IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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into “forces impelling (the patient) to do work and to make changes “ (Freud, 1915, pp. 164- 165). Psychoanalytic theory considers the existence of an unconscious, a buried formation, the ‘dead’, the ideal ego. It is an unconscious structure that can be deduced from lethargy and certain ‘actual’ manifestations, as a result of the original trauma: the phallic castration. In its constitution we find the tragic, buried primary Oedipus complex. It is ‘ideal’ because it contains a part of the Id that did not get to be postnatal ego. It is what never was conscious and thus never repressed, it is the buried unconscious, timeless and spaceless, ‘actual’. It manifests itself in the actual neurosis, wordless, silent and with bodily manifestations such as anguish, lethargy and other somatic diseases. It is based on the Oedipal proto-fantasy, which constitutes the primary ego. About the concept of the ‘dead’, it is a construction that we make from the buried contents that we discover in lethargy, and it becomes conscious through death representations, among which the abortion representations are paradigmatic, besides the night-fiend, Mare, god, vampires, ghost, shadow- and actual neurosis. Previously, in 1956, Racker presented a clinical case about negative therapeutic reaction, the essential aspect of which was the presence of ‘dead’ objects and the stillness of the patient’s internal world. The following year he presented another case where he dealt with the analyst’s boredom and somnolence (Racker, 1957). Cesio concurs with both Freud and Racker that, when it comes to transference and countertransference, there is no room for moralizing or ethical dilemmas, only the considerations of a good technique. The analyst, in his neurotic transference response, takes the patient’s sexual demand to be his/her aim and sometimes unconsciously seeks to meet this aim by seducing the patient in his/her helplessness. Analysts will always find their patients grateful when the analyst sustains his desire to analyse. The analyst’s drama is that the technique, the abstinent setting, elicits incestuous sexual transferences and at the same time frustrates them. These are ‘real’ transferences, that is, neither imaginary play, nor reality. The analysis progresses in an unstable balance. If it remains in the imaginary, then the real unconsciously grows until it finally overflows into acting out: reality. Freud uses the concept of ‘actual’ when he enquires into actual neuroses, which he considers the foundation of all psychoneuroses, as every mental production is founded on an actual one. In the opinion of Cesio, that is the ‘real’ beyond time and space. What presents itself as ‘actual’ corresponds to what has been buried, Untergang . The experience of the transference that takes place in the session between analyst and analysand is ‘actual’, its sexual nature is as genuine as the infantile experience that is being repeated instead of being remembered. The inclusion of the analyst as protagonist introduces the analysis of the actual neuroses and the disorders with a somatic presentation in the psychoanalytic session.

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