Recovering the Psychic Apparatus*

In this paper I intend to describe the work of recuperation of the psychic apparatus of a patient as a way of achieving the elaboration of psychotic parts and of making possible the development of the capacity of thinking and feeling. This recovery, which was actually almost the construction of a psychic apparatus, allowed the development of the capacity to think symbolically and to establish object relations. I will report a case maintaining what is pertinent in relation to the issue addressed, leaving out other elements present in the analytic process.

I will try within the scope of this Congress to stick to the use of the psychoanalytic tools that we have today, when in the 21st century we are faced with the challenges brought by patients who cannot even inform what they feel or think. These patients live in a world where action prevails and conflict is not experienced and where few relations are established which makes it necessary to help them build a psychic apparatus capable of symbolizing and consequently thinking and establishing relations. In this case these features are radicalized by the psychotic state presented.

Freud differed from the psychiatrists of his time being able to listen to what his hysterical patients said and revealed enabling him with this listening to see beyond what was said and known. Listening allowed contact with a whole world of feelings and emotions that until then were not understood. I believe that nowadays we have to take this lesson of Freud as an example of listening to patients who came to us with various complaints or even without knowing what they complain about or feel. Psychoanalytic listening remains a major psychoanalytic instrument.

Bion (1962a) called alpha function the transformation of rudimentary emotions into alpha elements. That is, the function that the object has of containing rudimentary emotions and experiences that are projected by the subject so that they can be slowly digested psychically and thought by the o