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Keeping up this parallel to dream-work, Cesio states that without the intervention of the analyst, the session would become an anxiety dream that could turn into a nightmare, thus interrupting the process. The oedipal tragedy ends in the interruption of the analytic process, therefore, understanding the narcissistic, incestuous, and tragic structures buried in the id will help us establish a distinction between the concepts of oedipal tragedy and Oedipus complex. In The Ego and the Id (1923) Freud claims that there is a primary oedipal structure in the foundations of the psyche, the oedipal protophantasies, which lead to the “first and most important identification.... This is apparently not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of an object-cathexis; it is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis”. These primary identifications are the basis for the identifications that later on will form the Oedipus complex; they shape the ideal ego, the forerunner of the ego ideal. These protophantasies contain the origins of the Oedipus complex: incest involving filicide and parricide impulses in the struggle for the possession of the mother-wife, as Freud describes in his account of an original mythical time. In the psychoanalytic process, current evidence of that mythical time can be seen, for instance, in the cases of incest. Its clinical manifestation is the negative therapeutic reaction, whereas transference love is one of the forms it might take. Thus, Cesio (1993, p.137) maintains that there are two oedipal structures: one is that of incest with its narcissistic, passionate, tragic nature, the oedipal tragedy, while the other results from working through the former with the parents of personal history: the Oedipus complex, described by Freud as characterized by tenderness and ambivalence. As for its manifestations, the latter seeks the inhibited sexual aim and its symptoms are those of the psychoneuroses. This ‘actual’ material is a consequence more of a process of burial than of repression. The return of the repressed gives place to psycho-neurotic symptoms that can be interpreted, whereas the ‘actual’ material, which has been buried (Untergang), gains access to consciousness in terms of tragedy, of actual neurosis, lethargy, and acting-out, and therefore, will require the use of construction. When Freud faces Dora’s acting-out, he concludes that “this [the interpretation of the transference to the person of the analyst] happens to be by far the hardest part of the whole task. It is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient’s associations his unconscious thoughts and memories, and to practice similar explanatory arts: for these the patient will always provide the text. Transference [to the person of the analyst] is the one thing the presence of which has to be detected almost without assistance and with only the slightest clues to go upon, while at the same time the risk of making arbitrary inferences has to be avoided. Nevertheless, transference cannot be evaded (…)” (Cesio,1905, p. 116; the clarification in brackets specific to this publication). Therefore, Freud emphasises the ease with which he could analyse the dreams brought by Dora – the imaginary – while it was harder for him to analyse transference to his person – the actual, the real – which led Dora to act out, to the interruption of analysis.
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