You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The paper written by Monica Balaşa brought to my mind the image of the obstacles course of a riding event, a contest in which horse and rider try to get over the obstacles faultlessly and as quickly as possible. I think this impression is due to the large number of ‘gates’ left half-open by this paper which, by lack of enough space, invites us to explore those barely touched issues at leisure, individually or in small groups, once this Conference will be over.
As for myself, I have chosen to open the last of these gates and I submit to your attention a few considerations related to the very last lines of this paper:
“The analyst has to know how to knit safety nets. Safety nets able to catch the patient who falls into the void and to hold on himself in those dramatic and exhilarating analytic situations when the analyst follows his patient into the void.” [My translation]
The metaphor used by Monica Balaşa made me think of a book written by Michael Balint called “Thrills and Regressions” published in 1959 and in which he tries to retrace the psychogenetic evolution of two defensive developments in relation to the trauma caused by the inevitable