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.
Taking up the Congress theme of ‘Psychoanalysis at the frontiers’, this panel attempted to rediscover the overlap of artistic expression and psychoanalysis. It is widely accepted that cinema and psychoanalysis enrich each other, and the two fields have developed a close interrelationship. The panel dealt with concepts such as impulsive lack of control in personality disorders, translated into actings out and rescue fantasies. Projection of film clips before the reading of the papers resulted in rich and dynamic discussion.
One of the objectives of the panelists and audience was to discover how psychoanalytic developments and processes are expressed using cinematic resources. The papers by Golinelli, ‘Idealisation and destructivity in La cérémonie (Director: Claude Chabrol)’, and Costantini, ‘The risk of the discovery of affects in Six degrees of separation (Director: Fred Schepisi)’, considered such personality disorders as borderline states, anti-social personalities, psychosis and severe neurosis. At a deeper level of interpretation, the authors compared the transference and countertransference processes and the relationships that are developed on the screen. Costantini concluded that, when working with patients who show symptoms of these personality disorders, affects are likely to be discovered in the transference process too. Similarly with the ideas developed by Golinelli. The panel explored idealization and destructiveness as mechanisms present in characters' relationships as well as in the transference and countertransference.
Josefina Mendoza Rios, a Mexican colleague, asked whether the presenters had in analysis patients like Paul, one of the main characters in Six degrees of separation. The authors considered that such patients are unlikely to present for analysis; more probably, analysts will encounter periodically the anti-social aspects of mental functioning in the transference-countertransference.
Another question on Six degrees of separation came from a