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International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Volume 72, Part 2, 1991
This paper describes a particular form of ‘silent’ regression during the psychoanalytic treatment of infantile personalities (a type of character pathology related to the hysterical personality). This regression is characterized by the development of rapid interchange in the roles enacted in the transference and projected on to the analyst, an apparent ‘disconnexion’ of the transference material from that dominant when the patient is in non-regressed states, and the intensification of the analyst's countertransference reactions. The diagnosis and management of these regressive transferences require a particular interpretive style and strategy outlined in this paper and illustrated with two case vignettes.
International Review of Psycho-Analysis, Volume 18, Part 2, 1991
The image of the semiotic murder of the mother is a metaphor for the odyssey of the human infant as s/he moves from tactile at-onement with mother and the ‘language’ of normal auto-sensuality, and enters into the signifying and symbolic universe of discourse. Freud's emphasis on the father-son relationship as the key experience around which oedipal development takes place, and Lacan's dichotomization of the capacity to use symbols and language from maternal capacities, have seriously deleted women and mother from the central stage of psychoanalytic theory. Melanie Klein's notions of the pre-oedipal played an important part in re-integrating maternal capacities into psychoanalytic theory. Post-Lacanians, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have also resuscitated maternal capacities, proposing that the discourse of mother and child has been exiled from the symbolic order. The notion of the ‘black hole’ as a psychic structure of emptiness and meaninglessness is a m