother to take him home, believing in his impending abandonment. Upon arriving at the institution, she immediately returned home with him. The memory suggests a traumatic history of relatedness and attachment, and provided a way to understand the transference/countertransference of his using language to deaden the analysis and prevent contact. He could disable the analyst from driving the “analytic car” with its risks of destroying him and keep himself from having awareness of his terror of aggression and annihilation.

For the analyst, Mr T’s words lost their vitality and prevented contact. The analyst felt she did not exist. At times, she felt a drugged sleepiness come over her as she saw herself as a helpless ineffectual mother or an inanimate object. An excerpt from an hour illustrates the patient’s language and its power in evoking an ongoing enactment with the analyst. The “dead” mood that Mr T created in the analytic hour is apparent. The concept of “concreteness” brings further understanding to the functioning of Mr T’s psyche in this ongoing enactment where language coupled with the absence of affect became an action to prevent contact. The action was the concrete expression of trauma, and as the traumatic meaning was not yet symbolised, action made for a distorted function of his language. In this session the patient’s wish for a tape recorder serves as a condensation illustrating the patient’s mechanistic approach to language that was used to create deadness with the analyst.

A Friday:

Patient: I would like to tape record Wednesday and Friday hours. I’d get back into where I left off, especially when the previous time is not present in my mind, like right now. It would help that sense that something is wrong with me; I’d retain a full sense of the previous hour.

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