IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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experiences. This view is consistent with Freudian Nachträglichkeit (Freud 1896, Modell 1990). According to Modell, metaphoric matchings play a crucial role in this process. Traumatic memories, which are not recontextualized, may then represent a failure in the transformative power of a metaphor. Under the condition of trauma, metaphor is used not to transform memory but to simply transfer memory so that an unyielding similarity is experienced between the past and the present. VI. Cg. Fred Busch: Building ‘Complex Representations’ and The Curative Factor in Psychoanalysis Clinical Context For Busch (2013) , one of the most important components, if not the most important component of what is curative in psychoanalysis, is the building of representations. He defines building representations as: 1. Developing a beginning representation from its more primitive, non-symbolic representational origins; 2. Building a more nuanced, complex representation out of a highly saturated, simple one. Busch thinks of representations as having multiple dimensions: they may range from deeply unconscious to close to the preconscious, from simple to complex with varying degrees of saturation. In this model, building representations means attempting to make representations more complex, bring them closer to consciousness, and less saturated (or more nuanced). Sometimes it takes a form of building a representation from one that is conceptually primitive (e.g., somatic representations). The attempt is made to ‘build’ the rigid, ‘highly saturated’, simple representation with strong pressure to act (i.e., ‘All men are animals’) into the one that is close to consciousness and more complex and less saturated by interpreting the variety of factors that lead to this position. Recognizing that some treatments focus on the relationship rather than on building new representations, Busch posits that most psychoanalytic theories subscribe to the idea that, in one form or another, building representations is a key factor in a psychoanalytic cure. 12 Defining cure, in broad brush strokes, as changing the inevitability of action to the possibility of reflection (Busch 2013) is a contemporary rendering of what was first expressed by Freud (1915) as changing thing presentations into word presentations . In modern times, the French analytic tradition is credited to have been at the forefront, starting with the work of Marty (1952), one of the founders of the Paris Psychosomatic School (Aisenstein and Smadja, 2010). Marty is credited with being the first to suggest that it was not a question of looking for content to make sense of psychosomatic problems (Aisenstein and Smadja 2010, p. 343), but rather that psychosomatic problems presented the failure of representations , and of the capacity for psychic elaborations. This has led to increased understanding that what is represented can

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