On Working Through the Psychotic Elements in the Analytic Process

The author, after some considerations about the choice of the theme of the Congress, using some clinical cases as a starting point, reported some critical moments of the analysis which he qualifies as 'moments of crisis' and which in his view, represent an evolution of the analytic process with the climax at the transference situation where some psychotic infantile models come up to the fore. If the analyst understands this phenomenon and can stand the countertransference anxiety, if he has the capacity of verbalizing to the patient the psychotic model, and if the patient, in his turn, cannot run away from this contact with the analyst's verbalizations, an ntegration of the self of the patient, with an increase in the insight, can occur. The author takes some clinical data and tries to show that the integration of the psychotic elements of the self needs some special attention of the analyst because of the incapacity of his patients to use language as a way of communication, instead of as a way to discharge tension and anxiety.

It might appear that the author had done no more than repeat Freud (1914), but the author thinks that he differs from Freud in the different consideration given to his patient's incapacity to think, in the psychotic areas and the relevant function of the analyst for supplying what is missing to the patient, i.e. the verbalization of numerous primitive and crude affects related to the present context, in transference and countertransference.