Basic Crisis. Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique in Very Serious Narcissistic Disorders (The Case of Eleftheria).2

In today's clinical reality, we are confronted with resistances relating to the emotional absence of the primal object or even the non-existence of maternal functions, and with the terror that emerges from reliving the archaic trauma. These resistances have a radical dimension (basic crisis), the overcoming of which decides the course or termination of the analysis. Bion's concept of catastrophic change has led to the realization that change itself is not the least bit desirable, since it results in a smaller or greater imbalance due to the necessary restructuring of the entire psycho-somatic system. This is particularly true of the cases with archaic traumas to which I refer. At the moment of change during analysis, transition from one situation to another involves a negative intermediate space: an investment gap. If the analyst has not yet been integrated into the patient's psyche as a ‘new object’, there is no stable representation of the analyst for the patient to ‘hold on to’ before crossing over to the other, new, side. I present the case of Eleftheria, an example of a patient with an archaic trauma (categorized as ‘living-dead’) during whose analysis basic crisis situations often emerge, and describe in detail a specific stance, that of active silence, which contributes towards the patient reliving and overcoming the archaic trauma.