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In his reading of Winnicott's “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena,” Thomas Ogden suggests that Winnicott conceptualises the human task of creating states of being in which the individual's ideas, feelings, and bodily sensations feel alive and real. The concept of paradox captures something of the idea and experience of transitional objects and phenomena, says Ogden. He offers an example of clinical work in which an alteration in the analytic frame provokes the patient to begin to experience feelings that feel real and alive to him.
Cannibalistic fantasies underlie some core mechanisms: identification, incorporation, introjection, and internalization, says Britt-Marie Schiller; thus, cannibalism is a useful concept for understanding the dynamics of trichotillomania and trichophagy (pulling out and eating hair); both suggest a magical reconnection with what was disconnected in order to establish a bond with the mother/analyst. The passion of consuming the object of desire, symbolized by the hair (resembling an umbilical cord) captures the cannibalistic fantasy of never losing the object by destroying it.
Thomas Rabeyron offers an overview of the possible links between psychoanalytical metapsychology and contemporary work in neuroscience concerning entropy and the free energy principle. The psychic apparatus can be considered at different levels, from the most primary to the most secondary, as having the essential function of reducing entropy and free energy. Various forms of “failure” of this process of linking, regulation and transformation of energy within the psychic apparatus could be considered as the origin of different psychopathological manifestations.
In adolescent psychiatry, when patients present high-risk sexual behaviours, there is usually a traumatic sexual event in childhood, says Marion Robin, Aziz Essadek, Maurice Corcosa, and Gerard Shadilia. In the first stage the trauma