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In this book, Jean-José Baranes, a member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, sets out his thinking on the vicissitudes of the symbolisation process and, more specifically, what he terms ‘composite symbol-formations’. This theme runs throughout the book and the author addresses very different facets of it. Starting with problems in symbolisation, Baranes goes on to explore in depth some themes connected with identity problematics, narcissism, the double and transgenerational issues. His interest in adolescent psychopathology and his substantial experience with borderline and psychotic adolescents have also led him towards an interest in individual psychoanalytic psychodrama, which is another subject discussed in this study.
Baranes enables us to explore with him the often complicated and arduous pathways along which he accompanies some of his analysands from one day to the next in the attempt to give a meaning, a beginning of articulation and a new opportunity for understanding to these lost and split-off realms of the psyche, the seat of historic traumas, deep injuries and excitations that have not yet or only just been converted into drive form.
He describes to us the everyday treatment of these patients, whom he calls ‘difficult cases’ in preference to expressions such as borderline pathologies or narcissistic patients. With these difficult cases, the analyst needs to extend his listening beyond language and into ‘bodily memories’, and to seek out new technical adjustments and modifications of the usual analytic operation. The analyst must be able to confront his inevitable vacillations of identity if he is to succeed in accommodating the affects, sensations, perceptions and emerging emotions of his analysand, who is in the throes of an unspeakable existential suffering.
The book's preface is by Jean Cournut, a French psychoanalyst who died in December 2003. Cournut has bequeathed to us a rich, lively and critical testimony; he has managed, in his characteristica