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Chair: Andrew Gerber
Panellists: Tamara Fischmann, Rafael Mondrzak and Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber (read by Tamara Fischmann)
Reporters: Tamara Fischmann, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber and Lisa Kallenbach
Surprisingly, chronic depression often represents an unconscious attempt to psychically cope with unbearable psychic pain following severe traumatization: dissociative states, a chronified psychic state of shock, a disappearance of emotions, an emptying of the self and object relationships, as well as a disappearance of the psyche in the body are among the possible consequences. The treatment of these difficult groups of analysands can also frequently bring analysts to the limits of their endurance. Often related to this is the repeated danger of denying the trauma, and a re-traumatization of the analysand in the analytic situation. This was the main focus of discussion for this panel: clinical observations on how different psychoanalysts are coping with such dangers can only be studied in the intimacy of the clinical psychoanalytical situation. The first paper presented (written by M. Leuzinger-Bohleber, read by Tamara Fischmann), illustrated this thesis with a clinical case study summarizing some of the findings of a psychoanalysis with a chronically depressed, severely traumatized analysand (Leuzinger-Bohleber, 2015).
In the second presentation we discussed the relevant question of if and how the intimacy of the psychoanalytic situation can be protected even in the frame of a large study. The psychoanalysis presented had been one out of around 100 psychoanalytic treatments in a large ongoing comparative outcome study on chronic depression, the so-called LAC depression study