IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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among others. Referring to Loewald’s Ego psychology, which integrates Freud’s drive theory with Object relations, Busch (2016) examines many dimensions to how to work in a way that enlarges the ‘Ego’s capacity for containment’ across the spectrum of pathologies, albeit with differences. Within the neurotic to moderately severe character disorders, analysts attempt to transform thoughts into meaning; with more severe character disorders, they try to transform ‘language action’ (Busch, 2013), along with unmodulated affect states, into thoughts. The movement is from language of action to the language of (unconscious and conscious) communication. Although the methods used to contain more primitive states (in both the patient and analyst) are more frequent (and difficult) with severe character pathology, they also occur in analytic work with neurotic patients. Here, Busch follows and further develops Loewald’s (1975) work on “language action within the transference force-field” (ibid, p. 293), serving the purpose of re-enactments. This approach also concurs with André Green’s (2000) capturing both the role of containment and building representations, as in “By constructing an analytic space in which free association and psychoanalytic listening are possible, the analyst can voice and link previously catastrophic ideas, quite unknown to the patient’s consciousness, to help the patient to create meaning and obtain relief from previously dominant but unknown terrors” (ibid, p. 429). In his recent publication, “The Analyst’s Reveries”, Busch (2019) deconstructs, ‘demystifies’ and explores the clinical utility of the analyst’s (=container’s) reverie (transformative sensorial-affective image, followed by an associative link to a memory/idea) and explores its relation to some more traditional concepts like countertransference, free association, evenly suspended free floating attention and subsequent self-reflexion. He finds himself in agreement particularly with Bion, Da Rocha Barros and Cassorla and states that reverie can be usefully implemented, when the projective identification can be differentiated from the analyst’s own countertransferential input. Thus, the co-constructed nature of reveries only becomes apparent via the analyst’s associations and a growing awareness of a countertransferential enactment. It follows that only via analyst’s free associations he/she is able to contain what is the beginning as an enactment. Thus understood, analyst’s capacity for containment of their internal experiences and for reverie can lead to increasing psychic efficacy of every analysis. Michael J. Diamond (2014), too, implements the notion of containment among the prerequites of analyst’s overall approach, when he states that the analyst is to “1. allow for regression in ego functioning; 2. take his/her mind as an object , including its manifestation in the ‘analytic third’ ; 3. contain internal experience , including bearing uncertainty and tolerating intense affective states; and 4. utilize more developed ego funcions for self-reflexivity and elaboration” (ibid, p. 548, emph. M.J.D.). Within inclusive contemporary Freudian framework, Eva Papiasvili (2019) described a ‘reverie-like rolling free associative and interpretive process’, as taking place “in the therapist- patient dyad when…two unconsciouses communicate with each other in what may look like a rolling dream-like process” (Papiasvili 2019, p. 246). This inclusive clinical approach

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