You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
You see me now, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars, I've been living on the edge so long where the winds of limbo roar. And I'm young enough to look at, and far too old to see; all the scars are on the inside and I'm not sure if there is anything left of me.
At the heart of our reflections there is the fact that transference — the elective «scene» in which the past returns and comes back to life (Freud, 1912) — will manifest itself within our work under different forms, and not always on a symbolic level. For instance, in patients whose psychic suffering originates in the area of preverbal trauma — in the area of the «basic fault», to use Balint's words 1 —, transference occurs mostly at a more primitive level of expression (Winnicott, 1967a, b) that involves in an unconscious way, at least initially, not just the patient but also the analyst. In such situations, in fact, we are in the domain of non-occurred or non-completed symbolization; with the passing of time, this can be slowly reintroduced into the analysis by the functions that the analyst performs, so that the patient will eventually be able to find it within himself.
In this paper, we would like to draw attention to two points in particular. Firstly, that the analytic functions we are referring to aim to concretely create the affective inter-psychic conditions that will enable the transmission of the emotional alphabet needed to master the lived experience. Secondly, much time is needed in this type of