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Chair: Samuel Zysman
Presenters: Susan Finkelstein, Claudia Frank and Heinz Weiss
Reporter: Béatrice Ithier
1. Referring to both B. Lewin and H. Rey, who defined the claustro-agoraphobic syndrome as the sense of being trapped within a relationship, Susan Finkelstein, the first panellist, sought in her presentation
‘Claustro-agoraphobia, Bertram Lewin and the Oral Triad’ (the wish to eat, to be eaten and to sleep), to validate these hypotheses by considering three dreams of a woman patient who had been suffering from panic attacks since her partner left her.
The first depicted internal and external spatial anxiety and an experience of being both trapped and lost, a reality that was tangible throughout the entire panel, associated with the functioning of an unintegrated self mobilizing the transference and countertransference. The patient's oral needs were transferred to the vagina, requiring total attention from her partners. She made Finkelstein experience what she herself had gone through when she was a little girl. The analysis faced her with her confusion concerning who does what to the other? Finkelstein insisted on the need to distinguish between confinement and containment linked to the absence of inner affective experience.
In the second, a dialysis machine with two tubes was removing the poison of sugar in the blood, in the presence of an old reassuring male nurse (the father). In the transference, she was expressing her defiance towards the analysis and the analyst.
In the third, a woman was sitting on a chair with her head decapitated but attached to her body with threads, perhaps suggesting the idea of a possible electrocution. In fact, it was a puppet controlled by a puppeteer. It was as if she needed to feel controlled and in danger of dying in order to ensure her survival. This scene seemed to reveal a mechanical “holding” (Winnicott, 1965) in the primary relationship, being played out again in the analysis. Her mistrust persisted even if, the analyst con