The Central Phobic Position

The central phobic position as conceived by André Green (2000) corresponds to a mode of psychic functioning marked by the negativisation of thought processes that occurs at the heart of analytic communication. It is a thought phobia that affects borderline patients for whom associative thinking as such represents a danger; a phobia that does not reveal mechanisms of symbolisation or displacement that would make it possible to circumscribe anxiety within a neurotic symptom.

The patient seeks to avoid the intersection of different associative lines of thought, because when they are brought into relationship with each other, it amplifies the traumatic charge. It is the resonance between the different themes that represents a danger. It is a matter, then, of preventing their revival and deployment in consciousness, for bringing them explicitly into relationship with each other represents a danger for the ego's integrity. Non-meaning then becomes the only defence.

This has the effect of short-circuiting the production of meaning and of blurring the analyst's understanding. It is as if the patient, anticipating forthcoming meanings, virtually present in the associations that he has already formulated, carried out an abortion of what has been fertilized in the very context of the analysing situation. This associative braking is accompanied by a discursive vagueness

that often neutralises the analyst's listening and the elucidation of the transference issues.

And yet this anti-processual disposition cannot be dissociated from the dynamics of the transference. The central phobic position corresponds, in effect, to a situation in which it is the analytic situation itself that is attacked by the negativising processes operative in the patient. In this respect, it constitutes a transferential phobic position. When he is confronted with it, the analyst feels obliged, in the countertransference, to think about these mechanisms of the destruction and erasure of meaning. The diffic