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Chair: Beatriz de León de Bernardi
Presenters: Maria Inês Neuenschwander Escosteguy Carneiro, Susana Vinocur Fischbein
Reporter: José Renato Avzaradel
Maria Inês Neuenchwander Escosteguy Carneiro (Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro) started the panel with her paper entitled “Two Hogwarts Boys. Harry Potter and Tom Riddle, Best Friends Forever?” She developed a detailed examination of the Harry Potter saga, engaging with Kleinian concepts; her paper was a tribute to her child patients. Heroes and villains, as mutual antagonists, share the role of perpetuating the necessary existence of good and evil, she argued.
For her, Hogwarts’s ambivalence is the guiding line of the entire saga. Carneiro pointed out that ambivalences are always present, and she suggested the possibility of integration or disintegration, which are intense emotional experiences, since the anxiety entailed can be overwhelming in two opposite ways. She suggested that, in view of the depressive position, the gain would be directly proportional to the price one paid, since integrating and repairing the object entailed a significant effort and ceaseless choices.
Carneiro discussed the generation of persecutory anxieties in the paranoid-schizoid position, and she referred to the omnipotent hat: nothing is hidden in one’s head that the Sorting Hat cannot see. Harry asked: “Why did the hat hesitate with me?” And Dumbledore told him why: the protective shield of loving reverie, which he received from his mother, saved him from being murdered, but not from being touched by evil.
Carneiro said that all ambivalence intrinsically carried double messages, and the solutions to the ambivalence that dominated Hogwarts is what fascinated Harry Potter’s readership. The two boys Tom/Voldemort and Harry Potter provide examples on how projective identification works in the primitive moments of mental development. In this fascinating human enigma, as Klein has demonstrated, an experience within the subject is p