IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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sexuality is at the service of Thanatos. This can be recovered through the transference bond that will actualize the loving investment of the child for the development of the Ego and the subjectivity. The maternal binding capacity, when available, will make it possible to neutralize the death drive and to make use of it in the construction of psychic apparatus. Severe failures will maintain the logic of the principle of neurotic inertia. Only the mother, first, and then the analyst, both sensitive enough, can place themselves in the shoes of the child or the child in the patient and understand her needs. Only then, the child/patient can start to exist, and to have an experience, just as Winnicott (1978) had theorized. Jarast also references E. Bick, F. Tustin, and D. Meltzer, all of whom have considered these conditions. The notion of psychic skin and its role of joining together the parts of the nascent self in Bick. The concept of autism as a defensive form of sensation to avoid the repetition of uncontainable feelings of non- mentalizable experiences were theorized by Tustin. This multi-theoretical approach further includes Meltzer’s finding that there are patients who seem to have only ‘two surfaces’, two dimensions, and the lack of an internal object that can contain them. Jarast further includes M. Klein’s concept of introjection of a “good object” to tolerate anxiety. Jarast further theorizes that the analyst has the task of allowing the traumatic situation, silent until then, develop, to make it comprehensible and historicizable. In this way, the analysis will be a process that runs contrary to the death drive, as noted by Baranger and Mom (1987). For this purpose, the approach will be different from the “traditional one”. Overall, Jarast views the analytic process – at the service of Eros – promoting the vital potentials of the individual to warn him against the paths that the death drive can seduce him into following. VI. Bg. Samuel Arbiser In “ Psicoanálisis y guerra ” [Psychoanalysis and war], Samuel Arbiser (2013) agrees with Freud that all human behaviors contain Eros and Thanatos, and that these vital engines mutually need each other. It is naïve, as Freud warns, to promote Eros at the expense of Thanatos or to try to repress or suppress the latter. As for the structural consequences in the psyche, one cannot disregard the relation between Thanatos and the Superego and the moral conscience, the product of the identifications resulting from the Oedipus complex, which would reload here the unmerged excesses of this dangerous instinctive ingredient; for this reason, one can find the paradoxical circumstance that a more severe moral conscience would inhibit aggression more and would lead to a larger internal accumulation of the death drive, harmful to an individual. In Arbiser’s view, Freud follows, to some extent, the widespread popular idea of a more exuberant sexuality or violence in the less educated or sophisticated social groups, which is consistent with his belief of the opposition between instinct and culture. However, in Arbiser’s opinion, this is an elementary simplification to oppose instincts and culture, as the notion of drive itself already implies a radical transformation of the instinctive biological baggage at the request of the human environment.

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