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This article seeks to explore, from a Bionian and post-Bionian perspective, the field of hallucinosis and its transformations, and to show how a certain kind of analytic work can take the patient from hallucinosic functioning to symbolic competence. The author refers to clinical situations where symbolic competence is markedly defective, and uses the term Munch-patients to refer to such persons, drawing on the metaphor suggested by the biography of the painter for its affinities with the suffering experienced by such patients.
The case of Alice is used to develop these ideas. The patient, faced with her inability to cope with a certain psychic pain, transforms this pain in hallucinosis. Having to face the emotional turbulences present in the field, the analyst becomes involved in an enactment, culminating in a state of somato-psychic hallucinosis during a session. Alices pain enters the relationship through the illness of the field, brought on stage, as it were, by the hallucinosis of the analyst, who manages to set in motion a metabolic cycle by means of her oneiric functions.
The paper suggests regarding hallucinosis as a bridge between psychotic and oneiric functioning and emphasizes the importance of oneiric functions in enabling the transition from concreteness and raw facts to real emotions.