IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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It is important to remember that the analyst’s drama is that the technique, the setting, elicits incestuous sexual transferences and, at the same time, frustrates them. These transferences are neither a mere imaginary play of representations nor ‘reality’, but what we call ‘virtual’ or ‘real’. By imaginary Cesio means the play of representations; by reality, dramatic acting out with things of the world; by real, that which implies the expression of the foundations, the affects, all that gives rise to ‘actual’ manifestations: those that have not been ‘re-signified’ (provided with a new meaning). By ‘real’ Cesio means the drama that takes place within the setting of the session, reaching consciousness in terms of affects that might range from anxiety to tender feelings. This is an original experience, a more or less direct presentation of the unconscious. As such it is also ‘actual’ in the sense that we apply this term to anxiety neuroses. The word ‘act’ denotes the verbal construction that describes the ‘actual’ drama based on the analysis of free associations; it leads to the reconstructions that place the act into history and time. Cesio describes the analytic space as ‘real’, inasmuch as it is not reality but includes, along with the verbal images, the affective manifestations to which we attribute a somatic, neuro-vegetative, cellulo-humoral, involuntary-muscular figuration. These are perceived by the analyst and attributed to the patient as shared ‘actual’ experiences. The analyst perceives these alterations and infers those that belong to the patient. When these actual experiences overflow the limits of the setting and massively invade the coherent ego, they finally reveal their incestuous sexual nature. Transference is always present, but in the analytic situation it is revealed and employed to interpret the experience: it is unavoidable. On the other hand, transference to the person of the analyst emerges from profound levels, it has ‘to be detected almost without assistance’, which requires the analyst to be on the alert for these ‘slightest clues to go on’ in order to be able to interpret and/or construct what is happening hic et nunc and avoiding the risk of making arbitrary inferences. With this idea Freud warns against inadequacies, against a kind of ‘delusion of self-reference’ on the part of the analyst, which could hamper the effects of interpretations and/or constructions. The concept of ‘the person of the analyst’ involves naming him based on his function, that is, on the role played along with the patient, who displays his fantasies that, as the analysis develops, cannot fail to re-awaken and become conscious as something ‘actual’. That which was buried, lethargic, actual, that which never constituted a personal experience, with the progress of the analysis arouses affects and words in the analyst in terms of experience (Erlebnis), and the analyst then infers that this exists in the analysand. He, then, makes a construction of a ‘theatrical performance’ as it were, which is part of a tragedy in which both are leading figures. It should be pointed out that when reference is made to construction, what is meant is the construction of the act -’akt-’ that was inferred from the affect, the anxiety, the silence or the lethargy that appear with the experience -Erlebnis- and from the ideas that come to the mind of the analyst, who is then able to describe the tragic scene which is displayed in the ‘real’ of

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