Metaphorization between Regression and Withdrawal in the Analysis of Psychotic Patients

First and foremost, I would like to attempt to define the relationship between the psychoanalytical work with psychotic patients and the experience that originated a devastating void of contact and reciprocity in the mother-child relationship. In the subject's experience, this void is transformed into an extremely distressing sense that something is missing, but there is no sense of an object, because that emptiness renders meaningless both the network of his inter-personal relationships and his psychic structure. Each time the subject finds himself in relational contexts that arouse the sense of this absence, because they arouse an excitement that is destined to remain meaningless, there is no question of the return of the repressed that can give meaning to the experience. In the analytical relationship, the actualization of the past in the transference is foreclosed and therefore the analyst tends to be divested of his metaphorical meaning.

Although for different reasons and with different emphasis, psychoanalysts today generally accept the aetiopathogenetic association of psychosis with an extended foreclosure of the capacity for the metaphorization and symbolization of subjective experience. If affective and material primary needs are not met, the child will become psychotic when the deprivation is so persistent that it stops the child from giving the experience of satisfaction a subjective meaning by metaphorizing it.

While the terms ≪metaphorization≫ and ≪symbolization≫ (of experience) may be used as synonyms in view of the clear interconnection between metaphor and symbol, it must be pointed out that in a child's psychic development, the former precedes the latter (Thanopulos, 2005). As understood in the interpretation of dreams, symbolization is a developed aspect of metaphorization that requires a sufficiently differentiated relationship between subject and object. The roots of this level lie in the transitional field (metaphor) between bodily sensation and e