The Violence of Emotions by Giuseppe Civitarese

Author:Giuseppe Civitarese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Parameters

With patients who make ‘casting’ difficult one can sometimes get somewhere by intentionally introducing certain parameters into the way the analysis is conducted, in other words, ad hoc or permanent technical variations, or by making good use of accidental variations.

One stratagem that can sometimes prove useful is that suggested by Winnicott and explained by Bollas (1999): occasionally one can lengthen the sessions, or one can ask the patient to stop talking and to listen to the silence. In some cases, the analyst's silence may provide that atmosphere of tenable frustration which gives the analysand the opportunity to listen to himself in a different context from usual and to ask new questions about himself, as when in a Lynch movie reality gradually begins imperceptibly to take on a dream-like colouring.

Other times, the primary purpose is to ‘put the patient to sleep’, to cure the session of its insomnia, and thus to induce the hypnoid state that promotes free association: dimming the lights, cutting out noise, singing a lullaby – ‘bathing the patient in words’, in short – and, reciprocally, being receptive to the sensory side of the idea of reverie (Ogden, 2001).

With psychotic subjects, and often with adolescents, one can sometimes overcome the inhibition that prevents self-expression by asking the patient to draw, or to write notes between sessions, or even to speak of the blog they keep on Splinder (an Italian social networking site). In other cases, one can try to change the frame of the exchange by suggesting that the patient pretend that what has just been said is the story of a dream or a film seen at the cinema, or that he should say the same things as if he were talking to a close friend or as if it were the friend who was speaking, or the immigrant domestic help, or any other character. In this way patients can be helped to break away from the defences erected by intellectualization and abstraction and to get in touch with their more lively emotions. The domestic help, or whoever, thus becomes a fixed character in the analytic field.

The fact is that there is never a lack of possible actors, even when the patient is absolutely silent. Nor is there a lack of roles or emotions. They are supplied by the transference script and by the stage of the setting. What varies greatly, however, is the degree to which a certain actor is suited to play a certain part and how willing he is to do so. At this point the analyst can shoot scenes with a candid camera, or he can try to persuade the actors to act. After all, a transference interpretation is a way of making the actors play certain parts, but as with a candid camera, it can be experienced as an irritating and unpleasant intrusion.

A typical situation is when the whole analysis risks being conducted on the basis of a lie, or a ‘paramnesia’ (Bion, 1978). This is the case of psi-somethings in formation.

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