The Analyst's Intentional Action

There is, it is true, one class of women with whom this attempt to preserve the erotic transference for the purposes of analytic work without satisfying it will not succeed. These are women of elemental passionateness who tolerate no surrogates. They are children of nature who refuse to accept the psychical in place of the material, who, in the poet's words, are accessible only to ‘the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments’. With such people one has the choice between returning their love or else bringing down upon oneself the full enmity of a woman scorned. In neither case can one safeguard the interests of the treatment. One has to withdraw, unsuccessful; and all one can do is to turn the problem over in one's mind of how it is that a capacity for neurosis is joined with such an intractable need for love.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has been defined as a talking cure and the analyst's neutrality is an important feature of the method which contributes to favour in the patient the emergence, in transference, of repressed psychic content of very old origin. The analyst's interpretation leads to insight and the transformation of such contents from unconscious to conscious (Laplanche, Pontalis, 1967): this is the basis of classical psychoanalytical treatment. The analyst's abstinence is advised, and acting - while it is impossible not to act - is considered as merely a hiccough along the way, antagonistic to thinking (Rycroft, 1968).

The picture becomes more complex when patients, despite showing no evidence of a psychotic structure, display a marked subjectivation deficit, are particularly vulnerable in separation situations, find it impossible to remain alone and develop a permanent state of pervasive and disorganising anxiety along with an inability to calm themselves by relying on their own means.

The analysis of such patients leads us into territories «downstream of repression» and «upstream of representation» (Riolo, 2010) in which the need for a c